publishing

how does publishing work through sheer spite work?

Sheer Spite Press is both a publisher and a distributor. Which of these is right for you?

Publishing: I have a manuscript or an pitch, and I’d like your help with developing, editing, & designing it, and publishing it as a Sheer Spite title.

Distribution: I have a zine that I’ve already written and laid out. I want to know if you would be interested in buying copies of it to resell.

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!

Get in touch at lee@sheerspite.ca.

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.

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)

Things I am unlikely to publish

Sheer Spite Press commits to PACBI’s International Cultural Boycott of Israel, and I will not involve myself in anything contrary to the letter or spirit of that boycott. In general, this press is really strongly informed by my abolitionist, anarchist, transsexual, anti-colonial politics, so you’re not gonna have much luck with your book about how prisons are ok or whatever.
Poetry: sorry, it’s not my thing and I don’t know much about it.
Work written in an academic style
I am much more likely to publish nonfiction than fiction

I am one person and this is not my day job, so my capacity of what I can put out and the amount of feedback I can offer is pretty limited! Thanks for understanding.

Publishing 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.
70% of net profits from print copies after the cost of the print run is paid back.
70% of pdf sales.

Distribution with Sheer Spite

If you have a zine already written and laid out that you want me to consider for distribution, please fill out the form below:

contact me if you’d like to collaborate!

about sheer spite: