There is no bookstore to be seen. The route from Zurich’s main train station to the tranquil neighborhood where Kampa-Verlag has found its home does not pass by any shop whose shop window advertises books. You can still find them elsewhere in Zurich, the owner-run bookstores where you can browse and advise. They are particularly important, especially for books with small editions and thus for Kampa-Verlag, a publisher founded in 2018 that is already in the black after a very short time and has just announced that it has bought two more traditional literary publishers: the Frankfurt Schöffling- Verlag and the Salzburger Jung-und-Jung-Verlag. Since then, half the book industry has asked itself: How is something like this possible?
There are supposed to be publishers who wear jeans, curly hair and untidy shirt sleeves sticking out of their jackets. Daniel Kampa is of the other kind. He’s a suit publisher, and he’s set up presentably in Zurich, in a bright shop with an intelligentsia flair, an old building, herringbone parquet and a stainless steel coffee machine. A Christmas tree dealer is stationed in front of the shop, he is allowed to use Kampa’s electricity, the publisher hopes that in return a fir tree will be left over for him in the end.
The publisher is now supposed to work in a similar way, based on the principle of shared resources. The “backup synergies” of small publishers are the only answer to the crisis in the book market, says Kampa, small publishers have to organize themselves together, share the expensive distribution or the complex network maintenance, help each other with the complicated license negotiations and a more self-confident counterbalance to the retail branches and , yes, also form online retailers.
The chances of survival for small independent publishers are deteriorating
Seen in this light, the takeovers are a challenge to the concentration in the book industry. There are more and more chain bookstores, the small shops are disappearing, today there are only half as many as twenty years ago, and their number is steadily declining. The internet book trade is increasing, the inner cities are deserted. For small publishers without the powerful distribution systems of the corporations behind them, it makes it difficult to make their books known to readers in the first place.
“Actually, I just want to make books and be on the market in ten years,” says Kampa. This is not a humble wish, because the chances of survival of small independent publishers are deteriorating by the hour. Venerable houses like the Stroemfeld-Verlag, famous for its manuscript-like transcriptions and lavish complete editions, closed their doors forever. On the other hand, small and medium-sized companies are increasingly coming under the umbrella of large publishing companies; Many fear that the diversity of the industry will suffer as a result.
So now in Zurich the opposite idea, a bibliophile, hierarchy-free network, an armada of small publishers. “We don’t want to grow in order to grow, I prefer to speak of cooperation, otherwise that sounds so mercantile,” says Kampa. This habitual criticism of the free market seems a bit flirtatious in view of Kampa’s self-confident demeanor in that very market. He founded his own publishing house three years ago, previously he was the publisher of the Hamburg-based Hoffmann-und-Campe-Verlag and before that at Diogenes in Zurich, where he was in charge of the work of Georges Simenon, among other things. So successful that Simenon’s heirs entrusted the rights to him. So he could do Simenon take with you to his new publishing house, a nice business foundation. So now he is expanding his success by taking two of the finest and most popular small houses in Germany and Austria by his side.
“It has always been difficult to make money with good books. But now it is even difficult to make money with bad books”: Daniel Kampa.
(Photo: Keystone / mauritius images)
Kampa, together with publisher Daniela Koch, has reanimated a third, Atlantis-Verlag, out of a 30-year rigidity. Atlantis was the first publisher in which Max Frisch published his works, and there will also be a book by him in the first program in 2022. Aki-Verlag, an imprint founded by the publisher Ann Kathrin Doerig, specializing in female authors from the 1960s, Dorothy Gallagher and Audre Lorde, for example, whose fame in the German-speaking area is undeserved, is also new this year under the Kampa umbrella still a little in coming.
The Kampa program itself is difficult to characterize, it is a cornucopia of almost everything. There are the books by Georges Simenon and Louise Penny: “Crime literature finances our publishing house,” says Kampa, and the mixed calculation allows him to also use post-migrant auto-fiction Jamaica Kincaid and Jean Kyoung Frazier and volumes of conversations with Margaret Atwood and Carolin Emcke.
For the small Kampa publishing house, which has fewer than ten employees, the renewal in 2021 is about as drastic as switching from a carriage to an airplane without going through the car. The house now unites publishers from three German-speaking countries under one roof, whose book markets operate according to different rules. But Kampa also sets the pace in terms of content: the publisher has only been around for three years, but it already has a Nobel Prize winner in its range. His Polish mother, who still does not really understand what he works there, once read for him Olga Tokarczuk recommended, says Kampa. He secured the German-language rights to her work, and in 2018 she received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The year 2021, the year of the closed bookstores, the lack of paper and the collapse in sales, has been the best for the publisher. But still, Jung und Jung and the Schöffling-Verlag was not able to buy Daniel Kampa from the postage, the money was lent to him by friends, that was easier than getting it from the bank, he says, because it takes a bit of idealism for pumping money into such an insecure industry. Fortunately, there are still people “who believe in books”, “people who are enthusiastic about books” who are happy to contribute. He doesn’t want to give their names.
At Schöffling everything is allowed to stay as it has been since the publishing house was founded
In Frankfurt there were some who feared the worst when it was announced a few weeks ago that the long-established Frankfurt Schöffling-Verlag will be part of Kampa from the turn of the year. After Suhrkamp moved away in 2010, the book fair city counts each of its remaining publishers like rings on their fingers. But everything is allowed to stay as it has been since the publishing house was founded in 1993, says the new boss, “Schöffling-Verlag and its employees will stay in Frankfurt”. Just like young and young in Salzburg.
With Schöffling, the publisher buys works by Eva Demski, Guntram Vesper, Ror Wolf, Joshua Cohen, early publications by Juli Zeh and, last but not least, Elisa Diallo, one of the most talented young licensees in the industry. And with the Salzburger Jung-und-Jung-Verlag, among other things, he brings the works of Xaver Bayer and Ursula Krechel and one of the most generous publishing subsidies in Europe into the house. In the past three years alone, the Austrian state has supported young and old with 400,000 euros in publishing funding.
In Germany in 2018, 60 publishers called for more state aid for their companies in the “Düsseldorf Declaration”. The then Minister of State for Culture Monika Grütters responded by setting up the German publishing award, which at least supports symbolic political support and attracts attention. “It has always been difficult to make money with good books. Now it is even difficult to make money with bad books,” says Kampa in conclusion. Two things stand out about this. First, it sounds like he’s said that phrase quite a few times. And secondly, for Kampa, this sober diagnosis does not seem to be a reason to lose heart.