Book publishing: Little guy hits big

There is something very old school, even Cinderella-ish about the way that a small literary press here found itself with a breakout book this fall in “The Time Traveler’s Wife.”

But yes, first-time novelist Audrey Niffenegger really did just send her unsolicited manuscript to MacAdam/Cage Publishing after reading about the press in a magazine.

And yes, someone there actually picked it up and read it and liked it.

Within a month of publication, “The Time Traveler’s Wife” was named a “Today” show book club selection with a celebrity endorsement and was climbing up the bestsellers list of the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and Publishers Weekly. The book, which originally had a modest first run of 15,000 copies, now is in its sixth printing, with more than 100,000 copies in print.

Not a bad ride for a publisher with just 10 full-time employees that released its first fall list in October with only six titles.

“It’s happened at last,” says MacAdam/Cage sales and marketing director Melanie Mitchell. “The planets aligned for once and the stars were in the right places.”

Corporate behemoths such as Random House (with 6,026 employees) and Simon & Schuster -- themselves appendages of multimedia conglomerates -- dominate publishing the way Microsoft dominates the software industry. Small, independent publishers, which lack big-name authors and large marketing budgets, usually have a hard time getting any attention at all.

Of course in this case, MacAdam/Cage’s editors point out, Niffenegger had written a fabulous novel. But then fine prose is not a guarantee of success.

How it happened is a story of both hard work and luck.

Most publishers won’t even look at unsolicited manuscripts. They rely on agents to pluck out the would-be writers whose efforts might be worth considering. MacAdam/Cage welcomes them, and about a quarter of its titles arrive unbidden at its small suite in an Art Deco building in the financial district.

The packages eventually wind up in a numbered binder somewhere in the modest office of Anika Streitfeld, one of the company’s two editors. Four bookcases bulge with binders. Piles also rise from the floor and teeter atop her desk.

“Mostly, these are books I’m in the process of rejecting,” says Streitfeld, but “we’ve found really good books from the slush pile.”

One of those was the manuscript by Niffenegger, an artist and teacher from Chicago.

“Everyone was really seduced by it,” Streitfeld says. “Everyone in publishing dreams of being transported by a manuscript, being swept away.”

Niffenegger, 40, was not totally unpublished. She’s been printing her own books since she was 15. She is a professor at Columbia College in Chicago, where she teaches graduate students how to craft fine art, limited-edition, letterpress-printed books. She has printed several books, including two visual novels, which combined her art and text. Her biggest printing was 100 copies. Ten copies is more typical. She worked on one book, which featured 80 aquatints, for 14 years.

“I’ve been writing all my life, small limited editions,” she says. “I wanted to tell stories, so I got into making books that were unconventional. Every now and then I tried to get them published. They weren’t very commercial.”

Several years ago, Niffenegger decided to write a more traditional novel, relatively speaking. After more than four years, she finished “The Time Traveler’s Wife” early last year. The 500-page novel tells the story of Clare and Henry, a married couple (she’s an art student, he’s a librarian) whose relationship is complicated by the fact that he suffers from “chrono-displacement disorder”: He spontaneously disappears from the present and pops into the past or the future. He always returns, but Clare finds herself doing a lot of waiting and worrying. The book explores how the couple deals with such an uncontrollable force.

“I had this idea that would just not work with pictures,” she says. “It’s hard to deal with time in images. I had a yearning to write dialogue.”

Niffenegger spent the next nine months trying to find an agent. She also sent the book to four publishers, including MacAdam/Cage, which she had read about in Poets & Writers magazine.

Late last year, Streitfeld got around to reading Niffenegger’s manuscript and was floored. “It’s the kind of book,” she says, “that people associate with MacAdam/Cage: a first novel, a little unusual, a good story.”

The press was founded in 1998 by David Poindexter, a successful commercial printer who wanted to publish novels (the company’s moniker comes from the middle names of his two children). The publisher brings out about 30 books a year, mostly literary fiction by first-time authors. A typical book sells between 5,000 and 10,000 copies. The house’s biggest until now had been Susan Vreeland’s “Girl in Hyacinth Blue,” with 65,000 copies in print.

“I have had a lifelong love of reading fiction and felt the large publishing houses were overlooking important new voices,” Poindexter says. “I’m not sure that Faulkner or London or others would be published today because they lack any clear commercial value.”

MacAdam/Cage offered Niffenegger $25,000, but by then the author had an agent, Joe Regal in New York. Suddenly, things were getting more complicated.

Regal sent the book around again to New York publishers and two -- Ballantine and Putnam -- eventually made offers in the low six figures. MacAdam/Cage upped their offer to slightly more.

“It was the biggest offer we ever made,” Streitfeld says. “We wanted her desperately.”

Niffenegger too was pleased. “An independent publisher was appealing to me,” she says. “It’s a David and Goliath thing.”

The buzz took off in March, when Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston’s production company optioned the movie rights.

MacAdam/Cage then focused on getting the title into stores. Mitchell took the unusual step of sending its top bookstore clients the book’s rough-form manuscript with a plea to take a look. “They actually read it, which is surprising,” she says. The publisher printed up 3,000 pre-publication galleys, triple its usual number.

In May, MacAdam/Cage built a small mountain of 1,000 galleys at its table at the Book Expo in Los Angeles, and it excerpted the book in a glossy eight-page insert in Publishers Weekly, the book industry magazine.

Over the summer, the company distributed posters promoting the book, a marketing expense it usually can’t afford. In September, the book got another huge boost from bestselling author Scott Turow, who recommended it as a “Today” show book club selection. Turow’s wife is an acquaintance of Niffenegger’s.

Once momentum began to build, MacAdam/Cage stepped up its marketing campaign, placing full-page color ads in the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review and expanding Niffenegger’s book tour to 17 cities.

“We’re doing as much for ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’ as a big publisher would,” Streitfeld says. “It was a huge investment.”

The book also has been propelled by rave reviews -- a starred Publishers Weekly review called it “a soaring love story illuminated by dozens of finely observed details and scenes” -- and it has popped up on bestseller lists.

“I’ve been working like a maniac my whole life,” Niffenegger says. “There’s definitely a lot of hard work involved, but it was the same with my visual work. For books, there exists a whole world that doesn’t exist for art. A good painting doesn’t get on TV. Part of it is luck. There are a ton of lovely books that get published but don’t get found.”

Times staff writer Renee Tawa contributed to this story.