Joshua Doležal: Welcome back to The Recovering Academic Podcast. I’m Joshua Doležal and my guest today is
.My interview series this year is called “The Things Not Named.” It takes its title from a passage in Willa Cather’s essay “The Novel Démueblé,” one of her craft manifestos. I’ve been asking writers how they know high-quality writing when they see it and how their own sensibilities have been forged. But today we’ll examine those questions from the publisher’s side — why certain books get chosen and how much or how little style factors into it.
Anne Trubek is the founder and publisher of Belt Publishing. She is the author of So You Want To Publish A Book? (Belt 2020), and editor of Best of the Rust Belt (Belt 2024), and Voices From The Rust Belt (Picador, 2018). She is also author of The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting (Bloomsbury, 2016), and A Skeptic's Guide To Writers' Houses (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). She has been publishing her
newsletter since 2018.I hope you enjoy our conversation.
Joshua Doležal: Anne Trubek, thanks so much for joining me. Am I pronouncing your name correctly?
Anne Trubek: Yeah, Trubek.
Joshua Doležal: And are you from Wisconsin originally or from Pittsburgh?
Anne Trubek: No, I grew up mainly in Madison, Wisconsin.
Joshua Doležal: And am I correct that you are a fellow recovering academic?
Anne Trubek: Yes. I mean, I used to be an academic. I don't feel like I'm a recovering one, but yes, my first career was as an English professor.
Joshua Doležal: Why did you leave academe, if I may ask?
Anne Trubek: It's a complicated one. I mean, I was one of the very lucky people who had tenure and I was at a good institution. But I had a very unusual job situation. This is a lot of detail, but at some small liberal arts colleges, they split positions so that two people have one position. So I was in that situation with a halftime job and I needed to make more money and so I started to do a lot of other things. I started to do a lot of freelance writing and other stuff like that. And so the other projects that I was doing started to pick up and get more steam. And then I started this press. And then at a certain point the juggling was too much. And so I had to, I had to go one way or the other. And so I leaned into the press.
Joshua Doležal: How did you end up in Pittsburgh then?
Anne Trubek: So Belt Publishing, which is my press, focuses on the Rust Belt. And I was living in Cleveland for many, many years. And I had a sort of post pandemic, empty nest desire to move. The other part of the other reason why I left academia is that because of a joint custody arrangement, I wasn't able to go on the academic job market. So I was sort of in one place, but that was done. And so I wanted to move, and given that Belt Publishing focuses on the Rust Belt, and I needed to stay in the region. So I had a lot of good friends in Pittsburgh and I love the city, so that's why Pittsburgh.
Joshua Doležal: Well, I hope you'll indulge one other personal question. Your name seems Eastern European. It could be Czech or Slovak. I know there's a big Slovak population in Pittsburgh. Is that part of your own background too?
Anne Trubek: No, it's, it's Jewish actually. So it's sort of Russian, Ukrainian, you know, type of area. But yeah, a lot of people with the “ek” think of it as, you know, it's all generally Eastern European.
Joshua Doležal: Very cool. Well, so the series that I'm doing this year is mainly devoted to craft, and I've mainly been talking with authors about their craft and how they define it. But I think it's very difficult to really pin down what it is that we're looking for when we're reading for high-quality literature and how we define our particular craft sensibility. So you're coming at this from the publisher's standpoint, and you are a kind of curator because you're acquiring titles. And so I think everyone's interested in that sensibility. You know, what does an agent look for? What does a publisher look for? And so that's one thing I'm hoping to get to the bottom of a little bit more today. But you're also an author. Am I correct in saying that your books are more nonfiction or history or journalism rather than what we think of as memoir?
Anne Trubek: Yes. So I've edited a lot of volumes, but I've also single-authored, it's a weird phrase, single-authored a few books. One is A Skeptic's Guide To Writers' Houses. And another one is The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting. So both of these are a combination of research and reporting narrative nonfiction. You could call it serious nonfiction, perhaps. These are strange genre titles that we use for nonfiction. So yeah, no, not memoir but you know, reported nonfiction. Based on my academic research, obviously.
