I was thinking the other day how the cycle of literature : how we burn oil for the light of life lived long ago :: paper pressed down as hard as possible : a blood diamond shines light like everyone deserves to know the truth but at what cost to whom. I don’t know. What do you think. When will small literary presses give Amazon the proverbial bird call? Would anyone care or would it be like when a kid throws a rock in a pond & people just glance & think, “Cute.” But imagine if there were like a thousand kids throwing rocks in a pond. I feel like people would notice that. Have we talked about this 782 times or 783? But if you whore it out someone will write about it maybe? Again? Worth a shot. Just like cage-free eggs. THIS BOOK SOLD WITHOUT AMAZON. Give some good Ra Ra’s & record yourself on VHS kicking an elephant in the junk. So why haven’t you? What are we going to do. Does anyone even care about the weather anymore or was that just something to talk about because the clouds looked like a chorus for a second.

It’s 12 o’clock, I wish it were 11:59. (Who knows who wrote ~ that?) The sale is over but some of the books aren’t sold out. But so many are. So still go.

Until midnight, the discount code LEVITATE gets you *50% off* the *already reduced* price you always get for ordering any book directly from UDP.

So, for example, Corina Copp’s PRO MAGENTA / BE MET and Jacqueline Waters’ ONE SLEEPS THE OTHER DOESN’T will run you $10 $8 $4 and $15 $13 $6.50, respectively. Your total for both books, even with shipping, will be less than the list price of Waters’ book alone. Read from / about Copp’s chapbook there there, and hear to Waters read here.

Until midnight I’ll add 12 13 more eleventh hour pairs. Suggest things in the comments, on Facebook, at my window, to your neighbors. Of course you don’t need to buy two books, but you probably do.

Uljana Wolf’s FALSE FRIENDS (tr. Susan Bernofsky) + Lev Rubinstein’s THIRTY-FIVE NEW PAGES (tr. Philip Metres / Tatiana Tulchinsky) [Megan Burns, via Fakebook, suggests some Michael Ford with one's Rubinstein]

Aase Berg’s TRANSFER FAT (translated by Johannes Göransson) + Johannes Göransson / Joyelle McSweeney, DEFORMATION ZONE

Tomaž Šalamun’s ON THE TRACKS OF WILD GAME (tr. Sonja Kravanja)+ Laura Solomon’s THE HERMIT

Julian T. Brolaski’s GOWANUS ATROPOLIS + Karen Weiser’s TO LIGHT OUT

Filip Marinovich’s AND IF YOU DON’T GO CRAZY I’LL MEET YOU HERE TOMORROW + Julien Poirier’s EL GOLPE CHILEÑO

Kristen Kosmas’ HELLO FAILURE + Ellie Ga’s THREE ARCTIC BOOKLETS (save $37.50!)

David Cameron’s FLOWERS OF BAD* Rachel Levitsky’s NEIGHBOR + Christian Hawkey’s VENTRAKL [*distributed by SPD not UDP, so not eligible; Cameron's book is deserving of its own post; it will get it; you should get it, too]

M. Kasper’s OPEN-BOOK + Nancy Kuhl’s LITTLE WINTER THEATER

Trey Seger’s DEAR FAILURES + Noah Black’s USELYSSES 

Gregg Biglieri’s LITTLE RICHARD THE SECOND + Clark Coolidge’s THIS TIME WE ARE BOTH

Vito Acconci / Bernadette Mayer, 0 TO 9: THE COMPLETE MAGAZINE + Robert Fitterman / Vanessa Place, NOTES ON CONCEPTUALISMS

Ammiel Alcalay’s NEITHER WIT NOR GOLD (FROM THEN) + Yván Yauri’s FIRE WIND (tr. Nicholas Rattner / Marta del Pozo)

+ PS, a thirteenth, UDP HOFers Jen Bervin & Eugene Ostashevsky

http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/

LEVITATE

You can still float. UDP titles are carried by Flying Object and all the best bookstores, which are carried by you.

YOU

want to run a nationally recognized micro indie press. like head honcho big mamma jamma.

want to work with Lidia Yuknavitch.

want to reinvent online, print publication, and cross genre media projects.

