LitNYS Mentoring Program: Stephen Motika of Nightboat Books

“There’s all this stuff we never know about how a book moves in the world. It’s exciting and what I love, but it’s also challenging to capture what’s going on in a world that’s looking at analytics as the most important thing.”
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LitNYS: How did you get started in publishing and at Nightboat?

SM: Upon finishing undergrad, I went into the industry and had two pretty brutal publishing jobs. One was at David Gordine in Boston and Simon & Schuster in New York. I was young and green, but also the field was set up in such a punishing way. Instead of welcoming young people, trying to help them to figure out their strengths and what they could improve, it was a bizarre, hierarchical world and very brutal environment, especially at Simon & Schuster. I lasted a little over a year. I learned a lot, but it was also really exhausting. 

I left Simon & Schuster and thought I was done with publishing. I thought it just wasn’t for me. I found it to be such a toxic environment and exhausting. So, then I worked at universities. I ran a center at CUNY and a center at Northwestern. Then I came back to New York and worked at literary nonprofits. I worked at PEN America and for many years at Poets House. In the nonprofit life, I was really into poetry and had moved away from the corporate publishing novel.  

I was really humbled, excited, and felt invited to work in this field. There’s no money, but it’s more open and by-and-large about a process of engagement, a kind of invitation. It was while I was working in the nonprofit sector that I met the founder of Nightboat – Kazim Ali. He’s a poet and professor at UC San Diego, but at the time he was living in the Hudson Valley of New York. He had started Nightboat and we ended up collaborating on a launch event for the first book that the press published. He was also looking for someone to help him who was really keen on publishing. I had some background and real interest. 

The first book was in 2005. It was a reprint. I came on as an editor in 2006 . I have been the publisher since 2007. The press was really tiny when I came on. We had two books in print. It’s been a process of maturing, professionalizing, and growing. The first eight years I spent really focused on growing the apparatus by getting distribution and trying a whole bunch of different things. Some worked, some didn’t. That was how it came to be. 

LitNYS: What do you love about being at Nightboat?

SM: I love that it’s always different and changing. I love the absolute creative world that the press is. It was just me doing almost everything with a little help from part time interns or volunteers, and now we have a staff of – I don’t know – 7 people. We’re publishing 18 books a year and a bigger outfit than we were. 

I love that it’s been so interesting and exciting. I love making a book that’s an object to show the work or a writer that you admire. The part I really love is to figure out how to share it with the world. What’s the best format? How do we want to present this? Who do we want to ask to help give voice to it? Or, host the author? The whole story of unfurling something is really exciting to me. 

LitNYS: What are the biggest challenges in this work?

SM: The publishing industry is a brutal business. It’s got a very low margin. We are a returnable business, which means any bookstores that order books can return the books if they don’t sell or if they don’t want them. They’re not stuck with them. We’re stuck with them. It’s just a financially challenging business to begin with. 

In small press and nonprofit poetry, it’s just really difficult to convince the broader literary cultural world – whether it be booksellers, librarians, media, editors, – to take a chance on something that’s a little outside of what is familiar to them or beyond what is sold at the big five publishers. 

We have a very little crevice to operate in, so the challenge is to make things work in that crevice. Some books are small. No matter what you do, these books are going to be small, and some books have a broader readership, which can surprise you. I guess all books can surprise you. 

There are books we do that are mission driven. We do them because we love them. We think they need to be in print and are passionately committed to them and to supporting our authors. But, they are not books that are going to make any money for themselves. So, you have to balance the art side and the creation side with the engagement. You measure a book’s success based on many channels. One of them is sales, another is reviews, attention, and awards. Sometimes there are also things that are ineffable, very hard to track and that can be challenging. To say “look at this book. It has this life.” Sometimes you don’t even know it’s having a life.

We live in a world that is very surveilled and tracked. Say we were doing this interview in person and I gave you a little stack of books – 3 or 4 books — to take home with you. You could do anything with those books and I would never necessarily know. You could give them to people – one of your best friends is a reviewer for the Times literary supplement, and all of a sudden we have a review. One of your friends teaches and another one of your friends gives it to their child. And for that child it’s a life changing experience. 

There’s all this stuff we never know about how a book moves in the world. It’s exciting and what I love, but it’s also challenging to capture what’s going on in a world that’s looking at analytics as the most important thing. How do you tell your story as a nonprofit press? Part of it is about numbers. Part of it is about affect — reaching people and changing their minds, inspiring them to push themselves, or to help make a change in their communities. It’s a very complicated smorgasbord of inputs and things to track and then to translate.

