 Welcome viewers to our ongoing program focus coming to you from Burlington, Vermont from town meeting TV from centered for media and democracy. We are going through the pandemic and we are sequestered in our homes at this time for this program via zoom. I am your host Margaret Harrington for focus. And the, the topic, or the title of our show is for my press. Be careful what you wish for. And I have the, my guests here my wonderful guests who are returning for a second time to focus. And it's Donna Vister, and Mark Estrin, the co founders of for my press and the publishers of for my press. Welcome Donna and welcome Mark. Thanks. So happy and when it seems that thank you so much for inviting us into your home. And it's wonderful to see you there and, and looking well to as we go through this pandemic. And so first of all, can you bring us up to speed on what for my press is doing right now. Working hard at bringing out new books we have it in our previous lineup we have 193 titles out already and another 40 and production right now of all sorts. Graphic work. Poetry novels, short stories, and the category that we call odd birds which is anything else including a lot of work by Peter Schumann of bread and puppet theater. Wonderful. If the tech works, I can just take you on a flash trip through the titles that we're showing and working on right now. If I can share a screen. Okay, we'd love that. Okay, so can you see this. Yes. There are books that are currently published, and there are so many that all I want to do is show you how ridiculous it is how many books we have. When I do this I can't believe it. I just go on and on and on. And, you know, considering that we started with the idea of, of just a joke. You know, can we come we can we publish anything. This is become this is the beware of what you wish for aspect of it because it does go on and on and on and on. And we've done all those things and they're out and they were for sale and sold and they exist in the world and I can't believe it. And anyway, when we get to the end of this, we haven't come to the end, because then we also have forthcoming books. All the books that are sort of in process now that aren't out on the market yet. So this is a whole lot will be out soon. They're the ones that are almost ready. So anyway, that's, that's the answer to the question. This is beautiful and wonderful and let's, let's, let's keep the books up on the screen to or if possible. It's just amazing. Congratulations. So great. Thank you. Well, yes, it's it's you started in 2011. Correct. And as Mark says it was a little bit of a joke, we had both been going to readings at the firehouse center. Once a month authors would just get together and read from works and it was open reading anybody could come and we both were taken by a novel in progress that Roger Coleman from Burlington was reading and this needs to be published. And this needs to be published and this needs to be published and Jason somebody should publish this. And so we investigated what options there were I mean at that time self publishing was just kind of coming into its own and self publishing meaning self publishing at the firehouse and Simon and just, you know, that you could do it yourself. If you wanted to and you can even make yourself into a publishing company. And so we had had a previous little publishing adventure called the Old North and Rag, which was a neighborhood newspaper that we did for four or five years in the late 90s, early 2000s. And that that project was Ron Jacobs. And when we mentioned publishing to him he said oh I have a manuscript. And so we used him as a guinea pig, and this is the book. We got it back and said, darn, looks like a real book. It even has words inside. I mean, it really, it looks good, you know, you can see it looks like a regular book. You can read it. It's in English. And we were working with very simple tools. A word processing program. And I think maybe Photoshop elements like very simple tools. And it came up with something that looked pretty professional. So we solicited a few more manuscripts from friends that we knew were good writers from these groups, starting with the people that we knew from the reading groups in Burlington and Flynn Avenue and from friends from Goddard writers from the old days. And by the end of the year we had 10 or 11 books on our bookshelf. That's amazing. And the process of it Donna, where did you do it all in your home, or did you send out for the, the, the print, we use a print on demand publishing process. And there are lots of companies that do print on demand but when we started out there was something called create space, which allowed you to just upload a PDF file for the book and a PDF file for the cover, and they'd send you back a book. Free, except for the printing cost. And then they had a distribution system that was mostly Amazon but would sell to bookstores to. And so we don't have to do any of the distribution of books because that's beyond us. We work, I mean you are looking at the phone my office. This is it. There's an upstairs annex where I have my computer but this is where Mark does all the editing and that kind of work. There, there are now a lot of other companies that do that, including one that's run by Ingram which is the major wholesaler for independent bookstores. And we've moved a lot of our work off the Amazon create space platform over to Ingram, because it's friendlier to a larger number of bookstores