The following is an e-panel with the publishers of seven relatively new independent publishing houses. By relatively new, I mean they have either very recently published their first catalogue, or will be doing so within the next six to nine months.
The publishers involved were selected due to my either having recently enjoyed one of the books they’ve already published, or I’m a big fan of somebody they’ll be publishing soon. These publishers are:
Kathleen M. Rooney and Abigail Beckel – Rose Metal Press
Aaron Burch and Elizabeth Ellen – Short Flight/Long Drive Books, a division of Hobart
Johannah Rodgers and Eugene Lim – Ellipsis Press
Aaron Petrovich and Alex Rose – Hotel St. George Press
Giancarlo Di Trapano – Tyrant Books
Victoria Blake – Underland Press
Peter Cole – Keyhole Books
Dan:
I’d like to first thank you all for participating in this e-panel. My first question is simply, where did the name of your press come from?
Rose Metal Press:
KR: Our focus as a press is on hybrid genres—prose poetry, short short fiction, novels-in-verse and so forth—so Abby and I hoped to find a name that evoked that hybridity. We wanted a name that would suggest a concerted and experimental combination of elements. We thought and thought and thought about it for weeks, kicking various close-but-no-cigar ideas back and forth between us. Then our friend Caryn Lazzuri, who’d also been in the grad program with us at Emerson, came up with the suggestion that we name ourselves after “Rose’s Metal”—a fusible alloy with a low melting point that is most often used to solder things together. According to Wikipedia, “Its special property is that it does not contract on cooling.” We really liked the pretty-but-tough combination of rose and metal, as well as the idea of this little-known substance (which, created by combining tin, lead, and bismuth, is a hybrid itself) being used to fuse together other substances with disparate properties.
Short Flight/Long Drive:
e.e. – The idea from the beginning was to print “mini” books. Small books you could stick in your back pocket and read on a short plane ride or a long drive (either way: around two hours).
Ellipsis Press:
EL: One thing I've noticed and enjoyed noticing, since we started the press, is that in books prior to digital layout software, the ellipsis is three separate period characters (e.g. in New Direction's Celine titles) whereas, more recently, the ellipsis is now a character unto itself.
Other names on our short list: Small Fortune Press, University of Brooklyn Press, All Is Vanity Press.
JR: I actually saved the piece of scrap paper that Eugene and I used the day we met to decide on a name for the press. I was advocating for the use of mimeograph because I like the word in general, as well as because it has a lot of associations for me of a very specific time and a very specific reproduction technology. Since Eugene was not all that interested in naming the press Mimeograph, primarily because the term has such time-specific associations, we started brainstorming about various possible names and, in the process, Eugene suggested calling the press dot-dot-dot and we both seemed to like that name and decided that we would use it for our press. However, once we talked more about the name, it started to seem a bit too cute for us and I then suggested using the name Ellipsis and we both agreed that Ellipsis resolved the cuteness issue and also, as an added benefit, had some interesting personal and literary associations for each of us.
Hotel St. George Press:
Prior to the launch of our company, my partners Alex Rose and David Willems and I met for several months in a building called the St. George Tower and Grill, which used to be the Hotel St. George, and though we’d been able to agree on nearly everything regarding the company, we were struggling to come up with a name we all were happy with, and spent many hours attaching the word “Press” to nearly every object or idea we encountered. Three Men Press. Too Much Whiskey Press. Three Men With Too Much Whiskey Press. Three Men Fighting Press. Fight Escalating Press. Two Living and One Dead Man Press . . . I’m ashamed to admit that I fought long and hard for Roach Nest Press, until David and Alex got the better of me. When at last one of us suggested Hotel St. George Press—more in a moment of exasperation than anything else—a sort of defeated concession to time and to place—we realized it was perfect, because it provided us an organizing principal for our multi-media website.
Tyrant Books:
I was lying in bed after drinking all day in an empty house in Italy. It was the only name that ever occurred to me as what I should call the press. There was no question to it and it could not be debated. Is that tyrannical of me?
Underland Press:
I needed something dark, without using the word dark. I’d just left an editorial position at Dark Horse Comics, so that was out. Underland was the name of a ballet I had recently seen, and it seemed to fit the mission of the press, which is to publish weird, strange, odd, and unsettling fiction. This kind of fiction goes by many names: slipstream, new weird, alt lit, new wave fabulism, speculative literature. It also goes by a few BISAC codes: Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, and Horror.
Keyhole Books:
It was only a couple of years ago that we came up with the name, still I remember very little. I recall discussing that we wanted a name that wasn't cheesy, didn't have any sort of profound meaning--basically we wanted something that was what it was. We went through the alphabet, listing off words. I recently found that list, but Keyhole wasn't on it. So really, I have no idea who came up with it, when, whether it was ever supposed to mean anything. We may have listed common items that people use everyday. Think that may have been it.
Dan:
To get a quick idea of who it is that we have here – can you please fill me in a bit about your background, especially that which pertains to the literary world? This is sort of the “Why you?” question to our panelists.
Rose Metal Press:
AB: Kathy and I met in grad school at Emerson College in Boston. She was doing the MFA program in Poetry and I was getting a Masters in Publishing and Writing. We are both poets and initially worked together choosing poetry for the Emerson literary journal, first called Beacon Street Review, then Redivider as we oversaw the renaming and transformation of the voice and style of the journal. Kathy eventually became the editor-in-chief for Redivider and I was the managing editor. We found we had a great alchemy and meshing of talents when we worked together on projects and publications. Coming from a background where I had worked professionally in publishing for a number of years and studied the design and business side of producing journals and books, I had skills that complemented Kathy’s editorial prowess and skill at creating a voice and aesthetic for the publication and discovering the talent among the slush and promoting it.
When we graduated from Emerson, we wanted to keep working together. I had always wanted to start my own publishing company, and Kathy was also ready to jump into the business of books, so we started Rose Metal Press in January 2006. Outside of Rose Metal, we both continue to engage in the literary world in various ways and bring much of that same combination of skills that drew us together in the first place: I am still working in the publishing field beyond Rose Metal and Kathy is a widely published essayist, reviewer, and poet. We both have really engaged with the world of innovative and hybrid literature and Rose Metal Press is currently working on two Field Guides to writing, one on flash fiction (due out summer 2009) and one on prose poetry (due out spring 2010).
Short Flight/Long Drive:
e.e. – Well, Aaron and I are both writers as well as editors. Aaron started the lit journal, Hobart, about six or seven years ago, and about three years ago we decided we’d like to try our hand at publishing a book or two as well.
Ellipsis Press:
JR: I’m currently teaching writing at The New York City College of Technology, which is located in downtown Brooklyn and is a 4-year college that is part of the City University of New York. I was an Assistant Editor at Fiction magazine for many years and, more recently, I’ve been quite involved—both as a writer and editor—at The Brooklyn Rail. I’ve been involved with literary magazines since I was in college and attempted to start a small press in 1992 with some friends in the Bay Area, but that never got off the ground. My first book, sentences, a collection of stories, essays, and drawings, was published by Red Dust in 2007 and I’ve had stories and articles published in various literary magazines (Fence, Fiction, Bookforum, Chain Arts, Pierogi Press, Tantalum, Harp & Altar, The Brooklyn Rail, SonaWeb).
EL: I'm the fiction editor for Harp & Altar, an online magazine that gets updated roughly twice a year. Ellipsis Press published my first novel Fog & Car this year. I work as a librarian in a high school.
Hotel St. George Press:
We’re composed of three writers with a fairly specific aesthetic, and though we were finding small homes for our work here and there, we longed for a venue that focused entirely on that aesthetic—and so we decided to make one; for ourselves, for all our friends who also couldn’t find a place for their work, and ultimately for the aesthetic we hoped would find a bearing. Our literary tastes can diverge wildly, but when our tastes converge, like the interference pattern between the disparate, expanding pulses from three triangulated radio towers, we find some pretty decent noise. And we’re finding a lot of decent makers of noise in that arena.
