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This content “reblogged” here is by the venerable Mississippi architect Louis Malveney. He blogged in late January of 2012 and shared a fine set of photographs from the actual cottonseed oil mill in Port Gibson that inspired the fictional one in the story “Coin of the Realm,” the mill that Lawyer Ducat and Sterling Estep are trying to save. The commentary and content is from Malveney’s blog http://misspreservation.com/. I will be reading from the story “Coin of the Realm” after signing Some Kinds of Love: Stories at 5 p.m. tonight (7.27.2013) at Lorelei Books in Vicksburg.

Originally posted on Preservation in Mississippi:

The abandoned plant of the Mississippi Cotton Oil Company wasn’t on the recent Port Gibson Holiday Home Tour, but as I was wandering about before the tours started, I was drawn to the place, just north of downtown, like a moth to the flame. I’ve always been intrigued by cotton seed oil mills–the strange shapes of the buildings, the rusty metal, and odd protruding machinery and pipes running this way and that. I find the seed houses, with their distinctive steep roof and clerestory, especially compelling, but unfortunately, I don’t understand how the whole operation works together. I know just enough to be fascinated.

This 1994 article in Agricultural History, “Cotton Gins and Cottonseed Oil Mills in the New South” may be worth the $14 that JSTOR wants to charge me. And this 1948 Sanborn on microfilm at MDAH (and a little cleaned up on Photoshop) shows…

View original 514 more words

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Karen Brown interviews Steve Yates on Mississippi Edition, MPB Think Radio

Time perception is an extraordinary thing. My wife is always tickled to recall to me that when microwaves first came into offices and homes, people waiting on snacks and lunches eagerly watched the digital timers winding down, and many starving seekers would bounce on their toes and shout, “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” The microwave did not change how time passed, only how that passage was perceived. Being on radio will radically change how you perceive time. Linked here on Karen Brown’s Mississippi Edition on Mississippi Public Broadcasting, her interview with me starts at 18:05 and runs about six minutes. We talked for seven minutes tops. It is both strange and wonderful to be in the presence of a great radio interviewer, one with years and years of experience as Karen has. Kyle Kellams at “Ozarks at Large” on Fayetteville’s KUAF and Randy Stewart at KSMU in Springfield are this way, so poised, so smooth, so good at what they do, you (the subject; the interviewee) never feel unnerved, nonplussed, or ill-at-ease. In fact, so good are they in this universe bristling with microphones and levels and lit with sound boards, it is hard to imagine Karen, Kyle, or Randy outside this compressed, racing, time-ridden space of radio. I felt I was with Karen for not much more than thirty seconds. In what’s on Mississippi Edition here (the private prisons story and the Nissan story do bear weird conjunctions with my story about the Pig-Thrower of West Point, Mississippi) I am barely edited. I sat down, she welcomed me, and in thirty seconds it seemed we said goodbye. All I remember is laughing. Fastest and funnest six minutes of writing life, I am sure. Thanks, Karen Brown and producer Ezra Wall! Who knew time could fly like that?

Steve Yates reads the Green Tomato Marquesa’s Night of a Thousand and One Triumphs at Lemuria Books from Steven B Yates on Vimeo.

I have often thought about family, that embracing, nurturing metaphor, when I travel to visit the many Mississippi independent bookstores I serve for University Press of Mississippi. You can learn about this second family of mine by glancing through http://www.squidoo.com/Mississippi-Bookstores . When I think of Diane Shepherd at Main Street Books in Hattiesburg, or Laura Weeks at Lorelei Books in Vicksburg, or Mary Emrick at Turning Pages in Natchez, or Scott Naugle at Pass Christian Books, or Jamie Kornegay at Turnrow Book Co., the commerce we have conducted, the books we have shared, the whole enterprise of caring for one another and bettering the bookstore experience for customers takes on the deeply emotional tones and sentiments of family experience. It has its repetitions, its traditions, its rewards, even in some senses its ceremonies, this golden duty of traveling and helping book sellers. In the vimeo pasted above, I have to say I had to take a moment and recover, for John Evans had said what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed. I was quite moved to hear him say before my reading from my new short story collection, Some Kinds of Love: Stories, “Let’s gather up for Steve. He is sort of like family.”   