YOU HAVE
big time digital savvy and skills, including web, blog and podcasting.

large experience with alternative press world–all facets.

impeccable literary and media counter culture taste.

crazy good organization skills.

a relentless desire to correct culture.

alternative forms of marketing do not frighten you. in fact, they turn you on.

you have big ideas everyone else thinks are nutso.

it’s likely you drink and enter altered states on occasion.

OTHER
compensation negotiable. if you know what “micro indie press” means then you have realistic expectations.

it is not mandatory that you live in Portlandia, though it would be helpful. We have heard of Skype and shit before though, so you know, we are down.

if this is YOU, send a 500 word description detailing your experience and desire and why we should pick YOU to: lidiamiles at yahoo.com by April 15.

yes, really.

Hey Sampson, what’s the deal with chapbooks?
Funny, that’s how I start all my stand-up comedy gigs. It kills of course. So I wanted to start with a quote from James Haug’s Why I Like Chapbooks (Factory Hollow, 2011), who waxes lyrical “Chapbooks are stealth books./ They can slip under a door./ They don’t impose. They suggest./ They’re not one thing or another. They don’t take much time. They’re sly and easy to ignore. They imply, insinuate, inquire./ They don’t expect an answer./ They have a long history; they have no history.”

Chapbooks are the currency of underground poetry publishing, and tied to a sense of community and gift-ish economy, mostly run by poets who want to give something back and create a home for the work they believe in. Chapbooks are the new of the new, in the world of poetry most poets’ first publications come through chapbooks, so if you want to know the future (of poetry), read chapbooks. Chapbooks tend to be exciting and tied to a counter-culture because they provide a space for more experimental, esoteric or avant-garde work to be published that contests and university presses or bigger presses who may be more concerned with money wouldn’t take the risk on or didn’t think would sell…Chapbooks are like the opposite of money. Which is so money!

Chapbooks also have such a materiality and visceral physical life, because they are mostly handmade and handbound and come in all shapes, sizes (from Small Fires matchbooks to The Pines LP records) and textures imaginable (god I love texture!), made from old military uniforms, childhood blankets, prison cups, cardboard, vinyl, rubber, bolts, matchbooks, you name it. It is this handmade element and imagination and of course each chapbook’s limited nature that gives them such value, and ties them to history and an archival existence. Chapbooks are a link to the human that I think is more important than ever right now in the face of ever increasing digital media and publishing, Chapbooks are like Sarah Connor and her son (John Connor) facing the Terminators in Terminator 2: the hope of all mankind and the future of the human race lie in their hands. Also, they are perfect to read on the subway!

Oh, cool. Well, what year were they invented in?
I should probably just put in a link to Wikipedia here, but I actually learned a bit about the history of Chapbooks from Andrew Kenower of Trafficker Press at a panel he gave at last year’s Chapbook Festival. Basically back in the 1550s, and they were peddled by chapmen or “unruly people” and they formed “nearly the sole literature of the poor” and ranged from everything from collections of “bawdy verse” to religious ballads and political manifestos, and served as the only device of communication for the general public. So it seems we are culturally indebted to them, I’m thinking about the Dadaist manifestos, counter-culture publications of the 60s and underground punk era publications of the 70s, and more recently as I’ve been watching Occupy movements evolve, the way literature is passed around has that same feel–pamphlets, documents, manifestos, and poetry collections are everywhere, like unrecognized passports allowing each other access to our ideas and minds, and of course the People’s Library, which is a haven for these “chapbooks” and hopefully will live as an archive.

Is there anything that strikes you about the chapbook as a form that can’t be done in other forms (like regular books or say movies)?
From a reader’s perspective, I think the main thing is the chapbook form allows for a succinct singular and intimate reading experience in which the life of the poetry is tied to material form. The difference is with most books or full-length collections, one is not reading it in a single sitting, but with chapbooks you can read them fluidly from beginning to end without stopping, and like all great art forms, you are transformed after that process. Not that you can’t be with longer books, but mass produced books and longer collections tend to supersede and drown out the particular or local, also each time you stop and then pick those books up again to resume you are to some degrees a different person, so it is a different kind of experience.

