Saint Louis Projects: AWP Highlights

2012 AWP Conference and Bookfair

Photographic highlights

JKPublishing and SLP have had a crazy couple of weeks, due both to the enthusiam of our supporters and our tendency to procrastinate. Last spring, we entered a panel proposal for the 2012 AWP Annual Conference and Bookfair. We learned that the AWP accepted this panel in August. We didn't start preparing for the panel until January. That's where you came in.

The Grand Supreme Ballroom at Hilton Chicago. Now serving "4th meal."

After certain outside funding options failed, we gave ourselves 3 weeks to throw a fundraising party and raffle in order to get ourselves to Chicago. You responded so kindly, with enthusiasm, your gifts and art. We had such a kick-ass selective raffle that strangers were coming by to participate.

The raffle that sold 200 tickets to around 45 people.

I thanked you all specifically in the last blog post, so I will thank you generically but emphatically now. Although I won't post our press's exciting plans for the future until the next blog, let me say that going to this conference has exposed us to so many inspiring people and presses. They have lit a fire under us; they have challenged us to get better. And because you believe in us, you are helping us to get better.

to be continued after the jump--

New business cards

A week later, we hopped on the Megabus from St. Louis to Chicago. We had fresh new PR materials to fold (brochures) and punch out (business cards), a couple of bags of books, and no idea what we were getting into.

We discovered that we are a very niche product in the extremely vast world of American publishing. It's hard to imagine everything and every person that is involved in writing words or making print in the US--that is, until they are all gathered around you. That is the function of the AWP conference: to frighten, goad, overwhelm, inform, and inspire with sheer numbers and common display of ingenuity.

After a little bit of sight-seeing in the parks between downtown and Lake Michigan, we met up with our panel moderator Colleen McKee and Behnam Riahi, publicist for Criminal Class Press. Although Winnie Sullivan of PenUltimate Press couldn't make it, we had a great discussion amongst our remaining panel members about the logistics of running and promoting a small press in the digital morass.

The next morning, we hit the conference at Palmer House Hilton to attend a panel on publishing literary magazines and chapbooks. We met quite a few like-minded people and presses, taking notes on advertising tools, small press organizations like the CLMP, ways to mesh the handmade with the digital, and new binding and packaging techniques. After lunch, we had our panel discussion on small press marketing strategies. We were shocked to see the gigantic grand ballroom in which the AWP had placed our panel.

The ornate vastness did little to calm our nerves, but as the 40+ attendees trickled in, PR mode kicked in. We filled the few minutes before the start of our panel with selected readings from Colleen's chapbook. We are ever the promoters, and it didn't hurt to demonstrate our marketing techniques to those in attendance. (A large part of our marketing strategy? Talk about the press. Talk about the authors. All the time. Even if you aren't quite convinced your audience is interested. You may be surprised).

The view from the podium.

Colleen had prepared a list of questions about unique promotion techniques that each of our presses had utilized. We discussed doing readings in prison gear, headlining a release party with a firebreather, sharing a bill with rock bands. We talked about small bookstores acting as allies, with larger chains perhaps serving as impediments. The audience was responsive and inquisitive. We sold quite a few books in the time after the panel.

We spent the rest of our time at the AWP garnering small press contacts; attending panels on fundraising, prison lit programs, and female Jewish writers; roaming the vast underbelly of the hotel's display halls to peer over countless book vendors' wares; talking to grad students about interning; finding women writers to submit to Bad Shoe. We danced with AWP nerds. We went to an amazing chapbook store in Wicker Park (QUIMBY'S! It's amazing!) where we found materials I had left there 3 1/2 years ago (and made $3 too!). That night, we also went to an offsite reading for Write Bloody Press at the Elastic Arts Foundation. We heard some amazing performance (and writerly) poets, among them our own Jon Sands (whom we published back in the early days in Athens, OH).

All-in-all, folks, it was a blast. I'll leave you with a few more pictures, and also the promise that I will tell you all about what this means for the future for JKP and SLP in my next post. A few teasers? A new, modern website. A Kickstarter campaign. A way for us to go full-time and get out of the restaurant biz. It is so very possible.