when indie presses go kaput
There should be no shame in self publishing.
Philadelphia is my hometown and even though I lived here 23 years before taking off to California, it feels a bit strange to be back. So many things have changed, a lot of my old haunts no longer exist, and many of the people I used to know have at some point or another packed up and moved on to other locales. I don’t have a lot of friends here, I don’t really feel like I’m part of a community yet, but I’m actively working on improving these situations for myself. Challenging as it is for someone like me who feels shy and weird most of the time, I’m trying to put myself out there when I can.
Being a mom is a fulltime job. I work around the clock, and I don’t have the freedom to just do whatever I want anymore. I don’t have free time, really. My baby is my boss. I’m not salty about it at all, but it can be a little lonely, isolating. When I go out, I usually bring Zosia. For the most part she is happy and well behaved, but she can be a little loud (I mean come on, she’s six months old) as I learned recently after taking her to a friend’s poetry reading and having to leave during the first set because she kept interrupting the poet with her own little exclamations. Admittedly it was super cute to hear her trilling in a room full of poetry lovers, but out of respect of the reader and the audience I thought it best to head out.
Zosia and I started going to a “new baby” group in South Philly and I’ve met some other moms there. One of the moms I usually talk to asked me about the bumper sticker I have on my water bottle, the cut up You Could Never Objectify Me More Than I’ve Already Objectified Myself sticker that I covered my hydroflask up with. I told her it was a title of one of my books, and gave her my website info when she asked where she could read my work. The other day she texted me and told me that a lot of the links on my site were dead, meaning the links to poems that I’ve had published with various small presses and online lit journals have since gone defunct. This didn’t surprise me, a lot of the links were kind of old and I haven’t checked up on them in a while, but it did give me an idea to make a new space for these poems to live on.
One day, when I have some time (or maybe piecemeal over the course of a month or two), I’d like to collect all of the pieces and poems I’ve had published online that no longer exist online into a single PDF that I’ll make available on my website for free download. Gotta love a free downloadable PDF, right? I care about readers having access to my work, if they care to read it, more than I do making money in the process (though it is nice to make a little bit of money to keep my websites up and running).
Indie presses die all the time for various reasons. Too often when you’ve got a shoestring budget and limited time and resources a passion project will get shelved or put out to pasture. Several of my published books, three at this time, have gone out of print due to the publisher discontinuing their business. It’s sad but sometimes inevitable that your book will have a shorter print life when you publish a book with a small publishing house.
When Spooky Girlfriend Press folded right as my book a place a feeling something he said to you was released, I took it upon myself to add the book to my Amazon store so I could continue printing it on demand for anyone who wanted to purchase it (by the way, if you’ve read this book and liked it, maybe consider leaving a short review on Amazon or Goodreads, it would help me out a lot and I’d really appreciate it!). I might end up doing the same thing with Rapid Transit and American Mary at some point, or maybe I’ll just load them up online as free PDFs. Would you be into that?
I have no shame in self publishing my stuff. If I did, I probably wouldn’t be writing this Substack, right? I used to think that handing my work over to someone else, someone with perhaps a larger platform, was the only way to legitimize myself as a real writer, but with so many writers these days taking to publishing their own work online as a kind of radical self reliance that idea of needing a co-sign feels very retro.
That being said (lol, I feel like I type out this phrase in my Substack posts way too often), I have a new chapbook of poems called The Soft Opening EP that I self published recently and have listed for sale on my website. They are newish poems and I feel good about them and I’d love for you to get a copy for yourself. I just sold out of the first print run and I need to do a re-printing, but please feel free to order one now. I also have another work in progress that I’m thinking of releasing on social media or online in some form. Still need to think more about that.
What do you think of publishing your own work online? What do you think about the future of indie presses? I guess that’s a pretty loaded question, but I’m curious to hear what you have to say in the comments!
A writer writes. Whether the writer writes for a mass audience or for an audience of one is rather beside the point.
Writing, by definition, is an act of communication, and by making a declaration out loud — whether orally or physically through ink on paper or via electrons in an online form the writer attempts to contact the world and say, ‘listen up.’ This is something I would like to say. Something I need to say.
Independent presses are more vulnerable today than ever. They once existed to provide a platform for the written word for niche audiences, but with readers now increasingly using electronic media, the struggling form is dying out. Look to the demise of printed newspapers and magazines to see the future of independent presses as physical entities.
A writer can create a website or a social media presence and submit or link all their content to it very easily indeed. This is the Future. It is also the Present.