Promotions Manager Karen Fisk

Promotions Manager Karen Fisk

There are two stages I’m finally perceiving to the inception of a book, two distinct states of mind and heart.

Let’s call the first stage Offer It Up, and set its parameters this way: Everything has gone right. Cooperative author and enthusiastic publisher have communicated mutual and realistic goals. The publisher has bound handsome advance readers’ copies (ARCs) right on time and rushed them to reviewers and tastemakers. Books are beautifully printed, shipping through all distribution channels, poised on store shelves like speedboats sparkling in their slips. Then silence. Everything is in the hands of someone other than the author or publisher. Offer It Up, that awful hush in the two weeks before publication date in the catalog, grips the heart and mind.

Mark Harril Saunders, currently interim director at University of Virginia Press and the author of a much heralded 2012 spy novel Ministers of Fire (Swallow Press), described Offer It Up brilliantly. “It is as if I am in a foreign country, and I get the broken satellite phone call that tells me my wife has been rushed to the hospital back home and is going into labor. Everything I love most I am powerless to effect and aid.”

I have just passed through Offer It Up, but barely. And this shaky lack of faith–it’s my own fault. University of Massachusetts Press had masterfully found a way to get everything in place. In fact the whole success of the enterprise was building this baby up in my mind to really dangerous flights of grandiosity. Usually about all enterprises I am the pessimistic Ozarks fishermen: We will catch nothing and get wet and cold; that’s the forecast. But with Some Kinds of Love: Stories, I could not get that frame of mind.

487071_10200333619684583_90110182_nToo much was going right to don my “Eeyore über Alles” baseball cap. The collection of twelve stories was the eighth Juniper Prize winner, chosen and blurbed by the brilliant writer Sabina Murray. All twelve stories in the book were published somewhere that mattered: TriQuarterly, Southwest Review, Missouri Review, Western Humanities Review, and so on. Generous blurbs came in from Ben Fountain, Brad Watson, Steve Yarbrough, Tom Franklin, and Kim Harington granted me and Massachusetts permission to use something Donald Harington had written about my work as another blurb.

But in the hush of Offer It Up, so much agonizing doubt came in. I felt terrible for Massachusetts especially, in that even with the offset of contest entries paying for some of the print run, here these wonderful people at this outstanding fifty-year-old press had taken a risk on me, a big risk. And it appeared that no one in that all important, Imperial capitol of American literary taste-making, New York City, no one there would give a durn about this hick from the sticks, this oddball who has worked twenty years now in university press publishing and yet somehow writes (and dares to publish!) stories and novels. The audacity! An elf who wants to be a dentist!

Designer Sally Nichols

Designer Sally Nichols

Director Bruce Wilcox

Director Bruce Wilcox

Thanks to a quirk in my New York and New Jersey sales calls for University Press of Mississippi, I had a Sunday and Monday free to travel to Amherst, Massachusetts, and do something authors at small presses sometimes never can afford to do, meet the publishers face-to-face. What a blessing this brief trip was, but at the same time, it made me even more cognizant of the hush of Offer It Up, and how painful it was that so far no one in New York was taking notice.

Bruce Wilcox and I recorded this calm and sensible, even revealing vimeo, yet I was dying inside. I was so worried that his team and press had taken a big risk on me, and there would be no spark of recognition from anyone in New York.

Bruce Wilcox, director of University of Massachusetts Press, interviews Juniper Prize winner Steve Yates from Steven B Yates on Vimeo.

And yet, O Me of Little Faith, the very morning we sat and recorded those 19 minutes, Publishers Weekly, that mighty purveyor of what matters in publishing, a magazine and now also an online powerhouse that for twenty years I had read, even visited in person, and strived mightily to get our UPM authors in, that purveyor ran this review of Some Kinds of Love: Stories:

