Q&A With Chin Music Press

nik.mercer — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 09:51:03 -0800

Chin Music Press, a small Seattle-/Tokyo-based independent book publisher, founded by Bruce Rutledge in late-2002, has released four beautifully produced books on a wide array of subjects (post-Katrina New Orleans; marriage and sex in Japan) since its inception to the print world, with a fifth, Art Space Tokyo, coming out in April (get a great pre-order deal on it here). Anthem asked Bruce a few questions (with Craig chiming in for two) about the company, its plans for further expansion, and inquired about its overall approach to and outlook on publishing.

How did Chin Music Press get started? When, where, and, most importantly, why?

Bruce: I founded CMP in October 2002. I had worked in Japan for 15 years in just about every media job imaginable. It was a white-collar Louis L'amour existence. I was a newspaper editor, freelance writer,
short-wave radio announcer, TV consultant, magazine editor, translator, teacher. I was burnt out on all these media jobs and wanted to do something where I had more editorial control. I watched enviously some of the things going on in small press culture in the US and finally decided to take the plunge and form my own press.

One of the key elements in deciding this was my friendship with Craig Mod, who I had met and briefly worked with in Japan while he was still a university student. As a senior at U Penn, Craig designed the logo and did the branding for CMP. As soon as he graduated, I offered him a low-paying, long-hours job in a fledgling publishing house and he couldn't say no. Actually, he had one condition: He wanted to live in Tokyo. That probably would have been a deal-breaker in any other job he tried to land in the U.S., but for me it was perfect, because I wanted to publish books about Japan. So we had a deal and CMP was formed.

From the beginning, you placed a tremendous amount of importance on the sheer quality of your publications; they're beautiful. They're substantial, use heavy paper, nice inks, and are bound to last a lifetime. I'm sure this is an expensive habit; why do you maintain such a high quality standard?

Bruce: Thank you! It is more expensive, but it also helps us stand out in a crowded industry. While most publishers price their books at 5 or 6 times the cost of publishing, we do it at about 4. It squeezes margins, but it also builds a following and helps us attract attention, especially when we can get the books into prospective readers' hands.

There is some serendipity here too. Craig Mod's vision was a driving force in making the books as beautiful as they are. I've been a bibliophile from a young age, and my Dad had a beautiful collection of
books that I admired, so when I met Craig and we started talking, our philosophies about books clicked.

There is something else: in a disposable and increasingly digital world, the sheer tactile pleasure of a well-made book should not be dismissed.

Chin Music Press has published Kuhaku, Goodbye Madame Butterfly,
Last Of the Red Hot Poppas, Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?, and soon, Art Space Tokyo. A varied and interesting selection. Is the company a Japanese publisher? American? A little of both? Additionally, how do you choose these authors and what role do you play in the books' publication (do you give the authors complete freedom or are you more stringent editors?)

Bruce: We are an American publisher, and every book we do is meant first for an American audience, then for the world. At first, we planned to start with Japan and tell the stories of modern Asia to Americans. But when the levees broke in New Orleans, we felt compelled to turn our attention there, knowing that eloquence would emerge. We still have a lot of faith in Americans as readers and writers.

Your first book was Kuhaku, a sort of introduction to Japan. You recently published another Japanese-themed book, Goodbye Madame Butterfly, and are preparing for the release of your third book focusing on Japan, Art Space Tokyo. Did you deliberately start with a broader subject and highlight more specific ones as the company aged or did you become more immersed in Japan's culture and society, learn more about the nation? That is, has Chin Music Press evolved over the years with you?

Bruce: Chin Music has definitely evolved, and you're right to note that we've moved from general to specific in our coverage of Japan. Part of that was because we wanted to gain some publishing experience before we plunged into books as intense and focused as Butterfly or as detailed as Art Space Tokyo. Also, the anthologies of Kuhaku and Do You Know were a wonderful way for us to get to know writers and artists in Japan and New Orleans, respectively.