Another thing that’s a challenge as a book publisher is that we make things. We make objects. We make a commodity that people buy in the store, online, or at a fair. When we are raising money, sometimes people say, “Why do you need money if you sell stuff? Why do you need extra support?” That gets back to the mission work and being a nonprofit. The things we do do not pay for themselves because [our books] are not primarily published because of commercial viability. 

LitNYS: Can you talk about your experience with the LitNYS mentoring program? What did you gain from it? What  was it like?

SM: I’ve done a lot of mentorship. I’ve been a mentee, but also a mentor. It’s very personality driven and some people are really good – great talkers – they have a great gift and a vision. You just take notes and let it all sink in. Other people are really great with the nuts and bolts: “This is the plan and you revise the plan.” It’s been fun and interesting to have so many different styles because not only are we all different learners, but we are also different teachers. I think the mentorship program is great because it allows so much flexibility. It’s not like you’re using a curriculum and check boxes to match things. 

We are isolated and lonely, especially those of us that are executive directors or publishers of small nonprofit publishing houses. I think having this support and the connection is really great. There’s not that much of that. We haven’t had a [Facing Pages] conference for years at LitTAP. I mostly work with my staff or alone and in a very small office. I don’t get that much input. I don’t have audiences. I’m not in the public. It’s a pretty back-end business, behind the scenes. It’s nice to be able to reach out to someone who has expertise.

LitNYS: What advice would you give to those starting out in indie publishing?

SM: Publishing requires a lot of different things — you have to have expertise in a lot of different areas. It’s probably impossible to be an “A” student and deeply passionate in all those areas. Part of what has helped me is to learn to say, “I have these strengths and I have these weaknesses. I have these passions, and these things are less interesting to me,” and to work with my staff and collaborators to find instances where I don’t have to do the things alone that are harder for me. 

You can share responsibility. You can share decision making and labor. You can share things dynamically, rather than hierarchically. Not to say that leadership isn’t important. I am committed to that and it’s important to me as a publisher. But, I do think there’s a time when you are in indie-land, where everyone wears every hat, to step up and say “I’ll lead on this” or “this isn’t so easy for me, could someone help me.” I think that’s what is great — to have support from my colleagues and to remember it’s ok to ask for that. 

There are times when it can be hard to run a company when you are focused on making a product, and then you run into an issue — like fundraising. I have found it to be challenging to switch hats and to have the confidence to ask people for money. It can be pretty hard when you are selling a book of poetry at $16 to then say, “I really think you should support us at the $3000 level.” That can be a challenging thing to do. And, there’s not that much money. It’s not like the art world where there are art collectors with money. 

LitNYS: Nightboat is a really exciting publisher of really good books that push the boundary of their time. I hope that there are more publishers that continue to push the boundaries.  I’m excited to see what you do next.

What are Nightboat’s plans for next year?

SM: We’re really working on some backend nonprofit stuff. We’ve been working on mission, vision, and values, and working with board and staff to do more of that. We’ve piloted a new editorial fellowship program. We’ve just announced the first fellow that was funded in part by LitTap (now LitNYS). The next year is really going to be back-end, some core development and developing philanthropic giving so people can better support the press. 

We’re going back in person to all kinds of events from The Brooklyn Book Festival to the New York Art Book Fair to AWP. We’re curating Segue, an artists’ space for eight Saturdays in October and November. There’s a lot of getting back in front of people to talk about what we do and get them excited to plug back in after coming out of the pandemic. 

LitNYS: What do you love most about being in publishing?

SM: I think a book has so many different lives. It has an editorial and planning life. It has the production and the designing of a beautiful object, and the publicity and marketing life. Then it has life after. Some books become classics. Some books are your go-to favorite book of poetry. I think it’s really exciting to be able to touch and make art. There are so many parts of the cycle and I don’t think a lot of things are like that.

Keeping a book in print and available, supporting an author, keeping the press going — all that stuff is really an exercise in the longview. Nothing in publishing is quick. It takes a long time in a world that’s very mediated and fast, bouncing around in all the different twitter waves. It’s nice to be grounded in something that you work on for a longer, deeper time.

I hope we continue to nurture the next generation of presses, publishers, and editors. I am very excited to be part of that conversation and lending support. Continuing to find ways to create projects for people to be invited into our field is really important. It’s about access, funding, and creating contexts. We have some real questions to ask in a field that frankly has a very troubling history when it comes to race and access. I hope that we can continue to do that work and make publishing a more equitable and stronger field.