From a writer’s perspective it also allows for the right measure or duration of an exploration of a subject, idea or theme which would often exhaust itself in a full-length collection or longer book. I mean just like poems can be long or short, why shouldn’t books of poetry, but we’ve got this limit in mainstream publishing like anything under 48 pages isn’t considered “book,” which is insane. Sometimes a sequence/series or collection just needs to be 9 or 15 or 34 pages, and that’s where the chapbook as a form and unit and means of publication is so crucial. George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, Jack Spicer and the mimeograph world of the West Coast in the 50s and 60s all come to mind as poets who mastered the form or unit of what we call the chapbook.

From a publishing perspective there is also an obvious analogy with music, much like EP’s function in the music world, with chapbooks you get a taste of what a poet is doing, then see the same work re-contextualized or realigned when it appears in a full-length collection, which can create a new and dynamic life for the work functioning as part of a larger whole/idea/conversation/narrative.

How come Birds, LLC doesn’t do chapbooks?
We come from a chapbook background, Birds was born out of Kitchen Press (2005-2008), founded by Justin Marks, who published awesome chapbooks (with freakin’ spines) by exciting poets writing a new kind of poetry that was outside of the mainstream of what was being published, most of whom it was their first published collection: Mathias Svalina, Elisa Gabbert, Ana Bozicevic, Lilly Brown, Jon Leon, Joseph Massey, etc. Birds, LLC seemed like a natural progression of this, wanting to fill a similar gap we felt existed in publishing full-lengths books (which seemed to be mostly carbon copy contest books) for writers who we felt deserved full-length collections and a wider audience (especially women). However, we can only afford to publish 2 to 3 books a year and there are so many more poets we’d love to publish. So we will be doing chapbooks, starting with the re-release of Morgan Lucas Schuldt’s Kitchen Press chapbook Otherhow. Morgan was a fantastic poet, pushing the limits of form and language in an exciting and beautiful way while still remaining emotional and personal, who sadly passed away earlier this year from complications of cystic fibrosis at age 33. We hope the publication of the chapbook will expose Morgan’s work to a wider audience; it will be available for free online soon. I should also mention Flying Guillotine Press just put an exquisite new chapbook of Morgan’s that will be available at the Chapbook Festival.

Can there be fiction chapbooks?
O Yeah (Randy “Macho Man” Savage voice), and plays, art, criticism, and comics too (check out Bianca Stone’s ridiculously awesome comic “I WANT TO OPEN THE MOUTH GOD GAVE YOU BEAUTIFUL MUTANT” from Factory Hollow Press). Fiction and prose is growing in the chapbook world, which makes sense, because let’s face it, it’s not easy to get your first novel published. Rose Metal Press actually just had a collection of 5 prose/fiction chapbooks bound together. New Herring Press is another good example promoting prose publishing alternatives, focusing on fiction and criticism, publishing manifestos, stories collection, novel excerpts, stories in one long paragraph, etc. All of which will be at the 2012 Chapbook Festival.

Can chapbooks exist online?
Chapbooks can exist anywhere! Like a gift from heaven, UDP is unrolling or re-releasing their out-of-print chaps digitally as part of a growing chapbook archive, one could spend a lifetime here. Yes Yes Press is doing some dope work in this world, check out two of my favorite poetry aliens Ben Mirov and Eric Amling’s collaboration. Or check out this mind-blowing interactive collaboration between Ish Klien & Orra White Hitchcock in Triple Canopy. Some press called Pubishing Genius (I think you might like them), H_NGM_N has their portable document series which rocks. I’m sure there are a million others.

So what happens at the Chapbook Festival?
Murder. And a lot of literary duels and scores are settled. No, it’s really a family atmosphere, which centers around the 2-day bookfair with over 50 small presses (from as far away as Croatia) held in the CUNY Graduate Center, and provides (for free) the smallest of the small presses a chance to show their work to the public. Chapbooks rely on an underground means of distribution, you can’t just run out to Barnes & Noble and pick up the new John Coletti chapbook. The Chapbook Festival provides an opportunity for the public to interact with the publishers and the books (they are tactile and material after all and beg to be touched). Besides the bookfair there are also workshops, which kick off at The Center for Book Arts, on Binding/Print-making, followed by a panel discussion on Community & Publishing, then on Thursday & Friday we have marathon poetry readings “LUNCH POEMS” (with a killer line up) from noon to 3pm, curated by 6 local reading series, and at 3 and 5 we have free workshops (such as Digital Chapbooks) and panels (such as Why Chapbooks Saved My Life), and Thursday is capped off by one of our most exciting events to day, a panel with an all-star cast called The State of Translation Trends in Innovative Publishing, and Friday night the festival is capped off with the Poetry Society of America’s annual Chapbook fellow contest reading/celebration.

