City Lights Books once asked me for a mission statement.
Here’s a very incomplete list of self-publishers:
Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, William Blake, Ezra Pound, e. e. cummings,
Edgar Allan Poe, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, Anais Nin,
Carl Sandburg, Stephen Crane, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Paine, Virginia
Woolf, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar
Allen Poe, Benjamin Franklin, Michel de Montaigne, Alexandre Dumas, Derek Walcott, Upton Sinclair,
James Fenimore Cooper, W. E. B. DuBois, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Robert Hayden.
Most of them rarely published other writers. I probably won’t either.
The mission of Earthrise Press is to go
around the academies, academic departments, associations, and schools
of
thought and literary practice that now hamstring literature
and poetry, thereby reaching directly the reader, American and
international, who is perhaps as tired as I am of the prevailing state of
affairs.
The Internet and other technological developments make independent publishing and distribution more of a possibility than ever for the serious poet and literary writer, weary of the small little postmodern theories of self, academia, Marxism, race, gender, and so on....
Further, the mission of Earthrise Press is to publish my work without giving away control of my writing and 88% of the list price to the illiterate corporate conglomerates, distributors, cliques and coteries, large and small, of which I’d include, in addition to the obvious New York and international corporations and mega-chain bookstores, Small Press Distribution, PMA, Booksense.com, CLMP, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Academy of American Poets, ALA, and other such organizations that attempt to filter, regulate, and manage independent writers, and the small and supposedly independent presses and magazines.
I’ve studied and sacrificed for over thirty years to write my books, and I urge other writers to think and act for themselves, and take back their work.
As Jason Epstein has said regarding his Espresso Book Machine, we are living in the most significant revolution in publishing since Gutenberg. Philosophically, at the center of that revolution is the individual breaking free of the old orthodoxies, in publishing and literature, as in other domains. I doubt that William Blake and many of the writers above would have hesitated to join the revolution.
In an increasingly Post-Gutenberg Age, why support a corporate
conglomerate?
Support a poet...
Order
Online Direct from the Author or your preferred online
Bookseller.
It's already happened with music. What are readers waiting for?
Frederick Glaysher
Earthrise Press ®
P. O. Box 81842
Rochester, MI 48308-1842 USA
SAN: 853-4985
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