Small Press Submissions
some reflections from the editor
As Erratum Fictions opens again to submissions I have been struck, once more, by just how many books are out there looking for a publisher. A good number of these would suit Erratum well, yet the press can only take on what it can manage, and what the press can manage is limited, on a very mundane level, by the amount of time that can be gathered together to run it.
As I wrote in review of It’s Tough at the Top, Erratum favours books that might be described as oddities, meaning, books that are peculiar in some way, and necessarily so. These books demand their form and have to be written as they are presented. They use the form of the book as an opportunity to think with, with the book understood as an exercise in thought and the activity of thinking here figured as an attempt to exceed what might, otherwise, be more easily and readily brought to consciousness. This is not to suggest that an author will be the master of their work, or will have deliberately produced it, or will have understood fully, or even remotely, what they have done and why they did it—actually those books where this is not the case are more likely to fall into the category of those that stretch perception and possibility. Lastly, these are often books which are written, perhaps self-consciously, within an era that has no time for such things and will only invest its system-energies in those books which do none of the above—the very books that Erratum is keen to avoid.
None of these statements will surprise anyone working in this area, and they remain at the level of guiding intuitions besides. As an editor I remain unclear about my own driving motivations, and as an author too, a similar uncertainty reigns. This seems to me a necessary and productive condition. Yet there are still some ideas that return around and take the form of orienting notions, such as the problem of maintaining thinking spaces, and at the local level playing some small part in something greater than the press. There is a living international network of intellectual activities and writing practices (with the word ‘intellectual’ here, for me, always placed in suspicion) that need to be sustained, and perhaps more urgently so when the institution that was once tasked with this endeavour, the university, is in a condition of advanced decay. Many authors and editors (not all, of course) will have benefited in some way from a university education (and certainly will be products or victims in some respect of their schooling), and this remains the case even if the institution only provided a model to rebel against or presented an example of what unhealthy (or unfruitful) intellectual work might look like.
Which is to say, writing at the periphery of this system will still be done in some kind of relation with it. Small presses and errant authors might still be dependent, if only now distantly, on the education system that they may know to be failing as it becomes increasingly stifling, becomes over-burdened by procedure and calculative thinking, and almost as if by accident becomes aggressive towards its outliers, those who exceed its habits of thinking.
An international community of writers and thinkers might hope to approximate, and do much better, and differently, and with much less resource, what an education system once facilitated, but it is likely to be even more marginal to a broader social system that cannot (will struggle to) register its existence. And this leads to another of the things I might do, as editor, which is to check in with a prospective Erratum author, to be a little discouraging even (as a conversational ploy), in an attempt to understand that there is indeed here a shared understanding of what this thing is—Erratum and similar presses are engaged in a marginal activity and the press itself is not hooked into those networks (is not able to pay for their grace) that are still trying to drive interest in books and provide the better known authors with an income of sorts (often conditional on their submission to its mundanities). And so, I have to say things like, currently it is an achievement for the press to keep the website running, pay for author and review copies to be sent out, pay the ISBN cartel for its absurdly cheap-to-produce product, and register each year with the most execrable British state for the protection of a limited liability company status (and pay its taxes).
Well, I don’t say quite these things, but the gist of it. Which is absolutely fine, in a way, given the commitment of the press to bringing books into existence that feel they need to exist regardless of any other calculation—which means not much need for Erratum to engage in that prejudicial arrangement known as the ‘author platform’ (though authors should know, it is the author platform which sells books, not the press, in a small press scenario). And presses will, and do, come and go. Some are run as collectives, others by an individual, and often it will be the heft of one or two people who maintain the thing around their other commitments, their writing, and the actual paid work they do (whatever that work might be and which might feel like a necessary but regrettable squandering of their energies). It is not to register a complaint so much as to recognise the fragile ecosystem that is in operation here. And if the humanities can manage one last thing before they exit the building, it might not be unreasonable to expect them to teach (and review and write about) a loose confederation of writers who seem, or so it seems to me, to have long carried on the work they have (largely) relinquished.