How to Start a Literary Press
Recently, I set up a literary press for publishing Old English poems and prose, written by modern writers. I want to go through how I set this up. I didn’t find any instructions online on how to start your own literary press or journal or zine, so I hope this helps someone else.
Normally, my projects are entrepreneurial by nature (such as The User Is Drunk), or made for developers (OSProtocol.com). However, this niche is so small I wouldn't even call it one, and I don't know many developers who read Beowulf for fun. I made this project because I wanted something like Word Hoard Press to exist. If you want to know how to start your own, similar thing, this is the article for you. However, this post will also be good if you want to know how I build a lean product, as fast as possible. Word Hoard Press took me around one day to set up.
1. Come up with the Idea.
This is the easiest and the hardest part of the process. Word Hoard Press was the result of a lot of time spent thinking, “I wonder why we don’t write poetry like this anymore.” If you’ve never read or seen Old English poetry, it is radically different than the 18th century doggerel we’re fed in 9th grade English classes, replete with rhyme structures and boring meters that read like it was written for kindergarteners. Instead of:
Down the lane went Dick and Jane To find some berries to ease their pain
or something similar, you’d have:
Down the dog-road Woad and woman
Seek sun-fruits For defying death
There’s a few rules about how you can write Germanic poems, but that’s the gist of it, and while this is a forced example, I still think the style of the second is interesting enough to warrant writing and reading. I looked for places that currently publish Old English or Old Germanic pieces of literature. I couldn't find any, and I couldn't help but ask: Why don’t I just set one up myself?
For the record, I didn’t (and don’t) expect Word Hoard Press to be a huge player in any game. The kind of people who write in extinct languages are rare, and mostly hobbyists. I know this type of community fairly well, as I have a Linguistics degree and used to be very involved in the constructed languages world. For two years, I was the maintainer and creator of the Na’vi Dictionary for LearnNavi.org, the fan community of the language from the movie Avatar. Around five thousand people regularly used it, and it was translated into around a dozen languages. I know who I am marketing this site towards.
2. Talk to people
I’ve been hanging desperately onto the edge of the current literary scene for a while — I was a regular at Mellow Pages Library, a library collective in Brooklyn, and built their website they used for two years. Here's the deal: you can basically have a printer and some submissions and call yourself a press. There’s no big barrier to entry out there, and no secret. You don’t have to be a gigantic publisher or put out 1000 volumes. I knew that. I still wanted advice.
A friend of mine, Brent Rydin, who used to drive me to high school before I got my license, had set up an independent press a few years ago. It’s called Wyvern Lit, and it is currently in its sixth issue. I had gone to a reading recently, as he lived in Boston, and decided to call him up. A lunch date later, I knew a lot more about what he had done, and how he had gotten the word out. We’ll cover that below. Talking to him was immensely helpful; I learned about Submittable, and the use of Twitter for indie presses, and just what I wanted to have and what sort of submission rate I could potentially expect.
3. Find a good name
At this point, I now had all the knowledge I needed on how to do start a press. Here it is; set up a website and start telling people. That is really all you need.
One of the most important parts of setting up a good website is choosing a good name. I spent half a day looking through lists of cool kennings in Old English and Old Icelandic. Kennings are word pairs that can be used to stand in for another noun; for instance, whale road for ocean. After a lot of thought, I went with Word Hoard, because it sounded cool, and it had a literary meaning, and it’s from Beowulf, the main poem in Old English we have. I should have thought a bit more about this — WordHoardPress.com sounds a lot like WordPress.com, which is the largest blog platform on the internet, and that might be confusing. But at some point, you’ve got to take what you have, and run with it. Word Hoard was a lot better than Thunder Rain, my other main contender. (If you’re curious, Thundr is another name for Odin, the god of poetry and of being badass. Apparently his rain means poetry).