Craig: As Bruce says, "We're an American publisher," but we both have tremendous roots in Japan. Bruce spent 16 years here. I've spent 5 1/2 total. I know Tokyo better than any other city in the world. For me, it seems most natural to produce works that stem from this intimacy.

Madame Butterfly had been in some form of production for over three years. I remember discussions starting in a cafe in Mejiro when Bruce flew over to Tokyo for the Kuhaku release party. Art Space Tokyo has been in the works for almost a year and a half. It's just the nature of being so small, having such limited resources (energy, time, money) that some of these projects require time to see to fruition. In many ways we've always had a sharp eye on Japan, it's just taken a while to actualize it beyond Kuhaku.

In addition to publishing books, you've also made several websites (Hitotoki, Canned Coffee, Buzztracker). From where did these ideas spawn, what's their function, and how are they related to Chin Music Press?

Bruce: Craig had been working on Buzztracker as a college student. I loved it from the moment I saw it. A new front page for the Internet, I thought. I also felt strongly that a small publisher needed to be savvy about the Internet and digital publishing, so expanding on the Web made perfect sense. Plus it's a lot cheaper than print! Canned Coffee spun out of Kuhaku; Voices of New Orleans spun out of Do You Know. But Hitotoki and Buzztracker are Craig's creations, and CMP is happy to
help make them realities.

Hitotoki is a joint production with AQ, a very talented design firm in Japan.

Craig: I studied fine arts and computer science at university, so I'm mostly to blame for the web-heavy seemingly schizophrenic nature of what we produce. Books have inherent advantages over the web (singularity, cohesiveness, object-ness, tactility, permanency, intimacy). The web has inherent advantages over books (interactivity, low-cost of development, quick deployment, huge potential reach at a minimum of cost). I think we see them both as amazing, versatile and exciting mediums. The act of producing for each is so utterly different (in terms of mindset, cost, production time, etc) that it keeps us active, nimble.

There's also a lot of overlap. One of my goals for our CMP projects is to bind the two mediums as rationally as possible. Kuhaku has its production site (we also tried to build a Japanese slang wiki-style dictionary but that fell through) and the Canned Coffee project. Do You Know has the very popular and immensely important Voices blog (I don't think you can find a more comprehensive collection of hand-picked New Orleans related news anywhere online: Voices of New Orleans). Goodbye Madame Butterfly has the GMB sub-site. And we have a lot in the works for the Art Space Tokyo site once the book is completed.

Even though it's starting to show its age, Buzztracker is trying to project in as clear a form as possible the idea that globalism is real and ever present. I think in the five years since I conceived the project the American sense of international connectivity has increased. But at the time (2002, right around announcing our intent to enter Iraq), things felt very different and extremely isolated.

The ideology behind the form of Hitotoki is a direct response to things literary and online. The web does short well so we made the stories on Hitotoki 500 words or less. The web does interconnectivity well, so we implemented what we hope is a useful mapping feature to bring added depth to the stories. The web does No Schedule well―Hitotoki is updated when editors have something interesting to post. Web projects also scale (usually) well, so we started small (just in Tokyo―again, working with what we are close to―and just in English) to get the idea out and have since slowly but steadily expanded the scope of the project. At the same time, the web does really bad really well, so from the onset we (CMP and AQ) envisioned the writing on Hitotoki to be high quality. People have reacted strongly to this point. I think this is because it's sadly so rare to see well edited and thoughtful prose online.

What's on the horizon for you? Are there more books coming out? Other projects?

Bruce: Lots more books coming out. After Art Space Tokyo we get political (and publish our first paperback) in Curing Japan's America Addiction by Minoru Morita, coming out in July. We are also putting out a second edition of Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? in October,
and may have a fourth title this year.

We published one book in 2005, two in 2006, one in 2007, and finally in 2008 we will break out to three or four titles. We hope to continue and slowly build that pace until we're doing perhaps 10 high-quality
books a year.