Posts tagged ‘small press week’

Announcing Small Press Week 2018

NOTE ADDED 14 NOVEMBER 2019: The work of administering Small Press Week has been kindly taken over by Santa Fe Writers Project who have moved it to November 30th – December 6th, 2019.

Small presses, the authors they’ve published, and the readers who love them, will talk about exciting new releases, classic back-catalogue titles, and what makes small press publishing so fearless, fierce, and intimate—using the hashtag #SPWeek18.

We’ll also have 7 one-day hashtags, each concentrating on a different facet of publishing:

Sunday November 18

#SPWtips: Kick off #SPWeek18 with some tips and advice for writers submitting to your press, whether new, aspiring, mid-list, or old pros!

Monday November 19

#SPWpast: How did you get started? How did you get where you are now? Talk about past titles, moments of glory and moments of despair, and anything else that has gone into making your press unique!

Tuesday November 20

#SPWpresent: Every Tuesday is #newreleasetuesday, but this Tuesday is for featuring all of your current 2018 releases, no matter when their release date.

Wednesday November 21

#SPWfuture: What’s on the horizon for your press and its authors? Share your goals and initiatives, your most creative projects, and where you want your press to be in 5, 10, or 100 years!

Thursday November 22

#SPWzoom: Zoom in to provide excerpts, close-up photos, and anecdotes about your new books.

Friday November 23

#SPWreads: Recommend some #FridayReads: what books from other presses are you loving? (Tip: when possible, tag the authors and publishers you’re praising.)

Saturday November 24

#SPWshop: Encourage holiday shoppers to support small press! Talk about what makes our books and our authors special, how you’re embedded in your local community, and how independent publishers help writers to nurture and sustain the literary conversation. And be sure to talk up your titles! (Tip: also use #shopsmall for greater visibility, since today is Small Business Saturday.)

â—Š

Remember to hashtag every post with #SPWeek18 so people can find the whole sprawling discussion in one place!

Small presses and their editors can also join us on Facebook for announcements and discussion.

18 May 2018

Small Press Week Round-up 2017

Oh my, have we had a week! When I founded Small Press Week last year, I didn’t expect it to catch on so big, so soon. Last year, participants included Alice James Press, Book Smugglers, Brick Mantel, Canadian Scholars, Carolina Wren, Comma, Dead Ink, Forest Avenue, Gold Line, Guardbridge, Headmistress, Hix Eros, ink & locket, Kamaria, Linen, Ninja Book Box, Open Books, Propriometrics, Red Hen, Sarabande, Shade Mountain, Steerforth, World Weaver, and Yali Books. This year, we’ve had even more!

Below, a small sample of the richness:

 

Sunday November 19 (#SPWtips)

 

Monday November 20 (#SPWpast)

 

Tuesday November 21 (#SPWpresent)

 

Wednesday November 22 (#SPWfuture)

 

Thursday November 23 (#SPWzoom)

 

Friday November 24 (#SPWreads)

 

Saturday November 25 (#SPWshop)

25 November 2017

Announcing Small Press Week 2017

NOTE ADDED 14 NOVEMBER 2019: The work of administering Small Press Week has been kindly taken over by Santa Fe Writers Project who have moved it to November 30th – December 6th, 2019.

Small presses, the authors they’ve published, and the readers who love them, will talk about exciting new releases, classic back-catalogue titles, and what makes small press publishing so fearless, fierce, and intimate—using the hashtag #SPWeek17.

We’ll also have 7 one-day hashtags, each concentrating on a different facet of publishing:

Sunday November 19

#SPWtips: Kick off #SPWeek17 with some tips and advice for writers submitting to your press, whether new, aspiring, mid-list, or old pros!

Monday November 20

#SPWpast: How did you get started? How did you get where you are now? Talk about past titles, moments of glory and moments of despair, and anything else that has gone into making your press unique!

Tuesday November 21

#SPWpresent: Every Tuesday is #newreleasetuesday, but this Tuesday is for featuring all of your current 2017 releases, no matter when their release date.

Wednesday November 22

#SPWfuture: What’s on the horizon for your press and its authors? Share your goals and initiatives, your most creative projects, and where you want your press to be in 5, 10, or 100 years!

Thursday November 23

#SPWzoom: Zoom in to provide excerpts, close-up photos, and anecdotes about your new books.

Friday November 24

#SPWreads: Recommend some #FridayReads: what books from other presses are you loving? (Tip: when possible, tag the authors and publishers you’re praising.)

Saturday November 25

#SPWshop: Encourage holiday shoppers to support small press! Talk about what makes our books and our authors special, how you’re embedded in your local community, and how independent publishers help writers to nurture and sustain the literary conversation. And be sure to talk up your titles! (Tip: also use #shopsmall for greater visibility, since today is Small Business Saturday.)

