Interview: Eli Horowitz, publisher

"I built a shack in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I didn't have any experience but it's still standing. That was a useful lesson," says Horowitz, taking a break in his San Francisco office. His enthusiasm for carpentry whetted, he moved back to San Francisco where he began volunteering as a carpenter at 826 National, Eggers' nonprofit children's literary project which has eight locations across America. Within four months Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, had made Horowitz managing editor of McSweeney's, which began life in 1998 as a literary journal committed to publishing works rejected by other magazines. "Back then McSweeney's was Dave and one other person. There was no real McSweeney's," recalls Horowitz who is appearing in two events at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. "There were all these things needing to be done and I was there and willing to take them on."

Over the past decade, McSweeney's has become a cult phenomenon on the literary scene. The publishing house has helped launch the careers of new writers like Gabe Hudson, Neal Pollack and JT Leroy as well as publishing works by well-established authors such as Michael Chabon, David Foster Wallace, Nick Hornby, Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates. In addition to its book list, and four literary imprints, it publishes the quarterly literary journal, Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, the website McSweeney's Internet Tendency, monthly magazine The Believer, and the new quarterly DVD magazine, Wholphin.

"McSweeney's is like this weird evolving organism. It's basically ten of us with no prior publishing experience sitting around in a room in San Francisco and figuring it out as we go along," says Horowitz. "Most people started out as interns and came up through the ranks. We all really want to be there and really believe in it."

"I don't know if it is a viable business. We keep it small with low overheads and everyone does everything. Our main goal with everything is just to keep it going, with each book doing well enough to do another book."

At the Book Festival, Horowitz and David Shields, author of Reality Hunger who has said the novel is dead, will look at the future of fiction. Horowitz confesses that his view on whether or not the novel is in good health depends on which manuscripts land on his desk on any given day.

"The ones that excite me, and that we hopefully end up publishing, are the ones that don't fit into any trend, the ones that seem absolutely singular. Books still matter because of the direct connection between a single reader and a single author - they achieve something a movie can't do."

Also in Edinburgh, as part of Unbound, the Book Festival's new events series, Horowitz will lead the audience on a captivating journey through the history of McSweeney's and the raconteur and adventurer Timothy McSweeney who is said to have inspired it. "It's an interesting story and I'm excited to see the city. I've never been before but I've always been a big fan in my imagination."

At the heart of McSweeney's success is the huge amount of care and attention which goes into producing each book, ensuring that the jacket design and layout complement the words inside the covers. Though Horowitz believes there is a McSweeney's aesthetic he is struggling to put into words what it is. "There's a notion of old-fashioned story-telling and a compelling plot combined with an innovative literary impulse - when we've had those ingredients that's when we've done our best works."

"I have a strong sense of what is a good book but no sense of whether this book is going to sell a zillion copies. We open the envelope, we read it, if it grabs us we publish it."

The cult status of the publisher has inevitably led to McSweeney-bashing in some quarters, but it is not something Horowitz and Eggers lose sleep over. As well as the ingenuity and commitment of its founder and staff, the success of McSweeney's is in part due to the support of the hundreds of small independent book shops across America who have always been happy to stock and promote McSweeney's books and to host their famous events, which feature live bands, readings and, sometimes, appearances by A-list guests.

Being located not in Manhattan, the centre of the American publishing world, but in San Francisco presents challenges but Horowitz says it is also liberating. "We don't view what we do in terms of other publishers and other books and who has which jobs. It's nice to be ignorant of that. When you don't know you are breaking the rules there's a lack of fear that comes with that which can be very freeing."

Because of the attention Horowitz and his team lavish on every aspect of their books, they have not been in a hurry to jump on the e-book bandwagon. "It would seem perverse and depressing to spend all that time and energy on the look and feel of a book, making it prettier, only to then rip all that up and make an uglier electronic version of it. But we are not resistant to change. These e-books will open up other opportunities." Horowitz has recently been working on a new version of the McSweeney's iPhone app. Fifteen thousand signed up to the original which was launched last year.

This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday, 22 August, 2010b v