Sumanth Prabhaker, publisher of the Brookline-based Madras Press, has a demonstrated affection for novellas and long short stories (being himself a writer, and now a publisher, of them). Noting most such fiction is too long for most magazines and journals yet too short for trade publishers, he decided to celebrate and accentuate the form, publishing stories and novellas as stand-alone volumes.

They’re lovely books - slender paperbacks about the width of an open hand, with cover art, such as the above painting by Jenny Downing, selected by the writers. The first series of authors - lauded short story writer and novelist Aimee Bender, Trinie Dalton, Rebecca Lee, and Sumanth himself - comprise a range of sensibilities whose primary link is an elusiveness to quick categorization. How is it Madras can afford to publish such singular, idiosyncratic books?

The key is that Madras focuses on social, rather than financial, profit. All artists - including the published writers and the visual artists providing cover art - donate their work. All net proceeds generated by the sale of the books will go to a charitable nonprofit of the author’s choosing. To keep costs low, Sumanth is distributing books directly to independent bookstores, including Harvard Bookstore and Brookline Booksmith in the Boston area, and RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth, NH, and selling them from the press’s website.

Madras is about to publish its first series of books (December 1), but you can get a sneak peak at a reading by Aimee Bender at Brookline Booksmith this Saturday, November 14, 7 PM. We asked Sumanth about his altruistic approach to publishing, and how interested writers can get involved.

ArtSake: In an interview for The Bostonist, you mentioned that the “not very marketable” length of your own novellas (too long for literary magazines, too short for trade publishers) got you thinking about a different model for publishing long stories. Have you found a strong response to your model in the writing community?

Sumanth: A lot of people have said some very nice things about us. At the same time, I’ve been interested to learn how many people see this as an obscure project - certainly not meant in a negative way, I don’t think, but it’s interesting to see how surprised people are at the abundance of these in-between stories. Agents discourage writers from pitching short stories, because they say that editors don’t buy them; editors don’t buy short stories because marketing people tell them they don’t sell; and all the market research shows that less-than-novel-length stories actually don’t sell very well. There are a number of different reasons why these stories don’t sell, but I don’t think any of them have to do with the actual stories. It’s equally frustrating to see writers who look at this trend as reason to avoid certain genres or forms, as it is exciting to see writers who don’t care about any of this stuff.

ArtSake: How did you decide to explore philanthropy as a central aspect to your publishing?

Sumanth: It makes sense to me, concerning my own stories; I didn’t write any of them with financial profit in mind, and I don’t like to think of them as commercial products. So we had to think of other ways to measure our success, outside of the marketplace. And without that burden of having to depend so much on sales for our survival, we were able to entertain some options that may not have otherwise been available to us, like giving the proceeds to charities. It seemed like a nice way to do things. Our authors get to choose the organizations to which the proceeds for each book are distributed, which I hope is a fun decision for them to make.

We still haven’t figured out the right model by which to assess our performance, however; there isn’t really a bottom line yet. Our authors contribute their stories at no profit, but our paper is heavy and costs a little more than average. Our production and editorial work is done on a volunteer basis, but our sticker prices are low. We’re saving money by distributing the books ourselves, but we’re spending more than most publishers on manufacturing by printing in smaller batches. It’s kind of confusing, at least to me, but I’m happy with the books, which is good enough for now.

ArtSake: I was impressed to see your initial list of authors, including Aimee Bender. Can you talk a little bit about how THE THIRD ELEVATOR and the other titles fit with your press?

Sumanth: For all three of the other titles in our first series (besides my own), we’ve just asked politely and hoped something would work out. There are so many reasons why Aimee Bender and Trinie Dalton and Rebecca Lee should have ignored us - we’re tiny, we don’t pay our authors, our books aren’t going to be in very many bookstores or on Amazon.com - but in each case I think they saw our project as an opportunity to publish these stories in a more appropriate format than they may have otherwise been given.

ArtSake: Do you see Massachusetts as a good place to be a writer? What about a publisher?

