Madras Press to Publish Short Stories for Charity

How are you funded?

Very sparingly. Which is fine, actually, as it's a pretty financially conservative venture—a few thousand dollars for printing, mainly, and some negligible costs for the website. Nothing that should take too long to make back, especially with a catalog as strong as ours. (Probably the only high-risk titles are my own, which is a lucky position for us to be in.) We're committed to producing books that are pleasant to look at and to hold, with heavy paper and a not-particularly-cheap trim size, but we're also doing our best to keep the sticker price low; and it turns out to not be so difficult to do both, assuming you have the spare time to do things like putting return address labels on envelopes (Saturday afternoons while watching cooking shows on television) and copyediting (on the train, or sometimes the bus).

It also wouldn't be possible without the generosity of our authors, who agreed to this project knowing that they wouldn't profit at all from it. That may be obvious now, of course, but when you ask someone to give you something that's very important to them, for free, you realize what a big deal it is when they agree.

How did you go about recruiting authors for the project? What has been their reaction?

These are all writers whose work I gush over. In each case it was just a matter of asking nicely and hoping they had something appropriate. All of them have been very enthusiastic about the project, especially Trinie Dalton, who I feel like I should put on payroll for the amount of marketing she's done. I think partially this is because we're publishing stories of theirs that may otherwise have gone unnoticed, for one reason or another. The writers each get to pick a charitable organization which the net proceeds will benefit, so that's another reason for them to be motivated about the success of the books. And it's also partially because they're all very, very nice people.

We're also open for submissions. Once the website is up in October, we'll have a list of formal guidelines. I've worked at a few literary journals before, and I'm always amazed at the high quality of material that comes in unsolicited through the mail. I'm fairly confident that we'll find something great that way at least once a year.

Were there any authors who expressed opposition/disinterest?

I can't say I've received any negative feedback from a writer. Maybe if Hachette copied our business model, some people might get bothered.

How are the books being printed?

They're all going to be little pocket-sized paperback books. We looked at the Penguin 60s series as models, as well as the Penguin Great Ideas series—both must have had smart people in charge of production and manufacturing. It would have been much cheaper to saddle-stitch or hand-stitch our books, and there are a lot of really interesting ways to do that, but we wanted our books to last as long as anything else in a bookstore, so for now they're regular paperbacks.

We're printing them in batches of 1,000 each, which is much smaller than most publishers, but much cheaper per unit than printing on demand.

What is your distribution model? What bookstores are carrying the titles?

We're skipping commercial distribution, at least until our catalog grows too large to handle on our own. That helps keep our sticker price down and allows us to work directly with some of our favorite bookstores. We haven't approached too many places yet, as we don't yet actually have books to show them, but we do have a little list of some of the larger independent places. Powell's, of course, and Elliott Bay and Tattered Cover. Harvard Bookstore and Brookline Booksmith. It would be great to have something in http://www.quimbys.comQuimby's, in Chicago—that's my favorite bookstore. We'll have a list of locations on our website, where we'll actually have an online bookstore, too. If you buy our books online, we'll write your name in the ex-libris panel.

Do you envision being able to make use of technology like the Espresso Book Machine, which is coming to Harvard Book Store, to help your titles reach more readers? What about putting out ebooks, recordings of your authors reading their stories, or other alternative formats?

I love the idea of the Espresso Book Machine. I hope they pick a good name for it. I think if our titles ever sell out and we don't have the funds to reprint, they'll be the first people we contact. We considered printing on demand, but it's still pretty expensive. I'm sure in ten or twenty years that's how most books will be manufactured, if the technology continues to grow at its current rate. For now, though, we could expect a certain amount of demand for our titles, so printing in larger batches didn't seem cavalier.

I don't know enough about e-books to have a real opinion about them. I love a well designed book cover, so until the electronic readers can come up with a way to compete with that, I'm happy to pay more for a physical book. Maybe I'm on the wrong side of history, though. As for audio recordings, the idea is nice, and these stories are the right length—you wouldn't have to be on a car ride across the country to finish one—but for now we're focusing on the books. Plus I don't really like the sound of my voice. I like the guy who narrated the Virgin Suicides movie. He could record my story, if he wants.

How do you see this project fitting into the evolution of publishing? With other projects like Electric Literature?

Electric Literature is one of the few outfits that seems excited by both formats; with most others, you can tell right away whether they prefer print or screen. Ninth Letter is another. We probably don't fit into the evolution of publishing, if they're it (which they probably are). I really admire a company with enough muscle to be able to provide valuable content both ways. You can say it takes a versatile staff, or the ability to see the spirit of a story across the boundaries of media. The smell of paper and glue is part of what you pay for, and the feeling that evokes is not easy to replicate without textiles. For now it's rewarding enough for us to be able to produce our little books. Once the geniuses have figured out how to make it fun to read a PDF, we'll go along with that.

Visit Madras Press to get in on this interesting new form of publishing.