â—Š

Remember to hashtag every post with #SPWeek17 so people can find the whole sprawling discussion in one place!

Small presses and their editors can also join us on Facebook for announcements and discussion, and participate in our anticipatory hashtag campaign #smallpressQs.

1 comment 27 January 2017

Announcing #smallpressQs (Small Press Questions)

Small Press Week 2016 (#SPWeek16) was so much fun that we’ve decided to have regular mini-conversations under the hashtag #smallpressQs starting this Wednesday at 7 p.m. Eastern (6 Central, 4 Pacific). We’ll have these discussions every second week with a different question each time—including discussions devoted to taking questions from writers!

  • Wed 02/01 7:00 p.m. EST: What new books or projects are you working on?
  • Wed 02/15 7:00 p.m. EST: What books are you most excited about right now?
  • Wed 03/01 7:00 p.m. EST: How did your press get started?
  • Wed 03/15 7:00 p.m. EST: Open question time! Writers: post with the #smallpressQs hashtag for any of our presses to answer. (Add #askaneditor too, if you like!)
  • Wed 03/29 7:00 p.m. EST: Which genres do you prefer to read (personally & professionally)?
  • Wed 04/12 7:00 p.m. EST: What are some of your favorite covers, both yours and from other presses?
  • Wed 04/26 7:00 p.m. EST: What are you reading?
  • Wed 05/10 7:00 p.m. EST: Can you share some photos of your publishing process?
  • Wed 05/24 7:00 p.m. EST: Open question time! Writers: post with the #smallpressQs hashtag for any of our presses to answer. (Add #askaneditor too, if you like!)
  • Wed 06/07 7:00 p.m. EST: What new books or projects are you working on?
  • Wed 06/21 7:00 p.m. EST: What challenges do you find most difficult in publishing?
  • Wed 07/05 7:00 p.m. EST: Are you a writer? An artist? How much does your personal creative life leak over into your small press publishing?
  • Wed 07/19 7:00 p.m. EST: What books are you most excited about right now?
  • Wed 08/02 7:00 p.m. EST: What big picture dreams do you have about the future of your press?
  • Wed 08/16 7:00 p.m. EST: Open question time! Writers: post with the #smallpressQs hashtag for any of our presses to answer. (Add #askaneditor too, if you like!)
  • Wed 08/30 7:00 p.m. EST: What are your influences, aesthetic, and mission?
  • Wed 09/13 7:00 p.m. EST: What new books or projects are you working on?
  • Wed 09/27 7:00 p.m. EST: Should publishers try to be technology innovators and players?
  • Wed 10/11 7:00 p.m. EST: Open question time! Writers: post with the #smallpressQs hashtag for any of our presses to answer. (Add #askaneditor too, if you like!)
  • Wed 10/25 7:00 p.m. EST: What are you reading?
  • Wed 11/08 7:00 p.m. EST: What about small press publishing is particularly exciting right now?

And join us to gear up for Small Press Week 2017 (#SPWeek17) from Sunday, Nov 19 through Saturday, Nov 25!

1 comment 27 January 2017

Small Press Week #SPWshop

Last day of Small Press Week! Today we’re engaging in capitalism, since it’s also Small Business Saturday!

Most of our titles could only be released by a small, independent publisher not beholden to a large corporate editorial structure. Upper Rubber Boot has the freedom to take risks. Poetry books, especially, are hard to sell, but, I believe, vitally important to the literary conversation—every one that we publish is a risk. I also love stories that are hard to quantify and pigeonhole, which can make our anthologies riskier to publish because they aren’t absolutely clearly one genre or another.

We exist on the fringe. It’s even in our name (Upper Rubber Boot is Canadian for a place that’s far away from the center of things, and probably uncool and insignificant).

 
Here are some of our riskiest titles:

ChooseWiselycover-100x150  
Flight505cover-100x150  
  • Flight 505, a rock-and-roll road trip turns violent after an ill-considered heroin theft in this chilling novella by ex-Sparks bassist Leslie Bohem, who also wrote A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 5, Dante’s Peak, and the mini-series Taken.

    [Amazon ; elsewhere]
floodgate3-print100x150thumb  
  • Three short books of poetry in a single volume: brothers Anders and Kai Carlson-Wee explore America by train; F. Douglas Brown and Geffrey Davis explore fatherhood in the era of Black Lives Matter; and Enid Shomer explores environmental destruction and hope for the future.

    [Amazon ; elsewhere]
Memory-print-100x150  
  • Memory, a novelette by Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría (trans. Lawrence Schimel) of oppression, genetic engineering, non-binary relationships, and—you guessed it—memory, on a colony on a terraformed Mars.