Tell me about your chapbook.
I believe all my chapbooks are out of print, but I can tell you they were all out from super rad presses, Greying Ghost Press, Horseless Press, Rope-a-Dope Press and Immaculate Disciples Press, actually there are a few copies of The Heart is Green from So Much Waiting but I’ll let Mike Young tell you about it.

Tell me about one of your favorite chapbooks?
ONE! That’s impossible, I can tell you about a few that changed the way I write or think about poetry. Elisa Gabbert’s Thanks for Sending the Engine from Kitchen Press is one of my all-time favorite chapbooks, and is the reason we did this amazing book, it was what I think of as a book of thinking, Matt Cook says “you write the way you talk, I just happen to talk real cool,” well I think we write the way we think, and Elisa Gabbert thinks real cool! Dana Ward’s Typing Wild Speech by Summer BF Press totally blew my mind and made me realize if you’re good at running downhill, well then run down hill as fast as fucking possible! You open it and freedom jumps out and slaps you in the face and then kisses you and tell you “Let’s go!” Chris Martin’s How To Write A Mistakest Poem by Brave Men Press is mindblowing, and I find myself like a spy mechanic trying to figure out how it works, how it ticks and how the hell I can steal from it. Shannon Burns’ Preserving The Old Way Of Life is just super cool and a chapbook I wish I had written, and makes me just wish I knew this awesome person who wrote it. Amy Lawless’s Elephants in Mourning by [Sic] out of Detroit just totally bowled me over emotionally, somehow she is able to take this form or seemingly conceptual technique of writing based on watching Youtube videos of elephants mourning their dead, and making it beautiful, funny, sad, and ultimately, utterly human. Guy Pettit’s Love me or Love me No 1 & Ben Kopel’s Because We Must made me write to them, which is to me, the highest praise for any poetry. Look what Corina Copp’s double chap from UDP did to Ron Silliman. And last but not least, the last chapbook I read had a huge impact on me and is the reason I wrote this interview, Lorine Niedecker’s Homeade Poems, which are an amazing facsimile of the actual handwritten book she assembled and sent to Cid Corman, which is beautifully designed and published the Lost & Found CUNY Poetics Document Imitative, and masterfully edited by John Harkey. It’s part of the upcoming Series III of Lost & Found which will be available soon, and a few individual copies will be at the Chapbook Festival so look for them!

How many chapbooks do you have? How do you organize them? What percentage of them have you read?
A couple hundred. Besides scattered all over the house, I organize them in this shelving unit, so you can scroll through. I’d say I’ve read about 92 percent.

What are some of your favorite types of binding chapbooks?
Japanese stab bound, besides just sounding bad ass they look beautiful.

If you were a chapbook, how would you be bound?
I’d probably just be stapled, like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler.

Do you ever get chapbooks just because they look amazing, instead of because they might have amazing poems or whatever inside of them?
All the time. I’ll buy basically anything that’s produced out of Flying Object for example. But usually they turn out to be amazing inside as well, it’s sort of like magic.

Do you feel bad for chapbooks that came out in a limited edition of 75 copies 30 years ago and now no one knows they exist?
No, that’s part of their charm and genius, that esoteric, arcane nature of limited edition made objects, and just adds to their value and the thrill of discovering them. Besides, Nat Otting knows about all of them.

I have a chapbook of poems about Guided By Voices that I just wrote on the toilet, would Birds, LLC like to publish them?
If you could just send a video of you reading it on the toilet and post in the comments we’ll let you know …

Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity ed. by Jed Rasula & Tim Conley [like 400 pp full of insane shit discoveries]

Skin Horse by Olivia Cronk [I've already read this twice, it's wow]

All the Garbage of the World, Unite! by Kim Hyesoon, translated by Don Mee Choi [Which after Hyesoon's first book, Mommy Must Be A Mountain of Feathers, also from Action, I'm ready to be killed again]

Eat!!!!!!!!!!!!

1. Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar
Publisher: Ibis Editions

2. Girlvert: A Porno Memoir by Oriana Small
Publisher: A Barnacle Book

3. Devotional Cinema by Nathaniel Dorsky
Publisher: Tuumba Press

4. Barrio Bushido by Benjamin Bac Sierra
Publisher: El Leon Literary Arts

5. Up Jump the Boogie by John Murillo
Publisher: Cypher Books

6. The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field by Tara L Masih, Editor
Publisher: Rose Metal Press

7. Clamor by Elyse Fenton
Publisher: Cleveland State University Poetry Center

8. The Trees The Trees by Heather Christle
Publisher: Octopus Books

9. Gully by Roger Bonair-Agard
Publisher: Cypher Books

10. Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns
Publisher: Dorothy, a publishing project

11. Humanimal: A Project for Future Children by Bhanu Kapil
Publisher: Kelsey Street Press

12. Divorcer by Gary Lutz
Publisher: Calamari Press

13. The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You by Frank Stanford
Publisher: Lost Roads Publishers

14. Ventrakl by Christian Hawkey
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse

15. selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee by Megan Boyle
Publisher: Muumuu House

16. Ajax by Sophocles
Publisher: Flood Editions

17. Stories in the Worst Way by Gary Lutz
Publisher: Calamari Press

18. you are a little bit happier than i am by Tao Lin
Publisher: Action Books

19. Incubation: A Space for Monsters by Bhanu Kapil
Publisher: Leon Works

20. Song for His Disappeared Love/Canto a Su Amor Desaparecido by Raul Zurita
Publisher: Action Books

21. Event Factory by Renee Gladman
Publisher: Dorothy, a publishing project

22. Nets by Jen Bervin
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse

23. The Source by Noah Eli Gordon
Publisher: Futurepoem Books

24. ZaatarDiva by Suheir Hammad
Publisher: Cypher Books

25. Lunar Braceros 2125-2148 by Rosaura Sanchez and Beatrice Pita
Publisher: Calaca Press

26. Ordinary Sun by Matthew Henriksen
Publisher: Black Ocean

27. Poems of the Black Object by Ronaldo V Wilson
Publisher: Futurepoem Books

28. Ten Walks/Two Talks by Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse

29. Pink Elephant by Rachel McKibbens
Publisher: Cypher Books

30. Testify by Joseph Lease
Publisher: Coffee House Press

31. Home/Birth: A Poemic by Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker
Publisher: 1913 Press

32. Motorman by David Ohle
Publisher: Calamari Press

33. Notes on Conceptualisms by Vanessa Place & Robert Fitterman
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse

34. How Phenomena Appear to Unfold by Leslie Scalapino
Publisher: Litmus Press

35. FLOWER CART by Lisa Fishman
Publisher: Ahsahta Press

36. The Transformation by Juliana Spahr
Publisher: Atelos

37. Mule by Shane McCrae
Publisher: Cleveland State University Poetry Center

38. Face by Sherman Alexie
Publisher: Hanging Loose Press

39. Helsinki by Peter Richards
Publisher: Action Books

40. Dayglo by James Meetze
Publisher: Ahsahta Press

41. The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers
Bhanu Kapil
Publisher: Kelsey Street Press

42. Fairy Tales in Electri-City by Francesca Lia Block
Publisher: A Midsummer Night’s Press

43. Georgic by Mariko Nagai
Publisher: BkMk Press at the University of Missouri-Kansas City

44. Sitt Marie Rose by Etel Adnan
Publisher: The Post-Apollo Press

45. The Wide Road by Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian
Publisher: Belladonna*

46. Either Way I’m Celebrating by Sommer Browning
Publisher: Birds, LLC

47. Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me by Mark Leidner
Publisher: Factory Hollow Press