4. Figure out how you are going to host your site.
Setting up a site takes a few steps: you have to buy the domain name with a registrar or an all-inclusive hosting provider, and then decide on a website framework to use, and then build the thing. There’s a lot of options out there. I looked at using Squarespace initially; they provide very beautiful themes and an easy way of setting up a site quickly. All I needed for this site was a few static pages and the ability to add posts. However, it’s nearly $100 a year. That’s a lot! None of the themes seemed perfect for me, too.
So then I looked at Wordpress. I could buy the domain with them, and host it on their website. But I would be looking at roughly $18 for a custom domain, or $13 for redirecting if I bought the domain elsewhere. I try and keep all of my domains in one place, and I use Hover to buy domains, so that would have been roughly $26 for the year. I looked at a lot of their themes, and I realised I could make my own much easier.
So I bought the domain on Hover.com for $13.17 for the year, and redirected it at GitHub. GitHub is where I host all of my code, and it is the number one place on the internet for hosting open source code in general. They have an option where a ‘repository’, basically a folder, can be used to host a free website. I looked for themes for Jekyll, their framework they use to host these free sites. An hour later, and I had a Jekyll-based website up and running with a modified theme at wordhoardpress.com. I won’t bore you with the details on how to do that, but you can see the code here if you like.
There are more options out there than GitHub, Wordpress, and Squarespace! Ask around. Ask your nerd friends. you’ll find something.
5. Get Google Analytics.
You’ll want to know how many people go to your site! You can set up Google Analytics and plug it into pretty much any provider you went with for your site, and then see how many people have been clicking away. This is free, too, which is cool.
6. Get an email address
If you’re setting up a press, you’ll need people to submit submissions to you. I looked into Submittable, which Wyvern Lit uses. They have a 50% discount for art projects, which is awesome, but I’d still be looking at $160 a year. I had no idea how many submissions I would get, and I wasn’t willing to pay that much on the off chance I was inundated with Old English poems by masters students everywhere. So, I figured I could just have an email address.
I used Google Apps to get email accounts for wordhoardpress.com. This was a relatively painless process, except that I messed up and forgot my password and it took my almost a day of talking to support to fix it. You can sign up for Google Apps for around $50.00 a year per email address. I only needed one, as I could make aliases so that it would look like submissions@wordhoardpress.com would go to a different place than richard@wordhoardpress.com. Surprise! They don’t.
This step is important. Having your own email address with your domain in it makes it sound less like you’re an out of work person with an Old English credit in your underused MA in Linguistics trying desperately to make up for lost opportunities.
Another trick you can do is to send emails with tags in them: richard+submissions@wordhoardpress.com will go to the same place, and I can set up a filter that automatically assigns the label ‘submissions’ to those emails.
7. Get a logo.
You’ll need pictures for a lot of things — for the website, for Twitter, and for social media metadata for your site which your blog system should set up if you don’t code it yourself (this is what is shared as a little box with a description on Twitter and Facebook). Finding a good logo can be hard!
I went to TheNounProject.com and found an icon I like — a little viking ship. All of these icons are free if you just attribute them — I did that in my About page on the site. I then went to Google Images and searched for ‘swamp’, ‘pine trees’, ‘mist’, ‘old english’, ‘vikings’, and so on, until I found a picture I liked that fit the theme I wanted for the website. Make sure to use Advanced Search and specify that the picture is allowed to be reused and changed, preferably on a Creative Commons license. Eventually, I found one I wanted — mists over pine trees. Perfect.
Then I had a friend put the icon over the pine trees because I don’t have Photoshop at the moment. I had him make a large image — around 500x500 — and then I used Preview on my own computer to shrink it to whatever size I needed. Bam! I had a sweet logo of a viking ship superimposed on a pine forest.
8. Write the copy.
This is probably the most important part. You’ll want to make it clear to new visitors what your press does, what you hope to publish, and why. I opted for a cover page, an About page with a Masthead showing who the staff is, an FAQ for questions I predicted might come (and which I fielded from friends and my first visitors), and then another page dedicated solely towards the Journal I was putting out. This might be a bit confusing, but I was thinking that in the future I might have multiple journals or publications, and I didn’t want to limit myself.