Joshua Doležal: So that's a very different kind of sensibility, but, and you do acquire some books in that area for belt publishing, not just theory fiction.
Anne Trubek: Right. So for, in terms of what Belt publishes, we do focus on nonfiction. So that is, the craft question is a little strange there. But we have published, as of next month, three novels total. So very few, very little fiction. But I'm still looking for a certain kind of writer. I don't know if craft is the term that those writers would be using or that I would be thinking about, but I'm definitely looking for a certain kind of writing.
Joshua Doležal: Well, let's perhaps stick with literary fiction then for our purposes, to keep focused on craft. I became aware of you through
, who's sort of a Substack gentleman that everyone appreciates. I've interviewed him for my own series a while back about his novel and the future of higher ed. But his deal with Belt Publishing was a kind of success story because he serialized first and then he didn't pitch you directly, did he? You discovered him on Substack.Anne Trubek: That's right. I reached out to him.
Joshua Doležal: Yeah. So you, how did you discover Major Arcana?
Anne Trubek: So, and I should say it's the only literary fiction that we've ever published. So I'm, and I'm not gonna be speaking from broad, you know, in terms of generally what I'm looking for this is very aberrant.
did an interview with him for his newsletter. And I was really fascinated by John's answers because it was clear from them that he had a grounding in literary history and that he was doing something based on that grounding in his novel. And that is not common these days. Or, you know, the answers that he was giving were not what most authors are saying about their book. So I thought, well, this, this sounds really interesting. And so I started to read it and the very first scene takes place about half a mile from where I live here in Pittsburgh. And so even though Belt does very, very little fiction and has never had never done literary fiction, we are open to fiction with a strong sense of place particularly if it's in the Rust Belt. And this suddenly, which I didn't realize from reading the interview with Ross, was an example of such a book and I thought it was really interesting and I thought John's decision to serialize was really interesting and so I reached out to him and that's how it came about.Joshua Doležal: So the regional emphasis was part of the appeal, but the novel had to hold up as a work of art, I assume, for you to decide to publish it. So when you started reading it, I mean, it could have been about Pittsburgh or set in Pittsburgh and really been a flop, right? So, so what was it at the sentence level or about the design of it or John's command of craft that convinced you that it was worth putting your resources behind?
Anne Trubek: If I'm being honest, I don't think craft is something that came into my head or is something that I think about consciously. What I certainly am always sitting up and paying attention to is a writer who's clearly very well read. That is the kind of writing that I really look for and is really, can be very hard to find. And so the fact that I knew that John had an incredible body of knowledge behind what he was doing, that his writing was referencing what has come before and making comments about that. That's the kind of thing I really look for. And I think that if there's something that unites Belt, Belt authors, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, in terms of what I look for, it's somebody who knows their field, whatever that field is, who's really well read and is integrating what's come before into what they're doing. That's something I really value: that level of knowledge and an ability to be sophisticated about integrating it without showing off. You know, that's not what's important to me. But that we're building on what's come before and creating new things at the same time.
Joshua Doležal: Well, forgive me for pushing a little bit on this, but to promote a novel like that successfully, I mean, it does have to hold up as a story. So when you're talking about Major Arcana, a book that people should buy, what is it that you think is the main appeal or the artistic, if you don't like the word craft, you know, what's the artistic depth of it or originality or the literary side of it? Someone can be very well read and also be incredibly tedious and you wouldn't be publishing it.
Anne Trubek: Yes, no, absolutely. And I don't have any opposition to the word craft. It's just not necessarily anything a term that I think about in a conscious way. I love the ambition of it. I love that it was taking on a lot. I love the maximalism of it. It was putting everything in there. And those were the, you know, the well-read, the maximalism, and the ambition of the scope of the novel were the things that really appealed to me.
Joshua Doležal: Would you say there's a playfulness in John's writing that goes with all those other qualities?
Anne Trubek: Yeah, but I think that would be misconstruing the novel to a certain extent. It's a challenging book and it's one that I imagine a lot of people start and don't continue with. So playful makes it seem a little more fun. It's not that it isn't fun, but it's as intellectual as it is playful, and I think the intellectual aspect of it is what dominates. I love the book. I love what he's doing. I love the references and so it's playful for me reading it and pulling those up in my head. But you know, in terms of marketing this book and and publicizing it, I don't think playful is something that we leaned into too much.