Tyrant Books:
Because I have excellent taste in literature. At least that’s what I think. Don’t all of us here think that? That you yourself have it, not me. Although I do. And, I have to be honest, there was a sense of despair bout the independent book scene at the time. Pretty covers? No guts? I’ll stop.
Underland Press:
My literary life has always been divided into two parts: the writing side and the business side. For the business, I came to books through publishing of all kinds—books, comics, magazines, newspapers. I’ve had jobs or worked for/with all those outlets, or markets. Pretty early on, I looked around and thought, Hey, I could do this, too. As soon as I had the idea, it was just a matter of time.
On the writing side, I’m just now finishing up my MFA at the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, which is the world’s best MFA program. I’m keeping the two worlds separate, but I do think that writers make the best editors, and that publishers are well served by an understanding of craft and form.
But that answer doesn’t give any specifics: I graduated with an English degree from Barnard / Columbia, I’ve worked for The Oregonian, The Boulder Daily Camera and The Beaverton Valley Times, I was a prose editor at Dark Horse Comics, I’ve been a freelance copyeditor and proofreader, and I still do magazine work if the pay is right.
Keyhole Books:
I have zero qualifications. I don't have a degree. I've never written anything. I've read a lot of books and I care about reading and think it's important, so that's why I'm here.
Dan:
You’ve all either recently put out your first catalogue, or are going to in the very near future. How did you go about acquiring the titles? How did you let authors know you were looking for manuscripts?
Rose Metal Press:
KR: Back in January of 2006 as we were just getting started, Pam Painter, one of our board members, made the wise suggestion that we make our first book an anthology, the theory being that anthologies tend to sell better than single-author books since instead of having just one person’s set of friends and family and fans as a built-in audience, you have dozens of people’s sets of friends and family and fans. Plus, anthologies are often better suited to course adoptions and educational use than single-author books. As luck would have it, she was right, and our first collection, Brevity & Echo—a collection of short short fiction written by graduates of Emerson College—sold really well. This in turn helped us make our next couple of books single-author ones. From there on out, we’ve tried to strike a healthy and interesting balance of anthologies and one-author books.
Aside from Brevity & Echo, for which we heavily solicited Emerson College graduates and did not consider work from anybody who was not one, we have limited our restrictions to the form of the work being written as opposed to who was doing the writing. We have an annual chapbook competition where the only restriction is that the stories come in at 1,000 words or less, and we had a novels-in-verse reading period that led to the publication of Peter Shippy’s How to Build the Ghost in Your Attic, and another prose poetry one that led to the upcoming publication of Carol Guess’s Tinderbox Lawn: Prose Poems. We have also had excellent results from the open-door reading policy we’ve been able to keep up until relatively recently. Three of our next few forthcoming books—including two anthologies (The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Flash Fiction and The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry) and one single-author collection of short fictions (Color Plates by Adam Golaski)—all came about through the editors or authors approaching us cold, through our website. They got in touch and we looked at their work and loved it.
For the reading periods for specific forms, we placed ads in publications such as Poets & Writers and the Writer’s Chronicle, and handed out fliers at the AWP conference, and I think as a direct result of that—of just getting our name and our books out there—other authors who were doing what we wanted to be publishing heard about us and were able to find us.
Short Flight/Long Drive:
e.e. – Our first time out we ran a contest. And while it netted the wonderful Sicily Papers by Michelle Orange, we quickly figured out we weren’t contests sort of people. There are definite disadvantages to running contests. So, after that we decided that if we ever published another book (and we weren’t sure we would), it would be via word of mouth or someone we asked specifically. Which is how we acquired our next two books. One by word of mouth. The other by asking a writer whose work we greatly admired if she had a collection of stories she was open to publishing.
Ellipsis Press:
EL: We posted on a few blogs and sites that we were setting up shop and actively looking. I had read Eugene Marten’s In the Blind when it came out. I met him at a reading and, having heard a rumor that he’d written a previous novel, asked him about it. Marten is a disturbing writer and an uncanny stylist. He builds physical and visual experience using only words and style. This is of course what all writers do, but Marten impressed me as a very exacting keeper and sculptor of tone. Tyrant Books is going to publish a book of his in the near future which I believe will be called Firework. It's a dark and awesome title as well. In it there's a car chase scene that is as explosive and mesmerizing as any similar cinema scene of choreographed violence. How Marten achieves this visceral experience through language is, I think, pretty stunning. Also, there's a political element to Marten's book that I think is important. Waste is told from the point of view of a custodian in a multi-story office building (one early review called the experience of Waste like reading the margins of Then We Came to the End). I think part of the importance of Marten's work is that in this and in In the Blind and Firework, he writes convincingly and truthfully about the working class experience like no one else.
JR: I read the manuscript of Fog & Car in 2004 and I was just totally excited by it and I felt like it was an important novel that needed to be published and I was fairly surprised that Eugene had not yet found a publisher for it. I offered to help him in any way I could, not knowing, of course, at that time that I would end up being the co-publisher of the book! Eugene and I are very committed to trying to publish manuscripts that are written by writers living outside of New York City and by individuals whom we do not know. That said, the world of “experimental” fiction is fairly small. The reality of the publishing world right now is that an awful lot of really good books by well established authors are just not getting published by large, mainstream presses, which is in some ways good news for small presses because small presses are now finding themselves able to publish books by fairly established writers, but also possibly not such great news because it means that small presses may be publishing less work by writers who have little or no publishing history. Fortunately for these writers, it is much easier to get a first novel published by a large, mainstream publishing house than it is to get a second novel published by the same organization, so perhaps, in the end, I shouldn’t worry so much about the possible effects of small presses publishing books by writers that have already published elsewhere.
Hotel St. George Press:
The best answer to that question is, We have no idea what we’re doing. When we started, we didn’t even have the language to speak the sentence, We have no idea what we’re doing, but now that we’ve been around a few years we can finally speak the sentence, We have no idea what we’re doing. We decided to guinea-pig ourselves with our first two titles—if we were going to do any damage to anyone’s careers by entering somewhat blindly into an industry we had little background in, we figured it better be our own—and once that was out of the way, and we learned a little bit about how to go about publishing books—and especially thanks to the guidance of Johanna Ingalls and Johnny Temple at Akashic Books—we felt comfortable inviting others into our fold, and posted submission info in the usual places. As our first two books started to get review coverage, authors started seeking us out, and as we got to know people in the publishing community, we started to get referrals.
Tyrant Books:
We began as a lit print quarterly and through publishing certain authors, they warmed to us and gave us the goods. All of our titles of 2009 are by authors from our magazine: Eugene Marten, Michael Kimball, and Brian Evenson.
Underland Press:
Brian Evenson! I love him! We’re publishing his incredible Last Days as our launch title in the winter. I met him at BEA, he had a chapbook, I asked him to write an Aliens novel for Dark Horse, and away we went… His book is what made me want to start the press in the first place.
Underland is also publishing Will Elliott—a debut author from Australia whose book The Pilo Family Circus won all sorts of awards, both literary and genre. I found Will’s book at the Frankfurt book fair, and I bought the North American rights from the English publisher. And Jeff VanderMeer, who is one of the world’s foremost fabulists and is finishing up Finch, his third novel in the Ambergris universe, right now. I met Jeff through Brian Evenson when I was at Dark Horse. Jeff wrote a Predator novel for Dark Horse which has just gone to print.
Keyhole Books:
So far all the titles we've acquired are from contributors to the journal. I just sort of felt it out. Our first title is going to be from William Walsh. He was in our first issue, and I loved the story and just started talking to him and from emails I realized that I liked him--as a person--and I wanted to read more of his. I read some of the stories he had posted on his website and loved them too. So I asked him if he had any plans for a collection and that I'd like to put it out. The same happened with what will be our second release, from Stephanie Johnson (also in our first issue). I asked her if she would like to pull a collection together, and she sent me a ton of great stories, all of them are good. Since then I've asked for manuscript submissions on the website and the submissions started pouring in.