For a literary publication, you’ll want to cover a few things. “What exactly you’re looking for” is the most obvious, as well as “How to submit”. You’ll want to tell your users if you accept submissions they might have submitted elsewhere. You’ll need to talk about what the copyright for submissions will be, too.
I added another option for expedited reviews. Basically, if someone gives me a bit of donation money, I’m happy to get to their submission right away. I went with Plasso.co as an easy way of getting payments, but Paypal would also work. I’ve used Plasso before for theuserisdrunk.com and theuserismymom.com, so I knew how to set it up very quickly, and am very happy with that solution. I’ve used PayPal before when I used to have a webcomic on burntfen.com.
When writing your copy, keep your audience in mind. Who are you writing this for? I wanted language nerds, like me, but I always wanted them to feel like this was a serious literary journal. I decided at this point to have a separate journal, called Eala, published by the actual press. I thought of that name for a while, and wrote about why I chose it. I think I navigated the line between stiff professional copy and we’re-all-hobbyists OK. In retrospect, though, it would probably have been better to just publish everything directly by Word Hoard Press. I feel like I may have confused people here. That's good to know! In the future, I won't make that mistake.
9. Get a Twitter account
Twitter is important; cool people everywhere love talking about their hobbies on Twitter. I built @WordHoardPress, because @WordHoard was taken and it matched my URL directly. I used to logo I had made earlier for the picture. I was up and running.
Then, I got bought a one-year Buffer subscription for $100 because I wanted to be able to tweet to this account without signing out of my main one easily, and at various times of the day. I’m not sure if this was a mistake or not — Buffer doesn’t actually do multi-accounts very well, now that I use it, and I can’t see replies or direct messages to @WordHoardPress easily. I set up TweetDeck, another Twitter app for Mac, so that I could tweet and check out messages easily, and that was basically just as good as getting Buffer. I lived, I learned.
Then I searched for users who liked ‘Old English’, and followed a lot. Anyone who liked or favorited me, I followed. There were a few big players in the Old English Twitter scene — some of them I directly messaged, pointing out @WordHoardPress. Pretty soon, I had a small following for my little press, and people were starting to visit my site.
10. Market.
This is where I am now. I’ve got a website, I’ve got Twitter, I’ve got an email account and analytics and I’m waiting for submissions.
I tweet regularly-ish. I messaged friends about it, anyone I thought would be interested. I posted a link to the blog in some relevant subreddits.
There’s a few things I need to do; for instance, I want to email all Old English and Linguistics Departments in the land pointing out my new little journal. I’d also like to add this journal to pw.org/literary_magazines, one of the main lists for these sorts of things on the net, but I have to publish some submissions first. I need to email old Professors and ask their opinions and whether they would like to be language consultants.
11. Revel.
I would like to say at this point that I’ve got 11293 submissions to Word Hoard Press. In truth, I’ve got none. Not one.
But I don’t consider this a failure! For one, I’ve got a few more marketing tricks up my sleeve — around 150 people have been to the site, and that number could be a lot higher. People may take time to write stuff to submit, too — I don’t think that many hobbyists were sitting around waiting for this journal, but now they know it exists, they may submit stuff in time. Writing in dead languages is, after all, hard.
I’m not saying revel sarcastically. In this post, I described my process of building a literary press, and what you could do for yours. Doing all of this took me around one day of work. In one day, the world went from not having a literary press for dead languages — something so irrefutably cool I can’t believe it — to having one. Further, I went from someone who doesn’t do much with old languages besides read them in my spare time, to being someone known for building weird and cool projects around them. I’m pretty happy about that.
And if I never get a single submission, I can also say I’m just a millennia too late. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s the best excuse for a failed start up, ever.
