But no, I’m an animal and apparently the AWP conference just brings out the literary beast in me. Last year at AWP in Washington, D.C., Matt Mullins and I reached a gentleman’s agreement on Three Ways of the Saw as we drank nightcaps at the bar after the inaugural Atticus Happy Hour reading at Bourbon. A few weeks later, Jared Yates Sexton and I came to terms with his debut story collection, An End to All Things (forthcoming in November 2012).

Jared, like Matt, is a Jedi. And if you’re a Star Wars constituent among our readers, you know that Jedi have the gift of “Force sensitivity.” The Force, in this fictional universe, is an “energy field that connects all living things, it surrounds us, it penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together.”

It’s just the way these things go; buy me enough shots of whiskey (just kidding) and convince me that your book is the next coming of Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson (just kidding, sort of) and we’ll figure out a way to get it done.

Atticus Books has reached an agreement in principle with Luna Park Review founder and editor Travis Kurowski on releasing a 2013 publication on the literary magazine. We plan to launch the book next March at AWP in Boston and we are truly pumped up about taking the concept of a special issue of Mississippi Review to the next level and creating a legacy pub that could be applied to college course instruction for years to come.

I also rapped with Chad Prevost of C&R Press about his debut novel, The Director of Happiness, at Buddy Guy’s Legends across the street from the Hilton Chicago. After ongoing talks of online serialization of his work, I asked Chad to revise the manuscript and bring in a second perspective to the narration; I then offered him a contract conditional upon said revisions, while musicians warmed up for their act. I’m confident that Chad and I will reach an agreement on the book, partly because he digs the same kind of music I enjoy, but mostly because I think he’s a writer who has fallen through the cracks of an unforgiving book trade.

My primary objective of starting the Atticus Books imprint was to discover writers like Chad whose writing style kicks me in the rib cage and demands attention. His engaging and innovative approach to blogging and publishing in general have been a welcome departure from the same old, same old.

I met several writers today at our table who appeared genuinely jazzed to share their work with Atticus Review, if not a full-length manuscript with Atticus Books.

I have my eye on a few women writers while I’m here, with one in particular who has caught my fancy. She’s young, vibrant and a Chicagoan. She doesn’t yet know how serious I am about signing her, but I mentioned her work today to Steve Himmer at the table – and I’m keen on speaking to her about publishing her debut novel. This is one of the many reasons I am stoked by this profession. You get to make dreams come true, even if those dreams turn out way different than the author had imagined.

It’s all a matter of trust. Every publisher-author relationship is built on trust; we have nothing else to count on.

—————-

I attended the Propaganda reading tonight with two dear friends at the Haymarket Pub & Brewery on West Randolph Street. Matt Bell, Molly Gaudry, and Blake Butler were among the main attractions in a rapid sequence of readings.

Nothing like celebrating a friend’s birthday at an unpredictable reading. If Lynda wasn’t a member of an improv theatre in Chicago, perhaps she wouldn’t understand. But she gets it:

When it’s done well, performance art (e.g., reading poetry in public), in all its earnestness and all its realness and all its unseemliness, surpasses all forms of infotainment, if just for the pure spectacle of writers seeking affirmation and the audience giving it to them. Freely conjoining with their pain and precision.

Digging that I’m in one of my favorite cities doing the thing I love, lugging books and surrounding myself with people who swear by the power of ink.

Digging that it’s my friend’s birthday tomorrow and she and her husband plan to meet me at a reading somewhere in this glorious bar-littered metropolis.

Taking in this whole book fair scene with a pie-eating grin…

After arm wrestling the display rack and setting up multiple copies of 10 Atticus titles (yes, we’ve reached double digits!), I look at our loaded AWP table and anticipate that we’ll have to expand to a booth next year in Boston.

I once read somewhere that a common trait of literary presses is that they don’t know where they’ll be getting funds to produce their next publication and yet they keep signing authors. All indie publishing is predicated on a dream and an anti-business plan, and is populated by lit junkies who believe they were born to breed printed matter. The only thing that gives us hope is when an unknown entity like Bellevue Literary Press produces a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (Tinkers by Paul Harding). It’s a pipe dream but we like smoking from it. Even if it didn’t earn Bellevue millions in sales; the honor of the award alone is enough.

Yeah, I have the hubris to think that I know talent. The kind of talent that oozes from the page when you read it.

It may seem trite to compare a publishing house to a family, but as a publisher, I do feel an enormous responsibility to my authors. Similar to a parent, it’s my job to support their growth. I’m excited to see the expressions on the faces of Steve Himmer, Matt Mullins, and John Minichillo tomorrow when they see their respective book covers on the front of matchboxes. Yes, our extra special swag this year at AWP is matchboxes that show off the stellar work of designer Jamie Keenan, who I’ve kidnapped from the big leagues. If you come to our table (C-16, Southwest) and sign up for Atticus Digest, our monthly e-newsletter, you GET LIT e-mailed to you and get to bring home a limited edition box of matches. And yes, they light candles too.

All right, I need to shower and see if I can drum up the energy to party with some deliriously fine writers at The Empty Bottle tonight. The lineup is killer: Michael Czyzniejewski, Sarah Rose Etter, Jesus Angel Garcia, James Greer, Lindsay Hunter, Jamie Iredell, Michael Kimball, Lara Konesky, Cris Mazza, Mary Miller, Jeff Parker, Sam Pink, Craig Renfroe, Rebecca Roberts, Peter Schwartz, Amber Sparks, Sarah Sweeney, Ben Tanzer, Mike Young & xTX.

Wish me strength!

Dear Movers, Shakers and Innovators of Publishing,

Are we digging ourselves an early grave or is it a stroke of marketing genius to give away e-content? Let’s re-frame that question: when a small press launches a new title (fiction or non-fiction), is it counter-intuitively wise or just plain dumb to let consumers download the entire content of the book for free? What’s this say about the value of the content?

Moreover, how do we expect individuals to dedicate their lives to a career in the arts when we have a system that increasingly does not support their efforts? This is not a new challenge for artists, but it is a new paradigm in publishing—and a sad reflection of the current state of our culture and economy—when publishers and writers are made to put fresh work in the public domain and let people read it for free. It sounds open and generous and moral and beneficial to mankind, but do we all have this luxury? Do commercial artists have the financial freedom to offer their paintings to galleries for free?

Does this set up a system where only those who have the means get to be heard? Again, this problem is not new—poetry at one time was (and to some degree, still is) infamous for recognizing and rewarding educated, upper class poets because those were the only members of society who could afford to have their poems published. Poetry is a discipline that has long put the fear of Goethe in many an enterprising trade publisher because of its notoriously poor track record of book sales.

Like poorly written pieces of flash fiction, many literary presses are short-lived. They allow their ideals to get in the way of sound business practices. They are at risk of becoming extinct. If not for a select group of visionaries, the old business model surely would have killed us off by now. But the Business 101 textbook is being rewritten everyday and what once may have been deemed foolhardy now rings profound.

Before diving in to our ancestral graves and pulling out what little remains of Gutenberg’s parts, let’s quickly review the expenses publishers lay out to produce every title.

Forget the time we’ve dedicated to building and implementing a vision for our publishing house. (The sweat equity and sleepless nights are all part of any entrepreneurial venture.)

Forget the day-to-day operational costs and the money we’re laying out for staff we can’t afford to lose. (That too is the price of running a small business.)

Let’s have amnesia and forget too the insult to injury of having Uncle Sam with one administrative boot on our collective throat and one fiscal hand in our pocket. Let’s just focus on the hard costs of producing one 200-page book:

Hard costs on the cheap (using nice round numbers)*
ISBNs/Barcodes – $50 (buying them in quantities of 10)
Copyediting – $800 ($4/page)
Typesetting – $600 ($3/page)
E-enabling (EPUB generation) – $200 ($1/page)
Design (cover) – $1,000
Proofreading – $400 ($2/page)
Advance Reading Copies – $800 (100 units x $5/book plus $3/book mailing to reviewers)
Printing – $2,000 (500-unit first printing at $4/book including title/cover setup fees)
Marketing – $1,000
Publicity – $150
$7,000

*Note: Expenses greatly vary and aren’t all-inclusive. Many publishers spend more or less than the price listed for each service, whether they outsource it or perform it in-house.