and There are a lot of people also that don't want to deal with Amazon. Right. Yeah, politically, but Yes, go on, go on. In that, you know, we like to think of this as a post capitalist press but the fact is we're in bed with the biggest capitalist of them all, which is a contradiction, you know, a basic existential contradiction of trying to do anything in this society. So the other piece of what we were trying to do was publishing books, trying to do make a business that put the authors first. So, Well, and the basic principle of the business is to not make money for us not make money, make no money for the business for the business or for us. That's why we thought it was post capitalist. So the way our our process works is that we don't take a salary or anything for that for our work we just do it as political work. And the process that we use doesn't cost anything other than labor until a book is actually printed. And in the print on demand system, it's not printed until somebody buys it. So if someone say clicks on the crow books website and orders of fomite book. The order goes out across the internet and to the printer in Tennessee or somewhere and it gets printed and then shipped directly to the person from there. And then that money that the person paid for the book comes some portion of that comes back to us and royalties and we give most of it back to the authors at the end of the royalty period. So, because you have expenses right I mean, you know, we, we each have a computer, we have a website. We own our house. So we don't have the, the fomite business doesn't have to pay to support us, but we like the business to support itself to break even, which it does. Also, we most, I think most we also ask our authors to contribute their royalties to doctors without borders, and many of them do. So, you know, the cash sort of avoids us by plan, and winds up in in the right places and not in the wrong places. What about any. Do you have to pay Amazon or Ingram anything at all. They take a, they take a percentage of the sales, they pay themselves, they pay themselves. And off the top. Yeah, and it's so on a book that is, you know, 100 pages long, say, that's a pretty skinny poetry book. It costs about $3 to print. And those are the kind of books you buy for $15 and, you know, So the difference between that printing cost plus a small percentage that Ingram or Amazon keeps for their non printing expenses. The rest goes to the most of the rest goes to the office. I was going to say something else about the business side, but I don't really remember what it was. I was thinking about the joke side. Starting as joke. Oh yeah. That here we are with the possibility of having a publishing company. After we published one book. If we want to do some more because they're, it obviously works. The system works. We have managed people's offering manuscript. We have a company. Oh, we're a publishing company. What, what do we call it? What's its name. So I had, I don't remember when 10 years ago now, written a book called the annotated nose. And the annotated nose was not, you know, this is a stick, but it is written by a guy named William Hundwasser. He was just the editor of this one foster book. And then the character in the book contributed all these notes, calling Hundwasser a liar and telling the real story. So there was, you know, there was Hundwasser's novel over here, and the characters notes over here and I have some editorial notes. It's not kind of a funny book, you know, but the publisher, we needed a name for the publisher who published Hundwasser's book here. And I remember how the word first came about, but my daughter's a doctor. And I don't know. And I was a PA, the word fomite. Not everybody knows what that means fomite is anything, any surface on which you can spread micro organisms like this here, that's a fomite touch this, I got him on in my hands. Everything's a fomite doorknobs doctors ties in hospitals. And that's why they're always washing because everything they touches a fomite and the and so the company in this book that published Hundwasser's book is that we call it format format because this is a book about the plague and all that. But the plague, we're going through something like a play great. So now I have a Google alert for fomite. So I can see when there's something comes up about the press, but because of the pandemic. All I'm getting our CDC warnings about doorknobs, because they're fomites. The next movie I'm going to watch is contagion. Oh, from 2011 and fomite see it seems I haven't watched it yet, but fomite seems to figure in it. It does, it does. Yeah. And after having thought about fomite. As an image. It becomes clear that a book or a printed page clearly is a phone line for psychic organisms, and that the author plants a psychic organism on a page, and the reader strikes the page with his eyes and and disease is transferred, which is the disease of the author's thought is now contagious and so that, and in fact, you know, there's a nice we have, I don't know where it is on our card somewhere nice little quote from Tolstoy, about how the function of art is to, I have it here in front of me. Let me read it. The capacity of art is based on the capacity of people to be infected by the feelings of others by Leo Tolstoy. Okay, so we didn't tell Tolstoy to write that. We collected it. We grabbed it from the back of our car. I will. But the use of the words disease and infection in a positive sense