(Video ID: a white person with short, reddish hair and gold-rimmed glasses sits before a bookcase and speaks. /end ID)

Transcript: Do you ever get tired of reading and editing so many stories?

Yes.

Do you read through a lot of slush, or does working with fanfiction authors gain you a higher quality of submission to wade through?

These questions were asked together, I do think they go together. We don’t read slush per se. We don’t accept submissions that are complete, so we don’t end with a slush pile. Instead, we have samples. I definitely find reading through samples when we take applications to be A Lot. It took me like 20 hours to read through the applications to our most recent anthology, Beyond the Galactic Tide, which is ace stories in space. Excited for that one.

But, you know, when they’re all… When they’re all really good, it’s one thing, but the… it, it, it’s funny cause I’ll get, I’ll get a – you know – we randomize them, so I’ll get a string of ones that aren’t what I’m looking for. Usually because of technical issues. Like, you know, we ask people to submit something that they think is up to snuff, and if there’s pretty obvious grammar, technical, spelling, punctuation kinds of issues, that’s not what we’re looking for. And so, I’ll read several of those, and I’ll be like… oh… nobody gets it… we’re doomed… I hate this…

…and then I’ll read a good one, and then it’ll be like. Someone can do it! People can really do it! It’s so worth keeping going. I just need to find more just like this.

So that part can be really fun, when they’re good.

In terms of editing overall, I think I could happily edit endlessly if it was the only thing that I needed to do. The problem is I struggle with switching tasks a lot. I’m neurodivergent. My diagnosis is ADHD but I’m probably AuDHD. But if I do, like, eight 5-minute tasks in a day, I’m like, useless for editing for the rest of that day. Like, my brain just won’t do it. And so when I’m really busy, as I have been the last few months, it’s really hard to edit at all. And it’s not because I don’t like it, and it’s not because I get tired of it, it’s just because my brain is like “nope, we’ve done enough tasks for one day, we can’t do more.” So that can be a challenge, especially when we’ve got a lot going on.

But do I get tired of it? No. No, I get tired of everything else. I wish I had less of all the other tasks. But I think I’ve got some other asks to answer about that, so we’ll come back to that one.

Thanks for listening to this “Ask Me Anything” for Indie Press Month. I’m Claire from Duck Prints Press signing off for another day.

(Video ID: a white person with short reddish hair and gold-rimmed glasses sits before a bookcase and talks. /end ID)

Transcript: This time the question is, what advice would you give someone wanting to start up a project like Duck Prints Press, ie a small press with a targeted demographic of authors?

Hmm.

I would say, first of all, you need to be really be a member of the community that you’re trying to quote-unquote serve. I mean, I’m doing this because I’m a fan author who wanted to publish my original work. That’s why I opened a press that works with fan authors to publish their original work. Like. I wasn’t, it really kind is doom to fail when it’s, you know, “I’m a disruptor coming in from the outside. Hey fellow kids! Let’s publish your fanfiction” or whatever niche it is. Let’s publish your queer fiction. Let’s, you know, let’s work with 19 year olds. I don’t know. Whatever niche you’ve chosen, it’s gonna be really weird in a lot of ways if you’re coming in as an outsider and thinking that you understand these people better than they understand themselves.

I’m not… I’m not an outsider. I’m working with the community that I’m a part of and that I’ve been a part of since 2008. Though I didn’t start posting fanfic til 2015, but that’s moot. Like, I’ve been in online fandom since 1994 in one flavor or another. You know, when – so yeah, I would say that you need to – it needs to be a, like… I hate to say it needs to be a passion project, but it does kinda need to be a passion project in my opinion. Because you’re not gonna – you know, we’re not. There’s no investors. There’s no outside money, really. My mom helped get this press off the ground. And I’m lucky to have that support, to be clear. But, like, you can’t… there’s no big money to be made. You gotta be doing it because it’s something you believe in and it really is gonna be hard if you’re not part of the community and don’t know what that community is like. I won’t say it’s impossible, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

Okay, I’ve probably belabored that point enough. What else? Uhh…

Yeah, I think that’s my main advice. Also, just expect it to build slow. You know, it’s taken five years for Duck Prints Press to get to the point it’s at. Right now, our, you know, annual money in is about the same as, like, an average middle class job would earn a person in a year, and that’s the entire business. I’m finally getting paid, by which I mean I take one to two hundred dollars a month for working more than full-time hours and every day. I mean, like, I have like one day off a month and it’s usually because I’m, like, doing stuff with my kids, not because I’m at home resting.

