The New York Observer has new details on the closure of Soft Skull Press, which officially shuttered its New York office on October 28. According to the Observer report by Leon Neyfakh, Soft Skull owner and Counterpoint CEO Charlie Winton closed the company’s office and fired its two employees — editorial director Denise Oswald and associate editor Anne Horowitz — because sales declined by “about 25% since 2008.” Winton also cited “the seismic shift that the publishing industry underwent over the past several years” and hinted that running two offices (Counterpoint is based in Berkeley, California) was overwhelming.

What Neyfakh’s article doesn’t emphasize is that the time period Winton cites — “since 2008” — neatly coincides with his management of the company, which began in mid-2007 when he bought Soft Skull for a bargain price (rumored to be only its debts) and merged it with his Counterpoint and Shoemaker & Hoard imprints. Neyfakh leads with the fact that Soft Skull was “rescued from financial ruin” by Winton, but what’s also missing is that the most dire financial problem to hit Soft Skull in recent years was the bankruptcy of its distributor, PGW, which was founded by Winton and later sold (for real money) to the criminal AMS, which eventually filled for bankruptcy in 2007. PGW was then bought by The Perseus Books Group, which paid Soft Skull 70 percent of what PGW owed it, and also bought another company Winton founded, The Avalon Publishing Group, while simultaneously selling Winton Counterpoint.

Taking a few years to close a company is not, of course, rescuing it. The truth is that Winton, as many in the book business know, is an unfortunately cheap business man, lacking — in this instance especially — the foresight and smarts to profit off good things (Soft Skull’s trusted brand and audience) and competent management (losing former publisher Richard Nash, and now firing Denise Oswald, who successfully acquired for Faber and Faber for ten years). According to Nash, who is quoted in the Observer piece, one problem was that there was no publicity for the new Soft Skull: “Anne and Denise were acquiring books that exemplified the Soft Skull spirit… But another part of the Soft Skull spirit is the drum banging, and their books weren’t getting the drum beat hard enough for them.”

For what it’s worth, Winton’s cheapskate publishing model will live on: he plans to keep the Soft Skull name in use, allowing agents to pitch books for it even. “Eventually,” the Observer reports, “Mr. Winton hopes to designate a ‘point person’ within Counterpoint who would be responsible for overseeing the Soft Skull list, but he does not expect to appoint a full-time editorial director.”