is, it makes my hair stand on end almost you know. So, but it's true. You know, it's true like that. But, you know, more, more, it's a treatment. It's a subject that has been treated in depth in depth, especially in German romantic literature, art as disease. Thomas Mon, who's one of my favorite authors, this is one of his major themes, artist disease, the disease consciousness that produces a non normal substances, which is which becomes art, you know, the average shoe salesman in the role of a shoe salesman does not produce art unless he becomes sick and he quits, and then he starts becoming a novelist, you know, more painter, violin player. Art and disease is, is a big topic. Is it, is it a topic in any of the books that you've published in the last few years? All of them. I mean, maybe that's an approximation, but it's hard to get away from the if my look, we have very I mean, I get to, I get to pick all the books because I am the entire acquisitions committee. Donna gets to make all the books. I have no idea how she makes them. But what she makes is what I have worked on with an author, chosen, chosen to work with the author, and then I send to her. And, and then she takes it over from there. I have no idea what she does. And if she went away, there would be no phone. If he went away, there would be no phone. Because only because you wouldn't want to pick the books. Right. So, but, you know, we do serious books. And there's a lot of categories that are called genre books. That we don't do at all. And what what is a serious book well there's a great range of serious books, but you know most of them deal with situations in tension and conflict, and that in itself is disease, because, you know, you take a person a character who is in trouble in the environment in some way against the environment to being told or pulled apart in relationships or whatever. You have disease, you know, and if you don't have disease, then you probably don't have a book. That's an over generalization. Well, Mark, for a moment talk, I was surprised about that Charles, a book by Charles Simpson because I didn't I know him here in Burlington as an activist, but I didn't know that he was a novelist also. You know, one day there just comes in it's the how it comes submission, right submission. Are you interested in. I have, I have a dotted I have a book of poems I have a whatever. And I get something from Charles, you know and he says, you want to look at my novel or what's went out. Well I have a 500 page novel that I've read. I've known Charles for years and we're in the same sort of discussion group and I've never known he was a novelist. And, and then he not only was a novelist but he wrote a considerable novel. So, yes, I was as surprised as you were, but the fact is that the intelligence that he generally and analytical ability he's a professor as the was a tenured professor of sociology at across the lake. And has taken students a lot down into Central America and Mexico, and is wrote a book about the predatory corporations that are working on seed term and terminating seeds and have their laboratories and plots, you know, experimental farm plots, down there, and the violence that comes with them and the plotting international shenanigans. You know, it's all about that stuff. And that also surprised me because, you know, that isn't again what we talked about in our discussion group is usually, you know what to do with the pit in Burlington, right. The whole subject that, you know, landed on us. Like a ton from the sky was Charles's book. So, you know, do the things. Yeah, when I read when I saw what the book was about, you know, just now when I was looking at the information on on your website. I thought of the of those seeds that have been in Vermont, that where the farmers have to return the seeds to the company. Do you know what I'm talking about. They're not allowed to replant them. They're not allowed to save the seeds and plant them again. Well, in the way you do that more easily, you know, take the is simply they'll only, they'll only grow once, and the seeds that come out of the plant are sterile. That's what's in there. There are both, both kinds of the seeds that are can't be used again by contract. The seeds that just won't work, but it's part of the same project to get farmers to need to buy new seed every year. Yeah, and then one of the nice things nicer parts and in fact one of the few parts where Don and I actually work together on something is the covers the book covers. Charles is cover is terrific. And, you know, it's just stuff we landed on I don't know if you have. Do we have a child on the upstairs. Well, yes, but but Kevin, Kevin Harms, who was our technician on the show and director, he will be able to show that right right on the screen now. I'm not trying to find it here in front of me but I can't, I can't access it myself. Go to our website and click on our books, and then go to Simpson, you know, by author or something. It's near the top. Yeah, it's called an uncertain harvest. Anyway, it's a beautiful beautiful. Peter Bruegel harvest scene. And it's just in itself such a distance between the authenticity of that and the corrupt nature of contemporary agriculture, you know, for industrial agriculture that the fundamental mess of these people there with their sides and trying to drink out of, you know, some of the thirst gone and then it just is a wonderful wonderful contrast. I wanted to put a little tiny combine