Dan:
I’m going to end up jumping around a bit here – dipping into the business aspect of the publishing world from time to time. What sort of print runs are you publishing?
Rose Metal Press:
AB: For the two anthologies, Brevity & Echo and A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness, we’ve printed runs of 1,000. For our two single-author books of poetry, How to Build the Ghost in Your Attic and Tinderbox Lawn, we’ve printed between 600 and 700 copies. For our annual Short Short Chapbook Contest winner, we do limited edition runs of 300 copies. For both of our first two winners, The Sky Is a Well and In the Land of the Free, we’ve created letterpress covers by hand at the Museum of Printing in North Andover, Massachusetts, and chosen specialty papers. This handwork necessarily keeps the print runs low, but we also like the idea of making these chapbooks a little more sought after due to their scarcity.
For our traditionally printed books, we hope to keep increasing our runs as we grow. We’ve already had to print another 200 copies of Brevity & Echo and hope the same will be true as the rest of the books sell through the first runs. The trick is always figuring out how to estimate a print run so that you get the best price breaks for what you need, but don’t end up with boxes and boxes of the book sitting around for years. So far so good on that account.
Short Flight/Long Drive:
Aaron – For Sicily Papers, as well as going forward with our next two books, we printed (or plan on printing) 1,000 copies. This was a number we picked semi-randomly because it seemed like a good, nice, round number.
Ellipsis Press:
EL: We publish our titles print-on-demand. There's some stigma to this, but I think that that will soon be over. I think the entire publishing world will slowly move to POD publishing. University and bigger houses are already doing this for their backlists. The technology is getting cheaper and the quality is getting better so that it's very hard to tell the difference between a traditionally printed book and a POD book. ...Especially in the world of innovative fiction where a spectacular hit is to sell out a print run of 5000, I think POD makes a lot of sense. Here's a somewhat disheartening stat I read on Thomas McGonigle's blog: in 1980 the combined total sales of Thomas Bernhard's three Knopf titles was around 1,000. That is sadly typical. Note how the 2004 National Book Award nominees were mistreated. Part of the media response was to pretend outrage, saying these books weren’t literature because they’d only sold a few hundred copies. I think it may be best, in terms of sustainability, to comprehend this current fact of your audience—that it’s small. Good-looking and the brightest and the ones with the most panache—but small. But not to be too defeatist—and this is partly why the bigger houses will now do POD—if something does break out, with print-on-demand publishing it’s not so hard to scale up.
Hotel St. George Press:
We’re printing between 1,500 and 3,500 books for Trade Paper, but are also launching a limited-edition series this fall with a letterpress book from Ben Greenman called Correspondences. We’re making 250 of those. We hope to fill out our catalogue with more limited editions, in even smaller quantities than Ben’s book.
Tyrant Books:
We do 1,500 of our magazine. Still pretty dinky I guess. Not sure how many will be doing for the novels. Evenson’s title will be a small boutique run, so just a few hundred. The others, many more I suspect. I should look into this.
Underland Press:
My print numbers are based on what my distributor, PGW, says are the initial sell-in figures. Underland prints offset trade paper and offers ebooks online.
Keyhole Books:
The journal we do sporadically. Ordering in small chunks to make sure we don't overstock. First print runs of 100 and we order subsequent orders when necessary. With our author releases, we're upping that to 1,000 to keep the costs lower so that the authors aren't affected monetarily by our printing costs.
Dan:
Have you made a specific decision between hardcover and paperback, or is everything decided on a book by book basis? What factors led to whatever decision(s) you’ve made?
Rose Metal Press:
AB: We’ve decided to print all paperbacks at this point. The main factor in that decision has been cost, both for the press and for the reader. We truly believe in the book-as-art- object and try to produce beautiful and well-printed and crafted books, but it’s also important to us for as many readers to be introduced to these hybrid genres (which we think are sorely under-represented in mainstream publishing), so we don’t want to publish books that no one can afford to shell out the extra bucks for in hardcover. So, the happy medium there was to produce paperbacks but produce them using the best quality materials we could manage financially.
Short Flight/Long Drive:
e.e. – Given our initial thoughts about printing “mini books,” I don’t think we ever considered hardbacks. It would be difficult to fit one in your back pocket, I would imagine.
Ellipsis Press:
EL: We'll do paperbacks only. Paperback originals!
Hotel St. George Press:
We’re really just choosing between nationally distributed work in Trade Paper, or smaller quantity limited editions that we’re selling direct to consumers and to stores. I don’t see a hardcover in our future for our nationally distributed work, but you never know. We try to let the shape of the book come from its content, and I expect one day we’ll encounter a content that needs to speak with a hard cover and a thick spine.
Tyrant Books:
Haven’t made that decision really. The Brian Evenson book will be hardcover and just a high-quality hold, hope. This will contrast nicely with the blood and horror that fill its pages. I like soft cover though. No problem with them at all. Except the cheap ones that fall apart and their covers bend. We got fucked over by BookMasters on our last press so we are responsible for filling some shelves with some of those.
Underland Press:
At this point we do trade paper, but if the right project comes along we’ll do anything that project needs.
Keyhole Books:
A lot of personal taste goes into what we decided for the look of the books--mostly my taste. I'm picky about how books feel. I've gone through bookstores and felt hundreds of books to get a solid idea of how I want our books to look and feel. I also don't really care for hardback. They're more expensive. And cost is an issue, because we want to encourage reading and are trying to keep costs low. Though I am leaving the option open in case an author prefers hardback.
Dan:
How many titles do you plan on publishing per year?
Rose Metal Press:
KR: To quote Schoolhouse Rock, three is a magic number. In terms of our budget of both time and money, Abby and I have found that right now it’s ideal for Rose Metal to put out two full-length books per year, plus one chapbook of short shorts. The two full-length books can be in any style, on any subject (as long as they are in some way hybrid), and the chapbook is always the winner of our annual Short Short Chapbook Contest, as selected by our contest judge.
Short Flight/Long Drive:
e.e. – One? Two? Two, at the most. But probably one. We don’t really have time for more than one. Plus, we want to spoil it, for a full year, before adding other siblings.
Ellipsis Press:
EL: We'd like to do 2-4 titles a year. We're actively looking right now for next year and haven't decided anything yet.
Hotel St. George Press:
Honestly, we’re operating on a one-book-at-a-time paradigm. We each have full-time jobs, not to mention our own artistic projects, and our Hotel is something we come to in our spare time . . . our ambition is not necessarily to be a successful publishing house in a mass-corporate sense, nor even according to any model of Indie-publishing success, but to make beautiful books that reflect the care with which they have been written whenever we’re able, and to do our best to get them into reader’s hands. I could see us printing as many as ten books a year, and as few as one.
Tyrant Books:
Well, we are doing 6 next year that I know of. 3 issues of New York Tyrant and 3 novels. Maybe more. Not less though for sure.
Underland Press:
My goal is to publish four this year, six next year, and so on. I do want to grow, and I do want Underland to be a destination press in the genre world.
Keyhole Books:
Our first year we're planning on three or maybe four releases.
Dan:
A continuation of an earlier question to some degree – do you have an open submission process? And do you prefer electronic submissions vs. hard copy, or vice versa, or doesn’t it matter to you?
Rose Metal Press:
KR: We try our best to stay open to queries because one of our goals is to be as aware as possible hybrid work being done by all sorts of authors, and we were doing pretty well for a while there. So well, in fact, that now we are booked solid through mid-2010, and are no longer open to unsolicited manuscripts. We wish we could be, but since we are primarily a two-woman operation, we were finding that we owed it to the authors we had already accepted to concentrate on getting their work into the world before taking on even more new projects, exciting and worthy as those projects might be. Currently, we are only soliciting manuscripts through our annual Short Short Chapbook Contest, which runs from October 15th through December 1st this year, and which will be judged by Sherrie Flick.
