Contests, Submission Fees, and Lamar University Literary Press
Next month, I'll be heading over to AWP and speaking on a panel about book contests and small press publishing. I'm gathering together my notes for my little talk, and it's actually been a great learning process for me to think through some of the practices that Lamar University Literary Press has. I also realize that there's a lot of mystery and perhaps misconception about what happens at a university or literary press. How do we choose our manuscripts? How are we funded? What all goes into the process of making books? And who's involved? I thought a little blogpost might help shed some light on what we do, why we do it, and how it all came to be this way. Also, it will help me figure out what I want to say! First of all, the panel. We'll be talking about why we DON'T use contests to generate revenue and find manuscripts. I feel that, in the literary landscape today, we are far too reliant on the contest model for both the generation of income for s...