in the distance coming up the road toward toward them. We couldn't do it. And I thought it was tacky anyway. I didn't try it, but it was tacky. I mean, the Bruegel is enough itself to make a comment on the contents of the book. Wonderful and what and then tell me more about the process of you publish the book, and then they are available online from Amazon Ingram, and they have ISBN numbers right. So they have ISBN numbers and most of them also have Library of Congress numbers so their cataloging is all automatic through the Library of Congress. Although most people buy our books online, bookstores can order them through their normal wholesale channels. So if you want to buy a book through a bookstore, you may not be on the shelf, but you just go in and said like this book, and three days later or two days later it's there because the regular distribution channels need to buy it through an indie bookstore and not have to buy it through Amazon. And we also produce most of our books as ebooks so if you have a Kindle or a nook or some other kind of e-reader you can buy it that way too. Okay, well then how does that work, Donna and Mark, that you just mentioned something to me that I really I didn't know about it, that all of your books are available as ebooks too. There are lots of ebook sellers I mean, Amazon has a separate site, separate part of their website for Kindle books so if you look up Charles's book on Amazon, you'll see a page for paperback and a page for Kindle. Or a link for paperback. And the same on Barnes and Noble there's a print page and a nook page. And through that ebook process, we can make all our books available to public libraries and one of our principles is that we make it available to a library at the same price as we make it available to an individual. And that's quite different than most publishers. In fact, on the ebook publishing sites, they say, set your library price here make it a lot higher, because it's going to be borrowed over and over again but we don't do that we want library patrons to be able to to have our books. And libraries to be able to buy them without breaking the bank. Big pressure on library resources now. How does that work that do you does the does the, the person have to go in to request the book at the library before the library will, will get a copy, or do you have a system where the libraries automatically or not automatically but choose to, to have the full my books on the shelf. The books are listed in the, all the places that libraries buy them from but generally like a lot of books. Unless it's a best seller or a hot genre, a library is not going to buy it unless a patient patron requests it. And then they do buy it. And then they do usually. I mean, the fletcher seems to have all my books at 15 novels. They're there on the shelf. Yeah. But, but, but Mark, all your all your books were not published by FOMI trade. They were 1213 were published before we start, or still not. The last one was not published by. I just, it's nice to keep up your other publisher relationships. So generally speaking libraries order our books, if they're contacted by someone about that. And we have one author in the greater Boston area who's doing a big library portion as soon as she's done her second book is coming out in June of this year. So we do a little, either a newsletter article or a little zoom class for other for my authors about how you, what works and approaching libraries and getting them to stock your, your book on the shelf. I'm also getting the word out with reviews, too. I mean, how, how do you get it do for my authors, get their books reviewed in different publications, beginning with the New York Times book review. Review sites that are friendlier to independently published books. So forward reviews, Kirkus reviews, publishers weekly, often on library journal often on, and then there are hundreds of book bloggers and many of our authors go that route so they will research which book review blogs are interested in the kind of book that they write, and then they'll pitch their book to that reviewer and many of our books get reviews some of our authors don't care about that. They don't care about reviews they don't care about prizes they don't blurbs they don't care about blurbs from other authors. And then they every author has his or her own mailing list of friends and colleagues and people that they work with in other areas beyond their particular area. And so they are capable of announcing the book. And in theory, everything should grow geometrically you know you send it to two people, and those two people send it to two people. It doesn't work that way. But it does, it does grow. It's not, it's not a core nothing is a corpse. And it's, and it also hangs around. Well, you know the thing is, you publish a new book, I have this as an author, you publish a book, it gets attention for six weeks. And then there are other books by by you're done. Right. We've we did you. And then things, at least in the old days, simply went out of print, but nothing ever goes out of print anymore, which is, I think, terrific. Yeah, but wait a minute, when you say mark nothing ever goes out of print anymore. What do you mean by that. When you write a book. It's printed the file continues to exist. We have the files of all the books that have that we've done the places that have reviewed them or I don't you know it's just the until electrons go away. And then there's a print run that