As for electronic-versus-hard-copy, we vastly prefer electronic submissions. We have a Google email account for the press, and one of the beautiful things about Gmail is that you never have to throw anything away. I’ll say it again: you never have to throw anything away. From an environmental perspective, this lack of paper waste is fantastic. We also take the electronic side of this debate because it keeps postage costs down for ourselves and for our prospective authors.
Short Flight/Long Drive:
e.e. – I don’t think it matters, electronic vs. hard copy. And, we don’t really have a “submission process” as far as the books go. It’s all very: by-the-seat-of-our-pants, right now.
Aaron – Just to add to that, as Elizabeth mentioned earlier, we are primarily working via word-of-mouth and solicitation. I think a more open submission process is overwhelming for us, especially while we are also working on the journal, which is all open submissions.
Ellipsis Press:
EL: We are currently accepting submissions. We prefer electronic submissions of the entire manuscript.
Hotel St. George Press:
Until very recently we had an open submission policy, but, due to the huge volume of queries we were receiving, and the relatively large pile of manuscripts we were asking to read, we’ve had to close it for the time being. We simply haven’t had the time to give submissions the attention they deserve, and we’re deeply reluctant to have anyone but our own selves handle the reading. Our focus now is to continue to develop relationships with authors and artists via our online literary journal, and we expect many of those relationships to result, in the end, in print publication. That’s, roughly speaking at least, how our third and fourth books came about.
Tyrant Books:
Our submissions have been closed for sometime now. I know writers hate that and they will be open soon, but allow me to defend. We don’t have any submission readers and we don’t want them. We go through them ourselves and it takes some time. Sure, I could sit around and read 30 submissions a day but that isn’t fair for the writers. After reading a few short stories, good or bad ones, the belly is full. It isn’t giving the writer a fair deal if you don’t come to his writing with a fresh head. Another excuse for having closed submissions? We have our next books lined up.
I like hard copy stories simply for the fact that I pick them up from a P.O. box and always tear them open on my way home and it’s nice because I never carry anything to read so am on the train and am happy to have them with me so maybe I like them more. But at the end of the day, quality is quality and shit is shit, whether it’s electronic or hard.
Underland Press:
A quick story: I read slush at The Paris Review eight hours a week for a full year, and I didn’t discover one story that got sent upstairs. Maybe that says more about my 21-year-old self than about the nature of the slush pile, but the experience put me off reading slush. The best projects come to us through recommendation and through solicitation.
That said, I’m currently (and always) looking for interesting projects to do online. Underland is sponsoring a wovel, or web novel, that is going gangbusters. I’ll be looking for my next wovelist in the coming months. Check out the web site at www.underlandpress.com, and get in touch if you have a wovel idea.
Keyhole Books:
We decided to leave submissions open all year, from anyone, for free. Want the submissions to be as open as possible, yes.
I prefer electronic submissions because it's fast, free, and easy to manage. I can read them anywhere on my iPod or laptop. I do like mail, but it's just not as practical.
Dan:
How do you go about designing and printing your books? Do you have an in-house art person, do the authors get involved, is your printer local?
Rose Metal Press:
AB: We have two fabulous and talented book designers who work with us on a practically volunteer basis, Rebecca Krzyzaniak and Melissa Gruntkosky. The dedication these two women have to our mission has really been critical to getting our books produced and creating a recognizable design aesthetic for the press.
We generally choose the cover art from the work of an up-and-coming independent artist, and generally, the author is involved in some way in that process, whether they suggest the artist or just agree to the art we have chosen. Our authors also check proofs of their entire book and clear up any formatting issues at that time.
We have used all small and mid-size printers in the greater Boston area. Similar to the hands-on way we like to work with our authors, artists, and designers, we like to build a relationship with small printers and communicate with them a lot while we are looking at proofs and sometimes doing press checks onsite.
Short Flight/Long Drive:
Aaron – Part of the reason I started Hobart was actually to give myself an excuse to put my limited though curious design skills to use. So, I’ve “designed” the covers thus far, though we have very much kept the author in on the process and, in terms of Mary’s upcoming book, “designing” the cover meant all three of us deciding on an artist we liked and who we thought would be a good match, guiding him through a few different versions until we all decided on something we really loved, and then me kind of slapping a barcode on what he came up with.
Ellipsis Press:
EL: For these books, we designed them in-house. Which means, Johannah and I and my wife and a friend pitched in with various design ideas. We worked very closely with Marten. Johannah has some layout experience, but it was a fairly steep learning curve for me. I think they came out pretty well, but I believe we would love to have someone else do the design of the next books.
Hotel St. George Press:
We do everything but the printing in house. We work VERY closely with our authors in the design aspect of the book—one of the worst things I think you can do to an author is to eliminate him or her from the design discussion, and end up with a book that they don’t want to look at. That’s also something I learned from Akashic, but something that we likely would have found on our own, because we think of ourselves as collaborators with more than publishers of our authors. Our trade papers are printed in Canada—for letterpress, we’re working with Brandon Mise of Blue Barnhouse in North Carolina. The guy’s brilliant.
Tyrant Books:
We have a great layout guy who basically listened to us and gave us what we wanted. We do the covers ourselves. The authors will definitely have a say in their novel covers. We have had problems with printers price-wise or job-wise. We have used Hignell in Canada who make BEAUTIFUL books, but they eventually became too pricey. Bookmasters just sucks. They did not get our books to us in time for the launch party as promised so there we were with no books celebrating our books. We also sell a couple hundred at our launches so we were screwed out of that. We tried to get people to pay upfront and we would mail it to them but that was bullshit. We are now using McNaughton Gunn. They seem cool.
Underland Press:
We use Quebecor, which has printing plants in the US and Canada. The design is done by out-of-house freelancers. The author is involved in the process, but again, each author is different. One of our books is a translation of a Dutch thriller. The book is fantastic, the authors are really nice, but their English isn’t so good. As a result, the collaboration is limited.
Keyhole Books:
We have a friend who happens to be a designer and who happens to be very nice, works for free. So far she's done all the covers for the journal. I usually come up with the concepts, borrowed from a story or poem from each issue. She also designed our first book release. For future releases I plan to design some myself.
Authors do get involved for book releases. Marketing is something to think about when designing, but remembering that it is someone else's work is important to. I like artists to share their ideas, comments on our ideas. We may be publishing, but it doesn't belong to us and it's important to me that the author feels like they have control from beginning to end.
We plan to print our books through a company in Wisconsin.
Dan:
Would you say there is a specific aesthetic to your publishing house? What do you perceive as your mission?
Rose Metal Press:
KR: I sort of talked about this in my explanation of how we got our name, but when Abby and I decided we wanted to start a press, we knew that we wanted to create publishing opportunities for work that might get overlooked otherwise because of its formal oddity. From a marketing perspective—which is the perspective that a lot of the larger trade publishing houses take most frequently—work that is hybrid, which is to say work that does not fit neatly into a generic box, is perceived as a tough sell, and therefore as a bad risk. It struck us as perverse that talented authors who can do more than one thing at once—it’s prose, but wait, it’s also poetry!—should often have a harder time placing their work than writers who do just one thing well. So we made hybridity our mission. That said, I don’t want to make it sound like Rose Metal is some kind of pity party for orphan genres. In addition to looking for work that is hybrid, we also look for work that is fresh, strange, funny-sad, linguistically adventurous, and formally innovative. We look for work that is not afraid to take unusual risks.
