A few hours after the initial post at The Bark, Gatza announced he'd be discontinuing the pay-to-publish practice. A couple hours after that, he announced that he's closing the press at the end of the year.
What.
People immediately started jumping all over Brett Ortler, the poet who made that first post (and for the record, I don't know this guy from nobody on the street, had never run across his name til yesterday, have no idea whether I'd even like his work or not). I watched my Facebook feed play out the taking of sides, with people suddenly friending each other in two distinct groups, and the ones on the clearly pro-BlazeVOX side posting really angry stuff, at The Bark, on Facebook, on their own blogs, and probably many other places. Accusing Ortler of "closing" BlazeVOX, calling him and anyone else who'd chimed in that this seemed hinky & troubling a moron, a bitter egomaniac, etc. -- the usual online ad hominems. And then screaming choroi of high-energy panegyrizing: Gatza has the ethics of Amiri Baraka, BlazeVOX is one of the few DIY presses in the nation (factually untrue; we have a couple others just right here in Buffalo!); he/the press has done more for avant-garde poetry than whoever else, he's being pilloried, he's a nice guy who's given his soul and life to poetry and you're now ruining him, etc.
I should really emphasize, by the way, how measured and nonaggressive the criticisms of BlazeVOX have been, at least the portions I've seen on The Bark and HTML Giant. If there's been corresponding vitriol there, it's been in other venues. Almost no one has even said they're opposed to pay-to-publish -- I'm in the decided minority there, with the stringency of my opinions -- and again and again, the push has been for honesty, not a change in the press's funding/business model. People have consistently said that, whether or not this model is for them, they respect people's ways of trying to make poetry publishing work In Today's Economy; they just think authors ought to know what they're looking at when they consider submitting to a press.
Several of the more vocal defending BlazeVOX/attacking Ortler are people I know locally, in whom I'm disappointed. One got into it with me in a lively but (I think, at least) entirely friendly way a while ago about presses who charge reading/entry fees and the whole contest racket. I'm not naming him because I like him and his work and have no wish to make him googlable in relation to a spat -- but back then, not quite a year ago, he came out swinging against entry/reading fees, saying the practice preyed on desperate, young writers, suggesting their work was worth more than it might actually be. I consider this an unfortunate but tolerable compromise with the reality that nobody buys poetry books, not even other poets; since you usually get a copy of the winning book, assuming you send to presses whose catalogs you like, this isn't so bad. You're supporting poetry (beyond your own) after all; maybe you even read said winning book. Now this other poet is defending Gatza and BlazeVOX -- who were charging far more per "entrant," being thoroughly dodgy, giving inconsistent half-answers when someone asked him to explain what was up, etc. Inconsistent even to the level of the numbers he put out. Said local poet just published on BlazeVOX, so he's got a vested interest, but -- you can't accuse university and established independent presses of abusive business practices because they charge a clearly-disclosed reading/entry fee, and then defend a smaller independent press who's baiting vulnerable people into paying to publish their books without even letting anyone know that's on the table til they get there. Or, you can, but if you're someone I respect, it'll hurt my heart and push me away from you for doing so.
There are a lot of useful, clear-eyed comments on the various Bark posts. A couple selections:
The fact that these “donations” were probably only going to add up to a few grand shows me that BlazeVOX wasn’t really looking for or didn’t know how to really raise funds. I’ve seen small, start-up journals raise over a grand through kickstarter campaigns. I’ve seen local musicians raise similar amounts to allow them to release VINYL RECORDS! As far as I can tell, BV has a larger base of loyal supporters, has influences more people’s lives, and is more relevant than other institutions I’ve seen run incredibly successful kickstarter campaigns.
Someone else pointed out that as far as they can tell, BlazeVOX isn't a registered charity, which is just dumb, after 10 years in poetry publishing, if that's really the case. NY state is more generous with its arts funding than just about any state in the nation, but you can't take advantage of that unless you make your operation a charity. Gatza also declined Ortler's offer to set up a Kickstarter campaign just for the one book, which suggests that he's got some reason to keep from treating the press like a charity, and that makes zero sense. The only thing a for-loss arts outfit gets out of refraining from taking charity status is privacy, because once you file as a charity, your financials become public record -- but publishing poetry doesn't require, I don't know, corporate junkets to the Bahamas or shady currency trading schemes.