Let’s assume you charge $15 list price for the title and receive in return $5 on individual copies sold. This assumes you use a distributor to maximize your chances at exposure, so you need to allow for a combined 65% off list price (55% wholesale discount plus 10% warehouse, distribution & fulfillment fees).

You then share a paltry 10 percent “net” royalty with your author, so you now have received $4.50 per copy sold on a book that cost $4 to print. Right? Well, yeah, but if you EVER want to break even on this title, you really should print 3,500 copies at about three bucks a pop (accounting for economies of scale, we hope), which raises your out-of-pocket investment to $15,500 on one unproven author.

And because you’re a kind indie publisher with a dyslexic heart, you actually have an escalator clause in your publishing agreement which allows for bumps of 2.5 percent when the author hits certain increments of units sold (e.g., 12.5% for 2,500 and 15% for 5,000), so actually the margin that you estimated is even slimmer than you had anticipated and, well, you’ll need to rework your castoff and print more copies of his debut novel in order to hit the break-even point even though no one has ever heard of this guy and wow, maybe, just maybe if you had hit the books harder in college or if your dad had been a tradesman who taught you a useful skill like plumbing…

You get the picture, right? The odds at making money in the print publishing racket are stacked so high against the modern man of letters that Johannes Gutenberg, a hero of capitalism who died poor, is rolling over in a pile of antimony. Publishers lay out wads of dough to produce meaningful, engaging content for readers to consume. And consumption comes at a price, does it not?

Whether it’s printed on 30% post-consumer waste paper or delivered to your handheld reader, it costs a significant amount of money to produce high-quality content and both publisher and author should receive compensation for their work, should they not?

Has the ubiquity of free infotainment flowing on the Internet so warped our understanding of the value of content that we’ve decided to transform business practices to the point of no return on investment (ROI)? Am I the only nauseous capitalist in the room? Are the arts supposed to be run only by non-profits and the deepest of deep pockets?

I’ll often hear from authors and publishers concerned that free books devalue books. They fear readers will be conditioned to demand free and won’t pay. This isn’t the case. – Mark Coker, CEO of Smashwords

Can we really have it both ways in the book business? Can we persevere—and dare we dream, make a honest, albeit meager living—if the e-book becomes our loss leader? Can something even be called a loss leader if you’re handing it to the consumer for nothing, not even the promise of future business?

Which is it, colleagues? Is the e-book here to be our saving grace, helping us mitigate the exorbitant costs of printing, shipping, and returns? Or is the e-book our coup de grace, pushing us off the ROI cliff as we stoically observe the erosion of higher margins once promised by the sale of digital content?

The price of a book is set by the publisher. The value of a book is set by the reader. – Kassia Krozser, Booksquare

Ig Publishing, a Brooklyn-based literary press, is living in the capitalistic land of mega-contrarians this week, while it offers its newest release, Laura Ellen Scott’s quirky novel, Death Wishing, on the Amazon Kindle for free.

This isn’t completely uncharted territory for Ig. Last year the progressive-bending house experimented by giving away one story in Quiet As They Come, a collection of stories written by Angie Chau.

One thing is giving away a gallon of milk freshly delivered by the cow. Another thing is giving away the farm cultivated by the land owner, even if it’s for just a limited time. The gallon of milk (the free digital story download) indirectly produced more than 1,000 Kindle editions sold, a relative success determined in part by stellar reviews of Chau’s work, according to Ig editor-in-chief Robert Lasner. The economic impact of sacrificing the entire farm (the free download of Scott’s debut novel) remains to be seen. And because of the great number of variables that influences a book’s sales performance, it will be next to impossible for the publisher to determine if the free download worked.

Apparently there is such a thing as a free lunch and we’re gambling that the taste of it will drive future sales and not undermine them. What’s next, going the indie rock band route and putting out a jar for tips if the consumer likes it?

“We’re flying blind,” Lasner said on an impromptu phone call I made after I noticed the ploy via a Facebook post by the author. When I first caught wind of the publicity stunt, I was all set to rant on the subject, but I was torn mostly because I respect and admire the author of Death Wishing and I imagine she perceived the gambit as a shrewd way to draw multitudes of eyes to her work.

Death wish (psychiatry) — A desire for self-destruction, often accompanied by feelings of depression, hopelessness, and self-reproach.

So before I called in the death squad on the entire publishing industry for this ongoing egregious sin of giving the consumer the car keys after destroying the driver’s license and classifying the vehicle a wreck for insurance purposes, I thought it responsible to catch my breath, check my preconceived notions at the door, and call the publisher. Lasner welcomed the discussion and said he was pleased with the aggressive marketing tactics of Ig’s distributor (Perseus, which now owns Consortium). Once I realized that Johannes and I were the dinosaurs with the faint pulse and it made no sense to disagree with my colleague, the rest of the conversation mostly consisted of me bumbling, wincing, and wishing him well with the decision, even though the innovative strategy felt like yet another knife to my gut and Mr. Gutenberg’s heart.

The promotional giveaway certainly has garnered a groundswell of notice. On Friday afternoon, Death Wishing was listed No. 1 among The Top 100 Free Best Sellers in Literary Fiction on Amazon. How something can be free and a best “seller” apparently is besides the point. For the time being, Ms. Scott can claim to be more in demand than Mr. Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities) and Mr. Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter), so kudos to her.

The listing shows just how much the landscape is changing before our very eyes. Alas, you can not call it “bookselling” when you receive no monetary gain from the transaction, but there’s something to be said for publicity in this punishingly tiresome game of grabbing the book-reading consumer by the collar and hurtling him down to the ground for his attention. (OK, publishers and authors may not physically tackle prospective readers when they hand sell their books, but we’re not above wrestling with their intellect and twisting their arms.)

Lasner doesn’t believe that giving away product hurts sales. “It’s a myth,” he says. The idea, he says, is to draw people in and get them talking about books they otherwise would not have discussed.

Think like a fisherman. Fishermen chum: they throw buckets of free bait in the water to attract a lot of fish, and then mix in hooked bait to catch the fish attracted by the freebies. Free or low cost books act like chum in the water for marketing and platform building. – Mark Coker, “Pricing Strategies for Ebooks”

Maybe these guys are on to something and I’m envious because it’s taken me this long to figure out that old-style capitalism is indeed long buried and dead, right alongside the fractured parts of Gutenberg’s movable printing press.

Resources

Carr, David, At Media Companies, a Nation of Serfs, The New York Times, Feb. 13, 2011

Coker, Mark, “Pricing Strategies for Ebooks,” The Savvy Book Marketer, Sept. 22, 2011

Gonzalez, Guy LeCharles, Have Publishers Helped Devalue “Content”?, Digital Book World, Feb. 22, 2010

Harris, Marlene, “Why I’m willing to pay for ebooks,” Reading Reality, April 19, 2011

Krozser, Kassia, “A Question of Value,” Booksquare, Aug. 31, 2010

Pfanner, Eric, “Internet pushes concept of ‘free’ content,” International Herald Tribune, Jan. 17, 2007

Source: Stormer-Brooks Illustration

Through the windows outside the main building
Where their Nissan blocks the front entrance, alongside the wheelchair ramp,
The elderly woman watches solemnly as her husband makes the sign of the cross,
An unexpected act of desperation—or is it newfound faith—that frightens her.

Partly blind and unaccustomed to driving, mostly in deference to her spouse,
She grimaces and hobbles a few dozen feet
To their car where she gets behind the wheel and coyly turns the ignition.
As her sons see it, their father’s failing health has triggered a sudden jolt of defiance.
(“She’s half-blind, she doesn’t belong behind the wheel, she’s a danger to society.”)
As their mother sees it, the old man’s demise has required a reclamation of her independence.
Her eyesight, she says, has “never stopped me in the past,” only her patriarchal mate.

Their town, she learns, has done away with taxi transfers covered by Medicare,
Cab fare, she insists, is extravagant, particularly for a retired couple on very fixed income,
So with the assertiveness of a Driver’s Ed instructor at recess,
She grips the wheel, puts the transmission in reverse, and steps
On the gas pedal
For what passes today as home.

