Publishing During a Pandemic

FOR most of the past decade, indie publisher Gray-wolf Press has been on a roll. One of its authors, Anna Burns, from Northern Ireland, won the 2018 Man Booker Prize for her novel Milkman. Before that the nonprofit press in Minneapolis had breakout hits with Leslie Jamison’s 2014 essay collection The Empathy Exams and Maggie Nelson’s 2016 genre-bending memoir The Argonauts. Many of the press’s poetry titles, like Claudia Rankine’s 2014 Citizen: An American Lyric and Layli Long Soldier’s 2017 Whereas, have also sold well.

Then COVID-19 hit.

Fearing a prolonged slump in the wake of the pandemic, Graywolf’s publisher, Fiona McCrae, is planning for a 60 to 70 percent plunge in print sales over the coming year, along with a 50 percent drop in e-book sales. McCrae says she and her staff will “go hell-for-leather” to beat those gloomy projections, and thanks to Graywolf’s extended run of success, along with a federal small-business grant, she anticipates no layoffs or drastic cutbacks in its publication schedule. Still, she is preparing for the worst.

“When this is over, the mood is going to be different,” she says. “It’s going to be a different world. People are going to have lost their jobs, lost family members, lost friends. There’s going to be a downturn in discretionary spending just because people are not going to be buoyant, and that’s before factoring in that certain bookstores may not make it. There’s a cascading effect to this thing, and I don’t see how it doesn’t last quite a long time.”

This spring, editors and agents around the United States struggled to put on a brave face about the expected fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, noting that the book business has weathered countless previous economic and technological challenges that doomsayers predicted would sink the industry. Even at the height of the pandemic, industry veterans said, e-book and audiobook