Scags at 7

Sullivan St Press on the Road and at Work

~ deborahemin ~ Leave a comment

Our Itinerant Book Show will be going live soon, which means we’re leaving town. For several weeks (from 7/11-9/25), we’ll be away. We’ll be in our Prius filled with all our gear and hitting many KOAs across the country (as far west as the western entrance to Yellowstone National Park). We will visit as many indie bookstores and public libraries as possible during this summer road trip. We want to learn what goes on there and share with them our books and plans for the future. 

Here’s A Sneak Peek

SSP, as I fondly call my company, has lots of big plans going forward.  

Currently, SSP publishes novels, the Scags Series, and vegan books, the Vegan City Guides. In the works now are two different but ambitious projects based on these two series. What will be worked through over the next months, both while we are on the road and when we return, is a renewed commitment to make SSP an e-book only company. 

What Does E-Book Only Mean?

We’ll stop all Print on Demand. Based on the talks I gave at the NYC Green Festival in June, I worked very hard to lay out the reasons for “Why Publishing’s Future is Green Publishing.” I’ll be sharing those ideas in a series of blog posts soon. The short message is that The publishing industry needs to cut down its carbon footprint and learn to love the e-book. 

Going Forward

The Scags Series will be completed in 2018. Scags at 45 is the final volume. But Scags herself is a new writer for SSP and her first book, also coming out in 2018, Born Loser, Born Lucky will be about the exploits of her character, Sophie, and her work to kill the cancer in our global heart’s soul. We’ll be launching Scags’ books as e-books only. And we’re working on a way to put the entire Scags Series into an app. So, lots to do but all of it will offer much more interconnection with other writers and their books. 

The Vegan City Guides series is also plodding forward. We are talking to and looking for more partners. We want to go 50-state wide. We want to show the entire nation’s vegan footprint well beyond a focus on food but to encompass every aspect of what it means to be vegan. Thus for the animals, for our environment, for our health and for the spiritual well being of those who seek to live compassionately. 

Our goals are ambitious but should even a part of this new work bear fruit, there will be much more of interest to offer readers and writers for years to come. 

#GoVegan #ReadBooks

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.

Road Trip in Fall–Books at a Discount

A Page from Occupy These Photos
~ deborahemin ~ Leave a comment

We are leaving for Toronto, Dublin, London and Reyjavik and will be gone for 3 weeks. I feel grateful as hell to be able to travel as much as we do. (Don’t ask me where we will be going next because it is really a goodly amount over the next year.)

While we are away, Sullivan Street Press carries on its mission by sharing with you a number of promotions to help get the books out to more and more readers.

I often think of the books we publish as events, events that keep on going, whether the books are being created, produced, launched or available. No matter where they appear on that time line, they are alive, living happenings of ideas, words, pictures and responses that can’t be stopped. The real perpetual motion machines of our lives–books.

This weekend we are having an e-book promotion of our 4 books that were published before 2015–Scags at 7, Scags at 18, Eating Vegan in Vegas and Occupy this Book. They are on sale at Kobo for $4.99. I urge you to download the Kobo free reading app and put it on your device. That way you can take advantage of this sale. (Plus, to me, Kobo is the one e-tailer who understands the value of the independent bookstore and works with them as much as possible. This is another way to read e-books and not undercut the bookstores.)

Over the month of November, all our e-books will be discounted by 35% to libraries in the US. That means that if you go to your library and request our e-books, and please tell the library that the e-books are being discounted, we can take advantage of having more of our e-books filter through the library systems all across the country. You will be fostering more events that will help others to discover what Sullivan Street Press publishes.

Finally, we just launched a new book, Occupy These Photos. Another addition to the growing body of work by Mickey Z. This new title is a photo collection of Mickey’s eye roaming the city from the time of #OccupyWallStreet to #BlackLivesMatter. With a moving Foreword by Cecily MacMillan on the power of the witnessing eye to those harassed  and targeted by the police during times of political actions, Mickey’s book should be essential reading and meditating for those who want to both understand and participate in the changes we need to see at all levels of our shared lives right now.

This post calls attention to the work we have done so far and doesn’t speak to the work that will be happening. More events, more ways to connect with readers and to share visions and ideas and photos and stories in ways we intend to be indispensable to the community. Thanks for all the support you show us.