All the while her lifelong partner, a newcomer to the world of dialysis,
Waits to be called by name and shown to his seat,
Where a nurse with the help of an orderly
Will stick him good with a needle
And hook him good to a machine built to cleanse and purify his toxic blood.

Like a kindergarten student on the first day of classes,
He checks his backpack for snacks.

When he gets the call to enter a roomful of gurneys
He is stopped and weighed by a technician
To see how much water he has retained
From the previous visit
And then he receives with no intonation
A scolding from the nurse practitioner
About his excessive fluid intake, salty diet, and lack of exercise
Before another nurse preps the fistula and sticks a needle in his arm.

As if he needed the prick, a sullen reminder
As if he was unaware that dire events await.
Serious consequences,
Dead serious.
More serious even than the time he stole money from Daddy’s wallet.
Mama grounded him for the summer, remember?
Daddy never forgave him.
Is there a statute of limitations in the afterlife?

The blood pressure gauge strapped to his arm slaps him out of his whitewashed daydream,
Reminds him of his barebone reality,
With the ironclad grip of the Velcro
Tightening and Releasing Tightening and Releasing
Until his left bicep pulsates with the rhythm of a snare drum.
They say these are the golden years, he mumbles to the monitor.
They say with age comes wisdom.
They say. They say. They lie. Them bastards. They lie.

Following a second round of treatment after the first round failed due to blockage at the entry point,
Mother arrives promptly at the Dialysis Center
To pick up the man who once held his bladder for 418 miles just to prove he could
And as the Office Manager prepares the patient’s updates for the Nutritionist
And the Nutritionist shares test scores with the Social Worker
And the Social Worker adjusts her blouse, fixes coffee, and calls on the Kidney Specialist
And the Kidney Specialist furrows her brow and recommends further evaluation by the Phlebologist
And the Phlebologist coughs, demurs and opts for consultation by the Cardiologist
And the Cardiologist wipes his glasses, examines the results, and seeks the counsel of the Primary,
And the Primary swings his stethoscope, decides on Mexican for lunch, and punts the final diagnosis
To God knows who,
After all of this all in a day’s work of productive inaction,
The Nurse, bless her heart, checks Father’s vitals while Mother finds parking
Next to the shaded entrance behind an idle emergency vehicle
And as fast as a jackrabbit could travel through the eye of a space needle,
Father’s pin-sized pupils brighten and then depart
For good

Photo source: Mathew Brady Studio, “Reform School, Bladensburg Road, Washington, D.C.” Photo made between 1860 and 1865 by Mathew B. Brady (circa 1823-1896).

In the sign of autumn’s awakening

In the plane of the Milky Way

Near a star not alive, unlike the Sun

Plus a thousand light years away.

In a place with no beachfront property

In a mass like the Earth times three

Out there somewhere in the far galaxy

Our system’s holy grail to be.

In the labs of deep-sky technology

In the minds of the scientists

By radio dish, ideology

Safer planets than ours exist.

In the slums of the Bowery’s ghettos

In the layers of blood and spit

With microscope focused and slides exposed

Mankind’s findings find peace unfit.

In the time of this nation’s recession

In the hour of its deepest need

Dying voices croak in the oppression

As warfare spreads rampant like weed.

In the wasteland of street crime poverty

In the tar traps of Pothill Bend Road

A “For Sale” sign greets the calamity

On crab grass that needs to be mowed.

 
(1992)

Photo Source: The Tech Herald
Photo Credit: NASA

I’m writing because I know that writers will read this poor excuse for a poem
And pass judgment on me, a publisher,
And I know that I am here to take a bullet
For all writers who get rejected by publishers like me
And they can’t do anything, not one fucking thing, about it.

I’m writing because my thick skin will protect me
From criticism and silence.
And I know that my nephew and niece from Russia
And my daughter from Romania
Will not hold any of this against me.
Their adoptions far exceed any concern I have
About writing a poem.
Any excuse for a poem.
And I can fuss
And fret
And still it matters none
When compared
To my concern
About how it feels
To adopt a child
And how I feel
About the frustrations
Of Writing.
My concerns
About raising a toddler
And my fears
About writing.

This is my life then.
One concern
After another,
No real worry,
Really,
As writing,
Creating,
Can never compare
To raising a child,
Rearing a human from an early stage of development.
Sad, really, to think that evolution ever had a chance.

The submission,
I’m afraid,
Just wasn’t that good
To begin with.

“The little shrimp
Is eating ice cream,”
She says, while playing
With our Brittany Spaniel.

“He’s been eating rocks –
I’ve been watching him,”
She says,
Prying his mouth open
To see if she can spot any.

“OK, now I can pet you,”
She says, forgivingly,
As he puts his forepaws on her lap
And sniffs for the remnants of fudge vanilla crunch.

“He’s so cute and handsome –
Look at him,
Dad,
Look at him –
Dad,
You’re not looking.”

She hands me the cup of ice cream and says,
“Try it –
I’ll bet you five bucks you like it.”
I turn it down and
She runs off,
Looking for her mother.

It’s not often I get to write
About my eight-year-old
While drinking a third scotch
And watching my dog sprint around the yard
On a sensational September night.

Summer appears to have ended
Early this season
And the monsoon is behind us,
According to our neighbor’s forecast.

It’s funny how water seems
To be,
Well,
So essential to everything –
Everything we live for –
Everything we die for.

Water, I say,
Not oil, is king,
Water rules the earth.

***

A king, queen and princess
Are given the keys to the universe,
Only they don’t know it,
They’re not sure what they’re here for.

“I don’t want to fight anymore,”
Announces the strident king
Plodding his way through the desert.

“I don’t want to fight anymore,”
Agrees the tired queen
Remembering those bitter days on the prairie.

“I don’t want to fight anymore,”
The family of three barks in unison
With a backbone rhythm section
So tight, you’d swear it was born
In the Mississippi delta.

In the delta,
They say there was a reason,
A reason to fall,
A reason to stand.

In the delta, too,
There lived a princess,
A princess of the night,
A princess with a voice
Like avocado ice cream.

She,
Above and beyond all,
Had reason.
A reason to drown,
A reason to swim.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Cafaro is the founder and publisher of Atticus Books, an independent press, and Atticus Review, a forthcoming online journal. In his free time, Dan likes to skip the light fandango and turn cartwheels ‘cross the floor. When pressed for time, Dan tends to breathe deep the gathering gloom and watch lights fade from every room.

As a relative newcomer to the small press scene, I easily could be mistaken for a brown-nosing charlatan seeking to win friends, poach writers, and raise foot traffic to our website. That’s not altogether untrue (brown-nosing, in fact, is in my Italian DNA), but what motivates me to write this ass-kissing post can’t be measured by Google Analytics or a QuickBooks financial statement.

What drives me out of bed this and every morning (other than the bounding gait of two excitable canines) is knowing that I am surrounded by literary genius. As the publisher of a farcically independent press, I take pride in latching on to the ink-stained coattails of my peers whose syntactical fabric compels me to fasten my grip and hold on for dear liveliness.

As I see it, my job is to facilitate the dishing out and slopping up of meaningful, rhythmic prose. And my dream is to theatrically thumb my nose at the nay-saying media whose inept Nielsen ratings never demand an educated consumer’s attention like moving verse and rapturous dialogue.

Good writing isn’t exclusive to one country club, nor is it elitist or self-serving; good writing crosses out rules and replaces them with breadcrumbs. My responsibility is to lead you to good writing. So at the risk of losing you via hyperlink before you finish checking out the contents of our spanking new issue, and at the risk of pissing off everyone who’s not on this truncated list, here’s a sampling of terrifically influential, must-visit, literary sites and established publications (not university-affiliated, to my knowledge, and in no particular order): McSweeney’s, The Believer, Tin House, Granta Magazine, The Hudson Review, The Threepenny Review, [PANK], Hobart, The Nervous Breakdown, The Collagist, Monkeybicycle, Fictionaut, Necessary Fiction, SmokeLong Quarterly, HTML Giant, Big Other, Kaffe in Katmandu, Gargoyle Magazine, Metazen, BULL Men’s Fiction, Moon Milk Review, Mud Luscious Press, decomP, Prick of the Spindle, Word Riot, Knee-Jerk, Electric Literature, Vestal Review, jmww, FRiGG, Wigleaf, Everyday Genius, 3:AM Magazine, Volume 1 Brooklyn, BOMB Magazine, Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, and Slice Magazine.

