independent publishing

Anomalous 2.1

June 15, 2011 by Erica Mena

Today we launched issue 2 of Anomalous and I sort of can’t believe we got it done. My hard drive died on Sunday, and I hadn’t backed up in a few weeks, which meant that I lost almost all of the production I’d done for Anomalous. And a multi-format journal takes a LOT of production. Anyway, a stressful Sunday got me a new hard drive, and Monday I taught, so I spent literally all day yesterday redoing the production. But I […]

Categories: Publishing • Tags: 21st century publishing, Anomalous, independent publishing

Into the Web at WriteByNight

April 22, 2011 by Erica Mena

At Write By Night I’ve started doing a series of guest posts, mostly about Anomalous Press, but also about digital publishing and the multi-media mutli-platform model I’m interested in developing. Here is how my first post closes: As it turns out, people like options and will read literature if it’s made available easily. But that just scratches the surface of what is possible with digital publishing. We’ve been giving this a lot of thought, and the plan is continue pushing […]

Categories: Publishing • Tags: 21st century publishing, ebooks, independent publishing

Online Journals Thrive, Too

April 9, 2011 by Erica Mena

A heartening article in the NYTimes, which I hardly ever read seriously due to their disgraceful dismissal of literary translation, caught my attention yesterday. Literary journals are doing well despite economic difficulties, publishing industry difficulties, and rashes of bookstore closures. Literary journals, because they are focused on small communities of like-minded readers, are not only surviving they are thriving. The article then goes on to talk about a bunch of wonderful west-coast print journals. Emphasis on print. They talk about […]

Categories: Publishing • Tags: 21st century publishing, independent publishing, literary journals, online journals, publishing

To publish: print or online?

April 7, 2011 by Erica Mena

This came up in my post about the 21st century publishing conference I attended a few weeks ago, and about Rebecca Frank Morgan’s comments about the ecosystem of literary publishing. But I think it’s worth further thought. Is there a real benefit to publishing in print rather than online? It used to be, back in the early days of the galactic interwebs, that online literary publishing was stigmatized. I know, how could that be? Aren’t artists, especially writers, supposed to […]

Categories: Publishing • Tags: 21st century publishing, elit, eliterature, experimental poetry, independent publishing, literary journals, new media, online publishing, publishing

Ebooks have no style

March 30, 2011 by Erica Mena

I’m finally beginning to understand so many literary publisher’s resistance to ebooks: There is no room for real literature in these formats. Using the top two current digital book formats, ePub and Mobi, it’s difficult to present the content as more than a string of words. And literature is more than a string of words. The experience of reading the book matters, the presentation matters. If you had to read Shakespeare without any line breaks, or proper pagination, it would […]

Categories: Publishing • Tags: 21st century publishing, Anomalous, ebooks, independent publishing, poetry, publishing

21st Century Publishing

March 29, 2011 by Erica Mena

A few weeks I went to a conference on 21st century publishing held at Emerson College and sponsored by the Massachusetts Cultural Council. When I received the announcement I was impressed and excited, the subject was Business Models for 21st Century Publishing and this is something, with the launch of my new press, I’d been giving a lot of thought to. The day itself started ominously enough when the managing editor of Ploughshares asked if there was a hashtag for […]

Categories: Publishing • Tags: 21st century publishing, Agni, Anomalous, Bateau Press, Emerson, hilobrow, independent publishing, Memorious, net neutrality, new media, Ploughshares, publishing, Weightless Books

Erica Mena

Poet | Book Artist | Translator

Tag: independent publishing