Joshua Doležal: Well, I was meaning that more in the postmodern sense, you know, the Thomas Pynchon vein or you know, the Joseph Heller vein where there's a kind of absurdity that's part of the whole intellectual picture and is part of the thesis such as it is in a work like that. But to return to possibly a polemical point about craft, I wrote earlier this year about craft as a principle that's just dead in the literary marketplace as a shift toward perhaps identity reasons for publishing certain authors or guaranteed book sales. Celebrities are much more likely to get a memoir deal say than someone who's trying to debut the way that Tobias Wolff did in the eighties and nineties. So, I don't know if you would agree with that.
Craft — command of literary elements and a kind of sophistication of style — used to be the kind of thing that could get you on the map. Alfred Knopf was a publisher who explicitly went after authors like Willa Cather, who he thought had that kind of sophistication, and that was what he was investing in. And my feeling has been that it's increasingly difficult to be discovered based on craft alone, and John's book kind of proves that point, if it appealed to you for reasons other than what we would think of as sentence-level sophistication. Would you agree with the premise?
Anne Trubek: So I think that. American publishing is dominated right now by five conglomerate presses, the Big Five, and they're publicly traded stocks, they're multinational corporations. The bottom line's very important. That's always been true. And it's also always been true that there have been other presses that are looking more for, I think, the kind of books that you're talking about and the books that I would say Belt does, whether we call them, you know, on the sentence level or just books that are doing something interesting, whatever terms we want to use. Knopf started off small. Now they're part of a multinational conglomerate. They were bought out. So a lot of this has to do with, you know, it's something we've seen all in all facets of American life. The increasing conglomeration of a few companies that dominate everything. I think one of the things that I try not to be cynical about, but I'm tempted to get cynical about is the number of authors who just seem to want that kind of contract, so they're putting the money first as well. And so it's gotta be a symbiotic thing.
There are tons of small presses that publish beautiful books all the time. I mean, Two Dollar Radio is one of my favorites. Their fiction is phenomenal. They do very few titles. Everything that they publish is incredibly good. They punch way above their weight in terms of prestigious awards and all of that. And so I think that people have to be looking around, more peripheral vision. You have to go beyond the companies that have the most marketing dollars that are shoving things, you know, into the certain places to find the stuff that's out there, but the stuff is out there. I do think that the Big Five is getting increasingly focused on the bottom line. And the bottom line is gonna follow trends. And the trends lately are, you know, the celebrity memoir, the romantic, that's where the market is, that's where the sales are. And these people need to make numbers to keep their jobs. So if the market were to suddenly switch where everybody wants complicated literary fiction, well then those places would go running to the agents and say, bring me the unknown complicated writer, because that's where the money is right now.
So I think that it's really important to understand the publishing landscape when we think about these things. I do think that it's also really important to look harder, to spend more time looking for those really great novels by people who are not as well known. Obviously you can't find a book by somebody who's unknown if you don't know to look for it, right? By very definition. I think it's important to focus our attention and I lost the word, but it's important to focus our attention on the places that are doing what we want to see more of, rather than complaining about the places that aren't doing it, because they're, they're just multinational conglomerates in a capitalist system, that's what they're gonna do and what they're gonna be.
I think agenting is something that perhaps has a disproportionate role. At Belt, most of our books are not agented, many of our books come from me reaching out as I did with John. If you're working in a place where all you're getting is what agents are sending you, you're only gonna get submissions from people who know how to play that game. It's a very particular game that you need to play to get the agent, to get a proposal or a book in the kind of position where an agent thinks they can sell it and an agent thinks they can sell it for enough money to make the agent's time worth it, because the agent only gets paid their 15% of the contract. So it's in their interest to get the higher advance to get that early payday, which means they're going to want the book to become more and more, whatever the the trend is that maybe doesn't prioritize craft. Also, literary fiction has never sold well. So literary fiction has never been, you know, the kind of thing where people are lavishing huge book deals on.