Now that I’ve sufficiently brown-nosed some of my smallish press colleagues and told them how they all inspire genius every single day just by consistently bringing the literary goods, and now that I’ve alienated other deserving presses by failing to mention them, I’d like to acknowledge the fine folks who have made Atticus Review a gloriously skewed reality. Without their efforts and wildly misguided encouragement, I’d be raising this freak flag alone and that’s simply no way to fly.

Atticus Review materialized in a causal, casual, off-the-cuff manner as many creative, purpose-driven enterprises do: It mainly surfaced through a series of coffee-fueled and whiskey-hazed conversations, some of which occurred at this year’s AWP conference in Washington, D.C. This seat-of-the-pants approach often works, especially when the proposed initiative requires little seed money, and entails lots of voluntary sweat by metaphysically linked loon birds. This tireless labor of love—better known as independent publishing—brings out the philanthropist in many of us.

I first owe a debt of gratitude to Atticus Books author John Minichillo (The Snow Whale, July 2011) for leading me to Katrina Gray to whom he’s married. I had been keenly aware of Katrina through her delectable writings at various places online, but I hadn’t dreamed of finding an editor-in-chief who would be so readily capable of harnessing the reins. From the starter’s pistol, she has injected Atticus Review with a spunky mix of diligence, passion, and presence—a very conscientious guardian angel-like presence.

I tip my hat to Matt Mullins, too, for prompting me to turn the mixed media area of this website into an online gallery showcasing innovative pieces of electronic/interactive literature. This area of untapped experimentalism offers a potential explosion of cutting-edge creativity and through Matt’s resources, insights and expertise, AR is poised to become a hub for things that push contemporary literature’s boundaries.

A journal would be incomplete without the watchful eye and artistic mettle of at least one poet in every issue. I thank the generous contributions of AR poetry editor Michael Meyerhofer for filling what would have been a gaping hole in our paperless pages. Michael’s talents as a poet are immense and his evaluations of each week’s poems—carefully gauging their inventive use of form and language—are worth their weight in curatorial gold.

Writer and cultural commentator Djelloul Marbrook, bless his Rimbaudian nature, also deserves a note of praise. In the developmental stages of the Review, he emboldened (challenged?) me to “do something no one else (or few others) do.” We will do our best to fly, Djelloul, with your ongoing prompts and moral support.

Special thanks, too, to Arizona friends and former WorldatWork colleagues Mark Munoz and Suzannah Fields of RIPE Creative for their patience and persistence in understanding what I wanted from the new logo/masthead, and Tracey Holinka of Chaos to Clarity, who continues to be my go-to person for all things related to website development.

Finally, I would be sorely remiss to omit my trusty assistant, Libby Kuzma, who has been my anchor when I was sure this ship was headed for an iceberg. As managing editor of Atticus Review, Libby is responsible for herding cats and twirling plates, all while listening to my half-baked ideas and assuring me they are fit for grilling.

Whether you’re a widget manufacturer in Fargo or a for-profit literary press in Brooklyn (for the sake of this argument, assume that “for-profit literary press” is not an oxymoron)—whether you believe in the Power of the individual trumpeted by Bertrand Russell or prescribe to the Hippocratic Oath of a coalition of Main Street merchants … whatever your dream, you’re chasing the same carrot as your neighboring capitalist: stability in a fractured global economy.

Given the complexity of this free market conundrum, how does the next G.P. Putnam rise above the stagnant malaise that pervades much of America’s workforce? How does the next WH Smith dig in and make an honest living to feed his or her family? How do microscopic publishers and independent bookstores do more than just survive? How do we regroup? Recover? Reboot?

Forget the three R’s. (They’re too gimmicky anyway.) The book industry needs a new mantra and Seth Godin, bless or damn his post-industrial age heart, has the means and mindset to deliver the goods. All without interference from the middleman (the bookstore).

Really, Seth? Really? Let’s cut out the heart and soul of the book business, all so that your finely crafted marketing messages can spread like wildfire without the nuisance of profit sharing. All so Amazon can back your so-called revolution: The Domino Project. Who needs those pesky book pimps, right? I mean, who are they to get in the way of your and Amazon’s bottom line, er, I mean, “fundamentally different model of virality?”

Now I understand the book business model is broken. It has been for eons and we as a professional community have made little progress to fix it. The ludicrous practice of product returns makes absolutely no sense for various economical and environmental reasons. Trees take the hardest hit, followed by publishers and authors. UPS probably doesn’t mind. But most of us are frustrated (no, make that exasperated). We want change. We need change. We must change.

Seth, your premise is sound: the current business model of the book industry is undoubtedly broken. But I vehemently oppose your solution. Essentially you’re proposing a streamlined distribution model that will afford authors the opportunity to sell their content directly to the consumer (after Amazon takes its king’s ransom, of course). On the surface, that doesn’t sound too bad. And for authors whose writing is being ignored by even small presses, that’s a viable alternative. We all know that everyone can write, right, Seth? Who needs curators, packagers, and purveyors of content when you have desktop publishing software? Why only threaten the livelihood of indie booksellers? Why stop there? You may as well eliminate publisher and distributor jobs, too. You may as well ax sales reps and public relations folks. Hell, who needs an editorial staff? There’s an app for that, right? After all, technology and an Amazonian-sized budget can handle all facets of just about any business.

Look, Seth, you’re a brilliant guy. I’ve seen you energize a roomful of independent book publishers by just making us feel empowered. Making us feel like we can do better. Blowing up staid business models, I’m all about it. Bring it on. Resourceful innovation, I’m with you. The decision to self-publish, for many, is the right one. The advent of businesses such as Smashwords is intuitively the direction we’re headed as a self-service society. But the Domino Project and Amazon partnership work for you, Seth Godin, mostly because you’re an established author and electrifying speaker. You’re the exception.

The book industry may suffer from having too many gourmet chefs in the kitchen, it’s true, but let’s not burn the restaurant menu and fire the whole staff because the old recipes suck and customers are complaining of indigestion. Let’s not vacate the premises and shutter the doors because the materials are hazardous and the old building codes don’t apply anymore.

The book industry is under fire because instead of people finding an extinguisher to put out the flames—instead of evolving with the times and changing stupid conventions, we’ve watched the flames grow higher and higher and now while they burn out of control, all some of us can think to do is abandon the wreckage and seek escape for higher yielding ground. Dear Amazon, please save us. Or at least save us a nibble.

Firefighters, listen up. Booksellers, trade publishers, small press distributors, hell, anybody who feels a kindred spirit to our yesteryear industry, pay attention, too: Seth Godin isn’t all wrong. He’s not far from the truth; he’s just not far enough in the trenches to help save the burning bush.

“The laptop is now the means of production and the internet has brought down the wall between products and the market.” That’s a Seth Godin-inspired quote. (See “Tribal Leadership and the Next Industrial Revolution” by Deepti Chada.) It’s worth bottling and selling, but it only provides a taste, a glimpse of publishing’s bright future.

Readers deserve more than Kindles and online, interactive immersion; readers deserve tangible human experience at independent bookstores like Farley’s in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Farley’s has been selling books for more than 40 years, and in order for Farley’s to stick around and be socially relevant for another 40 years, it will take a renaissance—a small press movement, an indie uprising—to make it so.

Farley’s is among a small but growing group of booksellers that is helping the The Small Press Revolution become a reality. With prominent shelf space and displays dedicated to small presses, Farley’s is showcasing small press titles in a way that drives consumer behavior and shifts the paradigm of the customer experience. This recently launched in-store program helps connect the dots and reinforces publisher identities and brands for readers in a far superior way to simply lumping these unique books into categories organized by genre or alphabetically by author.

