2 Places From Which I Would Accept Employment, If Pressed

1. Soft Skull Press: Rad, punk press in NYC founded by Sander Hicks in 1992 as a guerrilla publishing operation. He ran it under-the-table at the Kinko’s where he was employed. 

From the website FAQ:

Q. What does “Soft “Skull” mean?

To be perfectly honest with you, we’re not really sure. Sander says in an interview somewhere that it’s kind of “punk” sounding. It’s certainly memorable. But we sometimes imagine that it has something to do with the softness of a baby’s skull as it emerges from its mother’s womb, and the beauty and fragility of a new thing emerging into the world, full of promise and righteous yowling.

Enough said.

2. Bitch Magazine: I’ve been reading Bitch since I was a wee feminist-in-training (Dear Diary, I’ve decided to spell “woman” with a “y” from now on.*), and I can always count on the mag to explain to me why I find certain pop phenomenon so disturbing, or to call out products I had considered innocuous on their shady subtexts.

Awesome recent example, this article about the Twilight books, taglined, “Stephenie Meyer’s vampire-infested Twilight series has created a new YA genre: abstinence porn.”

*actual excerpt from my 5th-grade diary

Free Labor: Ooligan’s Secret Weapon

Part of the business plan here at Ooligan Press is that, for all of the challenges we face in securing funds for decent PPB or creative book launches, there’s one thing we’re supposed to get for free:  Labor.  From acquisition to copyediting, from cover design to marketing, all of us busy little bees are, at least in theory, pouring our hearts and souls and tuition money into the press, receiving in exchange a comprehensive, hands-on publishing education.  It’s a simple, elegant solution, so long as everybody holds up their end of the bargain.

Unfortunately, the problem with not paying your staff is that it’s easy to lose track of them.  At a recent FOOP (Friends of Ooligan Press) meeting, it was brought to my attention that we actually don’t know how many students we have at Ooligan.  This information came up in light of an oft-heard observation that labor keeps coming up short next to the official number of enrolled students.  It may well be that some percentage of these officially enrolled students left the program without graduating, and were therefore never removed from the list. It also may well be that there are students who are actively enrolled but simply choose not to work.

If the discrepancy is caused by the latter, our business model is in trouble, and so are our students.  Taken for all it has to offer, the program functions both as an internship and a formal education, but if a student doesn’t actually participate in the work groups, he’s getting the degree without the experience.  This not only jeopardizes his chance at getting a rad job, but Ooligan’s reputation as a teaching press.

So what do you all think?  My impression is that working for Ooligan is not formally “required.”  

So, should it be?

doubleyou doubleyou doubleyou dot

As if The New York Times were trying to prove my previous post wrong, this Sunday’s book review had an Actually Pertinent to My Life Article about book sites, posing the ever-potent question:  “Do elaborate Web sites and videos really sell books?”  The article’s author, J. Courtney Sullivan, interviews the (apparently) hot-shot book site designer Jefferson Rabb, debates the merits of book videos, and, by the end, had convinced me that I needed to learn Web design.  Not because it necessarily sells a lot of books (it might not sell any at all), but because book sites can be so rad. 

Sullivan cites the Rabb-designed site for Reif Larson’s new book, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivel.  Here are some that I thought were motivational\inspired me to make learning “code” or whatever you write websites with a medium-level priority:

 Miranda July’s website for No One Belongs Here More Than You.  July does, after all, have a long history as a legit multi-media artist, so it’s no surprise that she nailed her book site so well.  She wrote it on her fridge because she didn’t have a dry-erase board.  Low budget!

 This next one, a book trailer…excuse me, book “video” for Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances is also very simple, and spoooooky.  It’s hard to find book videos for “serious” adult novels, probably because they’re so hard to pull off.

Notice how short it is.  It’s simple and, like July’s, gives you an immediate sense of the book’s tone.

Any other favorites from people?  Ideas for Ooligan?  Should I divert completely off track and drop out to study site design, or is the whole World Wide Web thing a passing fancy?

It Wouldn’t Fit In Here

Before I got “into” book publishing, I thought of Amazon.com as a pretty righteous company:  cheap, limitless, and somehow able to project a radical, free-market vibe despite its obvious corporate bulk.  I wrote my undergrad thesis on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire theory, which is kind of neo-marxism (if that even means anything to you\at all) and is very excited about the internet because Hardt and Negri wrote in the late 90′s, during the Pre-Jaded Era.  Anyway.  They loved the internet because it represented centralized information accessible to all, and, moved by that same spirit, I felt pretty Okay or even Good about Amazon.  Of course, the truth is that I was going to start using it no matter how I felt because it’s convenient, and I’m lazy.

Lately though, I’ve come to learn that Amazon is a lot more than one-stop shopping for my out-of-print textbooks and Pilates workout videos.  First of all, it’s cheap because Amazon screws over publishers (and authors), and there’s nothing new or innovative about that.  It is truly limitless, unconfined by spatial or geographical boundaries, which is the wave of the future, and, I’ll admit, pretty awesome.  But they aren’t radical.  They’re just Big Business, doing what Big Business does best:  Monopolizing the market, and then doing whatever the heck they want.

My Online Marketing professor, Marty Brown, posed the following question:

With its POD/distribution company (BookSurge) and its proprietary e-book platform (Kindle), Amazon looks less and less like an ordinary bookstore, and more and more like a publisher and distributor. Does this bode well or ill for readers, authors, and publishers?

This is, of course, a really good question. 

My first impulse is that this is a bad thing.  It’s going to run publishers out of house and home, destroy the industry, close the cute independent bookstores (if there are any still open), and convert books into GigaPets, or whatever. 

But the whole thing about the internet is that nobody owns it, and I would guess that, as we speak, some cybergenius is figuring out how to subvert the whole system.  Also, not to be a drag, but the publishing industry has been treading water ever since it started trying to make money instead of enrich and distribute works of art.  If anybody killed The Book, it was the blockbuster. 

In short, it’s high time for a restructuring of the whole system, and I’d be fine if all of us “publishing” students became freelance editors or literary agents, and left the ordering and stocking up to Amazon.  Not to excuse their evil ways, but if us bookish types were allowed to do our thing without stressing out over pricetags, it could be a boon to readers and authors alike.  My guess is that, in the future, sites like Amazon will be used as filters for the incredible excess of titles available to readers, and that other, more specialized filters will emerge.  Independent book review sites will be the new independent book stores, as well as the new “publishers.” 

Or, Amazon will just eat the entire world and we’ll have nothing to read but the Twilight Series.  Whichever.