Short Flight/Long Drive:
Aaron – I don’t think we have any specific aesthetic we are going for. Mostly, we want to publish books that we would want to read as readers and we also want to design them as books that we would be excited to buy and show off to friends. Our tastes, I’m sure, form a kind of aesthetic, though I’m never very good at explaining what I like beyond “I like it!”
Ellipsis Press:
EL: We want to publish innovative fiction. Unconventional, innovative, avant-garde, experimental, postmodern—however it’s called. Not fiction obscure for obscurity’s sake, but we’re interested in novels that, in particular, are unique and beautiful in style and self-aware and groundbreaking in structure. Just a few recent-ish names I see in this tradition: Renee Gladman, Peter Markus, Gary Lutz, Ben Marcus, Carol Maso, Lynn Crawford, Oisin Curran, Amy Hempel.
Hotel St. George Press:
We do have a specific aesthetic, but we have an impossible time describing it. In fact in this instance I’ll say I’m speaking for myself, and not necessarily for Alex and David—my own pulse from the radio tower, so to speak, with which they sometimes intersect. The best I can say is that we only know our aesthetic when we see it. We do love works that incorporate more than one media, because we like those patterns of interference in conveying meaning—and that has really become the chief focus of our online literary journal. We know more about fiction than anything else. And we prefer fiction that isn’t like life in a realistic sense because we spend all our days surrounded by a reality that we don’t care to see repeated in the things we read. And though we claim not to publish short story collections or poetry, we’ve published two short story collections and one book of poetry. Well-laid plans . . . In terms of mission, well, it all comes down to creating a venue for a meaningful exchange of ideas with readers and with authors, artists, and musicians as we all go about the business of learning to be human. And the exchange I’m talking about is certainly not programmatic, but the kind of exchange between two people that enhances the experience of being alive. I don’t know. The hotel is a place of collaboration—and chiefly between a writer and a reader, though there are other kinds. I’d say that my collaboration with Alex and David is the best example of our aesthetic—we’re constantly enhancing one another’s perspectives with new ideas and surprises, and because of this we would do the nature of collaboration a disservice by carving its meaning (or the definition of our aesthetic) too deeply into the stone. Which is all another way to say, we have no idea what we’re doing.
Tyrant Books:
It is cliché to say it but we really are sentence driven. Though not totally. There are some things that are more story than sentence, but we pay attention to the controlled burn of a sentence and how it leads to the next. We hear a lot from people that our stories are fucked-up and all about death and uncomfortable situations. But maybe that is what good writers write about. I think it is. I hate happy and jokey shit like David Sedaris and most McSweeneys writers (not all!). When writers are serious about what they are writing, they pay attention to what they are doing. These other jag-offs might as well not be in the room when they are composing. It isn’t good and it isn’t funny. Why don’t you shut the fuck up already. I’ll stop.
Our mission: To bury the bad books with the good books.
Underland Press:
Our mission is to publish weird, strange, odd, and unsettling fiction. We’d like to combine the best of the genre world—which is attention to plot and story arc—with the best of the literary world—which is attention to language and character. We don’t balk at blood or gore, but the violence has to be for a purpose.
That’s from the creative perspective. From the business perspective, our goal is to be an integrated in print, online publisher. Book publishing is where the music industry was in 1996. We want to be ahead of the curve.
Keyhole Books:
I hope we don't have a specific aesthetic. I like to stay open to everything, try new things. Basically we just do what we like.
We have a mission statement. Instead of repeating it, I like to think that our mission is to find new ways to encourage people to read more. That's my personal mission. We want to be a resource for writers too.
Dan:
Are you printing galleys or Advance Review Copies? What is your strategy for reviews – newspapers, literary websites, blogs, industry magazines, etc.?
Rose Metal Press:
KR: Frankly, it’s not financially viable for us to print advance copies of books before we print the actual copies of said books. So no, we don’t do ARCs. Instead, we do e-galleys—PDFs of the books complete with the cover art and all the pages laid out just as they will be once the books actually go to press. We’ve found that most places—large and small, print and online—are amenable to accommodating us by accepting these e-galleys instead of the more old school ARCs, and for that Abby and I are grateful.
We also send out copies of the actual books as soon as they are printed to various blogs, newspapers, journals, and magazines, and again, we’ve been pleased to find that most of these reviewing bodies are willing to consider them, even though there is nothing really “advance” about them.
Short Flight/Long Drive:
e.e. – Our strategy for reviews, like our strategy for pretty much everything else regarding Hobart and Short Flight/Long Drive is: wing it! Usually we don’t really have a clue what we’re doing the first time out. We jump in, get wet, and try our best to doggy paddle to the side. (Also, we like to talk in clichés!) That said, we try to send as many copies as we can to various bloggers, magazines, newspapers, people we know, people we don’t know…
Aaron – Yeah. What Elizabeth said. No strategy. You’ve hung out with me, Dan. Can you imagine me ever having anything in any way resembling a “strategy”? <editor’s note: “Umm, no!”>
Ellipsis Press:
EL: We’re sending early copies to selected, independent bookstores and those sites and magazines that tend to review unconventional fiction (e.g. American Book Review, Rain Taxi, Bookforum, Bookslut, Newpages.com).
Hotel St. George Press:
All of the above and more. Something we learned from Akashic is to get our books into as many hands as possible, as early as possible, and to recognize that each book has its own unique characteristics, and we try to find its unique niche. Paul Fattaruso’s book Bicycle, for example—a simply beautiful prose-poem—underwent a massive email campaign to bicycle stores. Not your traditional venue for prose-poems, but we had some success there. And for Ben Greenman’s limited edition we’ve expanded the scope of the project to include a “Postcard Project,” in which readers can complete one of the stories in the collection that Ben has left intentional gaps in. We’re also deeply event-driven—and much of the review coverage we’ve gotten is a direct consequence of author events—but I see that’s the next question so I’ll save my thoughts on that.
Tyrant Books:
We will print advanced copies for review. We send in a review proposal and they either agree to it or do not.
Underland Press:
Yes, we print galleys. I’ve been surprised, though, at a) how much this has cost, and b) at how reluctant the general tide is to receiving PDFs. It cost me about $4 to print each galley, and another $4 to mail it. That adds a big number onto the book’s bottom line. There must be a better way.
Keyhole Books:
Yes, we're printing advance review copies. We plan to hit all of the above.
Dan:
How is your press going about finding publicity for your authors? Are you supporting author reading tours? Sending out review copies? Finding interviews for them? How involved do you feel you need your authors to be in getting the word out, and do you find most of your authors willing to go as far as you need them to?
Rose Metal Press:
KR: Aside from our Short Short Chapbook Contest, which is judged blindly, Abby and I do consider the personalities of authors whose work we fall in love with before we agree we’re going to offer them a contract. I don’t mean that we evaluate whether we can be, like, best friends forever with them, but rather that we consider how willing and able to help us actively promote their work these authors are. We are so small that everything we do is a complete labor of love, so we want to team up with writers who are also not afraid to labor. So far we haven’t been disappointed, and all of our authors have been incredibly proactive in helping us get their work out there to reviewers and readers. We can’t afford to fund author reading tours, but we go to great lengths to set our authors up with readings in their home areas and in any areas to which they might already be traveling, or are willing to travel themselves in support of their books. We send out tons of review copies and hunt for interview opportunities, and we also ask our authors for suggestions as to specific reviewers, interviewers, or magazines that they think would find their work noteworthy.
Short Flight/Long Drive:
e.e. – Obviously, we want the author to be as involved as possible. You’re talking to new presses, Dan, so I think it remains to be seen how far authors will actually go. Some have families, fulltime jobs, etc. and can’t commit as much time as others who don’t. Understandable. We think reading tours are important – more for getting the author’s name as well as the press’s name out there than for selling copies - and try to help our authors read in at least a handful of cities. We do send out review copies and try to set up interviews. Again, we’re very, very new. We’re getting ready to publish our second book the beginning of next year. We hope we’ve learned from our mistakes last time around. Or, a couple of them, at the very least. It’s definitely a learning process.
