Women Publishers' Roundtable: Fourth Installment

Wecome to Part Four of the Women Publishers' Roundtable!  Here you'll find the last interview question sent to this group of small press editors, as well as the conversation that followed.  Enjoy!

Interview Question 4: Why did you choose to disseminate these texts in the way that you did? In other words, why a chapbook and not a perfect-bound book, and vice versa? Why did some of you turn away from the book/chapbook format altogether?

Kristy Bowen (Dancing Girl Press):  The decision to do chapbooks came from equal parts economics and my own love of papery things. Perfect bound books were too expensive to produce, and yet, having been publishing wicked alice electronically, I had this yearning for something physical, something tangible Since I was funding the whole venture out of pocket, it was a relatively inexpensive, low-risk , project to launch—needing little more than a booklet stapler, card stock, a printer, and some late night assembly marathons. There was also this flurry of chapbook publishing going on at the time (circa 2004) with a number of publishers appearing on my radar that were publishing chapbooks (sometimes exclusively, sometimes in tandem with other media (Effing, Horseless, NMP, BigGame Books, Ugly Duckling, Noemi, all sorts of author-issued chapbooks). It seemed like a great time to dive in.

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S. Whitney Holmes (Switchback Books):  I can’t speak for the Founding Editors as to why they chose to make perfect-bound books, but I can say that I think it’s heavily tied to our mission. Implicit in the idea of promoting the work of women poets as a way of making up for what other presses aren’t doing is the idea that we should respond by doing what we wish they were doing—and that’s publishing and promoting full-length collections of poetry by women. While we do aim to make beautiful books (and succeed), the book-as-art-object is less important to our mission than the book as a professionally-produced-and-promoted object. We love chapbooks (and we did do a limitededition collection of four chapbooks by Monica de la Torre), but perfect binding is part of the package we’re trying to offer to women poets.

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Gina Abelkop (Birds of Lace Press):  DIY publishing is cheap and fun. I made zines in high school and the cut-and-paste, photocopied style seemed accessible to me in that it seemed do-able without much know-how. In the late 90s/early 2000s I came across Roxanne Carter’s Persephassa press. She was printing people’s work at home, binding the chapbooks/books/journals herself, selling them online. It hadn’t really occurred to me that such a thing was possible, that you could just distribute work you loved like that. Making chapbooks is fun and creative and I like using my hands do it. I buy paper from Mr. French (which I also came into contact with via Persephassa) for the covers and usually do the design myself, though sometimes I get to work with very brilliant artists like Rhanimals and Susanna Troxler, who both did illustrations for Carrie Murphy’s chapbook, Meet the Lavenders. Jeanine Deibel, who we’re publishing in March, designed her own cover. I absolutely want to do perfect-bound books as well, because they’re a different kind of beautiful and can be distributed in larger numbers, and I believe in the physical preservation and documentation of art by people who aren’t usually canonized. Anna Joy Springer’s The Birdwisher was our first (and so far only) perfect-bound book but eventually I’d like to do something like two fancy (gold foil, french flaps, etc), vastly proliferated perfect-bound books and 3-5 handmade chapbook titles a year. Until I have the monetary resources to do so I will very happily provide limited edition chapbooks, because they’re cheap to produce/purchase, the entrance of their words into the public realm is vital, and they are beautiful objects.

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Lisa Marie Basile (Patasola Press):  We’re totally volunteer-run with almost no budget, so we opt for an on-demand model. We buy ISBNs and use an on-demand model to print the books. We’re open to both chapbook and book formats, and we usually go perfect-bound for all projects. We may, in the future, go with saddle stitch, and we’re happy to explore that in time. Nothing is closed to us. One day we hope to print a book with gold-plated pages. Oh, and maybe a pop-out. And tiny books. We are concerned with our books being available as an always-available item with an ISBN, and we think that is important for authors to have, but that doesn’t mean that a chapbook without isn’t valuable. The chapbook, which exists as a sort of temporary beauty many times, is still gorgeous to us, of course!

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T.A. Noonan (Sundress Publications): Sundress does or has done a little bit of everything: chapbooks, limited edition art-object chapbooks, e-chaps, perfect-bound books. I think the only thing we haven’t really done yet is an e-book. There are some limitations there, especially for more experimental and/or visually engaged texts, but we’re working on that.

Lately, we’ve been doing a lot more in the way of perfect-bound books because there is that sense of “the book as a professionally-produced-and-promoted object,” and for a lot of writers, it’s a crucial part of representing their work as something to be taken seriously. Despite this, we have a huge investment in online publishing (hence our continued interest in e-chaps), and I personally must profess a serious love of the “book-as-art-object.” So, I think it depends on what we personally and collectively want to accomplish with our authors and as a press.

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Erin Elizabeth Smith (Sundress Publications): What she said. Personally, there's a part of me that would like to see everything we publish be online.  That's where the readers are, and ultimately what we want for our press is to get our writers' work in front of as many eyes as possible.  It's not that I believe print is dead, nor do I wish it so.  I just have numbers—which show that our free e-chapbooks receive hundreds of downloads a month, something any print press would love to say about their more tangible publications.  That being said, the books are awfully pretty.

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Kristina Marie Darling (Noctuary Press):  When I first started Noctuary Press, I was determined to create perfect-bound books with ISBN numbers.  This is still an important part of the press's mission.  This is mostly because the book as a cultural object embodies the idea of "legitimacy" for many writers.  And so much of the time, women's writing that takes place at the peripheries of existing genre categories is perceived as "illegitimate."  This is often because the channels of distribution presuppose that writing will fall into legible, and often very limiting, genre categories.  The text that can't be disseminated becomes the illegitimate text.  I wanted to offer a place where women's writing that challenges genre categories can be perceived as legitimate.  I also wanted to offer a channel of distribution, allowing this work to be disseminated to an appreciative audience 

Please stop by for the fifth installment, which will include a discussion of technology and the small press!