Sumanth: Probably yes to both, but I’m still new here, so I haven’t got any huge insights into the local culture. Most of the book production stuff could probably happen anywhere, as long as you have a computer and some free time. But what we’re working on now - publicity, reading events, etc. - is much easier here than I’d expected, having grown up in a suburb in the Midwest where Borders was our only bookstore. I remember planning a reading at that Borders when I was in college. They couldn’t figure out how to turn the volume on the overhead speakers down, because there was some kind of password protection, so we all had to yell our stories into the microphone or wait for the quiet parts of the songs.

ArtSake: What do writers interested in submitting work to Madras Press need to know?

Sumanth: We’re looking for singular stories, ones that function better when read on their own than as a part of something bigger. Our first series of titles is very representative of our taste, in terms of content, so that’s always a good place to start. We like images and textures and colors and interesting prose and lots of food. We like murder mysteries, too. 10,000 words is our minimum, just to fill out the paperback spine, and for now 25,000 words is our maximum, to keep manufacturing costs at a manageable level. Previously published stories could work, depending on the status of the previous publication - query before sending anything (sumanth@madraspress.com). And we prefer printed submissions; they can be mailed to:

P.O. Box 307
Brookline, MA 02446

Aimee Bender reads from The Third Elevator at Brookline Booksmith on Saturday, November 14, 7 PM. All net proceeds from sales of The Third Elevator will benefit InsideOUT Writers, an organization that teaches creative writing in juvenile detention centers.

Images: Cover art from Madras Press Series One titles (2009): BOBCAT by Rebecca Lee, from PRONGS courtesy of Jenny Downing; SWEET TOMB by Trinie Dalton, image courtesy of Matt Greene; A MERE PITTANCE by Sumanth Prabhaker, from SUN/SQUASH by Joan Snyder (2002), oil, acrylic, and herbs on wood panel, diptych, 18×36in; THE THIRD ELEVATOR by Aimee Bender, image courtesy of Aimee Bender.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

Veterans Day Arts

The Way We Get By, a documentary about a devoted group of troop greeters in Bangor, Maine (featured on ArtSake) will have its PBS premiere on POV tomorrow night (Nov. 11, 2009). Check local listings to see this moving film, developed in part during a WGBH filmmakers residency.

Krzysztof Wodiczko will be In Conversation with Veterans on Wednesday, November 11 at 6:30 pm at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. The Veterans Day talk will feature the artist, veterans, and an Iraqi citizen discussing the collaborative process behind the new work …OUT OF HERE: The Veterans Project. Free tickets available first-come, first-served for veterans with military ID; more ticket info here.

From elsewhere in the blogosphere
Congratulations to Small Beer Press of Easthampton, which recently won a World Fantasy Award.

Interested in using Facebook to network as a professional artist? Writer Mitali Perkins offers five what-not-to-do’s in Facebook networking, such as: don’t be too humble to create a “fan” page (’cause we all would totally fan you).

While we’re on a “five things” kick: on the Valley Poetry blog, Allegra Mira serves up five ways to get involved in your local poetry scene.

MCC artists being great
The Somerville News Writers Festival takes place this Saturday, November 14, and includes past MCC Artist Fellows Steve Almond and Richard Hoffman among a host of talented authors. A daytime bookfair and evening readings are among the happenings at the spiffily renovated Center for Arts at the Armory in Somerville.

From one weapons-depository-turned-arts-venue to another… at the Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown, past Painting Fellow Ilana Manolson will be in conversation with author Allegra Goodman in Text and Context, a free event about craft, the creative process, and the surprising links between different disciplines, on Monday, November 16, 7 PM.

World-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma, winner of an MCC Commonwealth Award, was among those named to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities (putting him in the company of Forest Whitaker, Edward Norton, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Teresa Heinz).

Check out the Public Humanist blog of Mass Humanities, where past Film & Video Finalist Julie Mallozzi talks movingly about the relationship between a filmmaker and her subject:

My late colleague Dick Rogers used to tell students, “The true subject of all documentary is the relationship between the filmmaker and the subject.” … I think this statement speaks to the deeper truths that are recorded besides “content” when the world is converted into media. What is the power dynamic between filmmaker and subject? What are their understandings of each other’s motivations to participate? How deeply do they know each other?

