Massive lit love. Lost in Space. Fine company. And the Kristin Fouquet, who is so full goodness our heads just might explode.

Writer In Residence. Day Twenty-Eight. And more. Way more. Really.

Here. Here. Here. Here. And here. And on and on and on.

Lillis. Watch the Doors as They Close. And IndieGoGo.

The most awesome Karen Lillis has new novella, Watch the Doors as They Close, and a book tour to fund, at the IndieGoGo, and we think, you just might need to check it out, all of it, sweet.

CCLaP intersection spotlight thing Take One - Karen the Small Press Librarian.

With CCLaP's fourth anniversary rapidly approaching the center is receiving all sorts of well-deserved attention and adulation. In general, we couldn't be more excited about this, but we are especially excited because so much of the attention is coming from venues we quite dig, the first of which is an interview recently posted on the Karen the Small Press Librarian blog run by TBWCYL, Inc. favorite Karen Lillis. Now, how about some excerpt? Word.


How has the reception been for the e-books you’ve published so far? I’m not trying to single out your authors, but more to ask how you reached out and found an audience, and what you learned about how to find your readers in between Book #1 and Book #4.

When I talk to my friends who run more traditional basement presses about this subject, it looks pretty certain that in general terms, CCLaP is generating the same amount of paying customers from the ebooks as they are from their paper books, which as most people know is nothing to sneeze at but no great shakes either. The nice thing, though, is that since the ebooks are released under a "pay what you want" scheme, it means that our paying customers only make up around 25 percent of the book's total readership; and so if you're talking just about how many eyeballs the center's books are getting in front of, you can think of it in general terms of about three to four times the amount of a typical basement press. The biggest lesson I've learned so far about gathering an audience is that this stuff really does fall along traditional age lines to a great extent; so that is, whenever I publish a middle-aged author with a middle-aged audience, downloads of the electronic version are always smaller than a title by a twentysomething with a college-aged audience, even when that book will often generate the same amount of press and interest away from the internet. The adoption of ebooks is truly a generational issue, I'm slowly learning.

Some quite unexpected Karen the Small Press Librarian Repetition Patterns love.

The always awesome Karen Lillis has a way cool project going on at her blog Karen the Small Press Librarian where she is inviting indie writers to list their three favorite indie releases of the last two years. We have been working on our submission and were quite, quite geeked to see Repetition Patterns make an appearance on today's dual posting by long-time TBWCYL, Inc. favorites Ken Wohlrob and Tim Hall. Big thanks all-around some excerpt below, and look for our list soon, so, so soon.

"In many ways, Ben's writing reminds me of Mike's (Faloon) in how unforced it all is. There seems no effort behind it. And the stories are always great. This e-only collection was a nice step up for Ben. He took it to a whole different level compared to his previous work. And I always like that he writes good female characters, something too many male writers can't do very well. I also liked that CCLaP was experimenting with a different publishing model for this release and doing it as a digital- only release."

Confessions of a Book-Bagger. Karen Lillis rocks the JMWW.

The quite awesome Karen Lillis not only has a new serialized memoir happening at Undie Press titled Bagging the Beats at Midnight - Confessions of an Indie Bookstore Clerk about her days as a bookstore clerk at the quite awesome St. Marks Bookstore, but a quite happening interview about the project with TBWCYL, Inc. favorite and This Zine Will Change Your Life contributor Jen Michalski at the JMWW. Anyway you slice it, its goodness all-around, and we do love the goodness.

JM: So what came first for you—the idea for the bookstore tour or the idea for the memoir?

KL: The memoir idea came a few years ago, when I was in library school and all the 22-year-olds in my classes were saying that books didn't matter to them, that they were just "information containers" like any blog, e-reader, or PDF. I think my blood pressure went up during library school because of this ongoing conversation. The thought came to me, "Everyone I’ve ever loved, I related to through books." In 2007, I started keeping a notebook of book anecdotes, of my life spent with books, of my friends and loved ones and the books I associated with them. More recently I decided to make my book clerk years the parameters of the book—because St Mark's is so unique, and because those years were the ones most intensely lived with books. St Mark's was at the center of so many book-related friendships I made.

Cultural Tourism is an idea I have been really interested in ever since I found Larry Portzline online (maybe 2007), he invented Bookstore Tourism. Over the past few months, I’ve written about Small Press Tourism, Creative Tourism, and Library Tourism, and it was from these writings that SPF (Pittsburgh’s Small Press Festival) asked me to do the two tours.

This Self-Portrait Will Change Your Life, Week Forty-Eight - "Readings."

It is week Forty-Eight of This Self-Portrait Will Change Your Life, our most triumphant effort to post one self-portrait per week for one year and this week was filled work travel and readings in both Pittsburgh and Morgantown. It was big fun and we want to offer big thanks to Karen Lillis, Scott McClanahan, Savannah Schroll Guz, Craig Bernier, Jim McKay, the Te Cafe and The Bookshelf. We also want to be sure you know that one, you can follow this project in its entirety at the Flickr and two, you can see a self-portrait all your own right here at This Blog Will Change Your Life. Just hit us with one and we will take it from there. Really. We're good like that.

Pittsburgh. Morgantown. Winter Shorts. Guz. Bernier. Book reading madness.

We are hitting the road and we hope you will be joining us. On December 8th we will be reading with Savannah Schroll Guz and Craig Bernier at the Te Cafe in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh, and many, many thanks to Karen Lillis for helping us get this together, and then on the very next night, or if you prefer, December 9th, we will be reading in Morgantown, West Virginia at The Bookshelf. We expect that good times will be had by all. We also expect that these readings could very well change your life. So, having said that, can we also expect to see you there? Excellent.

The Blacksmiths for Literary Progress invade the annual Indie & Small Press Book Fair this coming weekend. For real. So, please go, cool? Thanks.

We wanted to let you know that The Blacksmiths for Literary Progress will have a table at the 21st Annual Indie & Small Press Book Fair this coming weekend in the New York City (details below) and will be featuring new books and zines (and possibly old lamps, used furniture, and rusted cutlery) from a number of wonderful writers including Brian Cogan, Mike Faloon, Tim Hall, Karen Lillis, Ken Wohlrob and TBWCYL, Inc. spokesperson Ben Tanzer. There are also some free books to be given given away so please do stop buy, say hello and take home some damn good independent lit. Cool?

Time and Place

Saturday, December 6, 2008, 10 AM - 6 PM

Sunday, December 7, 2008 11 AM - 5 PM

Location

The New York Center for Independent Publishing

20 West 44th Street (between 5th and 6th)

New York, NY 10036