“In this sturdy story collection, Yates (Morkan’s Quarry) parades a cast of characters who, as diverse as they appear on the surface, have in common an underlying ignorance and mistrust of others. This trait manifests in a larger theme of historical prejudice in the “American Empire”, the setting of these tales which range in time from 1833 to the present. The memorable ensemble includes an aging gay bachelor disturbed by a series of burglaries in his rapidly declining neighborhood; a vocationally and romantically unfulfilled highway inspector who has an affair with an uncouth contractor; an insect-collecting fat fetishist dealing with conflicting feelings toward the married object of his affection; a disaffected Pakistani would-be terrorist in post-9/11 Jackson, Mississippi; and a slow pitch softball player who happens to be able to see the future. Contrary to what the title suggests, the stories are more about what love is not: misdirected lust and other complex, confounding desires; but also personal and professional ennui and a sort of general angst. Instead of getting their comeuppance though, Yates’s clueless characters get laid, get back together, or get a new SUV, which somehow rings true: good things happen to bad people, or more accurately in these cases, things happen to people. (May)
Reviewed on: 05/06/2013″

It is, I told UPM’s director, Leila W. Salisbury, who proudly and gleefully pointed the review out to me on Thursday when I was back in my office, it is an “out-of-body experience” to read what someone you do not know thinks of what you have taken years to write. But oh, what relief I felt as well. Offer It Up was over. The second stage of a book’s inception, The Out-of-Body-Experience of reception had at last begun. Someone had noticed.

Even more striking, I awoke this morning to find a new friend on Facebook, someone from my own hometown of Springfield, quoted my detective, Joe Voss, from the story “Hunter, Seeker” and posted that on my Facebook page followed by her assessment: “Brilliant, Steve, brilliant.”

Offer It Up is over, the hush has lifted, the mother has emerged victorious from the faraway hospital, the baby gives a mighty squall! I am so glad and relieved to know the brilliant work of the good people at University of Massachusetts Press will get its recognition, recompense, and epiphany. I’m taking this baby home!

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Q & A with Steve Yates author of

Some Kinds of Love: Stories (University of Massachusetts Press)

 

Steve Yates won the 2012 Juniper Prize for fiction, established in 2004 by the University of Massachusetts Press in collaboration with the UMass Amherst MFA Program for Poets and Writers, presented annually for an outstanding work of literary fiction. His collection, Some Kinds of Love: Stories, will be published by University of Massachusetts Press in April 2013. Sabina Murray, author of The Caprices and Tales of the New World among others, was the judge. The dozen fictions in Some Kinds of Love: Stories were all published in nationally renowned literary magazines such as the Missouri Review, Southwest Review, and TriQuarterly. One was honored by Richard Russo and the editors of Best American Short Stories 2010 as among the 100 Distinguished Stories of 2009. Another story was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Yates earned his MFA in writing from University of Arkansas. His first novel, Morkan’s Quarry, was published by Moon City Press in 2010. Yates joined the University Press of Mississippi in 1998, and is now assistant director / marketing director at the Press in Jackson, and lives in Flowood with his wife, Tammy.

Q: So Some Kinds of Love: Stories is a short story collection. It’s not the sequel to Morkan’s Quarry?

A: Right, these are twelve stories I wrote and published between 1990 and 2012. But, one of the stories, published originally in the Missouri Review, is really an adapted version of chapter two from the sequel to Morkan’s Quarry. So for any reader demanding to be back in the 1860s in Missouri with the Morkans, Some Kinds of Love: Stories has a taste of what’s to come.

Q: How many of the stories are about Mississippi?

A: The four longest stories are all set in Mississippi. Two in Jackson, one in West Point, and one, the longest, in Port Gibson. The other story set in the South happens in New Orleans.

Q: You’re from Missouri and have been in Mississippi now 15 years.

A: And before that in the Arkansas Ozarks for eight years.

Q: So do you think of yourself as a southern writer?

A: No way I can claim any of that great legacy. The Ozarks is not the South, and it’s not the Midwest. It’s the Ozarks, a border band of hills and mountains, and really the vanguard, Westernmost outpost of the American hillbilly. After Sallisaw, Oklahoma, and Joplin, Missouri, the continent flattens out, dries up, and becomes the West. The Ozarks is its own thing.

Q: Is there any such thing as an Ozarks writer?

A: Maybe. Donald Harington, Daniel Woodrell, Skip Hays, Speer Morgan, Paulette Jiles all come to mind. All of them are as wonderfully different as stars in the sky. So it’s not hard for me to conceive of an Ozarks writer and an Ozarks literature, but maybe it would be hard to categorize and teach an Ozarks literature. And of course most outsiders would sneer that “Ozarks literature” is an oxymoron, like “luxuriant outhouse.”