Read the full post. Incidentally, Angkor Dance, the troop featured in Julie’s film Monkey Dance, has been numerously awarded by the MCC, and performs this Sunday, November 15, 3 PM at UMass Amherst, along with a screening of Julie’s film.

To read about other goings-on featuring past MCC Fellows/Finalists, check out Fellows Notes.

Images/media: promo for THE WAY WE GET on POV; video clip of Krzysztof Wodiczko talking about his work for This World & Nearer Ones, the first edition of PLOT, a new public art quadrennial, produced and presented by Creative Time.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

We contacted Mary Sherman about her thriving organization and its unique appeal to artists with global aspirations…

The course: artists may not have the time or resources to connect to a greater network of ideas and opportunities from the international community - such as international residencies or cross-cultural collaborations

The horse: TransCultural Exchange, a nonprofit organization that bridges cultural divides through the arts and supports artistic innovation through large-scale, cross-discipline, global art projects and programming

What we do: This year TransCultural Exchange celebrates its 20th Anniversary. Since 1989, TCE has worked directly with hundreds of artists, arts organizations, foundations, museums, and cultural centers in more than 60 countries, producing cultural exchange programs, educational workshops and critically acclaimed public art works and exhibitions, from Sarajevo to Sao Paulo, Berlin to Boston, Tel Aviv to Taipei, Mongolia to Mumbai. In 2002, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization awarded TCE sponsorship - the first US project to receive this honor since the US mission rejoined UNESCO.

Along with its large scale art projects – the most recent of which asked artists to collaborate with someone from another country, resulting in over 200 artists participating in 60 exhibitions and performances worldwide - TCE organizes a biennale Conference on International Opportunities in the Arts. This conference is “the” forum in the world bringing together artists, teachers, musicians, writers, museum and cultural administrators, and residency directors to network, showcase, support, and promote the vast array of programs for cultural administrators and practitioners to interact with their international peers. In the short period since the Conference’s launch in 2007, more than 70 US artists have been invited to attend all-expense-paid  exchange programs, 3 have received teaching positions, and over 75 have received invitations to exhibit. (Read about success stories from 2007 and 2009.)

These are just a few of the activities directly credited to TCE’s conferences. Many of the local schools also began exchange programs with the people they met at the conferences.

Already Massachusetts is seen as the nation’s educational hub, attracting people from every corner of the globe to its institutes of higher learning. TransCultural Exchange’s goals are no less than to 1. reinforce this international asset; 2. promote culture as a vehicle for diplomacy; and 3. complement the state’s already world-renowned cultural attractions to help position Massachusetts as a new, important, and vital international center for creativity and the important diplomatic role the arts – which transcend all political, social, and geographic borders - can play on today’s larger, global stage.

What’s up next: TCE is currently soliciting work for its next global project for which artists are asked to collaborate with people from different cultures and different disciplines - such as science, technology, and business - as a way to showcase the advantages of bringing multi-perspectives to bear on a task.

Any artist (including visual artists, writers, and musicians) looking for the time, space, and money to pursue their work, particularly in the International arts arena, should not miss the next Conference on International Opportunities in the Arts: The Interconnected World, April 8-10, 2011 at Boston’s Omni Parker House Hotel.

Also stay tuned: TransCultural Exchange is pleased to participated in the 2010 London Biennale as a satellite venue…

What artists interesting in working with us need to know: Anyone interested in being on our mailing list should add their name, by entering their email on the form at the bottom of this web page. Also, follow the TransCultural Exchange blog.

Mary Sherman is the founder of TransCultural Exchange. As an artist, she has exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad, including New York, Seoul, Vienna, Chicago, London, and Venice. Read her guest blog about her Taiwan artist residency, summer 2008.

Image: Dana Prescott, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, from the Transcultural Exchange Conference, photo by Sophia Andrianopoulos

Powered by Bookmarkify™

Money Talks
MCLA’s Berkshire Cultural Resource Center, in collaboration
with Berkshire Creative, IS183 Art School, and Pittsfield Office of Cultural Development is offering Tricks of the Trade, a free professional development seminar series for artists. The next session focuses on pricing one’s artwork. Registration is required. Contact Jess Conzo, program coordinator for MCLA’s Berkshire Cultural Resource Center, at 413.663.5253.