48. I Am a Very Productive Entrepreneur Mathias Svalina
Publisher: Mud Luscious Press

49. The Bled by Frances McCue
Publisher: Factory Hollow Press

50. The Irrationalist by Suzanne Buffam
Publisher: Canarium Books

51. A Mouth in California by Graham Foust by Publisher: Flood Editions

52. 100 Notes on Violence by Julie Carr by Publisher: Ahsahta Press

53. Brother to Brother: New Writing by Black Gay Men by Essex Hemphill, Editor
Publisher: RedBone Press

54. Torn from Troy: Odyssey of a Slave by Patrick Bowman
Publisher: Ronsdale Press

55. Radi Os by Ronald Johnson
Publisher: Flood Editions

56. Milk and Honey: A Celebration of Jewish Lesbian Poetry by Julie R Enszer, Editor
Publisher: A Midsummer Night’s Press

57. Beauties by Mary Troy
Publisher: BkMk Press at the University of Missouri-Kansas City

58. EVER by Blake Butler
Publisher: Calamari Press

59. Retrievals: Uncollected & New Poems, 1955-2010 by Jerome Rothenberg
Publisher: Junction Press

60. They Could No Longer Contain Themselves: A Collection of Five Flash Chapbooks by Colen, Jodzio, Jones-Yelvington, Lovelace, Miller
Publisher: Rose Metal Press

61. The Grief Performance by Emily Kendal Frey
Publisher: Cleveland State University Poetry Center

62. Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting
Starcherone Books

63. The Modern Predicament by George Scialabba
Publisher: Pressed Wafer

64. The Public Gardens: Poems and History by Linda Norton
Publisher: Pressed Wafer

65. Remember to Wave by Kaia Sand
Publisher: Tinfish Press

66. Book of the Given by Rusty Morrison
Publisher: Noemi Press

67. Us by Michael Kimball
Publisher: Tyrant Books

68. The Lessons by Joanne Diaz
Publisher: Silverfish Review Press

69. Pleasure by Brian Teare
Publisher: Ahsahta Press

70. The Man Suit by Zachary Schomburg
Publisher: Black Ocean

71. The Whalen Poem by William Corbett
Publisher: Hanging Loose Press

72. Master of Miniatures by Jim Shepard
Publisher: Solid Objects

73. Spreading the Word: Editors on Poetry by Stephen Corey and Warren Slesinger, Editors
Publisher: Bench Press

74. The Persians by Aeschylus by Brandon Brown
Publisher: Displaced Press

75. All the Garbage of the World, Unite! by Kim Hyesoon
Publisher: Action Books

76. Erzulie’s Skirt by Ana-Maurine Lara
Publisher: RedBone Press

77. Selected Poems by Roy Fisher
Publisher: Flood Editions

78. A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, Editors
Publisher: ChainLinks

79. Simply Separate People, Two by Lynn Crawford
Publisher: The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions

80. The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed
Sixteen Rivers Press, Editors
Publisher: Sixteen Rivers Press

81. Falling Out of Bed in a Room with No Floor by Terence Winch
Publisher: Hanging Loose Press

82. Had Slaves by Catherine Sasanov
Publisher: Firewheel Editions

83. The Waste Land and Other Poems by John Beer
Publisher: Canarium Books

84. First Indian on the Moon by Sherman Alexie
Publisher: Hanging Loose Press

85. SABORAMI by Cecilia Vicuna
Publisher: ChainLinks

86. Sancta by Andrew Grace
Publisher: Ahsahta Press

87. Ambient Parking Lot by Pamela Lu
Publisher: Kenning Editions

88. Sherwood Forest by Camille Roy
Publisher: Futurepoem Books

89. Waiting: Selected Nonfiction by Elizabeth Swados
Publisher: Hanging Loose Press

90. Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, Series 2 by Ammiel Alcalay, Editor
Publisher: The Center for the Humanities, The Graduate Center, CUNY

91. Drive-By Vigils by R Zamora Linmark
Publisher: Hanging Loose Press

92. Fatal Numbers: Why Count on Chance by Hans Magnus Enzensberger
Publisher: Upper West Side Philosophers

93. Moving Day by Ish Klein
Publisher: Canarium Books

94. Imaginary Syllabi by Jane Sprague, Editor
Publisher: Palm Press

95. Scary, No Scary by Zachary Schomburg
Publisher: Black Ocean

96. Determination by Kit Robinson
Publisher: Cuneiform Press

97. Against Professional Secrets by Cesar Vallejo
Publisher: Roof Books

98. [BOND, JAMES]: alphabet, anatomy, [auto]biography by Michelle Disler
Publisher: Counterpath Press