Q: When you write about Mississippi, did you feel a bar raised there? I mean, it’s not like Mississippi needs another fiction writer with Faulkner, Welty, Wright, Morris, Hannah, Nordan, Yarbrough, Watson, and now Jesmyn Ward from the Coast.

A: And a lot more besides them, too. I thought about that some, but in the end I figured here I am watching people work and love and fight and make fools of themselves and reconcile and raise kids. If a story hits me, let the literary journals sort out whether what I’m writing is worthy. And they did. All four Mississippi stories found publication, and one was even named among the 100 distinguished stories of the year by the editors of Best American Short Stories. I can’t really help where my job is. And I would also say that for a place that already has plenty of writers, Mississippi is incredibly welcoming to anyone writing. Outside of a graduate school writing program, I’ve never lived anywhere like it. With almost no prompting, people will openly tell you that they are writing and tell you what they are writing. Growing up, I would no more tell someone back home that I was a writer and what I was writing than I would try to sell them a UFO detector and a foil cap.

Q: You use a lot of humor in your stories. I mean, one is about a teenager who thinks he’s a performance artist and throws his family’s pigs over retail counters in West Point, Mississippi. Do you worry that Mississippians won’t care for an outsider making jokes?

A: For that story, I’ll risk some ire. The seed of that story was in the news of the weird—that associated press news feature that used to run on the wire service. A kiddo in West Point, Mississippi, had actually done that, driven around in the pit of night and hurled pigs across retail counters. In the Ozarks that would fit right in. He could have been from Buffalo or Marshfield or Sparta. Mississippians I work with were mortified that the nation, for one slow news day in December, was sharing that story far and wide. I proclaimed that the young man was a performance artist with a message heaved right at the heart of corporate America. There was considerable skepticism among my colleagues, but I couldn’t let it go.

Q: So some bored country kid throwing pigs inspired you?

A: A great performance artist! And I don’t believe in inspiration. Only obsession. I work fifty hours a week at a great university press. I have plenty of intensely fulfilling work. There’s no reason on earth for me ever to write a short story. But when something is an inescapable obsession, there’s really no stopping.

Q: Work does figure in a lot of these stories. None of your stories are about a struggling writer, or a student, or someone without a profession.

A: I do tend to write about people who are employed and whose worldviews are shot through with perceptions gained at work. One of the oddest things for me about contemporary American writing that tries to be literary fiction is this: people seem to have no discernible means of economic support in short story after short story, novel after novel. No jobs. Magic trust-fund babies do Portland! Whee! Americans are intensely defined by the work we do; few national workforces in industrialized countries work harder and longer and yet go back for more and say they love it.

Q: So that’s where we get the list on the back of the book—pioneers, limestone quarry owners, nurses, sex toy catalog designers, attorneys, missile guidance masterminds, librarians, highway engineers?

A: From age eleven I had a paying job, whether I was a gofer at Yates, Mauck, Robinett, and Bohrer, or at sixteen, a sportswriter for the Springfield News-Leader, I was doing something for a wage, and had big, black rings under my eyes. Even in graduate school in Fayetteville when there were no teaching slots, I surveyed highways in the summers and did construction inspection. Work matters to American life, and certainly to the Ozarks I know. I don’t think I could write a story about someone without a job. I mean, even Mrs. Bridge was affected by a job and really had a job, right? She was the wife of attorney, Mr. Bridge, and mother of three. She ran a household in Kansas City, and her leisure hours confounded her.

Q: Okay, that’s a lot about work, but the story collection is called Some Kinds of Love. What about love?

A: Well, the book is dedicated to my wife, Tamara Gebhart Yates, also of Springfield, for a lot of reasons. For a major inspirational reason in that she was the one who dared me to write a happy ending. Why in undergraduate school at Missouri State and graduate school at University of Arkansas in the late 1980s, early 1990s were we writing all these stark stories with fatalistic, inconclusive endings? Tammy hated that vogue and dared me point blank to think outside of it. And it ended up that each of these characters I invented found their struggle was with some aspect of love, how love did not work the way they demanded it to or the way venial desires led them to believe it did.

