Publishers Weekly Interviews Joe Pan, Founder of Brooklyn Arts Press
Brooklyn Arts Press saw a surge in attention this year, with the publication of Daniel Borzutzky's The Performance of Being Human, a collection that went on to receive the National Book Award in November. Publishers Weekly interviews Joe Pan, who founded the small press in his apartment in 2007. Pan is straightforward about the costs of entering a book into literary award contests: “'When I make a decision to submit a book to a prize like this, it [costs] around $125,' Pan said. 'Some of our books cost $800 to produce,' he added. 'So it’s the difference between using a quarter of the funds delegated to another book to send a book out for a prize, or just holding onto that money and using it for the next book.'”
John Maher and Pan discuss the importance of small presses to the poetry world: "There’s a huge new wave of small publishers our size that have been working under $20,000 a year to produce what I think of as the poetry of the future," he says. More:
"We get to take risks that big publishing houses don’t,” he added. “If something is crazy wild and experimental, I don’t have to sell 5,000 copies of it to validate its existence.”
One National Book Award for Poetry later, that strategy seems to be working just fine, but it was a long time coming. Pan began publishing the works of friends and others in 2008 and 2009, when he was also the codirector of a small art gallery. (The press, ever eclectic, also publishes art books and monographs; it will put out a rock album in 2017.) In 2011 and 2012, after the worst of the recession had finally subsided, Brooklyn Arts began ramping up, publishing between six and 12 books per year—fiction, poetry, essays, and anything else Pan wants to publish. Some years, Pan was sifting through 800 submissions, with only his wife, Wendy, and the occasional intern or for-hire reader or publicist to lend a hand. Pan handles publicity, marketing, design—everything—pretty much on his own.
It’s a labor of love, but a full-time one. Pan has no day job, and his work for Brooklyn Arts routinely takes up the bulk of his weekends. “I take on editing gigs when I can,” he said. “I teach a Brooklyn Poets class once a year.” (Brooklyn Arts will publish the forthcoming Brooklyn Poets Anthology, edited by Pan and Brooklyn Poets founder Jason Koo, in 2017.) Some of the struggle has been diminished by digital publishing and by the availability of POD. “Digital publishing has changed publishing,” Pan said. “It allows people like me to exist. I can create something, I can put it into InDesign, I can upload it as a PDF, and suddenly, I can get it to anybody.”
And while Pan still relies on his printer, McNaughton-Gunn, for major print runs, he turned to POD to meet the immediate demand for Performance, and after being sold out the book was up on Amazon again in three days. “If it wasn’t for that, I would have lost thousands of dollars in sales,” he said—although POD’s utility won’t stop Pan from using traditional printers. “It’s important to do both, and it’s important to me that places like SPD , which are helping out small businesses like mine, get their money. It’s important that we utilize these places that want to help us.”
Read all of this conversation (or all of it that made it to print) at Publishers Weekly.