WHAT :: HOW :: WHO :: WHY :: THE END :: AGAIN

THE WHY

TURN-ONS FOR PUBLISHERS
Misprints Press: "Great writing that couldn't be published anywhere else."
cold tea press: "I love the feverish, caffeinated, staying-up-all-night-on-a-self-imposed-deadline production process and being creative with the material elements of a body of text after spending so long staring at a computer screen."
Wood & Coal: "Work that demands the vanity of alienation from the less sensitive environment of a magazine, or work that's too uncompromized in its aesthetic to fit into a magazine."
semi-precious press: "i liked the idea of composing poems into a book-package. i see it as a further treatment of the text and a chance to concretize the poetry. when i published others' work, i felt like my publication was a creative response to their work."
yardpress: "When I saw derek beaulieu's Velvet Touch Lettering on pieces of paper that were 6 X 6 I immediately imagined them bound by an electric blue cover with a transparency jacket. Rob McLennan's longpoem about the rockslide which buried the town of Frank, Alberta made sense to publish because I'm currently living in Calgary and could easily get to Frank. The reason I wanted to get to Frank is that I wanted to publish Rob's poem in a bag of dirt and since I was so close to Frank... Well, it just made sense."
maple spitS "took a page from Barlow's recent publications like Sudden Magazine/magazen sudden. i just sent out an email, and slapped together whoever responded with some of my stuff in a photocopy format."
above/ground press: "I'm a big fan of the format. It's inexpensive to make, and inexpensive to purchase. I don't have to worry about how many I give away, or if I make my money back. A big part of what I do with my books involve handouts and trades, and I don't want to have to worry about cost getting in the way. When I started, I thought that more people would like poetry, if they'd actually seen it. A naive notion, perhaps, but I think I have managed to turn a few folk on here and there. For the general public, it seems far too much that their notion of literature, and specifically poetry, involves dead writers taught to them during highschool. How can you claim an opinion when your knowledge is so far removed?"
BookThug: "I really like to build a house for words. And I like the community that comes out of that architecture."

WHY PUBLISH?
BookThug: "My main reason for publishing the way I do is total independence. I publish what I want how I want and when I want. I often think that poetry (the main genre of publication with BookThug), especially new and interesting poetry, is improperly represented by the mainstream publishing industry. The readership is simply too small, and as a result all kinds problems crop up, the main one being an economy of loss and therefore a reliance on arts funding and various structures that we don't need interrupting an organic genre such as poetry. So I enjoy the fact that I can bypass all of that and address an economy of curiosity and desire rather than the hard sell. Another reason to publish as I do is that much "independent" publishing is really ugly -- I like to be able to create something independently that looks and feels as though it perhaps wasn't."
maple spitS: "originally i was entranced by the idea of cheaply publishing a version of my writing which might be "marketable" and giving around promo copies and selling and giving to "important" people. i have to say that i've almost completly abandoned this way of thinking, and currently my ambitions are more along the lines of making neat objects to share as gifts or trades…"
cold tea press: "It's a great creative outlet and a good alternative to letting your writing collect dust on your hard drive. And mostly because I like sharing and trading creative projects with friends -- whether they be chapbooks, zines, photographs, crafty items, etc."
housepress: "i began becuase it was fun, and it was a means of publishing that was affordable and ephemeral enough that i could handle giving them away, spreading the word, you know?"
Misprints Press: "All the fun of publishing. None of the hassle."
semi-precious press: "when i was publishing at first, it was a way to access the publishing side of the writing world and to get my own writing out to people who might not otherwise see it -- by getting the chapbooks in independent bookstores and such. With dANDelion chapbooks, it is a way to give the audience at events a little bonus for donating to the magazine as well as give the writers and audience some access and exposure to writing and small press publishing."
yardpress: "I enjoy the chance as an editor/publisher to interact directly with the presentation of a text."
Kitsch In Ink: "Enthusiasm for the material. Desire for poets I like to be better known and recognized."
iloveyougalleries.com: "i like making "things". the more time I spend making things, the more it all makes sense. zen!"
Wood & Coal: "My philosophy of micropress publishing is essentialy passive: that it's too easy (as compared to making a CD, or almost anything else) not to be practiced."

WHY ARE YOUR MICROPRESS OBJECTS COVETED?
The Expert Press: "Three things: 1) I published the work of notable and interesting writers, 2) the editions were usually quite beautiful despite their limitations, 3) they are quite scarce in book trade terms."
Kitsch In Ink: "Excellent writing. Items to aggravate completists and bibliographers."
Wood & Coal: "Usualy people (if not already familiar with the writing I'm publishing) are attracted to the enigmatic, but also somehow generic, surface that my books usualy present. I think in every case where someone has bought one of my books without knowing what the writing would be like it was because of the apearance or title of the book. I feel good about this, since it confirms my belief that there's no purely literary reception of a book, or rather that appearance and surface values are also literary."
iloveyougalleries.com: "quirkiness factor?"
yardpress: "Scarcity."
Misprints Press: "They're hand-made, cute and have a level of design not usually seen in the micro-press world. Also, one should have fun trying to figure out who wrote them."
maple spitS: "because my books are (with the exception of the couple of early ones) spineless, they would only appeal to collectors of small press and micropress ephemera, whom i usually try to give free copies to if i know who they are. i don't think they are desirable to all lit lover's collections, and i've come to the realization lately that they really shouldn't. although i've frowned in the past on elitism, the harsh reality is that even within the 'poetry community' there is only a limited audience for work as esoteric as mine, and as opposed to trying to integrate and 'market' what I do, my aims are to give or sell cheaply to those I know are interested, and if possible, get the stuff in libraries. that way if i don't personally know the people, at least they (hopefully) don't have too much trouble tracking down my stuff. i'm also interested in the internet for this very reason, but have yet to cross over my realworld stuff with my virtual stuff."
cold tea press: "They're one of a kind; I assemble each one with my own hands."
semi-precious press: "i find chapbooks really fascinating -- they are handmade and say a lot about the writers' and publishers' ideas and values. it's also great to have limited editions of work from friends, because i really value their talents."
above/ground press: "What I think makes my press interesting is not only the geographic range of authors I'm interested in publishing, but the stylistic range. I'm not held to any specific age-range or style, although there are places I gravitate toward, more and more, and others, less and less, as I get older (and much crankier). I like publishing things by authors you haven't heard of, but are quite amazing, or authors who haven't published in a long time. Take John Newlove, for example. It was a huge thrill to be able to publish a chapbook of his in 1999, especially considering he had only two books over the previous fifteen years or more - a selected in 92, and his last full-length collection in 1986. I put out an Artie Gold chapbook recently, and he'd published even less than that. On the other side, I love being able to introduce writers like meghan jackson, Gil McElroy, maria erskine or carla milo to readers - and not just around ottawa, but in various parts of the country. Through trades and handouts, for example, I just got an email from a guy in Australia who's poetry editor of a magazine there, and he asked for poems from myself and David W. McFadden."
BookThug: "[A]s far as books go someone once related a little something to me that I'll share. Anyone can go to the supermarket and buy sausages. But if you want to get the beautiful fresh mouthwatering sausages from the Menonnites, you have to go out of your way to find out where they're sold and then figure out how to get to it once you've found it."

WHAT :: HOW :: WHO :: WHY :: THE END :: AGAIN