So on the one hand things are different now than they used to be. On the other hand, it's just the way it's always been. Cather is unusual. She did make a lot of money in her time and she was extremely successful, but it took her a very, very long time to get to that point. Many, many years.
Joshua Doležal: Yeah, well she was a journalist at the highest level, she was a journalist with McClure's Magazine and perhaps one of the preeminent women in journalism at the time and was reading all kinds of fiction submissions for other magazines while she was working on her short stories. And she was 40 years old, I think, when she finally made her breakthrough. But she had to leave her job and jump off a cliff professionally to really devote the linear time that she needed to her fiction. So there's a whole…it's a fascinating story. Willa Cather was my primary area of research when I was teaching, so I can easily get off topic with her.
Anne Trubek: No, me too. I mean, I've done a lot of reading about her in terms of her life as an author and it's an interesting one. And that McClure's thing was really a blip. I mean, it wasn't like everybody was making a ton of money as a journalist in that time either. Like there was this little moment where there were these opportunities. She was also a nightmare to work with as an author.
Joshua Doležal: Well, she categorically banned any movie deals after an atrocious production of A Lost Lady. I think it was Warner Brothers who did that and wanted to cut the whole second half of the novel because it was too depressing and she was just horrified.
Anne Trubek: Yeah, and she made so many changes on the proofs, the last stage before it goes, that she was charged the equivalent of $10,000 today. And if an author made that many changes on proof, I would be so livid.
Joshua Doležal: Yeah. Colorful character for sure. Well, back to the bottom line part of it, I mean, so you left higher ed because you needed to make more money, and it seems like going into publishing is kind of, sorry to say it, but it seems to be one of those areas where that would be the least likely place to make to make more money. But here you are, Belt Publishing has been around for how long, over a decade now. And how do you make a go of it as a small press given those thin profit margins and the fact that fewer people are reading books? I hear these reports. I guess it was Elle Griffin who caused a splash with her thing about how nobody is buying books anymore, and all the stats about how titles typically sell fewer than a thousand copies. So it seems like as a publisher, those are really slim margins that you're working with. How do you make it profitable?
Anne Trubek: Sure. Well, I should clarify that it wasn't that I wanted to make more money. I just wanted to make my rent because I needed to supplement my income. It was very hard. I did both jobs for a long time. I never was able to really live on what I made through Belt for all those years. It was extraordinarily financially stressful. In early 2024, we were acquired by a larger press. So now a lot of that is, thank goodness, praise be, is in the past and we're much more stable financially now. So it was brutal. I couldn't make it. You know, I was still doing a ton of freelancing and other things to make rent.
But we have a focus, the niche that we have a focus on means that we have a very clear audience. We know how to reach that audience. We have a very clear brand. We have people who understand who we are and support us as a press and understand what we do. We have booksellers across the region who appreciate what we do and support us. So I think having a niche is absolutely key. I don't think starting a press that was just going to publish literary fiction, I don't know how you make that work because it's so hard to stand out. But the idea behind Belt was to fill a gap. And so the people who understand what we're doing is helping to fill that appreciat it and buy the books. A lot of the people who buy our books aren't readers per se. There are people who are very interested and invested in the place that the book is about. So we're not necessarily looking for the people who are the quote unquote readers. We're looking for people who have a vested interest in one of the cities that we might write an anthology about or do a history of.
Book publishing is still a multi-billion dollar industry. So, you know, there's plenty of people buying books out there. It is…margins are thin. It's hard to make it work. You have to work very hard and, you know, like I said, it was very tough for me. But I wouldn't say — if somebody said, I'm thinking about starting a small press, my instinct would be say, don't do it. Which is a horrible thing to say since I did exactly that, not that long ago. But literacy rates are just huge, right? If you think about America today versus a hundred years ago, there are so many more readers. There is so much to read out there. It's still a huge increase.