Q: So does everybody end up happy, happy, sunsets and holding hands? Who is this book for?

A: No, I can’t conceive that Hollywood, Disney outlook. Love is work sure as life is work. And I keep fretting that people won’t recognize that some books are for adults only. This book is called Some Kinds of Love, so people in the book will tear their clothes off and do terrible things to each other as surely as they may undress and do loving or merciful things that are nonetheless adult in content. My wife will sometimes ask when I fret about this, “People realize you’re not writing Hallmark cards, right?” Watching the public at my own book signings for Morkan’s Quarry and at book signings for University Press of Mississippi, my employer, I don’t know what people recognize any more. I think they are too busy sometimes, and find themselves somewhere with their kids, who may already have seen way more violence and depravity in movies and on television than I ever want to stomach.

Q: So the other stories set in the South, what are they about?

A: They are about all kinds of people—a terrorist cell member and a librarian who fall in love; three gay men in a love triangle, one of whom is stealing; a lawyer in Port Gibson who is losing his daughter and his town; a catalog designer for a company that sells sex toys.

Q: Sex toys?

A: Someone has to design those catalogs! The story is set in New Orleans. I wrote most of it one night while manning a book exhibit in New Orleans. I feel as if I’ve been in that city as often as I have been in New York for my work, and that’s a lot. From my hotel room, I could see people working, some pretty late, in a white, stone building on Saint Charles called The United Fruit Company Building. What are they doing, I wondered, working so hard and so late in a city that offers such a riot of dissipation and distraction? And they looked happy, too. It was office work, with PCs and Macs and modems blinking. They weren’t wistfully gandering at the street or rolling their eyes at the clock. And here I was, passing up a night’s frolic in the only foreign, carnival city in America to write all night until the last street car boomed home. And loving it.

Q: What does the title, Some Kinds of Love: Stories, mean? What’s it from?

A: Only a book geek would come up with a dream like this. As soon as I conceived of the title, since again and again love seemed to be what I was writing about, I realized something in Dewey decimal destiny might happen. There is a great short story collection, which all of us in creative writing programs have read and learned from, a classic. Now that University of Massachusetts Press has published this, there exists the distinct Dewey-decimal-system possibility that in some library where fiction is shelved the spines in a row will read Richard Yates: Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, and then a humble answer, Steve Yates: Some Kinds of Love. As a kid I was left alone for hours and hours on end at the Brentwood Library back home. It had a pronounced effect on me.

 

 

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For Missouri Writers Guild attendees

For those who attended my session at the Missouri Writers Guild Conference: Here you can review the webpages and links I discussed. Please note, the text of this talk below is geared to UPM’s presentation “How to Parse a Press,” which we make on the campuses of our eight supporting universities. So when I say WE or OUR or YOUR, I mean Mississippi, Mississippi faculty, or Mississippi readers. The links and the focus are substantially the same as you heard on Saturday morning, 4.27.2013.

I want to begin our talk, How to Parse a Press, with something about us, about University Press of Mississippi. How shall we parse University Press of Mississippi? Easy, we are your press, we are the Voice of Mississippi Scholars the bandwidth by which the eight state universities of Mississippi broadcast into the broader and ongoing discussion that is scholarship and scholarly publishing. Don’t believe me?

Well, here is http://www.upress.state.ms.us/thevoiceofms

HOW TO PARSE A PRESS?

On one of our campus visits to one of our eight supporting public universities we were answering faculty questions. I can’t recall what the question was, but a faculty member with a manuscript that was a business history of an agricultural company set me off on a jag about how he ought to look at University Presses more closely, ought to look up the Association of American University Press’s big clearing house of all our press websites, ought to make a list of presses with books he admired or recalled using in his research, and then market his manuscript to presses that do a great job with either business histories, agricultural topics, or both.

He said he had never thought of doing that, of choosing to market his manuscript, and choosing a publisher that he really wanted to work with.

This got me thinking that maybe on a future round of visits, Walter Biggins and I could both talk about ways to understand a press’s function, its core competencies, what it is by what it publishes and markets, and what it is by the markets it actually reaches. And thereby we might give some insight on how best to market your own projects to any university press within our association.

