read write interview: beth adams and dave bonta

by Dana Guthrie Martin

In September, Beth Adams and Dave Bonta, co-editors of the literary magazine Qarrtsiluni, announced the winner of their first chapbook competition. Pamela Johnson Parker’s collection, A Walk Through the Memory Palace, was chosen by contest judge Dinty Moore.

I had a number of questions for Beth and Dave about their entry into chapbook publishing. I figured others might find their answers intriguing, so I decided to organize my questions and conduct an interview with Beth and Dave by email then share their responses here.

The interview appears below. And for those who want to know more about the winning collection, check out this post at Qarrtsiluni.

Dana Guthrie Martin: What made you all decide to leap into publishing, and why at this time when so many publishers, especially small ones, seem to be having such a difficult time staying afloat?

Beth Adams: Well, Dana, if staying afloat were essential, we wouldn’t have leapt! Small publishing today is about as financially risky as it gets. However, if making your living from it is taken out of the equation, there are opportunities now for producing and sharing work — as artists and arts organizations — that have never been there before.

Starting a small press was really just an extension of stuff I’ve done since I was a kid, when I was always “publishing” little projects that I illustrated and wrote by myself or with friends. I’ve spent 30 years in graphic design and marketing, with my husband, producing all kinds of publications for other people, including books. So when an independent book project came up a few years ago that needed an ISBN and a design and a publisher, I just jumped in. (It’s a little easier to do that in Canada, I think, than in the U.S.)

But I’d also just been through the process of writing a nonfiction book and having it published by a small but respectable press — Soft Skull, in Brooklyn, run by Richard Nash, who’s well-known in independent publishing circles. That process and relationship really opened my eyes to the current economic reality, both for authors and publishers: You walk into a warehouse and see the boxes of unsold traditionally printed books, but there’s no money for advertising. Or a book gets impressive pre-publication bookstore orders but then a lot of those books are returned and the money must be refunded. Authors are paid advances “against returns.” So it’s very rough, especially for small- or niche-market books. Because of being a designer, there was no particular mystique for me any more about the nuts and bolts of producing a book, but my naivete about the marketing and sales side of publishing definitely didn’t last long either, once I saw it firsthand. And then there was the economic downturn. As my dad says, you’d have to have rocks in your head to go into publishing for the money.

So I’ve become convinced that publishing short-run books the traditional way is essentially over, but equally convinced that it’s vitally important to find ways to continue to get good work out into the world.

Three things seem evident: 1. Distribution and marketing and a lot of publishing are going to happen via the web; 2. The future of indie book publishing (of paper editions) lies in print-on-demand; and 3. The former competitive model has to give way to innovative collaborative efforts, where artists and writers and publishers help each other rather than competing for a shrinking number of book contracts, awards and recognition. Dave and I are both motivated by that third reality — wanting to find new ways to encourage writers, get their work out there, and preserve some of it for posterity in print — because we continue to believe that people want to hold books in their hands.

Dave Bonta: Hmm. Hard to improve on that answer! Like Beth, I’ve been publishing things for a long time, starting with a mimeographed magazine my brothers and I produced as kids. It was a nature magazine, but I always wrote a poem for the back page. We had 35 subscribers! Then as a young adult, I produced a series of poetry chapbooks, Kinko’s jobs, though one had a sewn binding and a cover designed by a local artist friend. I put prices on them, but I let the bookstores keep the money. Poetry was never about money for me. It’s like water. It’s supposed to be free.

When blogging started to get popular in 2003, I held off trying it for a while because I had heard it was only for expressing off-the-cuff opinions, reactions to current events. It finally occurred to me that it didn’t matter how other people were using the medium; I could use it to self-publish poetry and essays. And then of course I found other people who were doing the same thing. Beth was the first. I found her blog, The Cassandra Pages, through one of those blog directories that used to be so popular — Blogarama, I think, under “religion and philosophy.” And then I met other like-minded bloggers through her comment threads. Six years later, Beth and I are still working to encourage a culture of literary blogging. That was our original goal in launching Qarrtsiluni back in 2005.

