Occupy this Book

The Best Way to Support SSP

~ deborahemin ~ Leave a comment

It is now close to Christmas and everyone asks you for money and support. SSP is no different but the pitch is different and better. Why? Because we aren’t asking you to spend any money.

Ask your library to buy our books

You read that correctly. Don’t spend a dime, but ask your library to spend the money it has to buy e-books and paperbacks and make sure that they buy the books that Sullivan Street Press publishes.

A big sale is going on right now

All our books are now on sale to libraries. They can buy them for 35% off.When you go into your library with the list of titles published by SSP, you are actually going in and saving them money.

Not a way to undercut bookstores

I know you are thinking that. Your mind is saying right now: If I go to the library and ask them to buy a book written by Mickey Z. or Deborah Emin or Paul Graham, I am hurting my bookstore. But you are not.

What you are doing is helping this publishing company to get its books into more hands than just yours. If you like any of our books, your trip to the library is a gift to this publishing company and to the authors we publish. If all the people who like our books went to their library and asked for the books to be on the shelves or available for digital download, this company and many other small publishers would be financially viable and able to publish more books and put into readers hands many more stories about this world that need to be told.

You could never buy as many copies of our books as the libraries can

Simple math, my friends. Think about it this way too. I can ask each of you to buy a book. I could even ask you to also contribute to our GoFundMe account. But with one visit to the library, you could order all of our books, not spend one penny and make sure that all of our books can be read and enjoyed by your entire community. How many times do appeals for help come this wrapped up with ease and sharing?

Thank you to all of you who will take me up on this project.

Here are the books, with their ISBNs, which the librarian will need to order the books. And if you are asked if our books are available for library purchase, say yes, and say by Baker & Taylor, OverDrive, 3M, and EBSCO. Your librarian will think you are very smart.

Occupy These Photos, by Mickey Z.//e-book ISBN: 978-0-9819428-9-6 Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9963491-0-9

Occupy this Book, by Mickey Z.//e-book ISBN: 978-0-9819428-4-1 Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9819428-1-0

Eating Vegan in Vegas, Second Edition, by Paul Graham//e-book ISBN: 978-0-9819428-5-8///Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9819428-2-7

Scags at 7, by Deborah Emin//e-book ISBN: 978-0-9819428-6-5  Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9819428-0-3

Scags at 18, by Deborah Emin//e-book ISBN: 978-0-9819428-8-9 Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9819428-7-2

E-Books, Print Books and Giving

~ deborahemin ~ Leave a comment

Ah, it is that time of year again, no, not quite Christmas, but almost my birthday and Chanukah. Now my thoughts turn to snow, the cold and how you can support this publishing company I run, Sullivan Street Press.

Hear my prayers

First I pray that most of you will take it into your hearts to love and to read e-books. Whether you buy them for yourself, buy gift cards for your friends and family, ask your libraries to buy our books, there are so many ways you can both show your support for our e-books while at the same time helping the authors I publish get their stories into a wider world of readers. (To learn more about e-books, here is a recent blog post about e-books.)

Know our mission

I was talking to a new author today and I realized that I don’t outline our mission clearly enough. It is a lofty one, full of the need for more stories being told that will help our readers understand the life around us better. The authors I publish have all helped me to gain things I might not have even known I needed. Paul Graham’s book, Eating Vegan in Vegas helped me to become a vegan. Mickey Z.’s first book with us, Occupy this Book helped me to understand how to be an advocate and activist while his second book, Occupy These Photos was an eye opening series of photos showing activists at work from OWS to the #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations in NYC.

Coming Attractions

It is not seemly, some say, for a publisher to sell her own books through her company. My answer to that is simple: Who cares? The latest volume of the Scags Series, Scags at 30, will be out in May. (You can learn more about the earlier volumes here.)

