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What I've learned about small press publishing: there are more people eager to publish than to read books from their potential publisher. People tend to think your operation is larger than it is, and attempt to act accordingly. Writers tend to consider themselves geniuses and morph into Devas and Dervishes once you've accepted their manuscript, demanding what they consider to be the very best for their immortal works. Geniuses often attempt to treat their publisher as a foolish rich person with time to spare and unlimited financial and emotional resources who have no life outside of whatever services they may render their genius writer. Or they simply consider them robots who need to work faster. The publisher always seems to be guilty of the sin of publishing while the Writer remains the Pure Genius Writer. Therefore, as in any paternity case, it's ok to abandon your book once it's been published and let the publisher with his or her vast resources publish since that's their job, right? Therefore the Writer owes nothing to the publisher who is having a great time selling the WORK OF GENIUS, and therefore owes both the great time and whatever money can be generated from that great time, to the Writer. After publication, the Genius Writer then is free to march on to greater glory. Sadly, this is all a self-serving myth fed to the Writer by creative writing programs and conferences and movies made for TV. Small Press publishing is a labor of love until it isn't. No one ever makes money doing it, or at least I never did. Because of this Publisher As TOOL of My Genius philosophy, I began to stipulate that the author help sell and promote any work of genius that I might publish of theirs via readings and sales to family and friends, and gift sales, and all of the possibilities that open up to Genius writers. I asked that they buy an Ahadada book just to help the press and to see the kinds of writers we publish. And I still stipulate these things. My suggestion is that anyone interested in publishing with a small press be prepared to HELP AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE to PROMOTE NOT ONLY THEIR WORK BUT THE WORK OF OTHER AUTHORS PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS. Does this sound like too onerous a burden? :-) Jess ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the BRITISH-IRISH-POETS list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=BRITISH-IRISH-POETS&A=1