Walter and I are both published fiction writers, and so we are used to doing this kind of choosey marketing over and over again, reading in a lot of literary magazines and seeing how journals produce for their own kind of niche market. One might be formal, one experimental, one is filled with language poetry, another is devoted to short shorts, but only if they are set in Indiana. Happy and successful university press publishers are also niche producers. And since Walter and I work at a really happy and successful niche publisher of a university press, we can give you some perspectives from the inside of a press. So today Walter and I are going to talk about “How to Parse a Press”

The first place a university press ought to show customers its core competencies, the “what it does best” part of its identity, is right on the front page of the website. At http://www.aaupnet.org/index.php?option=com_contact&view=category&catid=7&Itemid=18

You’ll find links to all 134 member presses of the Association of university presses that have a website.

Here are a a couple of university presses that do good work showing you what they do well at the front page of their websites. Look especially at the column on the left-hand side. Those aren’t just navigation toggles so that you can find books. They are a statement of the core competencies of each of these university presses. The left hand column is often where a good university press with a well-designed webpage declares: THIS IS WHAT WE DO BEST.

Mercer

http://www.mupress.org/

Minnesota

http://www.upress.umn.edu/

National Academies Press

http://www.nap.edu/

At Mississippi’s maybe more than some others, http://www.upress.state.ms.us/ we’re very bold about what subjects we do well, our reason for being. These statements in the left hand column should be a guide to what each of these presses cares about right now. What are they looking for?

Drilling down into Mississippi’s categories you can find what’s upcoming, and what has already been published. While this may seem very basic to the veteran author, you would be amazed at how often writers approach presses with manuscripts that are nothing like what the presses are good at publishing. Presses have skill sets, core competencies just like any other manufacturer. And, since they have limited marketing budgets and a small labor pool in marketing, presses develop specialized sets of sales, publicity, advertising and promotional contacts, marketing skill sets if you will. Like any manufacturer, tooling up to do something entirely different, to sell a product unlike anything in the line will likely not be a success for the press or for the author. So investigating these categories is a great way to begin your research in marketing your manuscript.

Sometimes Press websites don’t reveal as much as we might like. So today, we have brought you copies of a chunk of a great little directory. This subject grid comes from the directory of the Association of American University Presses. Following the grid, you can discover a wealth of information about what presses have claimed specialties, have stated commitments to certain disciplines. Inside the directory as well, and I’m passing some of these around, is a wealth of information about each press. We’ll drill down into that here in a minute. And if you find that this chunk and what I mention from the directory is super helpful, well looky there, AAUP has extended you a special discount.

So let’s drill deeper with this tool and discover some things that you may not be able to discern at the website. At each directory listing presses again state what their specialties are, what disciplines they seek. They reveal who their editors and personnel are. I think that it is a good idea to see how many employees a press devotes to marketing, and what are their job titles. If no job title in a marketing department says anything about electronic marketing—which can mean everything from email flyers, to facebook, twitter, blogs—then you may ask how new media is engaged when you begin to talk with an editor.

The presses also reveal something you might never think about: How active, how busy they are. You want the very best for your book. What that very best means, you should determine. How active is a given press, how robust is its publishing program. Here in the directory presses reveal what you might otherwise have to work really hard at discovering: How many books are published each year. Now with the advent of electronic books, this number is becoming quite slippery and large. But let’s look at just a few of the presses we mentioned above and determine a number of books published per year, and another number to think about, the number of books per employee. We looked at Mercer, Minnesota, Mississippi, and National Academies Press. As you think about choices for your manuscript it’s good to note whether a press is robust, and to think about what kind of workload the staff is under. If the press has a low ratio of books per employee it could mean that your book will have plenty of attention. A very low ratio of books per employee would concern me, as it threatens stability if not sustainability in the current marketplace. A high number of books per employee can indicate a press that has the pedal to the floor and has its heart set on really shaping the conversation in a discipline. A really high number might be something to wonder about. Even professionals with honed skill sets have difficulties coping with a welter of competing priorities.