Ellipsis Press:
EL: We’re figuring this out, trying to make some contacts, scheduling some readings locally here in NYC in the next six months. Placement in sympathetic shops. Trying to get the book into the right reviewer’s hands. Maybe even an ad or two.
Hotel St. George Press:
First and foremost, we probably won’t work with an author with whom we haven’t already developed a relationship, and learned to gauge his or her willingness to get out and present their book to the world. That’s an essential ingredient in a publisher’s collaboration with an author. There may be a rarefied place somewhere in which the author’s work is done once she’s finished writing her book, but that place isn’t within the walls of the Hotel St. George. We tour as much as we’re able, and when we tour we target dailies and weeklies for enhanced listings that often act as mini-reviews. Even with our first foray into limited editions we’re relying heavily on Ben’s willingness to do events and to approach media from a variety of angles to get the word out. Ben’s kind of the perfect Hotel St. George author because his will to engage with live people is boundless.
Tyrant Books:
This is something that has been of great concern to me recently. I am nervous about our first books, but for personal reasons. They are great books. I know this and do not doubt it. With the journal, I feel a responsibility to do my job to get them out there to be read and I think we do an okay job at that. We could do more, okay, but have you ever had the feeling of being whimsically coddled to readings and boring nights of dull people to support literary magazines? I hate that and I begin to unfairly hate a magazine when it is all in my face all the time about how great it is. Maybe that is stupid and I don’t know what I’m saying.
With the novels I feel a greater responsibility because it is a single person’s work that I am dealing with. A single person’s hours, days, and months alone in a room sweating it out. Now it’s my job to bring it home. I will try and do my very best.
But we will take our authors on book tours and we will adamantly seek for reviews. Interviews will also be part of the plan.
Underland Press:
Publishing books is and has always been a collaboration between publisher and author. The more an author can make out of his or her personal network, the better. And nobody knows exactly why and exactly how a book sells, anyway. My theory? Word of mouth. If the book is good—if it’s a good read and it’s entertaining and if there’s some take-away value to the read—then it will be passed around. This is viral marketing at its most pure.
Keyhole Books:
We are very small, but we're trying to act big, do everything as professionally as we can afford. I let our authors know upfront that we're new at this, but that we will be doing everything we can to ensure that they get the attention that they deserve. I talk in length with authors and hopefully develop a relationship. I think of it as a partnership, so I think it's up to the publisher and the author both when it comes to publicizing, especially with the rise of online societies. It's important to have a face. I think people want to see that. And yes, I think our authors are willing to work.
We'll be building websites for authors, paying for all review copies (without limit), finding interviews, and hopefully assisting in setting up readings. We don't have the funding right now to afford to pay for full book tours, but hopefully we will in the future.
Dan:
Distribution. How are you getting your titles out into stores and in front of potential buyer’s faces?
Rose Metal Press:
AB: The majority of our sales are electronic, through our website (www.rosemetalpress.com), Powell’s, or Amazon, though we prefer the former two vastly to the latter since Amazon takes such a sizeable bite of the profit. We are distributed to retail bookstores by Small Press Distribution, who also promote us at many book shows through their catalog and displays. As Kathy mentioned, we set up lots of readings for our authors and we have had success selling books at those events, and the bookstore venues tend to keep copies on display in the store before and after the reading. We also exhibit annually at the AWP conference bookfair and the Chicago Printers’ Ball, and occasionally at other shows.
Short Flight/Long Drive:
Aaron – Ugh. The distribution question. We have relationships with a handful of stores because of the journal but, beyond that, we’ll get back to you…
Ellipsis Press:
JR: We are distributing and selling our books in three distinct ways: direct via our web site, indirect via Ingram and SPD to bookstores, and indirect via Amazon and other online retailers.
EL: One unique example I’ve read for a kind of grass-roots distribution is McPherson & Company Publishers. They develop and maintain ties with a hundred or so independent book stores. In exchange for a better discount, McPherson ships to these stores non-returnable copies of their new releases. That kind of path of personal contact and relationship-building over time is something we’re looking into.
Hotel St. George Press:
We’re very lucky to have a distribution relationship with Akashic Books in which our trade papers are distributed to the trade through Consortium, as an imprint of Akashic. So our books are available anywhere—online and in stores nationwide. And of course though we do have this distribution, we still outreach directly to stores—and, as in the case of Bicycle, try to identify unique markets who won’t know anything about the book unless we tell them. The limited edition series is an experiment I’m only beginning to engage in, so I can’t say for sure how that will work. We’ll be trying to sell most of the books direct at author events, to a few indies with whom we’ve developed good relationships, and on our and Akashic’s website.
Tyrant Books:
First we cold called places. That sucked and didn’t work very well. Now we have distribution with Ubiquity and Ingram and that ha helped immensely. Eve though they take such a big cut, which sucks.
Underland Press:
We’re distributed through PGW, which means that we’re everywhere—nationally and internationally. I feel very lucky to have them on our side. They’re a great distribution house, and a great team. Working with them has helped tremendously.
Keyhole Books:
Right now we're only in one bookstore and we just mail directly to them. One of our editors has been doing some traveling, stopping in bookstores and showing them the journal. We haven't found much time for this, but it is a priority and we hope to be in a lot more bookstores soon.
Dan:
How far into the future are you thinking as a publisher? Do you have authors signed for your next catalogue? Farther down the line than that? Do you plan on continuing with the same number of titles per year indefinitely or is there a ramping up rate you have planned out?
Rose Metal Press:
AB: We’re thinking pretty far down the road as publishers. We’d like Rose Metal to be around for a good long time and build up a strong backlist. Kathy and I have books lined up through 2010, and that feels both thrilling and challenging. Next spring, we’ll probably start reading new manuscripts again and thinking about 2011 and beyond. For the foreseeable future, we plan to continue to publish three titles a year. Of course, much of our growth in that area and in expanding our catalog is contingent on funding, and as we grow financially and are hopefully able to use more volunteers and possibly hire staff, we may be able to expand our annual catalog and still make sure each book gets the time and promotion it deserves.
Short Flight/Long Drive:
e.e. – What is this “catalogue” you keep referring to, Dan? We have two authors signed (well, truth be told, we’re waiting on the contract to be returned from the second author, so he’s not “officially” signed yet, but…well, I guess that’s more information than you needed. Sorry.). As I said, we hope to put our next book - Mary Miller’s Big World – out early next year/’09. And then we will be publishing (Aaron takes over…) this amazing book, The Avian Gospels. More info on that to come but it is actually a “bigger” book than we really intended to be publishing with our mini-books, so we are actually going to divide it into two (Book I and Book II) and then release them, hopefully, within a few months of each other. Beyond that, we have no plans. Those two (three? BW and AG x 2) are keeping us plenty busy as is at the moment.
Ellipsis Press:
EL: I think we’ll do 0-4 books a year. I think 2-3 is ideal and, importantly, sustainable. Zero if we don’t fall in love that year. More if we did and can afford to.
Hotel St. George Press:
There are any number of directions we can go in, but at present we’re still sticking to the limits of our funds and our attention spans, and committing to only one book at a time. We don’t have investors, and for the time being anyway we’re not looking into non-profit avenues, and when you combine that with our instinct to give every book we publish our complete attention, it’s hard to see us doing more than we’re doing right now while we’re all working other jobs. Eventually, we’d like to have a split catalogue, between a handful of nationally distributed trades per year and many more limited edition chapbooks—and to see some of the money we have ourselves invested returned!
Tyrant Books:
We are going to keep going with three issues a year and also begin concentrating on the book arm. I want to put out whole books.
Underland Press:
We’re looking into 2010 right now. That’s for titles. For strategy, I’m looking at least five to seven years ahead.
