Community Transparency & Trying to Pay the Bills
Inspired by an article on Fawn Press’s blog about the health and transparency of the publishing community, we decided to write our own version of it, as we often get asked why we don’t pay our anthology contributors. We are committed to being open and honest with our community members and to building lasting relationships with them that way.
The Team
First of all, Sunday Mornings at the River is a passion project. We think putting out books that matter to us, is the best fucking thing we can spend our time on. We won’t let a lack of money stop us from what we love doing best.
When I say ‘we’, I mean Sean, Leanne and Corinne who contribute invaluable copy, proofreading and advice, but most of what you see here is done by me, the founder of this press, Becks. A little bit of background on me to put some context with that: I was born in a working-class family and make my living working 24 hours a week in healthcare. I work part-time out of necessity, because of the lasting damage by a stroke I suffered when I was nineteen years old and chronic fatigue due to endometriosis. The time I don’t spend napping to restore some of the strength lost at work, I spent working on the press. I have been working on Sunday Mornings at the River since 2012 and have been paid 1500 euros for this work in total, once, because of a subsidy. This means I have worked more than ten years on this press as a volunteer.
Subsidies and Donations
When you don’t want to compromise your artistic vision, funding will be a lot harder to obtain. People usually don’t invest out of the kindness of their hearts, they want to see something in return for their money. We received 3000 euros in funding in 2022, granted to us by the city of Eindhoven for creating the endometriosis anthology and applying through three a4’s of grant writing.
This subsidy was spent on buying stock, creating merch, buying a busking set for our performances and paying for advertising. I also paid myself a wage of 1500 euros to pay off some debts that I had made with the press. We also received a donation of 400 euros in 2022 from a poet who loved what we do and saw the sincerity and enthusiasm behind the project when he attended one of our events. This was a beautiful gesture that meant the world to us. We used that money to create some totebags for our merch and to donate our African Voices anthology to 30 school children in Senegal.
Royalties
Like Fawn Press, “we pay our individual pamphlet poets royalties, the agreement of which is made at the point of contract signing.” We worked with a poet friend who used to be a corporate lawyer in the drafting of this contract and put the emphasis on protecting our poets’ work. We want our poets to feel confident upon starting to work with us/me.
Our individual authors get paid 65% of the royalties of their books. This is more than what the mainstream presses pay. Sometimes, when sales are not high, they get 100% of the royalties as a way for us to support them and showing that we believe in their work. We also do not receive any royalties for the first couple of authors we worked with, because we felt grateful that they believed in the press enough in those early stages that they trusted us with their work as we tried to build our brand. We also don’t take any royalties from poets that are on disability benefits or work in essential jobs.
Our poets get their royalties paid every quarter with a full report of their sales.
The royalties made from the sales of the Quarterlies are the only funding this press gets. This is why we don’t pay our anthology contributors. We use what little money we make to pay Sean for the introductions and reviews he writes. This is a symbolic amount, as we can’t afford to pay him what he is worth. We pay Corinne and Leanne in books at the moment because even though we are broke, we believe creatives should not work for free. We would love to be able to pay Corinne and Leanne in the future as well. We choose to support Sean first because he has been with us since the start, donating his time and talent, whilst paying his rent by working as a teacher. I want to use a line written by Scarlett Ward-Bennett from her blogpost over at Fawn: “Again, we are ignoring my (Becks’s) time as an editor, graphic designer, web designer, cover designer, marketing manager, social media manager, PR person and packaging (as most indie presses do.)”
Sales
This is going to be such a bummer for you to hear, but at the moment, sales largely depend on how big a poet’s social media presence is. We hope to change that one day, as we believe in matching our talented poets with the right readers. We are honest about this upfront and tell our poets that we don’t have a big marketing machine behind us, and no funds to advertise or pay for reviews.
Our focus lies on creating beautiful books, not on marketing. Since the team is so small, we decided to build first and amplify later, as we can't be everywhere at the same time. We do however drag our poets words with us everywhere we go, like we did with our photography zines in the early days of the press (whilst working as a live-in-carer). Changing the world one ‘book filled suitcase’ at the time.
Self-Publishing Services
To keep our press running, we had to come up with a way to sustain it financially. This is why we started offering self-publishing services earlier this year.
We want people to submit their work with us only because they want to be a part of what we are building, not because they can’t find the right tools to publish their own work. We also want our focus to shift from individual authors to themed anthologies and community projects starting next year. We would love to only publish one or two authors a year under our press’s name. This doesn't mean we want to exclude all the other poets who dream of one day having a book of their own in their hands. This is why we have started helping them to design their covers and interiors and to help them with Kindle Direct Publishing. We charge almost nothing for our services compared to other professionals because we know how much it sucks to not be able to afford a designer or editor. That’s the reason Becks taught herself all her creative skills in the first place. You can find our services here. The money we make here goes straight back into the press.
Sustainability
Because we don’t get funding and all the bills at the press are paid from Beck’s carer’s wages, we use the print-on-demand system by Amazon. Some Instagram users have called this vanity publishing. We call this democratic publishing. Money should not determine who gets heard and who gets overlooked. Amazon is a company that we loathe, as it destroyed a lot of independent bookshops and treats its workers appallingly, but without it, we could not publish the books we published. We use our books to fight the failing system Amazon is a big part of and to us, that makes it worth working with them. We buy very little stock so that we don’t print more than we sell.
Inclusivity
Inclusivity and diversity aren’t just pretty words to us. Out of the sixteen poets we worked on individual books with, we have published 13 people who identify as women, 2 people from the LGBTQIA+ community, two chronically ill poets and poets with diverse backgrounds like the American, Canadian, Jordanian (with Palestinian roots), British, German, Dutch and people of Iraqi and Russian descent. We have told the stories of migrants, people from the African diaspora, chronically ill women and nurses. We hope to broaden the stories we tell in the years to come.
Like we said before: we are not in it for the money. We give all our new titles away for free on Kindle for a little while because we believe poetry should be accessible for all. Even people who don’t own a Kindle can download the Kindle app for free on their Smart phones and read our books for free on the device they already own.
I hope I addressed the main things in this post, but if you have any other questions, be sure to drop them in the comments and I will do my best to answer them as soon as I am able.