Everybody’s rockin’; Everybody’s fruggin’
Opportunity available for choreographers at the Boston Center for the Arts. Movement at the Mills is a program designed for independent dance companies to showcase complete or in-progress work. For more information, contact Andrea Blesso Albuquerque, Boston Center for the Arts, or ablesso@bcaonline.org.
Deadline: Proposals due Friday, November 20

Behind the Curtain
Opportunity available for Playwrights from The Ensemble Studio Theatre.
They are accepting all one act plays which have not been reviewed in New York City. They recommend submissions not exceed 40 minutes in running time. Playwrights are welcome to submit up to two submissions.
Deadline: December 1, 2009

Kraftwerk
The Brookline Arts Center will host its 35th Annual Crafts Showcase December 2 - December 20, 2009 and is currently inviting artists to participate in a sale and exhibition.
Deadline: December 2, 2009

Fame is a bee. Fame is a bee. It has a song –
It has a sting — Ah, too, it has a wing. Emily Dickinson
Poetry Society of America offers annual awards for both emerging and established poets in recognition at all stages of their careers.
Deadline: December 22, 2009

Image Credit: Photo above from Liz Roncka, Real Time Perfomance Project, Boston Center for the Arts, Mills Gallery. For more on Liz, check out her blog (Was) Daily Dances, chronicling the creation of her work from the Movement at the Mills project.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

Anna graciously agreed to a nano-interview, and if the book’s title suggests an author with a mischievous sense of humor, Anna’s responses suggests a translator who’s game.

ArtSake: What are you working on these days?

Anna: My daughter, Niusha, who is 10 months old.

ArtSake: Were President Obama to create a cabinet post in the arts, whom should he appoint as Secretary?

Anna: George Scialabba, the essayist and reviewer, assuming that he would consider giving up his chair at Harvard.

ArtSake: Who wins the poets vs. prose writers paint ball war?

Anna: What’s paint ball?

On Thursday, November 12, 7 PM, a Russian-language event featuring Ludmilla Petrushevskaya reading There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby will take place in Room 101 of Boston University’s School of Communication building, 640 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston. Tickets: $5 at the door.

On Friday, November 13, 7 PM, a reception welcoming and honoring Ludmilla Petrushevskaya will be held at the Pierre Menard Gallery, 10 Arrow Street, Harvard Square. There will be a reading of her book, which will be available for purchase and signing. This reception is free and open to the public.

Anna Summers was born in Moscow in 1976. She was educated there, then took her doctorate in Slavic Studies at Harvard University in 2007.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkeuirxcspc

The above video was sent our way by artists involved with Second Nature, currently on exhibit at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.

The show, recently explored on ArtSake, features art of the natural world, by Vico Fabbris (Painting Fellow ‘06), Susan Lyman, Michael Mazur, and Nathalie Miebach (Sculpture/Installation Fellow ‘09).

‘ course, there’s no substitute for seeing the work in person, but this clip (shot and edited by Bill Warner) offers a lively sample of the art and artists. (I especially dig the piano music based on Nathalie’s weather patterns.)

Second Nature is on view at PAAM through November 29.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

Smack Mellon offers free studio space to eligible artists for a one-year period. The program provides artists working in all visual arts media a free private studio space and a $5000 fellowship (dependent upon funding). This is a non live-in space.
Deadline: November 12, 2009

The Photographic Resource Center
EXPOSURE: The 2010 PRC Juried Exhibition
Go here for more information.
Deadline: November 14, 2009

Public Art Commision: The Cambridge Arts Council seeks an artist/team to create art for the public realm along the Cambridge Street Corridor. Public Art Commission award is $50,000.
Deadline: All Electronic Submissions due November 30, 2009

Funding opportunity to any and all professional creative artists. The Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission works cooperatively with the National Endowment for the Arts to sponsor The U.S/Japan Creative Artists’ Program. The program provides support for up to five outstanding contemporary and traditional artists from the United States to spend a five-month residency in Japan to pursue their individual artistic goals.
Deadline: February 1, 2010.