Keyhole Books:
My brain has been in 2009 for almost all of 2008, and now I'm moving into 2010. We are keeping the same amount of releases for now but will most likely increase as we increase funds and help.
Dan:
Have you investigated other formats for publishing the titles? Audio, e-books, etc.? Any decisions in those areas?
Rose Metal Press:
KR: In a word: no. To state the super-obvious, Abby and I decided to start our own press because we both love books, and have loved them our whole entire lives. And when we say we love books, we do not just mean that we love authors and ideas and language and “literature”—we mean that we are kind of obsessed with books as physical objects; as actual things to hold in your hands, as devices designed to operate a certain way. We have nothing against audio-books or e-books; we are just not interested in making them. We are interested in making pages of paper printed with a particular font all bound together under a pretty cover.
Short Flight/Long Drive:
e.e. – Oh, dear God, no. We have enough to think about, thank you.
Ellipsis Press:
EL: Nope. But I have strong feelings against e-books. You can see from my opinion about POD publishing that I’m not exactly a Luddite, but I do think that the Kindle is in fact aptly named and is in fact a kind of culture-destroyer. I admit this is possibly a sentimental view, but it’s the way I feel.
JR: I’m more interested in making our titles available electronically than Eugene is. I feel that it is important to have the books in print, but I also think that more and more people are reading publications online and as portable eReader technologies evolve, I sense that people will begin reading books using these devices. I’ve seen people on the subway in NYC reading books on their Personal Digital Assistants, e.g., Palm Pilots, Blackberries, and I’ve heard good things about the Sony Reader. That said, I’ve never, ever seen anyone using a Kindle device, which, with its proprietary structure seems pretty misguided to me. I’m also interested in investigating new business models for publishing, for instance advertising supported publishing. I think that is the way the world of publishing is going and so I don’t see why small presses—and independent authors—shouldn’t also pursue that path.
Hotel St. George Press:
We’re constantly batting around ideas—in particular in audio formats—because we’d like to seek opportunities to enhance the experience of encountering writing, and hearing an author read his or her own work acts as that kind of an enhancement. We have a Radio Play segment in our Listening Room that does some of that. However, if we were to do a run of audio it would likely be in collaboration between a musician and an author, not merely a reading. Playing around also with affordable downloadable pdfs of small writings. Nothing happening yet in any of those arenas though.
Tyrant Books:
Not really. I hear about the Kindle every now and then and am waiting to hear more. But those things are heavy and hard and will wake you up when you drift off to sleep and drop them on your chest.
Underland Press:
Absolutely. It would be silly not to.
But here’s the debate, hinted at higher up by some of the other publishers. Is the book a book, or does the book live somewhere outside of the actual pages? Ie, is a novel content, or is a novel something you hold in your hands.
The same question could be put to another medium—say, nicotine. Nicotine is neither a cigarette, nor is it chew. Those are delivery devices for the drug. In the same way, I think of the different platforms for the novel as just that—different platforms. If a reader wants to read digitally, God bless them. If they want to read in print, God bless them too. My job is to figure out a way to get the book—the content of the book—into their hands.
Keyhole Books:
We may do audiobooks. Right now we don't have the equipment to produce an audiobook, but we're working on it. Yes to e-books. It's important to have titles in all formats. Personally, I prefer to read regular books, but it's good to have something for everyone. The Kindle is a good thing and to me it legitimizes e-books.
Dan:
How important do you feel your press’s website is? Do you have any specific plans for the website – podcasts, videos, etc.?
Rose Metal Press:
AB: We feel like the website is extremely important since it provides a venue for people to find out about us and our reading periods and get in touch with us, as well as buy our books, of course. We try to keep the site as updated as possible with the schedule of readings and a list of places where the books have been reviewed. As we further develop our site, we hope to include some audio and possibly video of our authors reading.
Short Flight/Long Drive:
Aaron – I think it is pretty important but, that said, we certainly aren’t using ours to its fullest potential. One of my favorite things I’ve done with Hobart in the last few years is have “DVD-style bonus material companion websites” for the print issues, with stuff like alternate endings, outtakes, photo essays, etc. So, I love having a kind of dialogue between the two forms. We haven’t really explored any of that with the book division website. I don’t know. Like choosing books that we want to read, I usually try to invest my time in stuff that I’m interested in and I don’t ever really watch videos or listen to podcasts or anything like that, so I haven’t really spent too much time thinking about any of that. Maybe we should. I have really liked websites like Ander Monson’s though, and the one for Matthew Derby’s Super Flat Times, which are both along the lines of the accompanying sites I described above, so we should probably look into that more…
Ellipsis Press:
JR: I believe the web site was the most important thing that we did other than actually selecting and printing the books. The web site is not only our way of making the press known to the public, it is via the web site that we can sell the books, as well as solicit submissions.
Hotel St. George Press:
In many ways it’s become the primary focus of our press. That wasn’t where we’d initially intended to go, but when we began to develop the idea for a multi-roomed website with every kind of media represented—fiction and poetry in our Library, art in our Gallery, original music, radio plays and sonic events in our Listening Room, a Screening Room for video & film, an Interrogation room for reviews and interviews—we got pretty excited about that. And as we learned more about the cost of print publication, we knew we’d be encountering a lot more work that we’d WANT to publish, but that we simply wouldn’t have the means to. The website is published quarterly, and every other quarter or so we add a new room with a new theme. In the meantime, we realized that our books were sort of acting like advertisements for our website, which has really started to get a ton of traffic. And, as I’ve said, it’s through the web that we now expect to develop relationship with our future authors. So that makes it an essential place for us.
Tyrant Books:
Doing a new website now. I wish it didn’t have to be so web involved, but it is. And I guess that’s cool. I just didn’t expect to have to be so up in my computer all the time to make this press happen.
Underland Press:
We’re experimenting with a wovel, or web novel, online right now. That’s where readers vote on the end of every installment, and the author writes forward in real time as the voting unfolds. Traditionalists hate the idea, but reader response has been tremendous and just keeps growing. The wovel has been a great community builder, and a good reason for readers to continue to come back to the web site next week.
As for blogging, yes, I have a publisher’s blog, but I’ve found that I’m not super good at keeping up with it. In the course of my day, I just don’t think, Hey, I should blog about this!
My main regret? Not taking an HTML course in college.
Keyhole Books:
Websites are very important. Seems it's the first thing on people's minds today. To go along with that, blogging is also important. I'll be encouraging our authors to do podcasts, videos, blogs.
Dan:
With the seven publishing houses involved in this e-panel, and the fact that a few other nice independent publishers have sprung up in the past couple of years as well, do you see signs that there is some form of an indie movement going on? Why with all the dreaded “publishing is dead” articles and talk do you think so many people are starting up at ground level right now?
Rose Metal Press:
AB: We also feel like independent publishing is experiencing a particularly energetic, productive, and creative time right now. It’s so heartening to see the AWP bookfair and other small press fairs expand as the number of indie publishers grows. I think the growth of indie publishing is based on three factors: one, mainstream publishing in America has become more market driven and less risky and interesting than it ever has been in its long history, and lots of people are reacting to that and wanting to contribute to a more literary publishing scene. Two, in the digital age, it is much easier to produce books. Anyone with a design program can learn how to lay out a book or design a cover and the options for printing books now range in price and method from one-off to larger digital runs to traditional offprint, not to mention e-books and other electronic and web-based formats. And three, the web has offered a way for independent publishers to market and sell their books inexpensively, widely, and directly, without expensive distributors.
Kathy and I are really encouraged by the growing strength of independent publishing and the multitude of voices it allows to be heard. Technology has made it so that the big publishing houses are no longer the only gatekeepers for deciding what is good writing and what is not.
