digital democratizes as price to entry and distribution are much lower. low overhead favors small publishers who's large cost is usually in printing as opposed to large publishers who through scale do not incur high costs (relatively) for printing.
Bomb magazine - arts related since 1981 - expanded audience through website - received grant to change static site into dynamic site - put legacy content online - has more readers now online than in print - as a non-profit felt free content was part of mission - finding other sources for income: sponsorship, ads - revenue risk seems to be paying off so far - looking into making eBooks of old content - anti-DRM as a consumer but it may become a friend of the magazine
soft skull press - indy press - 15yrs old - started at Kinkos in East Village as renegade punk publisher who embraces risk - published first anti-Bush bio - dedicated to print, though excited by digital - DVD extras look like they are put together in 20 minutes by PAs - video and digital in an eBook is not necessarily a great idea - the content should match the author's vision and the work - instead of just thinking digital think of the thing that best fits the work - experimenting with street art as a promotion and using QR scanable codes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_Code) - has an author who twittered entire novel - DRM is an ongoing debate within the organization - personal experience is that DRM is incredibly frustrating, but concerned about bottom line - hope that you can have faith in readership that they will be honest - as an indy you are much more likely to not be ripped off by the consumer since they identify with you and want to support you unlike a big house such as Random House or S&S
N+1 magazine - politics arts culture - ugliest website for many years - planing renovation of website - looking to make the site finally somewhere where people want to linger - all profits come from subscription sales - reads XKCD geek cartoons everyday put realized that the author never got money from her - looked at online store for XKCD and thought about buying a print of the strip to put on the road - with small publishers people feel they are exercising their will by supporting indy publishers - sell things 'Radio Head Style' which is a suggested minimum - try micro payment with a returning readership - agrees with Soft Skull sentiment about indy press having personal relationship with customer that will help to combat piracy
gigantic - biannual arts magazine - on route to being a non-profit - innovative but cheap format - using digital for a grassroots diy way with facebook and twitter
has book contract that is not only for a book, but also requires 10 online posts be made - some contracts require a certain amount of activity for publicity which includes doing content - requires authors to keep their attention and thought going after the book is published and by doing it at contract time it makes the later publicity part of the creative process for the book - had authors write for gawker.com and found print sales went up for that author's books
electric literature - five streamlined short stories published in every viable medium (all devices and POD) - printing bills normally take away all profits - POD offers no up front printing costs - embraced all social media - $5000 goes to authors, $1000 to each - create media database, form relationship with authors, gain reach - published story by Rick Moody to twitter - uses 140 char limitation of twitter as a structure for story - 153 tweets as dialogue between two people - wanted it to be as big as possible, so it was stretched over 3 days - one part of the 153 was tweeted every few minutes - was new to twitter and had a small following - reached out to other publishers and readerships for co-publisher - got 30 co-publishers - reached audience of 34,000 via co-publishers - one issue was that some people were annoyed that they received the publication from multiple people they were following - lesson learned: you don't mess with people's twitter feeds - LA Times mentioned how there was concern about consumer complaints over receiving multiple comments on the same topic - media declared it a failure but that caused publicity - readership (twitter followers) was up - used publicity to be able to get on top of the media narrative with their own content - has most followers of any indy publisher in the world now - a large publisher might have pulled the project because it annoyed people but as a small publisher there was nothing to loose and ended up capitalizing on it - anti-DRM for eBook sales since only one copy of their DRM'd publication sold
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