Image credit: The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music at the Special Collections at the Sheridan Libraries at John Hopkins University. Title: Croquet Galop; Composer, Lyricist, Arranger: Charles Coote; Engraver, Lithographer, Artist, Concanen & Siebe.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

In winning, Salvatore joins a list of past awardees that includes Denis Johnson, Alice McDermott, Michael Cunningham, and Colson Whitehead. Along with Salvatore, this year’s winners are Jericho Brown, Jay Hopler, Adam Johnson, Rajiv Joseph, Joan Kane, Michael Meyer, Nami Mun, Hugh Raffles, and Vu Tran.

Salvatore will read tomorrow (Tuesday, Nov. 3) at Suffolk University in Boston, as part of the Graywolf Press 35th Anniversary Reading. In the meantime, we caught up with Salvatore to ask about the award (and other writerly stuff).

ArtSake: I remember speaking to you after you received an MCC Artist Fellowship in 2006. You said you’d danced in the street when you heard the news! A similar response to the Whiting? A bigger, more elaborate dance?

Salvatore: I hope I was speaking figuratively. I only dance in the stereotypical white-man way: standing in a crowd, shifting from one foot to the other, looking plaintively at the bar.

After the foundation called last month, I did not dance, no. I sat on the couch and looked at the floor. Then I went to my see my friend, the brilliant writer Heidi Jon Schmidt - author of the story collection Darling? and the forthcoming novel The House on Oyster Creek, which is set in the Wellfleet oyster flats. I was only supposed to tell my agent, my editor, and my family, but Heidi and her husband and daughter count as family. If I hadn’t told her, my head would have popped off. So, no dancing. But a very cold martini followed by delirious laughter.

ArtSake: In an interview on ArtSake just after The End was published, we talked about how the novel took ten years to write. Given that, what do the honors it’s led to - including being named a National Book Award finalist and winning the NY Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and now the Whiting Writers Award - mean to you?

Salvatore: They’re fun, and they do function as a floor for self-doubt. So that when I get really down on myself I think, But look at this, are you maybe not totally up your tree? But for the most part they confuse me. I wonder which book the judges could have read.

I am a short person. I like living in two little rooms, with a little desk downstairs to write on, and then the little garden out back. And I have a huge family back home in Ohio, the kind of environment where no one’s individual work is supposed to get any different recognition than anybody else’s. And of course every writer harbors the same egomaniacal convictions as the infant that believes it rules the world (when I was seven, I wanted to own the Cleveland Browns). So these things may delight the ego. But I don’t want to write from the ego. The part of me that writes wants to get so small that no one will notice him. People who wish to be big are wishing to be joyous; people who wish to be small are wishing to be free.

ArtSake: You’ve got a unique perspective as someone who has worked in literature both as an administrator (Salvatore administers the writing fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown) and, now, as an acclaimed writer. Is there something Salvatore of now wishes he could say to the Salvatore of just-starting-out? Or to any writer at the beginning of those proverbial “ten years?”

Salvatore: That the feelings of mad admiration and mad hatred of your work are the same things, equally bogus. You may want to write something good, but that ambition comes from the internal judge, which derives most likely from the desire of the child to please its parents. The judge is useful, trainable, and unreliable. The real work seems to come from a part of the unconscious that’s incapable of judgment. It can only look at your work and say either, “Yes, that’s what I meant,” or “No, I didn’t mean that.” And all your fancypants education can do is articulate what the unconscious provides. The conscious mind only arranges furniture. It can’t make anything.

I think younger writers can learn a stupendous lot from other people about how to arrange the furniture. But only the unconscious can make the furniture. And you can only access that part of the unconscious in private. I had the bewildering luck last week at a benefit gala to have dinner next to Joan Didion. Someone on stage said something convoluted about creating the mental space that generates creative literary work. And Didion put down her fork, tapped her very small finger on my shoulder, and said, “It’s called being alone.”

ArtSake: What are you writing now?

Salvatore: A novel.

Salvatore reads on Tuesday, November 3, 7 PM, as part of the Graywolf Press 35th Anniversary Reading on the Suffolk University campus in Boston. He has upcoming readings at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute (Nov. 4, 6 PM) and at the International Center (Nov. 5, 7 PM), both in New York City, then at the RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth, NH on Friday, November 6, 7 PM.

