indie press basics 101
[the baby beginnings of dgp in my dining room]
There's some quote (Gandhi maybe?) that says be the sort of change you want to see in the world or somesuch. I think about this often when I think about the missions of small presses and other labors of literary love...how much one lit journal or press can, by its mere existence, change and inform the culture in positive ways. I started dancing girl about a year into my MFA program and people seemed surprised when they heard about it (granted, the whole endeavor those first couple of years was a small, private thing that I was doing on the side and only a few people around me knew was happening.) Editing was not new..I had worked in that capacity for wicked alice for about 3 or 4 years then, but I was kinda mostly faking it til I was actually making it. I ran around saying I was starting a press and then suddenly I was.
The logistics for staring the chapbook series was amazingly simple--figuring out how to do layout and print/assemble the books was in no way as difficult as actually finding writers who wanted to be published or readers who wanted to buy our books. This would be the big challenge those first few years. The first book we published that wasn't my own chap was the late Adrianne Marcus' The Resurrection of Trotsky, a book she had asked via e-mail, having been a repeat wicked alice contributor, where she should send it to. I think she was surprised when I told her my plans to start dancing girl press and that she should let me publish it as our first official title. That year, I opened my first round of submissions and there were maybe like 10 of them, of which I chose 5--mostly folks who were publishing in the same journals I was and caught wind of our existence via my blog or my online publication bio mention (this being considerably pre-facebook). The second year, the submissions tripled, and then just kept increasing incrementally, then jumped crazy after 2007 or so til we hit about the 500 hundred mark where it's stayed steady the past few years.
Once you have the means of production and work to publish, it was actually pretty easy and I probably produced those first few chaps for under a $100 each then rolled the profits back into the next book. When people would ask how I managed to do it, I could explain to you pretty easily the logistics and how probably anyone, with some printers and staplers and people willing to let you publish them, could do it pretty cheaply. Also, if you're only putting out a handful of titles a year, it's easier to manage your time and adjust as needed if you don't have a lot of time to do it in. Technology and duplex printing and streamlined tech stuff has increased the speed of everything from layout to production, so even I spend less time than I used to on things (layouts to print double sided manually used to take FOREVER. (that factor and being able to fund more titles being why we've increased the number of books we've published over the years dramatically.)
Around the same time I was hatching my plans, in the spring of 2004, I took a small press publishing class over in the Fiction Writing Department that helped me more on the business side of things. Actually, I've probably never been as organized on projects as I was taught to be in that class, but it was nice to have that sort of background knowledge, even if I didn't use it all. The thing I noticed about most of my classmate's projects was that they were too grand...expensive, unruly, involved a lot of people who had to deliver. My goal that semester was to put out a print annual of wicked alice, which I did for a couple years, but I was also putting out my first chap, Bloody Mary, as a trail run for Adrianne's book that would be issued that fall. I hadn't yet discovered cardstock suppliers beyond the kinda spendy Paper Source, so I used fancy papers from the art store on Michigan. I discovered later that Staples has a heavier stock that is actually pretty nice if you want a matte finish that will fit in any printer. I also had no actual overhead beyond supplies to make books pre-studio days, so it was easy to just keep rolling the proceeds into growing larger.
But what people asked me about more in the beginning was almost the how to take on that sort of authority for yourself, or maybe the confidence to say I can do this--that I have something--a voice, a vision--that I want to put out in the world. Along with a lot of other things in those days, I felt more self-conscious about it than not. But I kept trying to explain really that anyone could do it, at least on the tiny scale that I was doing it those days. All it took was some serious commitment and a little bit of cash (though not that much--I was operating super bare bones and using cheaper papers/printers.) So many other presses were already paving the way--Horseless, Effing, Octopus, Big Game Books--and doing it very well. I worried no one would submit work, or no one would buy the books, but I never worried about the endeavor itself.
I think so often (then and now) we feel like as poets we have to wait for someone to give us authority. To say, here, work for this literary journal or work for my already established press if you want to be an editor. But most presses, except for big operations or university affiliates were probably the work of one or two people who made that initial jump and claimed a little corner of the publishing world for themselves to do what they needed to do. You say you have a thing and suddenly, after some work, you have a thing and it's really pretty awesome.
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