Birth of a Publisher

It’s taken close to ten years. Happy bunny! I’m now an independent publisher, as yet for my own hybrid image and text manuscripts. Why this new career? It grew out of need to explore how hybrid image and text forms I have developed for individual clients will take my art to a wider audience. 

Content, of course, is king, and readers are looking for information, arm-chair traveling, and answers to questions—some of which they did not yet know to ask. It’s grown out of today’s distancing and restrictions.

I originally thought to follow the traditional publishing route. And yet I found the industry, especially university presses, and for non-fiction works, remains staid, less flexible, slow to act. Budgets are tight; art and photo books often sell no more than 80-100 copies, not a profit center. Hybrid manuscripts don’t fit easily into typical niches—even though it is easier to define a narrow, hybrid market.

My patience to navigate this world waned quickly. I wanted my design, my cover, my editor. I know how to meld form and function in the service of readability and kinship to readers. My urge to encompass thoughts and years in storytelling in a classic volume was impossible to lay aside. Enter the Colorado Independent Publishers Association. I was introduced by a book club friend; I saw immediately where soaking up information and connections from the members and professional providers of author services would be my ticket. Posing questions to every author, book coach, printer, and bookstore representative produces an amazing body of information—more with every passing acquaintance. Authors and artists (and those who serve them) are fascinating people.

I became a CIPA member in the mid 2010s; the doors that opened led to intensive study to garner understanding of the nuances of publishing. I had no idea that a work of imagery and text is perhaps the most complicated. While content is 99%, there unfolds another 100% in that last percent, a full job in itself to bring a beautiful book to the hands of the public It’s a sculpture of thoughts, three dimensions in your arms. This is a responsibility I take most seriously, with my own work under no less scrutiny than another artist/author’s. Perhaps more. I shall not settle. While the devil is in the details of preparation of complex works for print, there is also ebullience in a fine finish of lasting value.