The key to such a program’s success is predicated on a consignment arrangement, a much more straightforward and practical way for independent businesses to cooperate with less risk and more conservation of effort and resources. This Case for the Future of Indie Lit and Small Press Distribution continues to build momentum in the blogosphere and has been discussed at conferences hosted by the Independent Book Publishers Association and the American Booksellers Association. It’s long overdue to become the norm rather than the exception – and it’s a prime example of not having to reinvent the wheel to enhance standard operating procedures.

ABOUT THE INSPIRATION
These welcoming small press sections at Farley’s Bookshop in New Hope, Pennsylvania influenced my buying decision as an admirer of literary fiction and exposed me to authors and presses that I had no idea existed. I purchased One Last Good Time, a collection of stories by New Jersey native Michael Kardos (Press 53, Winston-Salem, NC) and Welcome to Oakland, a novel by Eric Miles Williamson (Raw Dog Screaming Press, Hyattsville, Md.)

The lesson for me illustrated that no matter how well informed you may think you are on a subject, there are plenty of things that remain a mystery until someone more informed than yourself brings them to your attention.

The AWP event, it seems, exists solely to satiate the hunger pangs of reading enthusiasts and unashamed book addicts everywhere. It is designed to accommodate the esoteric needs, wants, and tastes of a distinctly left-of-center audience with an appetite for mindful substance and aesthetics. AWP is a scene that should not be missed if you want to take part in shaping, observing, or trending today’s genre-bending, literate subculture. No matter how snooty my opinion may seem, there does not appear to be any literary equivalent (in size, nor scope) to all that embodies AWP on either side of the Atlantic.

And please don’t point me in the direction of BookExpo America or the London and Frankfurt book fairs, all prominent industry events that attract throngs of prestigious publishers, power-wielding agents, foreign rights reps, and far more illustrious authors and household brand names.

The AWP conference and book fair, held this past week at the Marriott Wardman Park and Omni Shoreham hotels in Washington, D.C., is not a popularity contest. It is, quietly and organically speaking, a culturally influential grassroots movement. From a public recognition standpoint, it resides creatively in the spirit of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association Golden Globe Awards. Moreover, in the mission statement and sentiment of Sundance Institute, AWP appears committed to actively advancing the work of risk-taking storytellers worldwide.

And that’s no small matter.

These outliers, sleepers, and tiny sensations (i.e., overlooked and underpublicized books and their hybrid product spin-offs) often are better societal indicators of the myriad forms of high-quality media being created by thought leaders on a regular basis than the largely stellar but frequently garrulous motion pictures nominated each year for Oscars by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. (By the way, there are numerous exceptions to this bias, and Life Is Beautiful, a tremendous Italian language film written and directed by Roberto Benigni, pictured above, is one of them.)

Unlike the much-maligned, but treasured glitz of the paparazzi wet dream known as the Oscar ceremony (or unlike even the modest luncheon held each year to honor the Pulitzer Prize winners, for that matter), AWP’s annual show brings together college educators, students, and content experimentalists in a fully breathing, interdisciplinary exhibit hall acting as a publishing showcase and laboratory. The breakout sessions and panel discussions are informative and enlightening, too.

In short, AWP is a celebration of independent publishing. It is an unpretentious advancement of literature, a table-by-table demonstration of underground, academic and nonacademic genius pushing and breaking communication boundaries; and, yes, it is veritable proof of intelligent life. Here on earth. All in glorious bound, printed matter.

I guess you could say I enjoyed it. Or if you want to try your hand at semantics—after all, the English language offers galaxies of descriptive word choices and phrases, I guess you could more metaphorically deduce: As a starry-eyed publisher celebrating the one-year anniversary of Atticus Books, I reveled in the whirling dervish of AWP. All that it encompassed and all that it unleashed upon our small press. And then some.

I retrieved your book proposal on my Android, a handheld device manufactured by Motorola, marketed by Verizon, and copyrighted and branded by Google with its ubiquitous logo carved into the back surface of the phone, just in case consumers doubted for a moment the world leader in all things cyberspace. A “Droid,” as you undoubtedly know if you have a gadget-minded niece or watch even just 10 minutes of television per day, is a smartphone with all the bells and whistles, though it does lack noticeably in the department of nooks and crannies. This sleek contraption is capable of snapping photos, shooting and downloading video, and accessing, storing and uploading files the size of 500-page manuscripts to ftp sites worldwide—with all of the coagulated ones and zeros whizzing digitally past, ad nauseam, on a 2″ by 3″ screen, via a satellite signal confiscated by an Internet service provider that bills me a “data charge” that would exceed most people’s monthly entertainment budgets. I think Droid even washes my car if I talk to it in just the right common-tone, late-night modulation. And oh yeah, E.T. call home, too.

I say all of this not so much to be a facetious blowhard, a lapsed Luddite, or to prove how terrible I would be as a Verizon pitchman (though all of the aforementioned do apply), but to illustrate a point or three, one of which you are well aware, but I will say anyway because obvious things worth knowing are worth repeating. This repetition of the obvious also allows you to shoot holes into the so-called obvious and disprove its conventional wisdom.

(Whew, that whole paragraph was a mouthful and I’m not sure it spewed forth any sense, but I’ll proceed as planned, so not to divert your attention or upset you, the submitting author or the blogosphere cart and buggy, sans the value-added apples. Aren’t we lucky the Internet is still free?)

The publishing industry is changing wickedly fast due mostly to the acceleration of technology—and the radically changing behaviors of each and every one of us who take residence in the modern reading world.

Yep, that last sentence was the obvious and I dutifully pointed it out. Now prepare yourself for the unexpected or at least the not-so-obvious issues surrounding the book industry. By the way, we someday may find it necessary to reclassify the book industry as the data transfer medium. (Though that may be a little too sci-fi sounding for some tastes, if the moon boot fits…) For now, let’s maintain the commonly accepted term “books” both out of pretense and more than a smidgeon of respect for the literary world’s checkered heritage.

I understand your primary concerns as a writer is for your work(s) to be published by a reputable publishing house, be preserved on library shelves (for as long as these institutions stand), and then perhaps be archived beside the works of other notable authors in an online repository.

Through Smashwords and many other sites, this latter ambition is achievable with or without a publisher. However by going it alone, it is likely that your e-book will receive little notice and recognition outside your family and friends without the backing of an objective, outside press. That’s why you came to me in the first place.

You, a writer of serious intent, want to see your book in print. You’re OK with the idea of e-book distribution, as long as your book also has an initial print run and has a shot at being displayed on the shelves of a brick and mortar bookstore. You’re not sure what you think of print-on-demand (POD) books, but you’ve heard a lot of industry scuttlebutt around the concept, and it’s mainly negative. Most large booksellers, the chains in particular, won’t even consider POD titles for their floor. There’s a perception out there that if your book was not deemed worthy enough for a publisher to invest an initial out-of-pocket printing cost, then it’s probably not worth the time of a bookseller to consider. Besides, print-on-demand books typically skirt the due diligence procedures of an established publishing house and fall more in the category of self-published books as they aren’t as attractive or professionally packaged as “regular books.”

Most of these yesteryear perceptions are bunk, but that’s what you’ve heard and the residue of that mentality remains, so independent presses, such as Atticus Books, invest significant resources into entering an arrangement with a distributor and making sure that we’re not labeled a print-on-demand publisher, even though the industry would run more efficiently and the environment would benefit if more of us operated under that premise.

Readers, of course, wouldn’t know the difference and would be perfectly fine with “digital short run” POD books. In fact, they’re perfectly fine with all of the dastardly changes going on in the book industry, save the shrinking number of indie bookshops. For certain, readers are not appalled or intimidated by progress in the ancient art of bookmaking—in fact, they’re on board with this whole off-board/no-board publishing model. After all, readers are book-buying consumers, and like brainy fashionistas, prefer choices—why do you think books come in so many categories, colors, sizes and formats?

(Quick note to establishment types and money-grubbing, forest-pillaging capitalists: get over it.)

Independent publishers and booksellers, along with authors interested in self-preservation, too are OK with going green. It’s not as sexy as the old way of doing things, what with three-martini lunches and high-quantity clothbound, jacketed editions. (Thankfully, those measures of success died in the Eighties or was it the Fifties?)

