Distribution can be the least-cool part of the small press poetry projects because it most-overtly displays the economy of a world that has self-mythologized of being “outside the market.”
Last year, Jonny was writing about Young’s drive to demystify publishing and make it more egalitarian. This led to him think about the actual purpose of publishing in this “outside the market” economy that the poetry world claims. Most of that self-mythology comes from the academic structures behind poetry publishing, because, before academia collapsed, the economic-value to publishing a book of poetry as an act of professional legitimization for the tenure-track position-seeking poet. Jonny called this the “credential economy,”
The credential was the commodity of the published book, and that the credential economy was continually restricted by a hegemonic agreement on what earns credential, and what level of credential is earned. This is seen in the NEA proclamation, as well as academic job listings that specify book publications must be by a ‘major press.’
One of the integral parts of a poetry press being considered “major” was through its means of distribution.
In the US, the NEA allowed non-academic presses to function outside of the market., as in the Mimeo Revolution. This too has to do with distribution, as Milwaukee’s Woodland Pattern openly said the NEA would pay small presses to publish books and then pay Woodland Pattern to purchase them. Further grants would allow the store to survive when those books didn’t sell.
Jonny mentions in the Young piece that the drying up of NEA funds is what led to the tightening of the rules on what “counts” as a “real” publication, which seemed aimed primarily at self publishing. Rebecca Wolff’s essay on the history of Fence, “Weird is an Emotion,” promises, “Something Fence has never done: Published ourselves.” This tightening of rules is especially felt as Print on Demand services make the possibility of publishing perfect-bound books much easier. Jonny said,
The increased availability of the means of production has caused a restriction of what qualifies as acceptable forces of production and that the isolation of the labor of book production (physical) from the labor of content production (text) was seen as the only publishing mode that “counted,” or credited the author with the credential.
Major Small Presses
With university presses, poetry book is able to exist completely outside of the market because it is already being housed by the university. The book will be distributed via review copies, desk copies, syllabi, and libraries. Remaining copies will be displayed at academic conference book fairs.
Other “major presses,” meaning a press that would traditionally qualify one for a tenure track position, function inside this structure. Most of them are tied to a university or a larger non-profit organization in one way or another. These presses distribute through the structure of the academic poetry market, but also through the market of the now-infamous Small Press Distribution.
This is notable with the recent exposure of Small Press distribution as a predatory work environment with a history of abusing, underpaying, and overworking employees, as well as exploiting unpaid labor. The dismissive response to this from many people associated with a “major press” was that Small Press Distribution was necessary for the survival of these presses.
What is implied in this sentiment is that at a certain point, at a certain level, a poetry publisher can only survive through the exploitation of labor. This exploitation was being hidden from the respectable “outside of the market” poetry-class, literally warehoused with the books at their distribution center.
If distribution means the confluence and valuation of all the aspects of labor behind a publication, so too does Small Press Distribution function as an end-point and itemization for all the outsourced and hidden labor of a major press publication. What is apparent in this itemization is that, along with the labor behind the production of the book, the labor behind the distribution of the book is meant to be unseen. It is a hidden signifier of the market that the poetry economy has prided itself in having escaped.
Unimportant Small Presses
What we’re trying to work through is what should be the economy of something like Adjunct Press. We have always said that we run Adunct Press as a hobby so it’s ok if we don’t make money. We also try to control every aspect of it: editing, design, printing, binding, etc. We keep everything on a small scale so that we are only exploiting our own unpaid labor, and don’t use the unpaid labor of anyone else.
The confluence of labors at our point of distribution is that we make 50 copies, give the author 20 copies as payment for their labor, give five copies to Woodland Pattern, one copy to the UW-Milwaukee library and try to sell the other copies to recoup costs for the next publication.
We distribute sales through our website and the mail.
We state that our labor goes unpaid. This all helps us be smug and holier-than-thou, but it also means that AP will always be on a very miniscule scale and, honestly, pretty unimportant. It also means that our personalities, such as poor marketing skills and poor social skills, have an outsized impact on the visibility of someone’s publication, someone’s work. By trying to create our own “outside of the market” economy, we force those who would publish with us to be scaled down us.
There have been times when we’ve been unable to provide more author copies as someone is about to go on a reading tour. There have been books that have immediately sold out with a demand for more, but we didn’t have the ability to create a second run.
Balancing Roles of an Unimportant Press
We’ve thought about removing ourselves from the distribution of the publication, to outsource that labor, so to speak. The idea would be to completely eliminate recouping of costs of our “hobby-economy” and to have the press provide poets with free-at-point-of-service copies that they can distribute as they like.
But then what would be the purpose of an unimportant small press that does not do distribution? When the primary function of the press shifts to printing pages through a $50 laser printer and then do the folding and stitching, the press pretty much functions as a notary stamp guaranteeing that a text is not self-published. We have always been completely in favor of self-publishing, but understand that someone might need to work within the system and that people can need publications to jobs, but, let’s be honest, publishing a chapbook through a non-major press won’t help your CV.
It also emphasizes the curatorial aspect of the press, where it feels like us choosing who we want to gift with books. Obviously this aspect has always been there, and perhaps it’s good that we aren’t able to ignore it.
Neither the credential-economy of the major press nor the hobby-economy of our unimportant press exist “outside of the market,” and distribution is the point where neither can pretend that they do. In general, this self-mythology of poetry publishing is false and should die.
Specifically for us, perhaps, the removal of distribution can lead to an openly symbiotic relationship of outsourcing labor between the poet and the unimportant press. The poet uses the outsourced labor of the press to print and bind the book and the press outsources the labor of distribution to the poet.
Adjunct Press is a chapbook press from Milwaukee. We make hand-stitched books and use all proceeds toward making future books.