99. Monster Party by Lizzy Acker
Publisher: Small Desk Press

100. The Cosmopolitans by Nadia Kalman
Publisher: Livingston Press

I often stumble across unique ways of exposing readers to new books. Chin Music Press (which I’ve discussed before here and here), has a pretty cool new program, BooksRx, where each quarter, a writer or artist curates a selection of independently published books and/or magazines around a theme. Their third installment, the Mardi Gras collection, will be available on the 21st and looking ahead, they want to incorporate titles from other presses. One installment is $40 and a yearly subscription is $100.

This seems like a great idea for indie publishers, who could band together and sell their books in curated, thematic packages. It will be interesting to see if this idea succeeds.What presses would you like to see participating in a venture like this?

antennae 12 (the last issue)
January 2012
$10

Lee Gough
Andrew Zawacki
Cupola Bobber
Ray DiPalma
Kristen Gleason
Thomas Hummel & Brett Fletcher Lauer
Joshua Ware
Andrew Durbin
Matha Oatis
Janice Lee & Laura Vena

Cover by
Thomas Hummel & Brett Fletcher Lauer

If you’re related to me, don’t read the rest of this sentence: I got most of the people in my family books this year for Christmas. I don’t usually do that, actually. For a writer, it seems rather hazardous. Because, for one thing, though I love my family and I want them to be happy, I’m not going to intentionally purchase things that I consider truly shitty on their behalf. But on the other hand I’m not going to go out and buy them, say, the FC2 catalogue just because I happen to like it; that would be a Real Dick Move. But even once I’ve negotiated that mess and found the place where my tastes and those of a given family member overlap, there’s still the risk that you’re essentially giving someone homework for Christmas. The fact that I want to read a book someday has nothing at all to do with whether or not I want to read it now. By giving someone a book, you either rob them of that decision or, more likely, give them something that they’re going to feel guilty about for several months (or even years) but likely never actually read. But this post isn’t about giving books for Christmas, really. It’s about ebook pricing.

Because here is the thing: I was reminded by my Christmas shopping that, among major publishers, it is still common practice to charge more for ebooks than for paperback copies. You don’t have to know the particulars of their business models, of their distribution networks and royalty schemes, to understand that this is some bullshit. Whatever it costs to typeset the book and design its cover, to truck it out to Amazon, to give Amazon their cut, that has got to be more than making the ebook (something most publishers are still too cheap to do properly) and uploading it to the Internet, still giving Amazon a cut but keeping the lion’s share.

This is the thing about selling ebooks: every single sale, past those few needed to pay for the ebook’s creation, is basically free money for the publisher. Consumers know that 11.99 is too much to pay for an ebook, especially when the paperback is available for less, and so for the most part we don’t pay these prices. My family actually prefers their Kindles, by and large, to print books (a position I share in some cases, actually), but I went the print route anyway, partly because you can wrap them up like proper gifts and partly because the thought of paying more for something that cost much, much less to produce was simply too much for me to accept. The publishers know that I and many others feel this way, that we won’t actually buy their products at punitive prices. And, weirdly, that’s the point. They’ve actually said as much.

It all goes back to hardcover books. Hardcover books are, of course, hilariously overpriced themselves (as you can work out by observing the way that chain retailers will cheerfully discount the new, say, hardback Harry Potter by 33% or more, laughing all the way to the bank) but major publishing houses have been able to make them a major profit center. Now personally I almost never buy hardback anymore — I find them physically less user friendly, sometimes in the extreme, and their fancy slipcovers just get in my way. (I usually remove them for use as bulky bookmarks until I’m done.) But apparently other people still dig them. Publishers fear that ebook sales will cannibalize their hardback sales, and so they fight against every other stakeholder (Amazon included) to keep prices artificially high. The downward pressure on prices will, I am confident, eventually push them to a more reasonable place. The fact that ebooks have grown so quickly in spite of ridiculous paranoia about piracy and attempts to depress interest through punitive pricing only demonstrates the resilience of the digital revolution in publishing. Under the circumstances, you have to wonder how much money these publishers could make if they actually tried to sell their ebooks.