Yeah, we of the nimble press mindset are dealing with the whole lower-volume, higher-margin ROI concept of e-books, but the pricing model needs to stabilize for consumers to understand the value. In my estimate, too much is being given away. Piracy also remains a legitimate concern, but title obscurity and bankruptcy remain a much greater threat to publishers and authors than the theft of digital files.

Today, a publisher’s chief responsibility is to create portals for readers to enter from as many directions as possible, both intellectually and virtually speaking. We’d be remiss to put our eggs into one basket (one business model, one product-deliverable solution) when we’re not sure we’ll even recognize the basket, no less the eggs, in a handful of years.

Besides, if our collective mission as literary presses truly is to share stories that need to be heard, then who cares how the words are consumed or digested?

All of the industry players, from editors to designers to typesetters, are adapting (or already have adapted) their thinking and operational processes to accommodate this new e-sanity. Now we haven’t exactly rolled with these changes, mind you, but we’ve accepted them and, unlike rumors of zombies, these buggers are here to stay. (Perhaps I underestimate the zombie phenomenon.)

The book is not dead, nor comatose, so spare us the drama and headlines. No need for a funeral, nor consoling phases of emotion after a death. For book industry insiders, the e-volution is yesterday’s news, a drop cloth for the birdcage. Instead of being afraid of this transformation, we’re all a bit relieved. Even the print purists whose resistance to e-books is palpable (pulpable?) are bound to this boundless format without having to be gagged.

Most literary presses will protect printed matter to the death, not only because old habits die hard but because we’re nostalgic creatures with an undying appreciation for the fine, tactile arts. But e-books are now part of the equation and no calculator or spreadsheet can change that societally-driven, economic reality.

People’s desire for storytelling isn’t go anywhere anytime soon. It’s how people crave to receive content and how we, as creators and curators, choose to supply it that will continue to evolve. There’s nothing new or groundbreaking about this concept; it’s just that our systems of communication are barreling down the superinformation highway (even that terms seems passé) at breakneck speed and the old model (print production, storage and distribution, specifically) is broken, if not irreparably damaged.

One inventive solution for book retailers (and perhaps deep-pocketed, long-tail thinking publishers) to counter the broken distribution model is the espresso book machine (EBM). With its direct-to-consumer distribution and print model, the EBM (essentially an ATM for books) replaces the inefficient and centralized supply chain for the distribution of books – largely unchanged since Gutenberg – with a radically decentralized direct-to-consumer retail model in which content is fully distributed electronically at point of sale and converted into a paperback book.

Does that mean print-on-demand or a variation thereof is the only viable solution for publishers of literary fiction to stay in business? In part, yes. But in larger part, I think it’s the leveraging and repurposing of content that should keep authors and publishing houses afloat.

Product innovation will become publishing’s new paradigm. A hybrid climax of film, art, music, literature & games, spearheaded by thought leaders of interactive multimedia. And it all starts with an author’s imagination, a few words on the page.

Atticus Books is still mastering the tried and true way in order to fully prepare for the new. We work with a typesetter that lays out our titles for print and e-enables the files (in EPUB format) to be compatible with various handhelds and other environments (e.g., Desktop/Mobile, Kindle, etc). EPUB is becoming the industry standard, much like PDF is the PC user standard for creating and distributing documents. But don’t think for a moment that we’re taking this so-called industry standard for granted. Ten years ago, writers who opted to publish their manuscripts with Online Originals now have their e-books available only to Palm Pilot readers. A decade ago, Palm Pilot may have been the best choice a publisher and author could make to be considered cutting edge. Today it’s a laggard among readers. And the future, even short-term, remains a G.K. Chesterton mystery worthy of Father Brown sleuthing.

So where does this leave us: you, the unpublished writer, and me, the well-meaning publisher? How do you get your work in the public eye and keep it there? If I’m impressed by your skills and fortitude as a writer, and equally smitten by your integrity, marketing savvy, and platform, then sure, I’m more than open to the idea of working together.

To start, send me a sample of your writing for us to consider for online publication. Once you hurdle that stage, then I propose you offer us a chance to evaluate your entire manuscript for print and e-publication. If we’re enamored by what we read and delighted by the prospects of publishing your work, then we’ll offer you a book contract. If you think the terms are fair, then sign with us. It’s really quite simple to get your novel published, as long as you’re willing to play the game and leave your hands in the fate of Droid, Google, and the metafictional powers that be.

See you on the small screen,
Dan

Some of us will conduct our year-end assessment and complain about the color: “Pallor doesn’t suit me.” Others will pull at the stitches, tear at the seams, and sulk about the inferior quality of this year’s fabric: “Surely, this is proof that the world is going to hell in a hand basket and it’s quite likely made in China.” And still others will attend a church of the mind and praise the marvel of creation—the delicate construction of any object with meaning, and acknowledge the no-small wonder of beginning each waking day with nothing and ending it with something: “Life is good.”

A fresh New Year’s perspective never goes out of fashion. It arrives always on time, in fine threads, unsoiled. And leaves without loitering, perhaps wrinkled and tattered, but a little wiser and more comfortable in its own skin.

For Atticus Books, 2010 was the year of the improbable. We started a small, literary press on the digital wing of papyrus, a leaky fountain pen, and a prayer that even Owen Meany couldn’t have fathomed. We signed eight writers to book contracts, formalized an agreement with a distributor we respect, and met and worked with a whole slew of individuals whose creative talents are too numerous to convey.

For Atticus Books, 2010 was the year of the implausible. We ascertained our belief in the importance and endurance of literature. We watched incredulously and admirably as a small press won a huge literary prize. We applauded the arrival of the iPad, the advent of Google eBooks, and the evolution of an age-old profession that is in full-blown historical flux for the benefit of civilized readers worldwide.

For Atticus Books, 2010 was the year of immersion. We immersed ourselves in circles of those smarter than us, those bolder than us, and those more experienced than us. We immersed ourselves among poets and artists, presses and e-zines, bloggers and booksellers, and industry leaders and fictional characters whose collective integrity and depth are what make each of us leap out of bed in the morning.

A poet friend recently commented that critics often complain that novelists don’t address the big issues of our culture. Esquire Magazine, in reviewing Don DeLillo’s new novel, Point Omega, called DeLillo: “One of those rare writers whose work has transcended literary circles and touched the wider culture.” For Atticus Books, 2011 will be the year of the impossible. For 2011, our goal is to produce works by novelists who do address the big issues of our culture. This alone should be the indelible mark and distinction of all literary fiction. It separates the lofty from the pedestrian. The canyon from the curbside. It doesn’t mean our books are holier than thou or even better or more elegant than thou; it just means they’re striving to make a difference.

Our publishing house’s new mission statement for 2011:

To produce and disseminate work that transcends literary circles and touches the wider culture.

May your 2011 be filled with mystery and glory, and may you witness firsthand the generosity of man’s enduring spirit. May you look back at your year 2010, even if the party favor has fallen well short of—or is quite different from—your expectations, and think: “What hasn’t killed me has made me stronger, indeed.”

KENSINGTON, MD — If you aren’t paying attention or you’re buried somewhere under a three-and-a-half foot drift of snow, you may be missing one of the most fascinating multimedia developments in the book publishing industry. There’s nothing new under the next-generation iPad sun, of course. But for a Luddite-leaning publisher slow to adapt to the latest cyber fad, this techno-geek party has just started and I’m not only grateful to drink from the punch bowl, but I’m anxious to know the ingredients and find out exactly who spiked the Kool-Aid, how they pulled it off, and what on Gutenberg’s greenish-turning planet does it all mean?

Granted, natural born marketers do not consider these thinly veiled plugs novel, and media hounds covering the e-book revolution hardly think they warrant a Farmville cow’s backside speck of attention, but with fascination (and envy), I’ve been watching as more and more publishers get on board with the medium. After all, most of them are nothing more than product pushes that borrow crass, commercial elements from TV, Hollywood, and other parts of the advertising-driven entertainment industry. But the damn things are everywhere you turn these days, and they range from surprisingly stellar and creative to mostly horrendous and boring. They’re called book trailers. And I’m having the damnedest time having them produced for Atticus Books.