    [Amazon ; elsewhere]

 

 

Previous URB Small Press Week posts:

26 November 2016

Small Press Week #SPWreads

Some books I’m interested in that other presses have released:

Antigona Gonzalez
Sara Uribe
Les Figues 		antigona-gonzalez
Assdeep in Wonder
Christopher Gudgeon
Anvil Press 		Home Tour 2014 booklet
Assi Manifesto
Natasha Kanape Fontaine
Mawenzi House 		assi-manifesto
Canto General: Song of the Americas
Pablo Neruda
Tupelo Press 		cantogeneral
The Conjoined: A Novel
Jen Sookfong Lee
ecwpress 		conjoined
culebra
Roberto Harrison
Green Lantern 		culebra
Equilibrium
Tiana Clark
Bull City Press 		equilibrium
How To Draw a Rhinoceros
Kate Sutherland
Book Thug 		how-to-draw-a-rhino
I Am Providence
Nick Mamatas
Night Shade 		nick style=”border:1px solid black; float:right” />
IRL
Tommy Pico
Birds, LLC 		Untitled-7
Lament for the Afterlife
Lisa L. Hannett
Chizine 		lament
Literature for Nonhumans
Gabriel Gudding
Ahsahta Press 		literature-for-nonhumans
Lithopedia
Anne Keefe
Bull City Press 		lithopedia
Mercurial
Allison Joseph
Mayapple Press 		Background fabric
Miniatures
John Scalzi
Subterranean Press 		miniatures
The Missing Museum
Amy King
Tarpaulin Sky 		the-missing-museum
Monsieur de Bougrelon
Jean Lorrain
Spurl Editions 		monsieur-de-bougrelon
Myriad Lands
Stories by: Tade Thompson, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Lyn McConchie, Daniel Heath Justice, Dilman Dila, Daniel Ausema, and more.
Guardbridge Books 		myriadlands-vol1-310px
Non-Sequitur
Khadijah Queen
Litmus Press 		non-sequitur
Notes on the Assemblage
Juan Felipe Herrera
City Lights Books 		notes-on-the-assemblage
The Performance of Becoming Human
Daniel Borzutzky
BAP Books
Winner of the 2016 National Book Awards for Poetry 		the-performance-of-becoming-human
Pirate Utopia
Bruce Sterling
Tachyon Publications 		bruce
Remembering Animals
Brenda Iijima
Nightboat Books 		rememberinganimals
Selected Works
Jose Antonio Ramos Sucre
Noemi Press 		selected-works-sucre
Some Nights It’s Entertainment; Some Other Nights Just Work
Matt Robinson
Gaspereau Press 		mattr
Street Magicks
Stories by Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Bear, Catherynne M. Valente, and more.
Prime Books 		stmagics
Sympathetic Little Monster
Ricochet Editions
Cameron Awkward-Rich 		sympathetic-little-monster
Testament
Vickie Gendreau
Book Thug 		testament
Vile Men
Rebecca Jones-Howe
Dark House Press 		vilemen
When the Ghosts Come Ashore
Jacqui Germain
Button Poetry 		when-the-ghosts-come-ashore
When the World Wounds
Kiini Ibura Salaam
Third Man Books 		kiini
Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone
Sequoia Nagamatsu
Black Lawrence 		where-we-go-when-all-we-were-is-gone
Words Are My Matter
Ursula K. Le Guin
Small Beer Press 		9781618731340_big
Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad
Ugly Duckling 		written-in-the-dark

 

Previous URB Small Press Week posts:

1 comment 25 November 2016

Small Press Week #SPWthanks

It’s Small Press Week! Today we’re focusing on who and what makes us grateful to be in publishing.

First of all, I’m grateful to you. Thanks for stopping by! Readers are some of the best people I know, and I am grateful when you invest your time in reading our books. Ask any writer how much work it is to write a story or a poem or an entire novel. It’s similarly hard work to edit, design and format the actual book. Without you, our efforts would be for nothing.

I’m extraordinarily grateful to work with so many wickedly clever editors and writers, who are also often luminously kind and good people. Special shout-outs to Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum, who edited Apocalypse Now: Poems & Prose from the End of Days and carries the Floodgate Poetry Series every year from cradle to grave; to Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Wieland, who are currently editing Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk & Eco-Speculation; and to H. L. Nelson, who edited Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good with me, and who will be co-editing another women-focused anthology with me next year.

I’m thankful for my family, friends, and co-workers, who are constant sources of support and inspiration. A special shout out to my husband, who juggles so many things so that I can keep this business going.

I’m also thankful for gummy bears and Kroger’s double chocolate protein bars, which have been a significant source of comfort to me.