Small presses seem to have the opposite problem. Observing that the bestsellers on Amazon are often priced between .99 and 2.99, they price their digital offerings too low. I think this reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how the 99-cent books on Amazon become big sellers: by and large, these are not especially good books. They are usually exceedingly dull, predictable genre exercises (formulaic thrillers, often written by the same people you’ve been ignoring on Wal-Mart’s bargain book rack for a decade, and “urban fantasy” featuring sexy lycanthropic vampires). They’re priced at 99 cents because they’re designed to sell to people who buy indiscriminately from a given genre. There are exceptions, of course, but as a generalization this seems to hold. You price your book at .99 because you want people to buy it more or less by accident, on a whim. There’s nothing wrong with that! For a lot of books, this is an excellent strategy, and many writers benefit from a strategy where their books are temporarily 99 cents (or even free), or where they sell small works at very low prices and large ones at normal prices. But the problem most good small presses have isn’t, in spite of what many seem to believe, convincing people that their products are worth dropping twelve dollars on. The problem they (we) have is that practically no one knows they exist.

Think about it this way: when was the last time you really wanted a small press book but decided not to buy it, not because you didn’t have any money but because the book itself was just too damn expensive? It’s not uncommon to be too broke for a book, but it’s rare indeed to be just broke enough that you’ll pay seven bucks, but not ten, for a book you actually want. Once a person has decided that he or she wants a given book, it’s in the publisher’s interest (and the author’s) to charge as much as possible for the book without turning the buyer off. Unless you think your book is really bad, you have to figure that the magic number is higher than $2.99. Most of us rightly value the time it will take us to read a book more than we value the money we spend on that book — and most purchased books are never actually finished. The 99-cent book is priced the way it is to stop the buyer from even thinking about how much time is going to be wasted on the book: if, after spending just one buck, the reader decides not to actually read the book, then there will be no guilt in wasting the money. Essentially nothing’s been wasted. Simultaneously, the 99-cent book is priced the way it is because most of the people who read those books don’t really value their own time, in a sense. They read the books they do to get outside of time — to absorb themselves in something that allows them to stop worrying about time’s passage. The 99-cent price point communicates to readers that the publisher has an appropriate disrespect for their time, that they will waste it just as the reader wants them to.

They are both amazing — unbelievable, really, in their existence. It’s remarkable that human beings can do this stuff.

Open the cottony screenprinted cover of Prism Index – which is large format, like bigger than my copy of Inc. that sits near it — and there is a scanned napkin that lists Bowers’s goals for this issue. “Let the whole thing play out like a mixtape,” is one. “Maybe a bit longer” is another, and my favorite is “Handmade Book (make layout & format as meticulous & peculiar as the content.)” In this, he succeeded.

The magazine features writing by Kevin Sampsell, Trinie Dalton, Stephanie Barber, Bill Cotter and many more people. Amy Bender, Brian Evenson. There is vibrant art from Matt Furie and Eric Yahnker and Mel Kadel and Bowers himself. I can’t list everything. There are 88 pages and they are all startling. There is also a DVD and CD that I haven’t watched or listened to yet, but the names of the contributors are familiar to me.

I can’t do it justice. Just click here for images of the spreads.

The Disinhibitor’s review of Kyle Schlesinger’s What You Will, from NewLights, says that Aaron Cohick (who runs NewLights, the press that did the $400 Brian Evenson book) did 202 runs on this letterpressed book. For each copy. Does that compute? For each page, you have to do at least one. Then you want to add another color or something, you do another one. You want to have different textures, which is popular now, you do another one. This book is about 40 pages long, maybe. It has a dust jacket over the two codexes, so it sits on the shelf with a spine like a perfect-bound book. The labor that went into this thing is incredible.

But it pays off. It ensures people are going to read Schlesinger’s poems, I think. I know I kept wanting to see if the print quality on the next page is as good as the page before. The poems are printed in the negative — a black column creates the letters in outline. Then there is a column that looks like a palimpsest of the poem. That works really well for the content, since the poems are tentatively insistent as well. For instance:

There’s Nothing More

To it
Than that

The sky is
Broken and

It’s making
A mess

The book is only $20. Prism Index is only $25. I am enthusiastic about them both.