Let’s cover some more ways to learn about publishers. If you have spotted a couple of publishers that intrigue you, naturally follow them on facebook, or subscribe to their blogs, see what they are talking about when they tout their books. And a long look at a press website is certainly advisable. But I think it’s a great idea to go old school. Email the press and ask to be put on the catalog mailing list. Most publishers produce two catalogs per season. Looking at just one year’s worth of catalogs can tell you a lot about how committed a press currently is to a given discipline. In a minute Walter and I will parse two presses that fascinate us, and you’ll see what I mean. Presses have stated commitments but it’s a good idea to see how they really behave. It can reveal how many slots are offered in a given year, and that may let you know how eager a press may be to have your manuscript.

A little more about how robust a publishing program is. How many of you are familiar with Worldcat? http://www.worldcat.org/ Now there is even worldcat mobile for Android and Iphone. Use worldcat to see how far and wide a book was received by the library market. And turn this lens on the presses that you are scouting. Now in the age of electronic books combined with devastated library budgets, this number is becoming harder the grasp. But any number above 175 is a good reach. It’s free to sign up for worldcat and I encourage you to do it.

Ebooks should also be on your mind as you consider the outreach of a prospective publisher for your manuscript. I’ve passed around a white paper on where Mississippi stands. But how can you discover a press’s reach without asking. First on the website and in the catalogs that you have now signed up for, you will find “ebook available” listed here and there. Some presses, such as Mississippi, will list what ebook vending companies they sell ebooks to. Worldcat will let you know if an ebook is available. And some presses will print notice on the jacket of a printed book that an ebook is available. There are two ways to discover the breadth of a presses ebook publishing program in the two biggest consumer markets. Let’s go to Amazon.com and its advanced search function

http://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Search-Books/b/ref=sv_b_0?ie=UTF8&node=241582011

Also let’s look at Barnes & Noble.com

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/  

So let’s sum up how to parse a press quickly. In parsing a press, you’re really asking and answering a series of questions. 1) What is this press publishing? What disciplines does it specialize in? 2) How many books does the press publish each year? 3) How many books roughly in each subject per year? 4) How many people work there and what do they do? 5) What is the press’s reach, its significance? 6) How is it addressing the consumer’s demand for ebooks?

Walter and I chose two presses that fascinate us, and we parsed them for you. Walter tell us about Temple.

I chose Northern Illinois University Press.

FACT SHEET

NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS

6 employees

2 editors

1) Russian Studies, European History, Religion, History of Religion, and Philosophy

2) U.S. and General History, Literature, Regional Trade, and Asian Studies

Marketing is done through the University of Chicago Press, which also distributes NIU’s books

481 titles in print

33 books in 2010, 33 books in 2011

Editorial Program: US History, US Civil War, European history, Russian history and culture, history of religion; Southeast Asian studies, urban studies, women’s studies, studies on alcohol and substance abuse, regional studies on Chicago, and the Midwest, Midwest literary novels.

Special series: Drugs and Alcohol: Contested Histories; Orthodox Christian Studies; Railroads in America; Russian Studies

 

Fall 2012 catalog

NEW: 14 printed/15 ebooks

1 Trade hardbacks

5 Trade paperbacks

8 Short hardbacks

15 ebooks

 

REPRINTS / REISSUES: 3 printed

1 Trade paperback

2 Short paperbacks

 

SPRING 2012 catalog

NEW: 15 printed/12 ebooks

3 Trade hardbacks

3 Trade paperbacks

6 Short hardbacks

3 Short paperbacks

12 ebooks

 

REPRINTS / REISSUES

1 Trade paperback

6 Short paperbacks

 

PRESS WEBSITE

http://www.niupress.niu.edu/niupress/

AAUP’s UNIVERSITY PRES WEEK WEBSITE

http://www.aaupnet.org/events-a-conferences/university-press-week/university-press-week-2012

https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=216073455480332975290.0004cbcbd40261fed485d

Arkansas Literary Festival from Steven B Yates on Vimeo.

It was an honor to take Morkan’s Quarry (Moon City Press 2010) back to Arkansas and talk about it at the Arkansas Literary Festival. As I say in the vimeo here, Arkansas gave Tammy and me eight of the best years of our lives, at the writing program at UA-Fayetteville and at the University of Arkansas Press. It was also an honor to be introduced by Dr. Carl Moneyhon, editor of the great Portraits of Conflict Series. I was once his publicist.

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