Self Definition
We are not a traditional, profit-centered business but a union of artists, writers and musicians operating under the aegis of the magazine 96thofOctober.com. Our primary purpose is to promote the work of those creators we represent.
Rights and Control
All authors retain rights to and control over their work, and receive profits therefrom directly. As a service to our authors, we may also list on our site works by our authors published by other presses, depending on their suitability for our list.
Conditions for Acceptance are as follows:
1) The 96th of October editorial staff approves the work.
2) The author’s work has appeared in 96th of October. This is easily managed, retroactively, since a book we accept can have an excerpt appear in the magazine.
We publish and sell our books through Amazon, with our logo on the title page, but the copyright remains exclusively the author’s The book will be made through Kindle Direct Publishing, and all royalties will go to the author. Copies of the book will be available to the author at cost. If you can interest a bigger publisher in your work, you will be free to place the title under contract with them. We think this a less likely scenario, because bigger publishers are not interested in books that are actually good, and thus unlikely to sell to a very wide demographic. And we stand behind our authors in perpetuity: we do not drop, pulp or remainder work because it did not “make margin.”
We will retain creative control of the cover and design, to ensure quality and uniformity: the appearance of the books represents us as much as the author. As much as possible, the authors taste and wishes will be taken into account.
Advantages
Since the Internet, and the waning of print as a primary entertainment medium, “success” on the old terms, measured in sales, is not possible for really good books. What is attainable and worth attaining is the esteem of those one can esteem.
We do not compete with the Goliaths of commercial publishing, whose narrow profit margin and bottom-line criteria precludes their interest in our sort of titles . Nor do longer established small presses have any advantage over us. With extinction of small bookstores, distribution is a dead letter: the vast preponderance of books are bought online. 96th of October gives our authors visibility. Through Amazon, we sell books every day from America to Australia.
The problem now posed for all of the arts is how to be found in the vast everyone talk/no one listen of the Internet. An enterprise such as 96th of October, which is not concerned with profit, is a new bohemia for the ingathering of creators and connecting them with the audience they have earned and who deserve them in turn.
96th of October is self-supporting through our own contributions. We do not accept advertising, do not indulge in the disgraceful practice of charging “reading fees”, and all profits from our books go directly to the authors. Commercial considerations never enter into our evaluation of a manuscript. There are assuredly bigger publishers, but none that can match us for cultural credibility or disinterested dedication to those we represent.
The Collective
Mildred Faintly: editor for all manner of fictions
Justin Brumby: poetry editor
Jocelyn Beckett: classics and ancient world editor
Ottilee O’Malley: East Asian editor
Seraphina Powell: LGBTQ and Eastern Europe editor
Jacob Rabinowitz: non-fiction and memoir editor
Frequently Asked Questions
What’s in it for you?
We get to keep some of your writing online in our magazine indefinitely. The risk of you’re taking your book to a larger publisher and “all our hard work” having been “in vain for nothin” is, sadly, a remote one. Print is no longer a primary entertainment medium, and big publishers want potential blockbusters, not the kind of quiry wonderful books that appeal to us.
What will you do to advertise my book?
Advertising is now irrelevant, unless you have a brilliant catchy ad you can afford to print across a whole page of a very big newspaper or magazine—and even then, results are dicey. Banner and pop-up ads for books on websites do less than nothing—people find them actively annoying. Ditto reviews.