Sunday, November 14, 2010

The Idiots' Guide to Publishing


The New York Times' Paper Cuts blog interviews Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr, founders of Idiots' Books.

From the piece...

Q.

You’ve created a very successful indie publishing business. Why a commercial venture?

A.

Matthew Swanson: Our policy is to say yes to almost everything. I’m fascinated to see where this goes, since we’ve never submitted anything to publishers or solicited them. We just sit here and send our books out. That’s a part of the experiment I’m enjoying, to see how far you can get without doing anything.

Robbi Behr: We’ve never been against doing commercial work. We’ve just never had the time to market ourselves to a real publisher. We love what we have going on the grass-roots level and wouldn’t want work that we do for the big bucks to interfere with our subscribers!

MS: Our ideal model would be to do occasional commercial books for children that possess our style and our humor and our weirdness, and to have those make money so we can keep creating our pure art books for adults without financial pressure. Our Idiots’ Books series supports itself. It doesn’t make tons of money, but it doesn’t need to make any more money than it does.

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