But books also remain important fetish objects for both of us, and I believe for virtually all of the literary bloggers in our acquaintance. And it may sound odd for someone who believes so strongly in online publishing to say this, but I still find the printed page more conducive to deep reading, reading that goes below the surface of the words. Without audio or video accompaniment, poetry online is distressingly easy to skim. And then there’s the question of permanence. While we plan to keep Qarrtsiluni online indefinitely, we’re both pretty pessimistic about the long-term viability of our fossil fuel-based, consumerist civilization. Books are not just handy companions when sitting on the pot; they are also durable artifacts. A well-made book can last a long, long time. So when I started hearing about lulu.com and other print-on-demand services, immediately I wanted to give it a try. Fortunately, Beth has mad designer skillz and a head for business — which in our case means breaking even.

DGM: You’ve both talked about being very concerned about the process for your contest. I know you put a lot of careful consideration into it. Can you describe the process you used and what other contest models shaped yours?

BA: Well, for starters, Dave and I are both in love with poetry, and deeply ambivalent about contests. While we’re all for raising up work of merit, neither one of us likes the idea of “winners” and “losers,” and we’re well aware how subjective judgment is in the literary world; we both want Qarrtsiluni to remain independent of the whole tide of “poetry pedigrees” and have worked hard to maintain that stance and not contribute to a sense of poets being “in” or “out.”

Ultimately, we’d like to publish several chapbooks a year and have them simply be the best ones we receive. But to be honest, we’re new to this, and trying to be responsible — and we can’t afford to publish chapbooks without the reading fees generated by a contest. We wanted to keep those fees as low as possible, and be able to pay an independent judge as well as being generous with copies of the chapbook for the author, all the contributors and reviewers. So we figured out a way to do an initial trial run that we hoped would break even (and it looks like it will, though we definitely need some more sales — hint, hint!) and be good for the poets and good for Qarrtsiluni.

We felt it was crucial to run a fair and strictly anonymous contest, and have the winning book be of the highest quality, both in its online and print forms. We also wanted to recognize as many of the top manuscripts as we could, which is why we chose and published a poem from each of the 10 shortlisted chapbooks, with audio and an author bio. The work was stunningly good, I thought — I was often moved to tears while choosing these poems at the end.

Running a contest is complicated and we learned a lot: The more manuscripts you receive, the more exciting the contest becomes, but it also becomes more work. We were sure we wanted each chapbook to be read by at least two people, and to stay completely out of it ourselves, because we “know” many of these poets. The feedback we received from the judges was that 10 manuscripts was about the maximum they could handle; Dinty asked for a shortlist of not more than that as well, for good reason, I think. So you quickly find you need to call on quite a few people, all of whom need to be qualified and as objective as possible. We felt very lucky to have a group of past guest editors who were willing to help out.

DB: What models did we look at? None, I’m afraid. As our pattern has been with the magazine itself, we just kind of figured out what made logical sense and did that. Designing a blind submissions process wasn’t too difficult. The main thing was to choose screeners and a final judge who best resembled our ideal profile of a Qarrtsiluni reader. Dinty Moore was a friend who had recently said some kind things about Qarrtsiluni, so I figured he might agree to the gig, but more importantly, though he has taught poetry in college literature classes and certainly reads it for pleasure, he’s a nonfiction author and editor, not a poet. We really struggle against the prevailing assumption that the primary audience for poetry is other poets. Many poets are in fact too self-involved to make very good readers, to be honest.

For our screeners, we asked a number of past editors of Qarrtsiluni, people whose taste and judgment was a known quantity. Some are primarily poets, a couple are primarily fiction writers, one’s working on her rabbinical degree, one teaches high school English — a diverse lot. We paired them up pretty much at random, gave each pair a bunch of manuscripts, and Beth kept track of everything in a complex, color-coordinated Google spreadsheet that made my head hurt. I do a lot of the day-to-day Qarrtsiluni stuff, so the contest was Beth’s baby (as is our print division in general). I am grateful to her and to the screeners for all their hard work on this. All I had to do was the fun stuff at the end: set up the posts, solicit and process the audio, and design a new website.