Finally, thank you to everybody who makes the human race look a little more human. I’m so glad that you are here with me.

 

Previous URB Small Press Week posts:

1 comment 24 November 2016

Small Press Week #SPWfutures

It’s Small Press Week! Today we’re talking about the future.

Our next release, in spring 2017, is Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk & Eco-Speculation, an anthology of fiction focusing on solutions to environmental disasters, and the people living during tipping points and inhabiting the crucial moments when great change can be made. Follow the book on Facebook to keep in the loop on this release!

Next autumn, we’ll be releasing an anthology of long poems, Warning! Poems May Be Longer Than They Appear, co-edited by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum and Matthew Silverman.

Floodgate Poetry Series Vol. 4, featuring some kickass poets, will be released in January 2018.

We’ve also got big plans for two still-unnamed anthologies of women-focused fiction for 2018, edited respectively by Octavia Cade, and by H. L. Nelson and Joanne Merriam!

 

Previous URB Small Press Week posts:

1 comment 23 November 2016

Small Press Week #SPWpast

It’s Small Press Week! Today we’re talking about the history of our press.

I’m Joanne Merriam, the Publisher of Upper Rubber Boot. I had toyed with the idea of starting a press for over a decade, since my days as a staffer at the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia, where I was one of two staff, doing everything the Executive Director didn’t do (essentially running the office and our programming, and helping our members and the public understand submission etiquette and industry standards). Working there both made me feel like running a publishing company was a possibility, and gave me a great primer on much of what I needed to know.

After I immigrated to the United States, I was having trouble connecting with other professional writers, mostly because I was mired in poverty and couldn’t attend workshops or the like. I met Molly Peacock at a reading, and she suggested that I start something that made writers come to me, like she had started The Best Canadian Poetry in English series.

I started URB in 2011. I ran a very modest kickstarter which gave me the funds to buy 100 ISBNs, and spent my two-week Christmas break releasing and promoting Heather Kamins’ Blueshifting and 140 And Counting: an anthology of writing from 7×20.

In early 2012, Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum approached me about an apocalyptic anthology, which became Apocalypse Now: Poems & Prose from the End of Days, containing stories by Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, and Pinckney Benedict. I started to feel “real” at that point!

Andrew has stayed on as an acquisitions editor for the Floodgate Poetry Series, which annually releases three chapbooks (short poetry books) in one volume. He is also co-editing the forthcoming Warning! Poems May Be Longer Than They Appear.

After the success of Apocalypse Now, URB has released a number of anthologies of speculative fiction: Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good, How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens, and The Museum of All Things Awesome and That Go Boom.

We’ve also released single-author books of poetry by Peg Duthie (Measured Extravagance), T. D. Ingram (Hiss of Leaves), Lyn Lifshin (Marilyn Monroe: Poems), Corey Mesler (The Sky Needs More Work), of fiction by RJ Astruc (Signs Over the Pacific and Other Stories), Sergey Gerasimov (The Mask Game), and most recently by Argentine author Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría and translated into English by Lawrence Schimel (Memory: A Novelette).

I feel tremendously fortunate to get to work with talented writers on books that are important, that talk about vital things, and that challenge readers to think and act!

 

Previous URB Small Press Week posts:

21 November 2016

Small Press Week #SPWsecrets

It’s Small Press Week! Look for these hashtags this week on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and other social media sites:

spweek16

 

Today, we’re sharing some secrets and behind-the-scenes glimpses of life in small press publishing.

Small presses come in all kinds of different shapes and sizes. Some use digital typesetting and print-on-demand technology to fulfill orders one at a time, while others produce limited editions on small letterpress machines of their own, while still others order a few thousand copies from a printer and maintain an inventory. Some run their own associated online or physical bookstores. Some employ 30 people and some are one person’s passionate hobby.

how-do-you-450

Upper Rubber Boot is a micropress, because of the small number of titles we release a year (typically 2 or 3). Because of our low profits, I run URB as a part-time job, while holding down a full-time job as a program co-ordinator and admin at a local hospital. It can be tiring! Some days I’m exhausted and overwhelmed. But it also means I can choose projects with very slim margins, or which I know will lose me a small amount of money (most of our poetry titles lose money in their first year, and some never break even). I have a lot of freedom to publish what I love.

I also have an almost pathological need to create order out of disorder, and getting everything just right scratches that itch for me. And it’s an amazing privilege to be able to work with so many intensely talented writers, and to make actual physical things that go out into the world and have a life independent of me. Curating the stories that will appear in an anthology, or helping one of my editors to take a book from cradle to—well, not grave, since none of our titles are out of print, so let’s say, healthy middle age—is extremely satisfying work.

20 November 2016

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