arrangement of electrons will exist. I think I have a different way of explaining it and that is in the, in traditional publishing there's a print run. And it's say 10,000 books. If books are sold they either reprint another 10,000, or they don't. And if they don't, then that first group of books is all there are, and they circulate through used book sales and whatever's left in bookstores for print on demand, the book only exists as a file, until someone buys it, or until we take it down. You know, if we were to cease to exist with our books would probably get taken down at some point. But they don't have to. So, as long as someone orders it. It's in print. And Donna says the, you have a print run of 10,000, but, you know, not for literary fiction, which is what we publish. They have print runs of 250. I mean, the, the stuff in the four and five and six figures for print runs. That ain't what we do. You know, it's an in fact our best seller has sold about 1200 copies. And that's the way it is it isn't because we're bad or the it's bad or anything it's just that the different, you know if you want to write a romance novel. You can sell a lot more copies. Right. You want to write a complex intellectually sincere and authentic investigation of the problems of living in the world. Well, who needs that. And also in the context of this time. Everything seems to be online. I mean, not only people's private thoughts and musings and you know put out in it in a few characters or whatever, and then looked at by anybody who wants to. The, the printed word as we, as we remember it or I remember it from my childhood of the book in the hand. I remember of a of a treasured object than it ever was, you know that the difference between the ebook and and the the actual book in in your hand, I have the book industrial Oz here from you. The nuclear with the nuclear poems in it which anti nuclear poems, which I cherish, but it's very different to have this book right here with me. Than to see it online and so with your going, you're going actually going even though you are revolutionaries in your, in your sphere, you're, you're going with the flow, it seems. I'll tell you something. I mean, I'm one of the greatest fans of ebooks. First of all, there's no more room to put books, we don't have any more room on the bookshelf. Second of all, half of the books that I would pull out of the, these shelves that you can see, make me we's because paper deteriorates over time. And I have to, and then I go online and I look for an electronic version in order. Third of all, you're lying in bed at night. It's cold. You want the covers open the book up. You want to hold a 400 page book up like that. Try to keep the pages open. Try to turn the pages with one hand, and then have it fall down on your wife's face. It's so much better to read a Kindle at night. You know, you press, you can hold it, it's light. You can turn the pages with one finger. I love it. It gets tired at night you want to be, you wake up you want to read it three o'clock in the morning but your eyes are said, you make the print bigger. Right. For geezers, I'll tell you, it's terrific. But we have no intention of giving up the print book. That's for sure, because one of our promises to our authors is that we'll make a beautiful object for them. Right. I quote, and in fact, they are a beautiful object. And they are beautiful objects. And then what they transport to our interior is also beautiful in, in the reception that we have of new knowledge experience and the Tolstoy phrase the feelings of others. So, on that, I'd like you to, to come back again. We'll do a third time at some point if we, if you remember things that we didn't cover now that you wanted to. And for one thing, I hope that this spreads the word about for my press on from Channel 17. I don't know if you're familiar with media and democracy, but I have one, one last question here because I had have not lived in Burlington that very, very long, I've lived in Vermont for a little while, but not in Burlington. But I heard from my daughter that there used to be a nose running around town. Is that so. Was there a nose that was running around town and that. The book called the annotated nose and Google wrote a book called the story called the nose, neither have had anything to do with one another, but an actual nose no that's in that's in Google. This nose gets runs around town and is wearing seen going into church and praying and wearing a general's uniform with epaulets on its nose shoulders and my, my book was, you know, just a crazy book about a guy who. A guy who is trying to sell himself as a, as the nose nose. I thought that it might have been because of your involvement and real connection with the bread and poppet that they had made a nose, you know, and it ran around town because there was a production actually of Google story in this theater that was 273 main. And there were some posters, you know, Pearl Street and there were some posters of the nose and they were up a lot of places. But that was that was Google's nose. And as far as bread and puppet nose. And he has a mask. I love it. I guess. See, like that. This is. You can't maybe see it but this fabric is garlic. Close so it keeps away. COVID and also vampires. Okay. We'll set up on screen and we'll go out with that. Thank you. Thank you so much, Mark and Donna. Thank you for my press. Be careful what you wish for. Oh, it's a pleasure. Thanks. Thanks. Goodbye for now.