That said, there is lots of good stuff that gets published by the large mainstream publishers. And they are working as hard as we are to ensure that publishing and print books don’t go the way of the dodo. Publishing is a hard business model and one that is tough to make viable, but we don’t see any signs that “Publishing is dead” or will be any time soon. We are thrilled to be part of what we see as actually a very vibrant time in the history of publishing, one where a plethora of small and independent presses are able to more readily fill the holes the corporate publishers have always created, thereby strengthening and broadening the whole literary scene.
Short Flight/Long Drive:
e.e. – I don’t think of it as an “indie movement,” really. I think small presses have been around for years and will continue to be. They fill a need. A void. There are tons of great writers who are either just starting to publish or who write beautiful shit that for one reason or another, isn’t exactly marketable to the mass public. I don’t read “publishing is dead” articles. And, frankly, the talk bores me. We want to publish books we want to read. In easy-travel form. It excites us. And we’ll continue to do so as long as it continues to excite us and we can still afford to do so.
Aaron – Yeah. I’m certainly not, nor do I think is Elizabeth, very interested in movements or the grander scope or anything. That probably leads to us having a “business plan” that, well, we don’t actually have anything like a business plan. As we’ve said in about every answer, we really just want to publish stuff that excites us. If other people get stoked about it as well, awesome.
Ellipsis Press:
EL: I’d like to think an indie movement is going on. Twelve years ago there was an issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction, titled “The Future of Fiction,” and edited by none other than David Foster Wallace. In it, there’s a hilarious and dead-on piece by Dalkey head John O’Brien, which stated among other things that the “end of literary books in commercial publishing is a historical inevitability.” And so it has come to pass. The bigger houses will cease (have ceased!) to publish literary fiction. It is not profitable for them to market and produce a title that will sell to 5000 people (even if Rick Moody strong-arms a National Book Award for them). S’okay though. The old publishing joke goes, How do you make a small fortune in publishing? Answer: Start with a large one. And then you and your crony get to laugh bitterly together. But it’s the wrong question. A small and lively (and one hopes resurging) group of people care about the novel as art. And with the new methods of production and distribution, it’s getting easier for writers to connect with readers. The truth is there’s never been any money in publishing innovative writers (at least before canonization—for those lucky few). But now what’s being revealed is it doesn’t matter that there isn’t. This is parallel with the digital revolution in filmmaking, which Francis Ford Coppola famously predicted by saying, “One day, some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart and make a beautiful film with her father's camcorder and the so-called professionalism about movies will be destroyed forever.” Similarly and importantly, the means of production and marketing for books have become much more affordable.
JR: I completely agree with everything that Eugene has written. I would only add that I believe publishing is not dead, but that publishing as we have known it up until the end of the 20th c. is dead. Print publishing has not been around all that long and the publishing industry started in the late 17th and earth 18th centuries, which means that it has only been around about 300 years, which is, in the grand scheme of things, not all that long. I don’t think that any of us who were born between 1950 and 1986 would have ever imagined that book, magazine, and newspaper publishing as we knew it would ever change so dramatically in our lifetimes. And, while I said earlier that I don’t believe publishing is going to disappear, publishing as a business is changing dramatically right now and will continue to in the future. I think some of these changes are making it possible in certain ways for writers to have more power and control in the publishing process while, at the same time, these changes are—superficially at least—making writing more and more of a commodity. It is interesting to me that at a moment when writers now have the ability to market and distribute their own work directly to readers that readers are beginning to demand that more and more content be made available to them for free. There have been major changes with the advent of every new technology in the history of publishing—the printing press, offset printing, digital printing—but the fact that the Web is not only a publishing mechanism, but also a distribution mechanism, makes it unique in the history of publishing technology.
Hotel St. George Press:
I’ve always been of a mind that if you put some writing on a piece of paper and fold it in half and maybe add a staple or two and give it a good font, and then you take that paper with those staples and that good font and share it with your friends, what you have become is a publisher. I know that’s probably not exactly the answer you’re looking for, but as soon as I get into discussions about the future of publishing I begin to think in terms of product and get away from process and I don’t like to think like that. I don’t like to think of corporate print runs in the hundreds of thousands for meaningless books written merely for the sake of advancing the cultural incidents of banal lowest-common-denominator insights and ultimately endorsing an advanced capitalist system that can only understand progress in terms of commerce and not of the evolution of knowledge and communication between individuals in society. It sickens me to think of the relationship between an author and a reader rendered meaningless by mass-corporatization. If you think of the publisher as a vector, of sorts, for conveying meaning between an author and a reader, and if you recall that the relationship between an author and a reader is, ultimately, an intimate one, I’ll have to say that Indies are the better vectors, because of the close relationships we must maintain with our authors, and the close relationship we must develop with our readers. If I start to think that the one book I am publishing in 2008 is one of 250,000 books being published in 2008 and that my print run wouldn’t even fill the cumulative space of rat traps in corporate warehouses (or roach nests!), I might begin to feel a little bleak. If I remember however that at the Brooklyn Book Festival I watched a reader pick up Bicycle and instantly, broadly, smile, and read a line from it out loud to her companion, and watch her companion also smile a genuine smile—to basically watch this book we printed bridge the gap between its author and its reader—I feel pretty secure about the future or at least happy to be participating in the present.
Tyrant Books:
YES!!! Indie-revolucion!! DZANC is leading the way. I’m following.
Underland Press:
I can’t speak to publishing in general; all I know is my own experience with Underland. Looking around, it seemed to me that I could start a press, and that, with the right business model, the press could succeed. I don’t know how publishing was in the 1980s, or in the 1950s. I know how it is now. And, right now, I think that there is potential success for a press like Underland.
As for indie publishers, I’m going to echo what Keyhole says below me: We could do a lot more if we worked together. Yes. Absolutely.
Keyhole Books:
It certainly feels like it. I hope that is the case. "Publishing is dead" statements are good, because it seems to make people fight against the idea. I don't think we'll ever let books go away completely, even if people don't read much and publishers face the same decline that the music industry is dealing with. The music industry is a dinosaur--being too concerned about money and rights they failed to see what people wanted, and a computer company had to step in to do the job. It's important to stay on top of new ideas, and it's important to work together--we could do a lot more if we worked together in more concrete ways. We all want the same things, don't we?
Dan:
I’d really like to once again thank everybody that participated in this. I hope you had a good time.
Rose Metal Press:
AB & KR (in unison): We did! Thanks for inviting us.
Short Flight/Long Drive:
e.e. – Thanks, Dan!! You know I did. And thanks for being such a cheerleader for small presses year round. You’re the best, Dan. At cheerleading small presses, that is. Not always at Poker, but, I digress…
Ellipsis Press:
EL & JR: Thanks!
Hotel St. George Press:
This has been great—nothing like some focused questions to help give focus to a somewhat unfocused enterprise. And I should say that I remain amazed at everything you’re able to do at both EWN and DZANC Books—you do great service to this industry, and I’m happy to be able to participate with you here. AND I’m looking forward to seeing everyone else’s answers to your questions, and to checking out their books.
Tyrant Books:
Keep it up. And read Waste by Eugene Marten (Ellipsis Press) and Dear Everybody by Michael Kimball.
Underland Press:
Thanks for putting this together. I wish we could all be on the same panel together, and debate ebooks and digital distribution for real.
Keyhole Books:
Thank you, Dan. Happy to be a part of this. E-panels are a great idea. I hope to see a lot more of them.
Dan:
A last note, I highly recommend titles from each and every one of these publishers – those that I’ve read already, those that I’ve had fortunate sneak peeks at, and the others still a little further out there – I know who they’re publishing and am greatly looking forward to those titles as well. Please go out and support them.
great stuff. this gives me confidence that im pretty sure i know what im doing. thanks for this.
Posted by: barry | September 30, 2008 at 02:53 PM
Excellent panel! Enjoyed reading it. Warmest and best, Heather
Posted by: Heather Fowler | October 01, 2008 at 08:46 AM