Independent Publishing Quotes

This is a profession for me, but I started off as a self-publisher working on my own schedule and my own stuff before moving on to graphic novels with First Second Books, where there was definitely a schedule, but it was very different from monthly comics.

There's a thriving field of self-published stuff in, particularly, black fiction. I don't know that other groups of people of color have that same recourse.

I was studying graphic design at the time, when negative scanners and all that stuff was coming out, and you could do it all in your apartment. So I would shoot, make contact sheets, scan all the cool negatives, and make all these zines and books of my photos to give to my friends. I was really into zine- and bookmaking from skate culture.

You are at the mercies of the dailies. With an indie you don't have that.

Print-on-demand and electronic self-publishing options have made it easy for anyone to set up a business as a publisher whether they know what they're doing or not.

I knew people were independently publishing, and I buy books on Amazon. I began seriously considering it when Amanda Hocking was in the news about her self-publishing success.

The printing press had a very liberatory effect that meant individuals - small groups could produce radical pamphlets - could use it for organizing.

There's a widespread cultural barrenness across art and political culture. But there are some pockets of resistance on the extreme margins, like the techno-savvy protest movements, small press, the creator-owned comics, that seem to be getting some signs of hope for the future.

Trade book publishing is by nature a cottage industry, decentralized, improvisational, personal; best performed by small groups of like-minded people, devoted to their craft, jealous of their autonomy, sensitive to the needs of writers and to the diverse interests of readers. If money were their primary goal, these people would probably have chosen other careers.

If a traditional publisher offered me a quarter of a million dollars for a novel, I'd consider it. But anything less than that, I'm sure I can do better on my own.

I gave away 'Life in Hell' when it was a little 'zine, and sold it at record stores for $1, and I knew from the time that I first did it that I would continue to do it, because it was fun.

The greatest thing is the internet and that means that anybody, you have just as much access as I do. And you can make your little tape and work on it and work on it until you got it the way you want it. And then you can put it on the net. And if it's any damn good somebody's gonna notice. That's happened over and over again now. To me that's good. That's good access that isn't controlled by the companies. I think that's a great thing.

A cool thing about enthusiast press is the low barrier to entry. Anyone can decide they want to set out on this path and start publishing immediately.

In the war time many of the publishing houses were privately owned, a single publisher or a publisher and a few associates who were responsible for everything. They could take whatever risks they wanted, could essentially publish what they liked according to their taste. Publishers today are working for big corporations. They have different pressures. I don't think they can make decisions quite as independently as they used to be able to. They have more corporate and financial responsibilities weighing on them. They're not free to go broke or go to jail.

That's a wonderful change that's taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.

I've been dreaming about having a press forever, like the '90s. I've always known so many great writers who aren't as connected to the publishing world as they should be, and I have the energy and the enthusiasm to sort of gather and promote people, so I've always thought someday I might embark on a big project like that.

Self-publishing has been a dubious challenge to traditional publishers, at best.

I'm working on my own work, my own publishing company.

What's the challenge in writing a novel that few people will read? I'm more than happy writing what I do and have no plans to change that.

My first book was published without any editorial advice. Nobody said, 'You might do this or that,' or 'Why don't we see more of this.' I merely took the book and published it.

It was a great time to be born, because I got to have my own publishing company right from the beginning, so I made more money than somebody would have doing what I did ten or fifteen years before.

Digital-Original just shifts the R&D costs for publishing to the authors and affords us the chance to write the stories we want to write and the stories our patrons want to read.

I wanted to do a weird book and reestablish my independent, small-press roots.

I don't hire any companies or ask any of my friends to write reviews for me on Amazon when I have a book come out so they can drive up my ratings on Amazon. I don't have a publicist.

I like to go through the zine sections of local bookstores when on the road and have found a lot of really great kind of underground stuff that way. It all feeds into everything else.