BA: Actually, I did look at a bunch of other chapbook contest descriptions, mostly trying to see the range of manuscript lengths, reading fees, awards. I still have the Keystone and Flume Press guidelines in my file; there’s a comprehensive list here which we ought to get on for next year, Dave!

DB: You did? I’ll be damned! Well, like I said, the contest was your baby. Good thing Dana offered to interview us so I could find out what exactly we did.

BA: Right! Especially since so many contributors seem to assume we’re an item and know everything about each other! (Dave and I have met in person — what? — three or four times? But we’re very close friends.)

DGM: Dave, you mentioned doing the “fun” stuff — setting up the posts, soliciting and processing the audio, and designing a new website. Can you both speak to that element of creating the chapbook? Many chapbook publishers don’t even provide their collections online, or if they do they make them available only after the print run runs dry, and often they simply make a PDF of the chapbook and that’s it. Not only did you create a fine print edition, but also I am struck by how you are using technology in every way possible to provide the best online experience of the chapbook to as many people as possible.

BA: This one’s definitely for you, Dave.

DB: Well, making an online version was something I felt pretty strongly about, because of our mission to make work as widely available as possible. If we’d been making a more typical, limited-run printed chapbook rather than an unlimited, print-on-demand edition, we might well have decided it would be counterproductive to release the content online until the print run was at least half-gone. But even in that case, I would’ve insisted on making a true online book, not a PDF or other electronic file that isn’t searchable and may not even be viewable on some machines. A PDF is designed in part to be printed out, so it would more directly compete with the print edition. Issuu.com is pretty nifty as a PDF reader, but you still can’t hotlink to any content within an Issuu document, and it’s completely proprietary — you have to accept their branding and their terms. (I will give them credit for supporting audio files, though — one per document, I believe.)

The best model I’d seen for what I wanted to do was the 2River Chapbooks Series. I had also experimented with using WordPress to present two online collections of my own work. But one thing I felt that was missing from all three of these was a sidebar table of contents on each poem page, which I feel is important because I want the online reader to be able to skip around and read the poems in whatever order she chooses, just as a reader of the print edition can do. With my two online books, I had tried to fill this need with a “random poem” link in the top navigation bar, but those were both full-length collections. With a chapbook-length collection, a Random button doesn’t make as much sense — but on the other hand, the table of contents was now short enough to be viewed without much if any scrolling. So the challenge became, how to include a sidebar without making it look too bloggy.

The ability to include audio is one of the great advantages of the online medium as far as I’m concerned, and I’m surprised more publishers don’t do it. I decided to make the audio available in two versions: as a continuous reading of the entire chapbook for the podcast, and broken up into the constituent poems to put into Flash audio players on each page of the online version, for people who prefer to read along as they listen, or who don’t want to try and take in the whole thing at once. Though the website is independently hosted, we uploaded the audio files to the main Qarrtsiluni site, which is hosted at wordpress.com, to take advantage of the much faster, virtually Digg-proof streaming there. And we were very lucky that Pamela was able to convince an audio engineer friend to record the reading for us; we ended up with a more high-fidelity product than we would’ve gotten with some of the dodgier methods that we recommend to authors for our daily podcast. You don’t want to listen to someone reading over the telephone for a whole half-hour.

DGM: What has the response to the first collection been like so far?

BA: Very positive. We’ve sent out free chapbooks to all the contributors to the contest, and to the winner and artist and judges, of course, and sold some copies outright. I think people have been surprised at the quality of the chapbook itself — the artwork and excellent printing and binding — and we’ve only heard positive comments on Pamela’s poetry. We’d welcome additional feedback, and of course we’d love to have more people purchase copies. I think chapbooks are often more interesting than books, because they’re so focused, and they have such a long history and breadth of content and design — and they’re inexpensive — they’re a good thing to collect.