So that’s why I say it kind of has to be a passion project, because there’s no way to do this without working your butt off. Either you’re gonna have a full-time job doing something else, and this is your side gig, or this is gonna be your full-time job, but you’re not gonna get paid very much. And it’s gonna take, you know, short of really incredible or, like, weird miracle outside investor, it’s just gonna take a huge amount of time and effort to really get anywhere. I mean, I’ve been doing this for over five years now, and a lot of the people who I met who opened small presses right before/around when I did, a lot of those are closed. Because it’s just super, super hard to maintain.

So yeah. Don’t expect it to be easy, work with community you know, be prepared for it to consume your life, which is probably true of any small business. If you are thinking of doing something like and you’ve got specific questions, do feel free to contact me. God knows, I’ve learned so much through trial and error, you have to be a jack of all trades to do this.

Yeah. I think that’s about it. Feel free to drop me questions. Thanks. Bye!

(Video ID: a white person with short reddish hair and gold-rimmed glasses sits before a bookshelf and talks. /end ID)

Transcript: This is a long question so bear with me.

I’d like to hear about some of the structural challenges that make it hard for indie presses to compete with trad pub. For example, I know distribution is a huge challenge and that the big five have the advantages of ordering bigger numbers and they can eat losses more easily because they usually have a handful of massive hits that help them absorb risk. I feel like there are a lot of invisible barriers that readers and authors don’t get to see.

Uh, yeah. I would say the ones already mentioned are big one. Getting a distribution deal is very very challenging for an indie press alone. I haven’t even tried yet. Of all of the indie press people I know, exactly one has managed it. He was trying for years. He finally did it last year. He was this close to giving up because it was that hard.

I think that, in some ways it almost ends up comparing and apples and oranges. It’s very easy to look at a small press like mine, and look at a big press like, you know, Harper Collins or Penguin or whatever, and go, “You’re in the same business.” But it’s actually kind of not. What I do is extremely different because I don’t have access to the advertising budget. I don’t have access to bookstores. I have to expect to bring in customers, readers, people who like merch, all of that, you know those people are getting brought in by completely different channels. I’ve only paid for advertising, I don’t know, maybe a dozen times, and it’s pretty much never helped. Whereas, you know, the new big release from the big five gets billboards in New York City and movie deals and all of that.

I would say that it’s apples and oranges to some extent because we’re really almost not doing even close to the same thing. Sorry, I’m just checking what else it said.

Obviously, the risk, obviously ordering higher numbers. I’m a little alarmed by how popular, like, the really fancy hardcovers with the sprayed edges are getting, because in order to even attempt to get into that market, you have to be looking at minimums of 500 lots, usually coming from China. And most of our books don’t sell 500 copies, at least not initially. Like, I can’t afford that upfront, and even if we sell 200 in a Kickstarter, what would I even do with the other 300? I run this business out of my home. Our books are stored in my basement. Like, I can’t afford a storage unit to keep this stuff. I can’t afford to front huge amounts of money for a larger print run with fancier features. So I’m really hoping that stuff like that doesn’t become the norm because it’s gonna make it a lot more challenging.

There’s also a lot of gatekeeping from multiple ctors. I run into traditionally published authors who won’t even consider indie press as, like, their equals because we didn’t jump through all of the hoops of abuse that one has to be prepared to endure in order to be traditionally published. That must mean we aren’t as good writers, or something. I know I’m perpetually annoyed with Publishers Weekly, who when we tried to get them to do a deal announcement for us, which is a service that they offer, and I believe it costs money for an announcement, it wasn’t like we were asking something for nothing, they said that they couldn’t do that because we are a vanity press.

We’re not a vanity press. That’s complete bull– I’m not supposed to curse, bleep that out. We’re not a vanity press. We don’t take money from our creators. I’ve never taken money from a creator and I never would. We just crowdfund because we don’t have the capital and the investors to cover getting everything done ahead of done and hope that it sells. It’s really frustrating how a lot of sort of traditional publishing streams, even when they’re not tradpub themselves, like someplace like Publishers Weekly, are really not interested in recognizing and supporting new ways of doing these models, given – by which I mean publishing models – given the tools and resources available.

It’s much like everything else, they’re really trying to make it a rich person’s game instead of an industry that, you know, an average middle-class person could potentially break into as a small business.

Anyway, this is already getting long. I could probably keep going. But yes, there are a lot of barriers. But I think we get around that because of the apples to oranges thing. I’m not trying to do what they’re doing. I don’t want to do what they do. I want to do what we’re doing. And that’s part of why I opened a small press – to do things differently.