Salvatore Scibona’s first book, The End, was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Young Lions Fiction Award from the New York Public Library, and the Norman Mailer Cape Cod Award for Exceptional Writing. Riverhead published a paperback edition of The End in Fall 2009, and it will be published in German and French in 2010. His work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize anthology, Best New American Voices, and the New York Times. He administers the writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

The Valley Poetry blog recently featured Leslea Newman (left), Northampton Poet Laureate and launcher of an intriguing blend of artistry/philanthropy: She’s encouraging poets to write 30 poems in 30 days and sponsors to pledge donations per poem.

The 30 Poems in 30 Days Project raises money for a cause (proceeds go to the Family Literacy Project at the Center for New Americans, an educational resource for immigrants and refugees in Western Massachusetts) and it encourages the creation of new poems. At least 30 of them. What’s not to like? You can find a pledge form, along with instructions and writing prompts, on the Northampton Arts Council website.

Similar to the National Novel Writing Month project (which challenges authors to write a 50,000 word novel in November), the emphasis is on speed, quantity, and energy rather than flawless craft (though if you can write 30 flawless poems in 30 days, good on ya!). The poetry drive starts November 1 and ends November 30. Leslea, who is also actively participating and seeking sponsors, will host a reading at Forbes Library, where participants will read at an open mic.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

Except that it affords the opportunity to be creative about it. Some artists finance self-publishing projects before the books are published - artist/entrepreneur and opera singer Ja-Nae Duane raised funds to publish her book How to Start Your Business with $100 (due out next month) on a site called Fundable.com. Another crowd-funding site, Kickstarter.com, in which creative types seek pledges to fund their potential projects, lists about 30 literary projects currently seeking support.

Print-on-demand technology has the potential to simplify some of the complexities and costs of self-publishing for writers. So the news that Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, MA now operates a books-on-demand machine might have some interesting ramifications for Massachusetts writers.

The machine, dubbed Paige M. Gutenborg (and pictured, left), was featured in Wired.com and other national media due to its affiliation with Google Books, who have digitized and made available books from Harvard University’s libraries (sweet, The Sagacity and Morality of Plants is FINALLY available to non-Harvard students!!! High fives nearest plant.)

But it’s the self-publishing possibilities that may prove most interesting to authors. According to the store’s self-publishing guidelines, authors pay a set-up fee and submit the book as PDFs, which you can develop using the extensive do-it-yourself instructions. When books are printed, there’s a cost-per-page for authors.

How do writers get paid? Bronwen Blaney, print-on-demand manager at Harvard Bookstore, says there are two primary methods. The most common would involve an interested reader requesting the book, which has already been scanned for the machine. “So even if we don’t have a copy on the shelf,” she says, “if a customer calls, comes in, or orders through Harvard.com, then we would print and sell the book.” The writer then receives the difference between their selected retail price and the cost-per-page to print.

Alternately, an author could print and pay for a number of books, and sell or distribute them on his/her own. An author could also choose to have a copy kept on the store’s “Printed on Paige” shelf.

Though the machine has been operational for just a few weeks, Bronwen says that she’s already working with a number of authors interested in printing their own books. The first author to use the machine? Steve Almond (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow ‘08), who printed a short run of chapbooks.

That detail drives home one of the technology’s most intriguing facets: flexibility. On-demand machines make it relatively easy for authors to print a book of trade paperback-quality (or close to it), be it a chapbook, tome, novella, or eclectic mixture only your mind can conceive. Assuming you don’t have an exclusive contract with a publisher, you could continue to publish traditionally but opt to self-publish for works that don’t quite fit with a traditional press.

Of course, other questions about self-publishing still loom, such as: what do you lose by way of marketing, distributing, editing, publicizing, and/or presentation resources when you’re doing it all yourself? I can think of at least two self-publishing success stories - Massachusetts authors Lisa Genova (Still Alice) and Brunonia Barry (The Lace Reader) - in which eventual deals with a mainstream publishers were a big part of that success.

Have any intrepid ArtSake readers experimented with self-publishing? We would love to hear about how you made it - or are making it - work.

Powered by Bookmarkify™