Skip to content

Ecce Signum

Immanentize the Empathy

  • Home
  • About Me
  • Published Works and Literary Matters
  • Indexes
  • Laboratory

On This, the Day of My Journal’s Editing.

2016-01-31 John Winkelman

So here I am, sitting in the Lyon Street Cafe for the first time in several weeks, having just finished listing my tasks for my first completely open Sunday in months. To put it gently, Sunday isn’t open any more. The duties and needs of Caffeinated Press in general, and The 3288 Review in particular, have eaten up all of that nebulous part of my life I used to call “free time”. Am I exhausted? Yes. Is it worth it? ABSOLUTELY!

The first and most important consideration is that never have I had so much good writing at my disposal.

At ConFusion 2015, in one of the panels (“Staying Sane While Sluicing Through Slush“) a panelist pointed out that submission quality falls along a bell curve, with the majority being “competent” – meaning well written, professional, etc., but not exceptional. In my time at Caffeinated Press I have vetted something over four hundred written works- long, short, fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Few of them were terrible. They didn’t get published. Few were extraordinary. They DID get published. I don’t know how submissions fall out in the rest of the industry, but the bell curve of the work we receive leans toward the high end which, given the amount of work we receive, help to keep us from succumbing to feelings of tedium, ennui, etc.

My active involvement at CafPress is just about exactly a year old. In that time I have picked up a surprising number of skillsets, both primary and ancillary. Editing, obviously. An eye toward story structure. A renewed appreciation of poetry. A powerful ability to metabolize coffee. All important skills for an editor.

I also, for the first time since my days at Schuler Books and Music, have a big-picture view of what’s going on in the publishing world. Most is not at all surprising. The big guys are getting bigger, the little guys are struggling. So it goes. Small presses are run by several people working part-time, or one person doing the work of three and several people working part time. This is the way of the world now.

But this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Small presses are more nimble, more able to take chances with the innovative and the avant-garde. Small presses are not held captive by shareholders whims. But being small enough to fit a niche often means being small enough to fall through the cracks. Thus small presses learn to innovate.

One of my favorite (and more personally expensive) discoveries of the past few months is that several small presses offer subscriptions to their catalogs. For a nominal price, you will receive roughly a book a month for a year. This is not the old book club model of the pre-Amazon days; this is more an investment in the voice and taste of a small group of people who turn out excellent product. My first subscription was to Open Letter Books, quickly followed by Restless Books, Deep Vellum, and several others. All excellent publishers, and all beautiful books. I will explore this idea further in an upcoming blog post.

Suffice to say, I will not soon run out of excellent reading material.

Posted in Literary MattersTagged Caffeinated Press

Post navigation

Subscribing to Book Publishers
2016 Reading List

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Personal website of
John Winkelman

John Winkelman in a diner in San Francisco

Archives

Categories

Posts By Month

January 2016
S M T W T F S
 12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
31  
« Oct   Oct »

Twitter Feed

Retweet on TwitterJohn Winkelman Retweeted
JordanrosenfeldJordan Rosenfeld@Jordanrosenfeld·
21 May

Don't like "Show, don't tell?" Try: "Demonstrate, don't lecture." Characters use words & deeds. #writetip #characters #scenes

Reply on Twitter 1528089044319617024Retweet on Twitter 15280890443196170241Like on Twitter 15280890443196170241Twitter 1528089044319617024
Retweet on TwitterJohn Winkelman Retweeted
The_Lady_RedThe Lady Red- the night is dark and full of terror@The_Lady_Red·
20 May

@notcapnamerica

Reply on Twitter 1527768341934272512Retweet on Twitter 1527768341934272512138Like on Twitter 1527768341934272512827Twitter 1527768341934272512
Retweet on TwitterJohn Winkelman Retweeted
JohnFugelsangJohn Fugelsang@JohnFugelsang·
20 May

But the archbishop gladly still serve Holy Communion to pro-death penalty politicians.

And the death penalty, unlike abortion, was actually something Christ spoke out against.

In case you thought this had anything to do with Christ. https://twitter.com/sfchronicle/status/1527733939275702274

San Francisco Chronicle@sfchronicle

JUST IN: The San Francisco archbishop issued a notice Friday that he would no longer allow House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to receive Communion, an escalation of his feud with the Catholic Democrat over abortion politics. https://trib.al/Q3mKsI0

Reply on Twitter 1527744200753790977Retweet on Twitter 15277442007537909773565Like on Twitter 152774420075379097714169Twitter 1527744200753790977
Load More...

Links of Note

Reading, Writing
Tor.com
Locus Online
The Believer
File 770
IWSG

Watching, Listening
WYCE Electric Poetry
Writing Excuses Podcast
Our Opinions Are Correct

News, Politics, Economics
Naked Capitalism
Crooked Timber

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

© 2022 Ecce Signum

Proudly powered by WordPress | Theme: x-blog by wpthemespace.com