Ask me anything. I own an independent publisher. Bye!

(video ID: a white person with short reddish hair and gold-rimmed glasses speaks while sitting in front of a bookcase. /end ID)

Transcript: Question today is – why did you (me) get into doing this specifically? Which is to say, running an indie press focused on publishing the original work of fanfiction authors?

So, when I started doing my own original fiction writing and publishing, I had to learn a huge number of skills to self publish. And it seemed really wasteful and counterproductive to learn all of those skills only for myself and to note share. It’s like every single self-published author has to reinvent the wheel in a lot of ways and that seemed really silly to me.

And the same time, I was getting into writing fanfiction as a sort of tension release and I was meeting all these really awesome, amazing people who, for various reasons, wanted to publish their original fiction, but found that the barriers to doing so were too high. Either they weren’t enough of a jack-of-all-trades to learn the skills, or didn’t want to learn the skills involved in self publishing, or they didn’t want to market, often because of privacy concerns. You know, there’s the idea that, you know, you have to be your own marketing department to publish a book. Well, there’s a lot of reasons people can’t do that, quite aside from not wanting to do it. There are reasons they can’t do it, especially when we’re talking about queer authors and queer fiction.

A lot of people have challenges that make it difficult to stick with a specific schedule and meet deadlines – including me, I have a lot of those challenges. Such as physical disabilities (which I don’t have, but many of the authors I work with do – and artists). Mental disabilities, mental neurodivergence, mental illnesses, like, for me, I have depression. And of course, also, life commitments. Many people are caring for elderly family members, or caring for disabled family members, or caring for children, or doing multiple of those. I know I have two children, and I also – my father also lives with us. So, there’s – you know, the more complicated someone’s life is, it harder it can be to go in a traditional publishing, but that doesn’t mean that our life dreams of publishing original work have gone away. And so I wanted to make this because I’ve met all these amazing, really skilled people, and I wanted to help us all accomplish our dreams. Including my own, which has also always been to be a published author. And, you know – we’re – we’re doing it, and that’s really really exciting.

So if you have any questions for the owner of an indie press, I own Duck Prints Press, queer fiction, queer creators. Everybody was originally a fan creator. Feel free to hit me up with questions! Bye.

(video ID: a video of a white person with short hair and glasses sitting in front of a bookcase, talking. /end ID)

Transcript: My next question is what about being an indie press is the most rewarding?

The people. Yeah, hands down. I mean, I’m an introvert, I sometimes find all of the peopling involved in this job to be rather exhausting, but the community of authors and artists with whom we work is amazing and helps keep me going every single day. The community of people who I’ve met who are doing similar things, whether they’re other indie press people or self-published authors, and how hard we all work and how much we all want to lift each other up – it’s not a competition, it’s “how do we grow the pie for everybody.” And the readers and even just the supportive non-customers, just everybody, like, you know, “I don’t have any money, but what you’re doing is really cool.” Or, “this isn’t the one I’m interested in but I can’t wait to see what else you do.” And of course, the people who are like, “I read the book and it’s awesome” or “this piece of art is amazing, I need the sticker. Obviously, you know, every version of that is the best part.

I do this for the people. I do this because I wanted to be a writer but I didn’t want to do it alone. And, I don’t have to it alone and that’s really great. Thank you, everyone. You make this awesome every day.

I’m Claire. I’m doing an Ask Me Anything. Uhhh…hit me up if you’ve got anything you wanna ask me! Bye!

(video ID: a white person with short reddish hair and gold-rimmed glasses sits before a bookcase and speaks. /end ID)

Transcript: So I got this question as an ask on Tumblr, and I have been trying to do the math on it ever since. And the question is, how many ducks have you personally printed?

And that is a really tough question. I think it hinges on “personally” and “printed.” So if you mean, me myself with my own printer, probably a few hundred. I put them on things like address labels and those I print myself. Alternatively, if you don’t get caught up on “printed,” for an event I did a year and a half ago I did cut out roughly 150 construction paper ducks. Those I most definitely made all myself. If you don’t focus on “personally,” in that i’ve paid vendors to print them… thousands. Because of all of the different duck stickers, we’ve got several covers that have ducks, most of our back covers have our logo on it, which as a duck. It’s on, like, all of our title pages, so yeah. If we go with that one, we’re… we’re well into the high thousands I would think.

So, yeah. How many ducks have I personally printed? A whole, whole lot. There are many more ducks in the world than you’re used to be because of me. You’re welcome. Bye.