My attempts at creating trailers for our book releases have run the gamut from no- to low-budget (pizza with toppings, and a case of beer) productions to desperate measures. First, I begged Atticus authors to take the initiative and make mini-movies on their own. That’s right: I more or less implored Atticus writers to leave their No. 2 pencil-lead comfort zone, find their inner Coppola, and produce (if not become) a youtube sensation on their own time and nickel. Publishers are nothing if not persuasive, cost-conscious, and resourceful. I figure if Canadian author Stuart Ross (Buying Cigarettes for the Dog) could star in his own spoof video to sell his stories (see below) and Ron Charles could have fun pointing the camera inward for The Washington Post Book World, then certainly it’s within reach of our authors. My result thus far: Nada. Though I’m encouraged that at least one Atticus author, Steve Himmer (The Bee-Loud Glade), has promised to step to the plate with a promising trailer in the works (coming soon to a website near you).

Next, I turned to an unemployed friend in sales, with no video-making experience but an aptitude for gadgets and cameras that far exceeds my ineptitude of awkwardly pushing buttons with unsteady fingers sometimes confused with sausage links. My dear childhood friend gave it the old college try, but after a few decent but uninspired versions, we both agreed to part with a newfound appreciation of specialized training and that adage about not mixing business with friendship.

I then reached out to my cousin’s daughter, Chris Pagliei, a young college graduate who describes herself on her blog “as an upstanding gormandizer of film, music, media, the written word, good food, ideas, and schlock.” In an astoundingly short period of time, Chris created a two-minute video for the debut novel, Fight for Your Long Day, that demonstrated her own talent and ingenious resourcefulness. In the process, she made me realize how unrealistic it was for me to expect original, contemporary photos and footage (of Philadelphia, in this case) for a montage-driven trailer on zero budget without concerns of copyright infringement or familial exploitation.

FFYLD from Chris Pagliei on Vimeo.

The more I pursue this idea of making trailers with limited, internal resources to control costs, the more I conclude that I better defer to an outsider with credentials and actual experience in this department. For proof, check out this terrible video which I spent an entire Sunday afternoon attempting to create. I’ll spare you other creations that I cumbersomely threw together that day. The xtranormal software may be quite acceptable and fun for those who have worked in animation, but given my limited patience and skill set, I found the interface and orchestration tiresome.

Poets have proven particularly savvy in this evolving medium. One might say it’s the perfect avenue to project a poet’s word wizardry. As an example of a simple, yet highly effective trailer, I present to you the poignant reading of “Canvas” by Djelloul Marbrook, author of Brushstrokes and Glances, Dearbrook Editions). The videographer is Brent Robison.

Even though small presses may be hard-pressed to prove a return on investment, it’s book trailers such as Djelloul’s that should inspire publishers of all stripes and sizes to sacrifice a few dollars for the sake of art and the advancement of literature. If we at Atticus Books are part of a growing coalition of literary presses that say our goal is to make a difference and redefine the role of literature, then trailers undoubtedly must become part of that equation.

Photo source: Typewriter in Snow, Salcha, Alaska #6, Copyright Doug Von Gausig, Critical Eye Photography and Naturesongs.com 2004-2007

I’m not your typical assassin. I’m a stable family man. I have a loyal wife. (She’s never had an affair and I’ve only had a couple.) We’ve reared two maintenance-free, if not productive children. One, the boy, has a job at a bank. He’s still not an officer, but I think his position’s better than a teller. It sure as hell better be; I paid enough for his college education. Our other child has her eyes set on a doctor. She’s in her 20s and he’s in his 40s and we approve. Is it because there’s money in medicine and we want our daughter to have material wealth? Yes. I also have a dog I take for long walks. The dog, a miniature poodle, vomits a lot. I don’t mind it so much when he throws up outside or on the kitchen floor (it’s linoleum), but on the plush white carpet irritates me no end.

My parents are dead. They died last year only a couple of weeks apart. I inherited their house which I sold last month and made a tidy profit. My father was a veterinarian and my mother was a housewife. They lived a pretty long life and they seemed untroubled until their health failed them. He died of lung cancer (even though he wasn’t a smoker) and she died of a stroke (even though she had nerves of steel). Isn’t life ironic?

I wasn’t very close with my father. He and I were like two pent-up, rabid dogs in a cage, at each other’s throats and blind to the consequences. It’s a wonder we both stayed clear of homicide. My mother, on the other hand, was a saint.

I have no brothers or sisters and I share nothing in common but blood with my other relatives. They were at both of my parents’ funerals but they didn’t have much to say. Either did I. I’m afraid I’m terrible at awkward situations. I sweat uncontrollably in closed quarters filled with small talk. I have to frequently ask to be excused. People either think I have a bladder problem or a cocaine addiction. What I have is a sweat gland problem. It’s one of my numerous ailments. The doctors say my physical problems are in my mind. If they’re in my mind, then why do I have a cyst on the top of my backside that persistently leaks? Why do I have chronic body odor even though I take three showers a day? Why do large white flakes fall out of my thinning black hair every time I turn my head? Why do I have an enormous amount of wax in my ears? Why do my eyes tear uncontrollably? Have I grossed you out yet? I’m sure. Forgive my rambling. I’m a chronic complainer and I have bad breath to boot. A real catch. Good thing I’m married. The two affairs I mentioned? A lie. I’m a pathological liar, too. I paid for both dalliances. Are you surprised?

I hate anything that requires me to be in a suit. In fact, I loathe social gatherings in general. I find the entire ritualistic process annoying. The only reason I carry on with foolish traditions is to keep a façade I don’t quite understand going. I must have missed a crucial class in grade school that taught us the importance of entertaining friends we dislike. I disagree vehemently with the philosopher who called man a social animal. Man is not a social animal; man is a social misfit. Yet we carry on like baboons when it comes to social functions. Get married? Have a party to spend your retirement savings. Get a promotion? Have a party to impress your friends. Lose your wife suddenly to a mysterious illness? Have a gathering to mourn her loss and keep it elegant but modest. Your son graduates from a sub-par college with a 2.25 cumulative grade point average? Throw a party but don’t dare mention his GPA.

I love drama, but basically, I couldn’t give a white laboratory rat’s behind what has happened to someone else and I particularly don’t care what someone else has to say, so why then do I (we) continue to carry on with this charade?

When the funeral director informed me that my parents had already lined up (ha ha) their cemetery plots and gravestones, I was relieved. I would have dreaded that responsibility. Other than that, I was mostly concerned with attire (my black suit was a bit moth-eaten). I also was conscious of my wife’s makeup (she tends to overdo it on the rouge and lipstick no matter the occasion), my son’s newly pierced ear (he’s a banker, damn it; it’s highly inappropriate), and my daughter’s boyfriend doctor (who was unshaven; what kind of man shows up at his future father’s-in-law parent’s funeral with stubble on his cheeks?).

Call me old-fashioned, but I almost made a scene (even though I hate scenes and it would have been very uncharacteristic for me to have made one). I normally like things performed in an orderly fashion. I look at life as a game of tumbling dominoes. Events should unfold predictably. When they don’t, I become upset. Not visibly, mind you. Internally. Disorder eats at my insides and nearly drives me mad. To be intolerant is in my nature. And that’s simply not meant to change. My nature is unalterable, a foregone conclusion.

******

I’m a certified pest control specialist. The pay’s only okay, but I like the trade. The company that employs me specializes in termites and carpenter ants, but my preference is rats and mice. There’s nothing more I like than to let loose and eliminate those vermin. It’s a satisfying occupation. It enables me to bring order to people’s households. I also respond to commercial calls, but I’d rather help the common man.

Unfortunately, many of the sites I visit are false alarms. Some old woman living alone will phone headquarters in a panic because she’s seen a mouse. She figures, “My heavens, there’s a mouse. There must be dozens.” In many cases, a lone lifeless mouse and perhaps a few spiders are the only pests I find on the premises. My job is to quash her fears and collect our fees. Unlike other larger companies, we don’t bill our customers. We require full payment upon services rendered. (I know, I stole that line from dentist offices nationwide. Big whoop. Sue me.)

