June 2009 Field Letter

Written on May 26, 2009

Dear Friends,

Every couple of weeks, I walk into my office to find a beautiful book—literally hot off the press—sitting on my desk. Each time, I feel a sense of surprise and excitement, and I know that TCG publisher Terry Nemeth has just received a shipment of whatever our latest volume happens to be. This week, it was Emily Mann’s Mrs. Packard and Wallace Shawn’s Grasses of a Thousand Colors, along with two volumes of Molière plays in translation by Richard Wilbur. The Molière books were printed on a fast track so that the Sidney E. Frank Foundation could provide one copy of each to the first graduating class of the Foundation’s scholarship program at Brown University. A few weeks ago, the colorful cover of Young Jean Lee’s collection Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven was waiting for me when I arrived.

For this month’s Field Letter, I’ve asked TCG’s publisher, Terry Nemeth, to pen a few words on our book program. Under Terry’s leadership, TCG has become the largest independent trade publisher of dramatic literature in North America. Book sales, combined with advertising and subscriptions to American Theatre and ARTSEARCH represent nearly 40 percent of TCG’s annual income. But most important, the program fosters a long term commitment to individual writers and to distributing the highest quality trade versions of their work over time—even as technologies change. The program has also made possible a variety of directories and instructional books that have been indispensible tools for our field (think Dramatists Sourcebook and Subscribe Now!)

Happy reading, and until next month, best wishes,

Teresa Eyring
Executive Director

TCG’s Book Program: Back to the Future
By Terry Nemeth, Publisher

After the marking of American Theatre magazine’s 25th anniversary over the past year, culminating with an amazing event in New York on April 20, I began thinking about the other major component of TCG’s publishing enterprise, our book program, where a number of milestones have recently been achieved.

The seeds of the program were originally sewn by Jim Leverett, director of the literary services program, who was responsible for the publication of Plays in Process, a script circulation series, four volumes of the New Plays USA anthology and the origination of the Dramatists Sourcebook. I arrived at TCG as publications director in the fall of 1982, and we embarked on an expansion of the scope of our publishing programs. Since that time, TCG has published over 300 individual volumes—200 of which are individual play titles or collections. I have had the honor of working with a remarkable group of editors, including Betty Osborn; Gillian Richards; Steve Samuels; and for the past 14 years, Kathy Sova, our current editorial director; and the publications staff, associate editors Molly Smith Metzler and Alex Barreto.

The backbone of the program is our commitment to individual writers. To date, we have published 13 books by Athol Fugard; 11 by Caryl Churchill and August Wilson; nine by Tony Kushner; eight by Stephen Sondheim; seven by Eric Bogosian and Donald Margulies; five by Craig Lucas, Conor McPherson and Suzan-Lori Parks; four by Nilo Cruz and Tina Howe; three by Jo Carson, David Henry Hwang, Lynn Nottage, Sarah Ruhl, John Patrick Shanley and Paula Vogel; and two by Culture Clash, Tracy Letts, Emily Mann and Wallace Shawn. Each of these titles has been in print continuously since their first publication. Lynn Nottage’s recent Pulitzer Prize for Ruined marks the 10th time one of our original titles has been so honored, including eight out of the last 11 awarded. We also are publishing extraordinary new work from David Adjmi, Young Jean Lee, and Tarell Alvin McCraney, three immensely gifted young playwrights, new to our list.

We have been able to maximize the sales of our books through distribution partnerships with Consortium Book Sales in the U.S., Nick Hern Books in the U.K. and Europe and Playwrights Canada Press across our northern border. Our sales have continued to grow and we have shipped well over 2.5 million volumes, including surpassing the 500,000 copy mark on the combined sales of Angels in America.

As we look to the future, a major new initiative is the launch of the TCG E-Book program. As you have undoubtedly read about the increasing activity along this front—with both Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony Reader becoming the two dominant players in this emerging market—most publishers feel that the e-book traction is real this time and many are moving aggressively to convert their books to electronic formats. Growth in this market area has been in the triple digits for a number of the larger trade publishing houses like Random House, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins.

TCG will be publishing over 25 titles in e-book format this summer, beginning with titles by Nilo Cruz, Tony Kushner, Young Jean Lee, Tracy Letts, Eduardo Machado, Lynn Nottage, Sarah Ruhl, Wallace Shawn, Naomi Wallace and others. Our plan is to have 100 of our play titles available in this format within the first year. It will be an extremely useful platform for all of our reference titles and we will be converting both the Dramatists Sourcebook and the American Theatre Reader—which on some of the devices will have search capabilities for the users. This new technology will never replace the look and feel of the book, but making the work of our authors accessible in this format is an essential component for our book program as we move into the future.