to self-publish is to publish in community

a very nerdy community

When I get a chance to tell someone about the Workshop for Independent Publishing, I usually describe it place to do your own printing, or sometimes as space for DIY publishing. Often the next follow-up question is “but do you actually teach people how to make ______ (books, zines, etc?)” Lurking behind that question is usually another question: if I show up to this weird DIY print space, will there be any support? Do I have to figure out everything myself? The short answer is: WIP’s approach is to offer both tools and support. The rest of this newsletter is about the long answer, which is that I think the relationship between a community print shop and the community it serves is more complicated than that.

Traditional publishing is a collaboration between many different kinds of specialists—a writer, agent, various types of editors, a cover designer, a typesetter, a publicist, and depending on the book, perhaps a translator, an indexer, a legal team, etc. But you’re not here to read about traditional publishing; there are better newsletters about that, and besides, I don’t know a ton about traditional publishing anyway. Self-publishing could be thought of as doing every job in a publishing house, but badly (or perhaps, if we’re being more generous, audaciously?). I have come to terms with being an OK writer, OK editor, OK designer, OK printer, OK publicist, and OK distributor, mostly because when any single step becomes too complex, it can hamper the overall project of simply creating work and getting it read. Self-publishers are generalists, not specialists, although most self-publishers do some parts of the publishing process better than others. We might avoid some bits entirely (for instance, I hate creating illustrations for a publication), or relentlessly optimize certain tasks, or lean on collaborator(s) who pick up our slack and help us play to our strengths.

Through running a community print shop, I’ve seen how to most of the generalist skillset required for self-publishing actually occurs organically in communities. We live in a time of universal literacy, and widespread digital literacy. People making their first publication are drawing on a number of skills they already have, and that are not necessarily specific to publishing, like writing, storytelling, compiling information, organizing contributions (or contributors), revision, collaboration, and using a word processor or browser-based design tool.

While many publishing skills occur organically, publishing is the puzzle of fitting them together. There are as many different self-publishing workflows as there are self-publishers … something I see up close every Saturday at Open Copy (walk-in copy/print/scan at our community print shop, WIP). While the general public’s publishing workflows often seem chaotic to me, when I talk shop with other print nerds, their (super intentional) workflows tend to include steps I would never put myself through. For most self-publishers, even as workflows evolve with experience, they may still flex from project to project. But overall, I would say self-publishing involves a less linear workflow than traditional publishing. Just as there are many entry points to the activity of self-publishing, there are many different entry points into any given publishing project. I think this flexibility is one of the things that can make self-published material uniquely interesting to read or experience.

If you’re new to self-publishing, there’s a lot of flexibility in finding a workflow that makes sense to you. Plus, we live in an age of browser-based design tools, digital printing technology, and free apps that automate imposition. Publishing something interesting enough to read has never required fewer specialized design, printing, or prepress skills.

The other thing I’ve noticed, as a trained artist who gets to work alongside self-taught artists in community settings, is that whether or not someone was lucky enough to get formal art training has little bearing on whether they push their work, seek and incorporate feedback from peers, hone their eye, produce new work regularly, or connect to audiences. NEA data bears this out; if I’m remembering the statistic right, only half of the working artists in the US have art degrees.

What I’m trying to say is that we didn’t open a community print shop to teach our community publishing skills. WIP is a response to the reality that motivation and capacity for publishing (and arty publishing) already exists locally. The principle of the scrappy community print shop is that a little bit of dedicated space, tools, technical help, and encouragement can have an outsized impact on a local publishing scene, simply by making it more feasible to produce things. Structurally, WIP is mostly as an experiment in resource sharing. We’re figuring out the bulk paper orders, cheap copier contract, and affordable real estate, and then (thanks to a handful of truly awesome volunteers and some sweat equity) making it as available as we can.

However, all of this capacity and possibility coexists with the unfortunate reality that connecting to readers remains a perpetual challenge in independent publishing, no matter how many specialized skills you have. (The flip side of weak distro infrastructure is that someone who is new to self-publishing might have as good of a chance of cultivating a readership as publishers who’ve been at it for a while). While the community print shop naturally solves some persistent problems (reliable equipment access), it’s not as well-positioned to solve other perpetual issues, like distribution. Another thing that frustrates me pretty constantly is that even when you bring down costs as much as possible through bulk ordering, salvaging equipment, being resourceful, volunteering a bunch of your time, and organizing a bunch of your friends to volunteer a bunch of their time, publishing remains a resource-intensive activity. Making 50 copies of something is still more expensive and takes more time than is always realistic, and there aren’t a lot of outside funding sources accessible to someone making their first publication. A lot of projects that come through WIP could benefit from a free printing fund, something that isn’t feasible for us to organize right now/yet, but that’s always in the back of my mind.

Ultimately, I’m interested in seeing more people audaciously publish their comics, poems, zines, and chapbooks. A lot of those people, despite or perhaps because of being generalists, despite or perhaps because of puzzling together their own non-linear non-efficient workflows, will create things that are really interesting. Sometimes people will appreciate a good tip about how to make the publishing tasks they are attempting to do easier. Sometimes your job is mostly to get out of their way.

On a practical level, self-publishing offers the author control over how, when, and where something is published, and how the publication is funded and distributed. I suspect self-publishing also has a set of conceptual affordances, that are related to its quirks, inefficiencies, and lack of standardization. There’s a reason that micro-genres and micro-audiences exist in self-publishing that don’t exist anywhere else, and it’s a mistake to see a community print shop as something that simply teaches publishing skills to the unschooled. Social interactions both make publishing possible, and are created through the activity of publishing; the community print shop is part of a quirky ecosystem of paper and staples and toner, and above all, genuine relationships.