[Video ID: a white person in glasses with short, dark hair talking while sitting in front of a bookshelf. /end ID]

Transcript: Have you thought about producing audiobooks for your anthologies?

Yes, we have. We have not only thought about it, we are working on it. I don’t have the audio rights to most of our anthologies. This is on purpose. I do not request rights in our contracts that I do not expect to use imminently. This protects our authors and gives them more options but it does also make it more challenging when we want to branch out, because then I need to request those rights separately.

Currently, the only book I have the audio rights for – only anthology I have the audio rights for – is Add Magic to taste, which is our first debut anthology with stories cozy stories set in magical tea shops and coffee shops featuring queer characters in relationships that are growing, developing, and changing.

I am contracted with a person to do the audiobook. It should be a work in progress, though we have been having some delays. I also have cards for two other people who have approached me and said, “I do voice recording.” Actually, no – three other people who have approached me and said, “I do voice recording. I would love to do an audiobook if that’s something you’d be interested in.” So, if we continue to have issues with the current set up, I do have options.

The plan is to try to do it on a shoestring. Obviously, the narrator still is gonna get paid. But, you know, to keep it on the less expensive end. Audiobooks are expensive to make, and don’t tend to have a huge audience. Most people who do listen to them get them through a library. And so they’re not money makers. Most people in indie publishing who I know who have done them have lost money, and so I’m trying to get us set up in a way that’s prepared for that, basically. Which is to say I expect to lose money on it, but I still wanna do it.

So, yeah. It’s in progress. Sometimes take way longer than I think they should, and this particular project has had several setbacks. The first narrator we spoke to ended up withdrawing, because they wanted to work on other projects. Like, it wasn’t a dispute, there was no animosity on either party, it was just like, eh, I’m not gonna do this after all. Okay, have a good one, thank you, you know? But, yeah, it’s – we’re working on it. I want it to happen.

Feel free to drop me any asks you might have. I own and operate an indie publisher and I’m here to help. Bye!

Ever wondered how Duck Prints Press picks our anthology themes? The answer is…we don’t! Our Patrons do! Any backer on our Patreon, from $3/month on up, gets a say – and the current poll to pick our next theme is running right now!

Our twelfth anthology will be the second erotica collection. Our first, Many Hands: An Anthology of Polyamorous Erotica, crowdfunded over the summer and we will be completing campaign fulfillment within the next week, with the book to become available to the general public in mid-fall.

For this new set of short stories, we first chatted with folks on our private Press Discord, then the Press staff narrowed that down to a few specific ideas, and now we’re at the last step – where everyone who supports us gets a say!

No matter the outcome of the vote, our next anthology will feature…

1. stories about explicit sex with non-human creatures, monsters, and the like;
2. fully consensual liaisons;
3. unconventional genitalia (not required by highly encouraged);
4. happy endings; and
5. queerness!

But that’s not narrow enough to make an interesting thematic collection of stories, so that’s where our backers (and, perhaps, you!) come in. What are the choices for specific themes that are being voted on?

• cottagecore (but explicit and with monsters!)
• courtship and mating rituals (“how to woo your human”)
• underwater settings and underwater creatures
• your friendly neighborhood cryptid
• ye older high fantasy monsterloving (fairytale/folklore/mythology-inspired encouraged!)

Honestly, I’m glad I don’t have to pick, because it’s a damn tough choice – they all sound awesome. But pick we must, and one will become the theme for our next anthology.

Already a backer? Don’t forget to vote! Not yet a backer? Become one today!

This Saturday, November 25th, is Small Business Saturday! Duck Prints Press is offering our best coupon of the year – 25% off, no other purchase necessary! Looking to shop small this holiday season? Check out Duck Prints Press, the fan-created independent small press that publishes the (usually extremely queer) original work of fanauthors and fanartists. We’ve got great gifts for the queer book lover in your life, including anthologies, short stories, merchandise, and more. And, of course, we’ve got lots of adorable merch featuring our adorable Dux mascot, too!

This coupon was created for our newsletter subscribers… but there are a couple sneaky ways to get it even if you’re not a subscriber. Want to grab this discount for yourself but didn’t get to subscribe to our newsletter in time? Well, don’t despair – there’s still two ways you can get in on the savings!

You can…

…back us on Patreon, and get access to this coupon and additional coupons you can use all year round!

…join our Book Lover’s Discord Server, and get this coupon, a lovely place to chat with fans who love books, and access to Discord-exclusive events like Ask Me Anything sessions!