I don’t claim (nor have I ever claimed) to be a creative writer. I’m just keeping this diary to make sure people get my story straight.

******

My first homicide victim was a bookseller. Now he wasn’t running for public office or anything meaningful like that when I decided to slay him, but I believe it was more significant than just a run-of-the-mill murder. I mean, I think his killing had a positive impact on society. I’ll tell you why:

This was a guy who promoted trash. You know, pulp fiction, lurid romances, just the kind of crap our society can do without. I mean, you get in the book trade to raise people’s consciences, right? You certainly don’t get in it to make money. So, if you’re going to pick bookselling as your profession, then why on earth would you push garbage down people’s throats for the sake of a nickel? I mean, really. This irritates me no end. Here’s a guy ruining a perfectly noble profession. Booksellers nationwide, I imagine, would applaud my action. Now, I’m not shortsighted, mind you. I know I haven’t altogether cleaned up the enormous mess that’s out there. I mean, one death does not a philosophical cleansing make. Bad taste and poor judgment are rampant and I’m afraid they’re beginning to take hold in a lot of good, pure neighborhoods. But his death is a start, right? Once you’ve killed one moron who has no business being in such an impressionable position, you’ve made a statement. And that’s what I’m about, most of all. Statement making.

******

Naturally, election time is the perfect time to seek out a new victim. I mean, politicians, of course (most of them are rather useless), are the easiest, most common prey. But I don’t mean them any harm. Who I intend to kill next is a speechwriter. Not any old speechwriter, mind you. But a presidential candidate’s speechwriter. This is just the kind of person that the world can afford to lose – a spin doctor, if you will. A person, a public relations specialist, who makes a human marketable by putting words in his mouth that make him sound intelligent and sensitive. A spin doctor on this earth has no business perceiving his lowly self as anything but a cancer. His words spread throughout this great nation as would a malignant tumor, damaging the sensibilities of the voting populace, infecting the bone marrow of many a good person like myself. That’s right; I’m on the hunt for a spin doctor and no one, not one god darned soul, is getting in my way. My reasons are sound. No matter which side of the issue you’re on (as you can plainly see), a person with little to no integrity belongs underground (OK, at the very least, he belongs on the sidelines, to pacify you pacifists out there). He does not, by any stretch of the imagination, belong in the middle of the action. Leave that kind of visibility to the men and women of this country who are made of substance, not style. Style, as even a child knows, is for superficial losers. Substance, on the other hand, is for winners. And winners, as any dimwit knows, reside on the only side worth fighting for. And I, of course, abide by the laws of the triumphant, as they alone are worthy of defense. Whether they shall inherit the wind, well, that’s for our maker to decide.

Author’s Note (Caveat): This rough draft was written before Dexter, the TV series, was likely conceived. My best guesstimate: 1996. The only known influence on the style of this story can be attributed to Joseph Heller in his novel, Something Happened. Otherwise, the author has no recollection of what drove him to write this twisted tale – and will stick by his memory of constructing this tale under no false pretenses, under oath, in a court of law (if necessary).

I’ve decided to do something extraordinarily counterintuitive (and, well, just plain dumb) for an independent publisher who is quite literally swimming in manuscripts (and reveling in every dry ink-laden minute of it). I will hurtle my squat body forward, spare no idiom before my wine, throw four babies to the wind, out with sheets, caution, and the bath water, too–and participate in this week’s Literary Blog Hop, hosted by The Blue Bookcase, the book review blog for bookish people.

Even though this publisher’s blog does not “primarily feature book reviews of literary fiction or classic literature,” we do immensely enjoy hosting, facilitating and engaging in “general literary discussion,” so perhaps we won’t get booted from the Literary Blog Hop. If we do get the boot due to our irreverent tone and rule-breaking (and, yes, even ball-breaking) behavior, so be it. Our experience among the heavy hitters of the book blogging community was fun while it lasted.

This week’s question, submitted by Debbie Nance at Readerbuzz, is: What is the most difficult literary work you’ve ever read? What made it so difficult?

Instead of answering that excellent two-part question (or perhaps before answering it, depending on how long I ramble), let’s examine several literary works that I have not read and decide or at least rationalize, in an open forum, imprecisely the reasons that they have been so difficult for me to complete (er, crack open). These are the neglected stepchildren of my private library, the books that I have possessed for years with only the best intentions of curling up with them on the sofa and embracing their icy, crooked-nose brilliance on a cold winter’s night (or having them accompany me on a summer sojourn and immersing myself in their unseasonably warm, wisdom-laced waters).

But no, these are the books whose spines remain stiff, whose jackets remain unblemished, and whose words remain sadly, unforgivably unread. These are the literary albatrosses of my life. Not obvious classics like War and Peace, mind you, or Moby Dick, or Ulysses (all very admirable and popular choices among those who need to confess omissions of an egregious, sinful nature), but lesser known, critically acclaimed works of great intrinsic value, infinitesimal intellectual worth. Rich volumes of literature and contemporary wunderkinds that reside in me through the wonders of osmosis and the occasional flipping of pages … because I own them and they, like superior schoolyard bullies, tend to prod and bait me mercilessly as I pass their resting place on my shelf, engaging me in conversation and then promptly dismissing me as a knucklehead, a lost cause … knowing damn well that I haven’t actually read or attempted to understand a single one of them.

Why, you ask. I haven’t a clue.

These titles, in no particular order, are not among the piles of books on and next to my nightstand; these are among the unfinished books I move, and upon occasion, rotate to make room for other candidates. Lest I be misunderstood, these titles undoubtedly need to be read. And someday, perhaps, I will be in the proper frame of mind to read them. Until then, they remain utterly aloof and as inaccessible to me as a locked vault on frozen tundra.

1. John Steinbeck’s East of Eden: This 1952 work has eluded me to this point for reasons foreign to me for as far as my eyes can see. This ambitious saga of Steinbeck’s family history, all 601 pages of it in the 2002 Steinbeck Centennial Edition, begins with the simply stated fact: “The Salinas Valley is in Northern California.” For some reason, that sentence has always created an obstacle larger than any towering Sequoia tree. If this is “the book that brought Oprah’s Book Club back,” as it says on the 2003 Penguin Paperback cover, then I, like Groucho Marx, have no interest in joining “a club that would have someone like me for a member.”

2. Jack Kerouac’s Visions of Cody: An underground legend by the time it was finally published in 1972, Visions has been shrewdly marketed and strategically categorized by Penguin as a Non-Classic. I’ve read the scatter-shot, six-page introduction by Allen Ginsberg in the 1973 UK edition, but haven’t gotten past the opening line: “This is an old diner like the ones Cody and his father ate in, long ago, with that old-fashioned railroad car ceiling and sliding doors — the board where bread is cut is worn down fine as if with bread dust and a plane; the icebox (“Say I got some nice homefries tonight Cody!”) is huge brownwood thing with oldfashioned pull-out handles, windows, tile walls, full of lovely pans of eggs, butter pats, piles of bacon — old lunchcarts always have a dish of sliced raw onions ready to go on hamburgs.” Whew, no wonder I never made it past that opener.

3. Milan Kundera’s Immortality: Positioned as a Harper Perennial Modern Classic and just 20 years old, this too is a book, despite its alluring description of the character Agnes (“like Flaubert’s Emma or Tolstoy’s Anna”) that has escaped me as thoroughly as the meaning behind “the great themes of existence.”

4. Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks: I love the storytelling of Russell Banks and Affliction, Sweet Hereafter, and Rule of the Bone all stand tall and proud in my cases of fiction (yes, organized alphabetically by author), but I’m simply stumped by the challenge of reading about one of the most iconic figures in American history, the Che Guevara of his time. It’s a flaw in my DNA, I’m sure, and this too I someday shall overcome. Until then, I’ll gladly return to his masterful collection, The Angel on the Roof, again and again for inspiration.

5. Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible: Another author whose collected works of short fiction, essays and poetry, I admire, but this novel has been as elusive to me as the holy grail. “Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.” Now that’s a great opening line. Have I given it a fair chance from there? No. Why, you ask. I haven’t a clue.