Exclusive: Transit Books to publish more works from Nobel laureate Jon Fosse
Exclusive: Transit Books to publish more works from Nobel laureate Jon Fosse
The magnum opus of the 2023 Nobel laureate in literature, Jon Fosse, is called “Septology.” It’s a trilogy running hundreds of pages, involving doppelgängers and alcoholism and faith. It’s also just technically one really long sentence — there are no periods.
“Which to me, was kind of like, sign us up,” said Adam Levy, who is a publisher at Transit Books with his wife, Ashley Nelson Levy. They founded the nonprofit press in 2015 to bring works like “Septology” to a new audience. They published the first volume of the trilogy in 2020. When they learned last year that Fosse had won the Nobel, they were working out of their home in the Bay Area.
“We quickly made coffee and got to work in our living room,” said Levy.
The Nobel Prize in literature, awarded this year to South Korean author Han Kang, has the power to bring new readers to relatively unknown writers. This comes with financial ramifications for authors, of course, but also their publishers. Fosse was known as a playwright in Europe, but his annual print book sales in the U.S. were in the hundreds or low thousands prior to winning the prize, according to Circana. The Nobel increased demand for Fosse’s work here — and Transit reacted.
Transit sold out of all the Fosse stock they had within 48 hours and decided to print tens of thousands more copies of his work. But before they received any revenue for selling those books, they had to pay for printing and royalties to the author.
This can be a big risk for a small publisher.
“We ended up owing a huge amount of money to our printer, to Fosse, and his agent, before we’d actually received any money,” Levy said. “So it actually is the kind of thing that can sink a house.”
It didn’t sink Transit. They were able to move out of the Levy household into an office and event space. They hired more staff, made the decision to start publishing more in hardcover and have sold over 50,000 copies of Fosse’s books in the past year.
They’re also going to keep publishing Fosse’s books in North America; this wasn’t a given.
“I think it’s fairly common when a small house has a lot of success with an author, for them to move to a larger house to receive significantly more money, in an advance, say,” Levy noted.
But the energy and time Transit devoted to building a readership for Fosse paid off. Transit just signed four more of Fosse’s books — the “Vaim” trilogy, as well as a collection of stories about dogs. The first of those books will come out next fall.
“We really did try to make the case why we would be the right house to continue with him,” said Levy.
Any publisher would be happy to have a Nobel winner among their authors. But the effects are magnified for smaller, independent publishing houses. It can also give them some validation.
“It’s a rare moment of feeling kind of understood,” said Dan Simon, publisher and editorial director of Seven Stories Press, which has published more than a dozen books in English (with more to come) by the 2022 Nobel laureate, French author Annie Ernaux.
He feels that as a smaller house, he can be what he calls editorially driven — able to take a chance on a writer even if the payoff is modest.
“We’ll do a book knowing it might not sell, because we’re committed to the trajectory of that particular author,” Simon said.
Winning a Nobel can also benefit the author’s literary agent. Peter Straus is managing director with RCW, which represents several Nobel laureates, including Kazuo Ishiguro and Abdulrazak Gurnah. He said having a Nobel laureate gets the attention of publishers.
“They will also take a further interest in what other writers you have and what other books you have coming out,” said Straus.
There can also be knock-on effects for other writers from the Nobel winner’s country, he added. “All publishers around the world take more of an interest in that country’s literature, and that’s a good thing.”
At Transit Books, revenue and sales have both grown. But Adam Levy said there are also longer term benefits.
“It’s a kind of leveling up that won’t go away,” he said. “There’s that intangible piece of reputation.”
Fosse’s sales might go up and down. But Transit Books will always be the house that took a chance on him — and a book with no periods.
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