DB: Last week, the news blog connected with the online version of the chapbook finally received its first spam comment. I felt like a parent whose kid just got her first skinned knee falling off a bike.

DGM: Why chapbooks as opposed to full-length collections?

BA: Two reasons, for me. First, because the selection, editing and design process take a huge amount of time, which would be even more for a full-length book, and we’re still volunteers who have the online magazine as our priority. Second, there’s very little money to be made in publishing poetry; we need to make sure we do projects that can at least break even, and do them on a new web-based model. We need more experience with the market before publishing full-length books, but it’s not out of the question for the future.

DB: What is the ideal length for a collection of poetry? If it’s a multi-author anthology, maybe 300 pages. But for a single-author or collaboratively authored work, anything over 80 pages can seem too long, unless it’s a “new and selected.” Or maybe I’ve just been conditioned by years of exposure to poetry books from the American lyric-poetry mainstream. But look at one of those standard, single-author, 60- to 80-page collections, and what do you see? Almost invariably, it consists of three or four chapbook-length sections, often individually titled. I would argue that modern lyric poetry has a natural tendency to coalesce into groups of seven to 20 poems. I’m not sure exactly why this is, and whether it’s the result of writers’ or readers’ needs — maybe a bit of both.

Like Beth, I hope we eventually gain enough experience and confidence to be able to publish some longer books, too, but I want to emphasize that I share the view of a growing number of poets and poetry presses that the chapbook is more than just a stepping stone on the way to a “real” book. It can be a beautiful and satisfying thing all on its own. It’s like sex: One can’t have 3-hour-long tantric marathons every time. The kitchen-table quickie can be just as special.

DGM: Eew. [pauses] Is there anything you will do differently for the next contest?

BA: Gee, Dave, I hardly know how to follow up on that last comment! Um, how about illustrated chapbooks?

Seriously, though, we might reject manuscripts that aren’t properly prepared, because that created extra work. [see next question]

DB: We won’t depend on Canadian mail for anything urgent. (Sorry, Canadians! Your banking and health care systems still kick America’s ass, though.) And I think we’ll be a bit more aggressive about lining up reviewers.

DGM: Having sifted through so many entries, do you have any advice for those entering contests? Dos? Don’ts?

BA: Please make sure you read the guidelines and follow the contest rules! As for the manuscripts themselves — remember that we weren’t the judges. But if I had been, I would have looked for chapbooks that had an integrity and vision behind them, some reason for these poems being collected together, and a flow to the sequencing of the poems. Not all the chapbooks had this, but the best ones did. It helps the readers greatly if the manuscripts are carefully presented, too. Some poets don’t seem to have a basic command of word-processing programs and don’t know how to collect their work together, but this is a skill that every poet needs now, so it’s worth taking the time to learn how to prepare a digital manuscript with page breaks, page numbers, a table of contents, and headers and footers. The type can be Courier, I’m not talking about the manuscript having to be “designed” already; it’s a question of organization, just like a resume is expected to be well-organized and presented. And of course, we appreciated early entries, but it’s understandable that people submit at the last minute. Mostly, I’d just encourage people to give it a shot! We tried hard to run a good contest, and because it’s relatively new, there weren’t hundreds of entries, so poets had a good chance to make the shortlist.

DB: Enter early and often. Don’t enter contests that don’t give you a copy of the winning book in return for your entry fee. Read the fine print. And if you shop your manuscript around for a while and nobody bites, don’t rule out self-publishing — print-on-demand services such as CreateSpace and Lulu now make this exceedingly easy, not to mention free, except for the cost of labor. Just be sure to hire or arm-twist someone you trust to edit and critique it for you, don’t stint on the design, get an ISBN number, and be sure to make a generous sample of the contents available online so people can decide if they want to buy it. As Jello Biafra says: “Don’t complain about the media, become the media.” That goes for poetry publishing, too!

Dana Guthrie Martin is the founder of Read Write Poem. She writes things and stuff. Most of the time, her things and stuff happen to be poetry, or at least they call themselves poetry. She has a robot named Feldman. He’s writing a book of poems.