Well, this fall was supposed to be a whirlwind of work, as we furiously printed, sewed, and published in anticipation of our debut at two bay-area shows: the SF Zine Fest and the Alternative Press Expo. To get ready for the shows, we’ve been actively soliciting art and comics projects from various artists, cartoonists, and authors, since these are really comics shows above all else. I was (as anyone who reads this blog will have noticed) really, REALLY excited to get into the business of publishing comics, and my anticipation for bringing our press to the public at these shows has been building for the better part of a year now. Well, Justine and I made the difficult decision this week that we aren’t going to exhibit after all, because we basically have no projects that anyone at these shows will be interested in. I wouldn’t have minded showing our poetry and essay publications alongside the comics stuff we’ve been planning, but just showing these books on their own is not going to pique anyone’s interest… and at around $500 for both of them, it’s an investment we can’t afford to make, especially since we’re operating at around a $2500 loss so far this year.
We’re still planning to release the project with Paul Hornschemeier at some point, but finishing it by October turned out not to be realistic, for a number of reasons. But I am still really looking forward to do this project, and thankfully Paul has been really great to work with so far. However, other people had committed to sending us comic stories to publish, but now, when it’s time to get our hands dirty, they suddenly won’t respond to emails. Still others from whom we solicit work aren’t interested in being published in limited editions, saying that they’re waiting for someone who can print 10,000 copies, not 100 (even though we’re very clear that any author we publish has the right to republish the work at a later date). And of course there are those who just ignore us entirely. Maybe I’m going about it wrong and I sound like an asshole in the emails that I send, or people assume that we don’t know what we’re doing and will do a shitty job, or maybe it’s the whole “paying in contributor’s copies” thing, and cartoonists – who are justifiably bitter about putting so much time into something that doesn’t earn them any money – just want to get paid for their work. (I would welcome them to my world, but apparently they’re not interested.)
So, I enter the fall a little bitter and with a little bit of a chip on my shoulder, since in the past week I’ve seen three projects that had the green light fall apart before my eyes, and I realized that we were going to go in nearly empty-handed to these shows that I’ve been looking forward to all year. I’ve got more ideas for projects, and we’re certainly not going to throw in the towel at this point, but it has been a frustrating week around Chance Press HQ.
The silver lining, of course, is that CAROL ES IS STILL AWESOME AND NOT LIKE THE JERKS DESCRIBED ABOVE, and now we can dedicate ourselves fully to making this book happen. While there’s still tons of work to be done on them, my goal now is to have the entire edition finished for Carol’s gallery show in LA this October, rather than just a few pre-release copies. So, if you had been looking forward to that book, get excited that you most likely won’t have to wait until 2011 for your copy (unless, of course, we encounter tons of delays and push the release date back 6 months, which pretty much happens on every book that we do).