Any graph would just be showing a steady growth of books. Actually sales, they're pretty much holding steady. If you look at data for the entire industry. So, yeah. People are reading less. Absolutely. Certain types of genres of books may become more…it's more like opera, the ballet, than TV or radio. It's gonna become more niche, but it's still a viable industry with lots of people who are invested and for whom it can employ and entertain and edify
Joshua Doležal: Another thing that I've talked with some of my guests about is the traditional book contract versus self-publishing. John Pistelli had done self-publishing mainly before you reached out to him.
is another author who's done that with his book, The Requisitions, a World War II novel, and there is a certain argument there about how few royalties an author does get from book publishing. And so if your production costs are fairly minimal, you might be able to break even or make a small profit self-publishing versus going the traditional route. And Substack is kind of dangling that option out there to people as an alternative and a disruptor to the traditional path. So I don't know what your thoughts are on that. Obviously you have a vested interest in a traditional publishing route. Do you think it makes more sense for some authors to self-publish versus seeking some other press to represent them?Anne Trubek: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, self-publishing is nothing new. There are people who have been doing self-publishing for at least 20 years now and making a ton of money off of it. I think if you know how to market and publicize and you like doing that and you are writing something in a genre that can be found, you should absolutely self-publish. Yeah, you will make more money, but you have to do all the work the publishing company would be doing, and that's why your portion is less because you have to pay for the printing and you have to pay for the publicist and you have to pay for the editing and you have to pay for the distribution, which is huge. But self-publishing is an absolutely viable path if you are someone who is good at marketing and organizing and doing all the parts that a publisher would do.
Belt started because I self-published one book which is an anthology of writing about Cleveland.
And I was like, I want to know what it's like to do this, to design an interior to go through the process to print. We did a conventional print run and I had 2000 books show up in my driveway and I kept the books in my garage. But we made a lot of money because everyone expects to pay money for a book. Thank God books have never gone to the economy free, you know. So I was like, oh wow, actually there's money here. And so then I did more of them and eventually we became a traditional press. But it all started with me self-publishing one book.
Joshua Doležal: I didn't realize that part of your story, but nice reminder that the two can work together and share some of the same principles. Well to wrap up, I'm curious…we spent a lot of time on John Pistelli, deservedly. But who are some other authors or other titles that you're really proud of at Belt Publishing that some of my readers could find?
Anne Trubek: Oh yeah. Thanks for asking. So we published a book last year that was a finalist for the NBCC, the National Book Critic Circle in the autobiography genre, it's called The Minotaur at Calle Lanza. And it's this beautiful, beautiful memoir, which is actually a surrealist memoir. And he pulls it off like it is a memoir, but it also has a surrealist aspect to it. And the author's name is Zito Madu. And it takes place while he's wandering the streets of Venice during the pandemic. And he writes about, he was raised in Nigeria and in Detroit. And he tells these stories as he is walking through the streets of Venice. And then at a certain point there's a Minotaur that is involved. Anyways, Zito is absolutely one of these people who, he's read everything and it comes through in this subtle, subtle way. And talk about someone who knows how to write a sentence. I mean, the prose style is just, it's almost addictive. You have to keep reading it. It's very subtle. But if you know what he's doing, you just, it's amazing. So proud of that.
And we have another book that just won the Stonewall Award honor title from the American Library Association called Be Not Afraid of My Body, which is another memoir by Darius Stewart which talks about HIV and race and again is doing something really sophisticated and experimental with the essay form and drawing on a lot. It's very Whitmanesque. He's got a lot of Whitman in him.
Coming up, we have a series of revivals which are reissues of sort of underknown works that are in the public domain. And we have an early Dawn Powell novel. It's set in Central Ohio that just entered the public domain, it's called She Walks In Beauty. Dawn Powell is mainly known for her sort of witty New York novels, but she was very much an Ohioan born and bred writer and her earliest novels take place in Ohio, so that comes out next month. I'm really excited about that.
Joshua Doležal: That’s “the thing not named” for today. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back in a few weeks with
. Stay tuned next week for another installment from my fatherhood memoir.Most of my content in 2025 is free, but I appreciate the support of readers who make my essays and interviews possible. Upgrading your subscription unlocks my monthly installments from a memoir-in-progress, as well as the entire archive. I’m also proud to be a Give Back Stack. 5% of my earnings in Q2 will go to Centre Volunteers in Medicine, a free clinic for those with no health insurance and annual income under $38K (individual) or $78K (family of four).
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