To start a publishing venture in 2025 is to court any number of hazards. Some people, enticed by the prospect of the riches that inevitably flow from such an undertaking, will surely seek to curry favor. The kind of wealth produced by mid-list fiction can corrupt even one’s closest relationships. And while there’s no doubt a Tuscan villa in my future, who’s really prepared to cope with Tuscan villainy?
More sensible souls will question the fledgling publisher’s mental health. After all, who reads books anymore? The love of literature is almost embarassing, like a pathological devotion to some retrograde deity who neither exists nor believes the things right-thinking people all know and espouse. Under the circumstances, launching a book publisher seems not just crazy but perverse.
Stranger still, more people seem to be publishing books—their own books—than ever before, even as the cultural salience of books has been declining. Students in particular seem to lead book-free lives nowadays. Perhaps there is some relationship between all these trends. Fiction in particular seems at risk of following poetry into vanity and irrelevance.
Yet the novel, like Yiddish, has always been dying, which is to say that it is doing no such thing. On the contrary, cultural and technological changes may be injecting new vitality into what Randall Jarrell called (approximately) an extended prose narrative that has something wrong with it.
One thing these changes have done is to democratize the process of book publishing by making it possible to undertake at little or no cost—and not in any half-assed, amateurish fashion, either. Good material, old and new, abounds on all sides, and someone with strong tastes and varied talents can make a go of this at a reasonably high level using platforms and tools (Amazon, Vellum, Canva) ideal for the purpose. Tivoli Books aims to use these means to publish compelling works for intelligent readers. I hope you’ll watch this space to see if that proves true.