Look to April for the Third Edition of Eating Vegan in Vegas. This latest edition will be a guide to vegan restaurants in Las Vegas but more than that it will be a resource for all visitors to Las Vegas who want to know what is going on in the Animal Rights community, how the environmental movement is shaping up in Las Vegas, where to go to find the artists and those working to help spread the word about a plant-based life in Las Vegas.

Starting a new poetry series, too

I had a vision in West Virginia of the sort of poetry books that SSP could publish. I know we now have the capacity, through our distributor, INScribe Digital, to make available both e-books and bound books that could have text as well as full-color photos in them. I had been thinking about Liza Charlesworth’s poetry and her photographs for a long time.

Out of these visions and memories, a new hybrid poetry book was born. Liza’s book, Why Happiness Makes Me Nervous, uses text as a trunk for her lyrical narrative of a girl growing into the world and uses photographs as visual poems that expose another set of emotional experiences similar to leaves on a tree that come out of the trunk, her poems. This will be a book to linger within for hours. Whether bought as an e-book or a bound book, it will be a beautiful addition to what we refer to as poetry but as a new hybrid form.Liza’s book will be out in April, in time for National Poetry Month.

Send good wishes, support and your money

SSP is in need of your support as we begin this new year with new books, new authors, new ways of producing books (which I will describe more fully in another blog post) and our continued commitment to see publishing as a creative act.

GoFundMe will gladly take your payments for next year’s work. Thanks in advance.

I Choose Every Book I Publish

~ deborahemin ~ Leave a comment

No slush pile, no agents calling me up, no advances, no time spent reading manuscripts because the books I publish have not yet been written.This is a very risky way to publish but it is also the most creative way.

New ideas and new authors

It is also a very exciting way to publish. Each and every book becomes, in a way, a shared project and I am aware of how all the decisions were made.

Occupy This Book

When I learned about all the books that Mickey Z. had published, I went to the bookstores and began looking at his body of work. Then I read his blogs and articles. Then I went to his talks and watched him as he shared vital information and created teaching forums, all with a great deal of laughter and good cheer. To me, this all indicated he and I could work on a book together.

Screw ups and Missed Opportunities

I messaged Mickey on Facebook a few times but he kept telling me had a dentist’s appointment and could not meet. I backed off because I knew my wife and I would be leaving town soon and badgering someone to write for the press didn’t work anyway.

When we returned from our summer tour, I began the same process again, reading what Mickey wrote, going to hear him talk and then making myself known.

Eventually we sat down to talk at a restaurant in Astoria. It was a beautiful fall day, the weather was warm and we had the first of our 5-hour lunches. Talking to Mickey helped me to understand what kind of book he and I could put together and he, as always, was full of creative suggestions and ways to make these ideas happen.

For example, he was worried about Occupy this Book being too text heavy. He thought it needed to be opened up, so he had me reach out to a cartoonist, Rick Cole, who had worked with him on another book and Rick agreed to do the ‘toons for Mickey’s book and to draw the cover image.

Structure, Form and Titles

Mickey is a fast worker. He always asks for a deadline and then he beats the deadline by days. But I also wanted someone to write a Foreword for his book and I had no ideas at the time who that could be. Mickey reached out to his good friend, Cindy Sheehan, and she gladly sent us a wonderful Foreword with a great tag line that we have used to promote the book: “It’s a pleasure to be in the struggle with Mickey Z.”

It was a pleasure to struggle with Mickey to figure out the best ways to organize the text, where to put Rick’s ‘toons and how to title the book.

Occupy this Book, when it was finished, was all that I had hoped Mickey would produce. He was at ease on the page, teaching and sharing experiences, creating a format that was almost like a self-help book but was so much more. Every page, he encouraged activism in ways that matched precisely the talks he gave and the blogs he wrote–aware of the importance of being an activist and at the same time, aware of the amount of self-criticism and self-care that are required to make this a life time’s work.

It is a pleasure to be Mickey Z.’s publisher.

For more information on where to buy Mickey’s books (Occupy this Book and Occupy These Photos, both published by Sullivan Street Press) go to this link.