Direct- INDIE- and self publishing

As a professional artist, you are running a business, and you end up being a tiny, round-the-clock capitalist, but in direct relationship or adjacent to the communities who read and consume what you make.

• I originally self published (in 2013 with my first book Contemporary Prayers to Whatever Works) because it was the most direct route to getting the first book in print. I hacked my own path through the forest because a) that seems to be how I do most things, and b) because I didn’t get the kind of ‘yeses’ from the publishing industry I was hopeful about.

After some confusion, I realized that I had a good mentor and a reasonably clear path forward, and I sallied forth with my first crowdfund having no clue what I was doing!

Now, I have a different understanding of why I both value self publishing and choose it, and I will share that with you here.

By self publishing, what I mean is: I print the book through and with my own means, and I sell the book myself through a variety of non-traditional channels.

One of my favorite ‘means’ as an artist who has made her own books, is the art book fair. This kind of venue is unique and distinct from others, in that it is creatives and their books or book-like things, showing up in a public way, to share, sell, and talk about what they’ve brought into print.

​What is absent in this kind of exchange is the large institutional gatekeepers of the publishing world. No one from Barnes and Noble or Amazon is going to show up, and you are operating outside of that machinery.

When I have been published through Simon & Schuster’s Tiller Press (in 2021) I negotiated a very complex contract and paid for someone’s help with that, was given a small advance, and in exchange gave them my content, collaborated and negotiated over various decisions from title to design, and the book arrived in the world in their warehouse, without me knowing how many were even printed.

I didn’t have to house the books, but I also don’t own them, and I don’t earn anything unless they sell enough to make back their advance. So I still have to do all the selly stuff, but without any control. And unless I'm Stephen King, their sales reps aren't spending much time trying to sell my books either. It was a lot less blood and sweat, easier up front money and a lot less traction.

It means that I have one book in every Barnes and Noble, I am in the giant machinery, in their catalog, like a tiny fleck among the thousands of other wonderful books that are printed through major publishing every year (they publish about 2000 titles at Simon & Schuster alone, annually). It is a lot of pressure, with a little feather in your cap.

At an art book fair with books I print myself, instead it’s artists with their own small presses, long-armed staplers, access to risograph machines, needles, thread, screens and paper (not at the fair, but back in their studios or collective spaces), or via a printing company creating small runs of stuff — all of these bring something forth in book form that’s also art, everyone making and sharing it directly.

At first, back in 2012 or so I looked at this route as kind of a plan B. It seemed like I had ‘failed’ to make it in that I hadn’t landed a publishing company. But over the years I’ve come to see that it’s part of both an age-old and a forward-thinking movement: we take full responsibility, we have control of the product and where it’s shared and how, and we invest through our own means and keep our own profits. This is the self of self publishing and the independent of indie publishing.

Within the art book fair milieu, there are many permutations and styles of fairs, and I’ve only participated in a handful of them. Some of them are pricier, more exclusive, more organized, and each set of organizers seems to have different goals - the worst type seems to be the profiteering type, which I believe also has a relationship to how sprawling, impossible to get into, and unweildy of a fair it is (PS1 printed matter eg.) and my favorite lean more toward keeping things smaller, affordable and fair for artists. Someone is making a lot of cash here at PS1:

Maria Molteni, Sue Murad and me at the Boston Art Book Fair in 2018?

And in the end, it’s about relationship. I get to have new colleagues, collaborators, peers, friends and readers, by meeting them and sharing my work, versus teams that keep changing, closed doors I’m not privy to, and a feeling of disempowerment and unwelcome mystery.

Really this post is just an excuse to share the two beautiful graphics of Half Letter Press, and the printed  illustrations of Kione Kochi.  Half Letter Press was tabling near me at the Detroit Art Book Fair in 2023. 

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