Literary Hub Mulls Donations, Distribution in the Digital Age

Writer Deirdre Coyles's chance encounter with Kevin Bertolero at an upstate New York writing conference in 2014 was the beginning of an internet friendship that paved the way for Ghost City Press and even further adventures. More:

In the summer of 2014, I met Kevin Bertolero at a writing conference in upstate New York. As two of very few millennials at this particular conference, we immediately bonded over internet-related nonsense. This “nonsense” comprised DIY presses, independent literature, Twitter geniuses, and, of course, memes. Bertolero started telling me about his own idea for a press: a Syracuse-based organization designed to support local writers in upstate New York’s independent poetry communities.

I’d had a few glasses of wine over the course of this conversation. “You should make that happen,” I told him. “It’s a good time for DIY presses. Just do it.” I’m nearly a decade older than Bertolero, and for whatever misguided reason, he believed I was wiser. By the next time Bertolero and I saw each other, Ghost City Press had been born. Two years later, their catalog includes five full-length collections and nine chapbooks. The geographic range of their authors has expanded from upstate New York to across the US and Canada.

At the start of summer 2016, Bertolero devised the idea of a summer-long micro-chapbook series. Each chapbook would be ten pages in length, digitally distributed, and pay-what-you-can. Even more radical: 100 percent of the pay-what-you-can donations would go to the poets themselves. The project began with the intent to publish one micro-chap per week, but as the series began to take off, more and more authors expressed interest, and the series expanded to two or three releases per week. As of this writing, Bertolero’s series has produced 43 micro-chapbooks.

The micro-chapbooks began taking over my timeline on Twitter—and I was thrilled. I acquired micro-chap after micro-chap, because I knew ten pages could be easily consumed while taking a break from work, or while drinking my third cup of coffee, or while taking another break from work. If I didn’t know a given poet’s work, I downloaded the chapbook for free. If I was already familiar with them, I’d give a small donation. This was how I justified acquiring so many chapbooks on the limited budget I had for literature consumption.

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