Small Press Profile: Steerforth Press and Hanover Publisher Services

Steerforth Press, located in Hanover, New Hampshire, launched in 1994 with its first title list and the goal of producing well-written and engaging works that have something important to say. In the subsequent 21 years, it has established a reputation both for its quality fiction and nonfiction titles and for its distribution services arm, Hanover Publisher Services, which provides support to several small publishers.

Chip Fleischer, the company’s publisher, met his three co-founding partners at his alma mater, Dartmouth College. Co-founder Alan Lelchuk is a novelist and professor who is currently on the faculty at Dartmouth College. Thomas Powers, an author and a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, is also a teacher at Dartmouth. Michael Moore, who died in 2014, was an editor at Esquire and Rolling Stone and was the editor and publisher for Mountain Gazette.

“When we first envisioned Steerforth in the early ’90s, our aim was to be a teeny tiny Knopf, Norton, or Farrar Straus: A general-interest publisher of serious fiction and nonfiction works that are intended to engage the full attention of their readers,” said Fleischer. “The idea was that with the consolidation of the publishing industry — along with the rise of the chain stores — and the new emphasis on bestsellers versus midlist, a small house with a low overhead could make an outsized contribution to the life of literature in America.”

The Steerforth name grew out of a suggestion to Lelchuck by actress Claire Bloom. In Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, the character James Steerforth first appears as a bright and charismatic leader who then takes a rather dark turn as the story progresses. “I would say two percent of people recognize the name as coming from David Copperfield,” said Fleischer, “And when they do, an arched eyebrow and a grin, sometimes sly, sometimes befuddled, is the usual response.”

Steerforth currently has 100 titles actively in print. Irish writer Donal Ryan, winner of the 2015 European Union Prize for Literature, is one of the company’s most recent successes. Ryan’s The Spinning Heart and The Thing About December, both published by Steerforth in 2014, have been chosen by booksellers for the Indie Next Lists. His new collection of short stories, A Slanting of the Sun, went on sale earlier this week and is on the October Indie Next List.

Charles Brandt’s “I Heard You Paint Houses”: Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran and Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa, published by Steerforth in 2004, will be coming back into the spotlight, said Fleischer, as it was optioned several years ago for a film by Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, and Paramount. On a recent episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, De Niro confirmed that the project is moving forward, with Al Pacino and Joe Pesci to co-star.

“It’s my kind of true crime: extremely well-written, meticulously researched, and it makes an important contribution to our understanding of the mob, labor unions, and politics in America,” said Fleischer. A new edition with updated notes will be published next spring.

At its launch, Steerforth was distributed by Random House Distribution Services, which has since become Penguin Random House Publisher Services (PRHPS). In addition to sales and marketing support, Steerforth’s Hanover Publisher Services provides distribution through PRHPS to several publishers too small to qualify for direct representation under PRHPS: Archipelago Books in Brooklyn, New York; Pushkin Press in London, England; Campfire Graphic Novels in New Delhi, India; and New Europe Books in Williamstown, Massachusetts. With these four publishers and Steerforth’s own titles, Hanover Publishing Services has a complete lineup, said Fleischer, and it is not recruiting or considering new clients.

“We set everything up so that from Penguin Random House’s perspective it would be like working with a single client that had multiple imprints,” said Fleischer; metadata input, sales material consolidation, and sales conference presentations are all handled through Hanover Publisher Services. “The five presses remain completely independent from one another when it comes to things like editorial, design, and publicity, and of course the money they risk publishing the titles their publishers and editors select.”

Archipelago Books, which has been in business for 11 years, publishes quality fiction in translation from all over the world. Archipelago is currently best known as the U.S. publisher for Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume biography My Struggle. “If there can be such a thing as a rock star literary figure, Knausgaard is it,” said Fleischer.

Campfire Graphic Novels publishes full-color graphic novels in English for tweens and teens, and Hanover Publisher Services offers distribution services for the company in India and throughout much of the rest of the world. Campfire’s classics line, which Fleischer said has been widely embraced in school libraries and classrooms, includes top sellers such as Alice in Wonderland, Moby Dick, and Pride and Prejudice. Its “heroes” line has produced biographies of Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Steve Jobs.

Just four years old, New Europe Books publishes books from and about Central and Eastern Europe, such as nonfiction titles The Essential Guide to Being Polish by Anna Spysz and Marta Turek and Eastern Europe!: Everything You Need to Know about the History (and More) of a Region that Shaped Our World and Still Does by Tomek Jankowski. In August, New Europe Books released The Color of Smoke: An Epic Novel of the Roma by Menyhért Lakatos, which follows a Romani (widely known by English speakers as Gypsy) teen in Hungary during World War II.

Founded in 1997, Pushkin Press publishes works in translation, international crime fiction, and children’s books under three imprints: the Pushkin Collection, the Pushkin Press imprint, and Pushkin Children’s. One of Pushkin’s recent titles, The Fishermen by Nigerian author Chigozie Obioma, was recently shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

As part of Hanover Publisher Services’ relationship with its clients, HPS aims “to add value wherever we can, first and foremost managing the distribution relationship with Penguin Random House, but also serving as a sounding board and offering publishing advice and insights whenever and however our clients feel it to be useful,” said Fleischer.

Steerforth Press continues to be an alternative to major houses, said Fleischer, whether because sales of an author’s last book disappointed, the subject matter is not politically correct, the author’s approach or content straddles categories, or a work by a foreign writer comes from another small press.

“While the composition of our list and the look of our books might be indistinguishable from the offerings of quality imprints at big houses, insiders paying close attention will be able discern, in many cases, the reasons why a title we publish might not have been embraced by larger houses who must make acquisitions in a more risk-averse and bureaucratic fashion,” said Fleischer. “The most interesting projects, and those with the greatest potential firepower, are works that slip between the cracks for the big houses or are in their blind spots.”