A Rule Breaker On Capitalizing Book Titles

Farrar, Straus & Giroux is a bit of an exception. Owned by the giant German holding company Holtzbrinck, it nonetheless remains one of the major publishers most committed to literature. The two FSG books that LVF is backing are "The Savage Detectives," a prize-winning novel in translation by the late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, and Gregoire Bouillier's memoir "The Mystery Guest," translated from the French by FSG editor Lorin Stein.

"The idea is that we will try some innovative techniques" in marketing the Bouillier, FSG publisher Galassi says. He doesn't actually need LVF -- unlike a smaller press, he's got access to capital if he really wants it -- but he's happy to share the risk. Translated works are almost always a hard sell to American readers and he'd have been reluctant to commit $10,000 of FSG's own dollars to that effort.

The gently skeptical bottom line? LVF has taken "an optimist's approach to a very realistic business," Galassi says.

So is Jim Bildner just a crackpot idealist, throwing his money away on the kind of books nobody really wants and hard-nosed businesspeople won't go near? Doesn't everybody know by now that literature doesn't sell?

Not so fast, George Gendron says. Bildner is an entrepreneur -- and entrepreneurs think differently from you and me.

Gendron, a longtime editor of Inc. magazine who now heads the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center at Clark University, joined the LVF board at Bildner's request. To an entrepreneur, he says, what might appear to others to be "inefficient and ineffective parts of the market look like opportunities."

What if you found 15,000 readers for a book expected to have only 5,000? What if you did that over and over again? What if others in publishing started following your lead?

"I wish there were 10 more organizations like the Literary Ventures Fund," says Warner's Karp. "It's a complete win-win situation if this thing works."