about - sheer spite press

how does publishing or distributing work through sheer spite work?

what is sheer spite press?

Sheer Spite Press was founded in 2024 in Tiohtià:ke / Montreal to publish and distribute useful, generous, personal, political, funny, heart-filled works.

ordering from sheer spite

Thank you for considering buying from sheer spite press! It means a lot to me. Really.

If you have any questions about any of the things we sell, or about the press, or about zines in general, you can reach me at lee@sheerspite.ca.

Store policies

If your order hasn’t arrived, and it’s been a while, send me a message at lee@sheerspite.ca, and I’ll check into it for you! If you confirm that the shipping address you provided was correct, I can either send a replacement or issue you a refund.
If you’d like to cancel an order that hasn’t yet shipped, email me and I’ll cancel it and refund you. Once an order has shipped it can no longer be cancelled.
If you receive your order and something is weird or wrong or missing, let me know and I’ll do my best to make it right!
I am required to have a store privacy policy, which you can read here!

Wholesale

I’m happy to accept wholesale orders of things that are written by me and/or published by Sheer Spite!

Titles currently available for wholesale orders, and their pricing

For titles that we distribute, I am happy to pass along wholesale requests to their respective makers. If you’re interested in making a wholesale order, just get in touch at lee@sheerspite.ca.

Sheer Spite Press titles are or have been stocked at:

L’Eugelionne (Montreal, QC)
Drawn & Quarterly (Montreal, QC)
Mes pants de queer (Montreal, QC)
Coopérative de solidarité Agenda (Montreal, QC)
Venus Envy (Ottawa, ON, and Halifax, NS)
Riley Grae (Winnipeg, MB)
Another Story (Toronto, ON)
Atomic Books (Baltimore, MD)
Quimby’s (Chicago, IL)
Lion’s Tooth (Milwaukee, WI)
Woodland Pattern (Milwaukee, WI)

what kind of work do you publish?

Sheer Spite Press is open to submissions of both nonfiction and fiction writing, but is oriented more towards nonfiction.

I’m happy to put things out from people with some experience in zines and other types of writing, people who don’t consider themselves writers at all, or people who’ve put things out via traditional publishing but want to try out the zine format! If you have a story to tell but writing isn’t your thing, I can also interview you and help you write it up.

Here is a very messy list of attributes I like in writing, which I will refine over time:

I love to read, and would like to publish, people’s personal explorations of their lives, and how they got to where they are. I am especially interested in hearing about how people’s life experiences have shaped their values and vice versa. I like writing that gives a sense of breadth of ways that people can live their lives, especially ways that are non-traditional, marginalized, and that carve space outside of norms and expectations.

I am interested in the day-to-day details of people’s lives, and I like writing that is generous with emotional and tactile detail. I love smut and unabashedly horny writing! I am obsessed with friendship. I love learning about histories of radical movements and what it’s like inside them. I like to read about the joys of daily life. I like writing that is useful, instructional, or educational, that shares skills, lessons, or histories. I’m interested in survival skills in a context of mutual aid and community care.

Some dream topics I’d especially like to publish work about:

Memoirs and other writing by elders, especially but not exclusively 2SLGBTQ+ and/or disabled elders and people with histories of resistance, organizing, and activism.
Reprints and anthologies of older zines, esp centering around queerness, transness, disability, fat liberation, anti-racism, and organizing.
Friendship & how to place it closer to the centre of life. What it looks like to plan deeply and intertwine lives with your friends.
Reflections on communal & non-normative living arrangements like communes, cohousing, co-ops, land projects, punk houses, squats, etc, other non-Eurocentric and/or non-heteronormative ways of setting up a home and a life.
Special Topics In Organizing + Counterculture: 1960s/70s radical leftist bank robberies, informants in social movements, cross-movement solidarity work
Food, especially autobiographical, political, or reflective writing centring on food and eating and their place in life, especially in connection with any of the other topics on this list.
Survival and preparedness from an anti-individualist, anti-ableist perspective
Complicated and messy perspectives on disability, body difference, fatness, Madness, plurality, sickness, etc
Death & end of life care & planning
Experiences of incarceration and other forms of institutionalization
Quakerism! (I was raised Quaker and still have some degree of connection with it)

Sheer Spite Press commits to PACBI’s International Cultural Boycott of Israel.

get in touch if you want to talk!

how does publishing or distributing work through sheer spite work?

The press shares work in three ways:

Publishing work under the Sheer Spite Press name
Print zine and book distribution
Digital zine and book distribution

Full disclosure! I am just starting this and am making it up as I go along, and every part of this is open to discussion and modification by mutual agreement. Let’s talk about it!

1. publish with sheer spite

what i do

Help you to any extent you want with writing and editing
Design + layout for print, pdf, and ebook.
Pay the up-front cost of printing
Do book admin like getting it an ISBN, putting it on ebook marketplaces if you want that, and filing copies with Library and Archives Canada and the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec.
Sell your publication via this website, at events, and to bookstores and libraries.
Package and ship orders, assume risk of re-sending lost orders.
Provide the credibility of your book being published by a press rather than self-published, in case that helps you get grants etc. You and I both know this shouldn’t matter, but it does, so let’s work around it.

you get:

10% of the copies in the first print run to keep/sell/give, plus any other print copies you want, at cost.
75% of net profits from print copies after the cost of the print run is paid back, less payment processing fees, which are around 3%.
75% of pdf sales, less payment processing fees.

example:

I print 100 copies of your zine. Printing costs $300, $3/copy.
I send you 10 print copies for you to do with what you will. If you give 5 away to pals and sell 5 for $5 each, you make $25.
I sell print copies of the zine for $5. I have to sell 60 copies at $5 to make back the $300.
After those 60 copies and the 10 I gave you, there are 30 copies left. Selling each of those 30 copies for $5 produces a profit of $150.
Of that $150, you get $112.50 (75%) and I keep $37.50 (25%).
Meanwhile, we also sell 15 copies of the PDF version of the zine for $3 each, making a total of $45. You get $33.75 of this and I keep $11.25.
For this print run, you’ve made $171.25 and I’ve made $48.75, minus costs of payment processing.

2. print zine distro

I buy wholesale print copies of your finished zine/book.
I sell them at a sliding scale and mail them out to buyers. We can figure out the sliding scale pricing collaboratively, if you want!

3. digital zine distro

You provide pdfs of your finished zine/book (ideally a version set up to read on screen and a version set up to print).
I sell them at a sliding scale: We can figure out the sliding scale pricing collaboratively, if you want.
You get from 0-100% of all income (you decide), paid out quarterly or on request, minus costs of payment processing.

contact me if you’d like to collaborate!

about me:

Hi, I’m Lee! I started Sheer Spite Press.

I’ve been making zines for over a decade, and also ran a local zine distro in several Ottawa businesses for a couple of years, as well as co-organizing and co-running the Ottawa Zine Fair.

I started the press because I realized that I like helping other people get their work out even more than I like making my own stuff, and because I want to share the knowledge, experience, and relationships I’ve built through my own experience with DIY self-publishing.

I’m a white settler in Tiohtià:ke // Mooniyang // Montreal, originally from unceded Algonquin land. I’m trans. As someone whose mental and physical capacity varies a lot, my values and understanding of the world are deeply shaped by disability justice, and I aim to live and work in solidarity with those who are more impacted than I am by ableism and other intersecting forms of structural violence.