Using the numbers blazevox claims, If they sent 30 of these “donation”-based acceptances and all 30 accepted, then they get $7500, and spend $52,500. If 12 accept the deal, the publisher makes $3,000 and spends $21,000. That is why this looks like a scam–you’re saying you aren’t making money, so instead of focusing on a smaller set of books you’re most excited about (those accepted without the requested “donation”), you create a scenario where you could potentially make $7500 only to spend $52,500 more. From there, it becomes clear that the numbers Geoff is using are not accurate/made up, which only furthers the ill-will and suspicion about the scheme in the first place.
There's the math of it. Additionally, as of 7:30 last night, Gatza had posted on the press's blog that
I did send this letter to a 30 folk with the hopes of getting 15 people. No scams at all. It is done in the spirit of co-operation and in the 3 days since we asked folks for this, we raised $3,000. There is no requirement, I offered to publish their book next year for no donation or make an ebook / Kindle title out of this instead. There were many offered options but one poet was more than a bit upset. So this wind storm.
As Ortler notes, these few (ungainly) sentences copy-and-paste from his form letter, not awesome as far as showing regard for your interlocutors, and they incorporate multiple lies, notably that he's only been doing this for three days and that "donating" wasn't a requirement for publication. That aside, though, just a couple hours later on his Facebook wall, he posted,
Many have found our arrangement to co-operative in spirit and a bold and decisive measure in these tough financial times, thus why I chose to do this. There have only $200 donated through out the year to help the press in printing and the total was less than $1000. It is very hard to run this press and this method gathered up only a very small amount to help our production costs.
This also appears on the BlazeVOX blog, and if you load the main page, you can see the conflicting numbers right above one another.
So first it's a great, workable business plan that raised $3k in three days -- let me in on that, huh? -- and everyone should be on his side. A couple hours later, it's gotten him either $200 or $1000 -- the syntax isn't clear, but either way, much less -- over the entire year; this was never a big deal, no one should be mean to him, and so on. I think the $1000 is the number referring to "this," the pay-to-publish scheme. Which, no, I'm not calling a co-op. If you made your authors "owners," involving them in the press's workings, the way Alice James does (and Alice James pays its authors, it doesn't charge them to publish), and if you told people that was the deal coming in, that would be a co-op, but there's nothing cooperative about putting up a surprise $250 paywall between a frantic, un- or underpublished poet and his/her book. Given chance after chance to clarify what he and his press want/need, what their financial situation is, what kind of relationship they want to have with their writers, and what their business model is, Gatza only obfuscates further, contradicting himself.
And he shuts his whole operation down! Or at least threatens to do so, although after this display of shitpants nuttery, I think he'll have a hard time coming back. If, heaven send, I get young writers to mentor any time soon, I would use this story as a great big warning about how well you have to know a press's workings to trust them with your book. I probably will; it'll just vary in tenor depending on whether BlazeVOX exists or not. But here's the thing -- reasonable questions about what you're up to from your own community should not trigger a collapse of your ten-years-going publishing endeavor. For fuck's sake, you're in writing! The career is fraught throughout with other people tearing apart everything you do. You have to, have to have your ducks in the straightest row you can manage; you have to have excellent answers for why you make the choices you do, whether that's my avoidance of capital letters, which will get me misaligned with e. e. cummings as long as I maintain it, or an editor's decision to pursue some innovative funding model. You have to balance a necessary hubris with an equally-necessary humility.
Or rather, you have to do that if you participate in a community where debate and criticism happen. It does at the national scale. I faced a lot of very real questions when I went up for this great job, for example, from strangers with a strong interest in how I do poetry. Ideally, magazines and presses ought to put submissions to tough questions, too, in deciding whether to publish them or not, although of course we don't exactly knock that one out of the park. Students and teachers ought to do it to each other, colleagues at and among universities and those who aren't even on campuses (which, right now, after all, is me). That's how we get better. It's not always fun, but it's necessary and you have to be ready for it.
It doesn't happen within the scene here, though. The in-group's culture is strong enough that it can protect itself from difference, which feels great and glowy when you're in it, but leaves you without resources to handle criticism productively. In this case, Gatza could be royally fucking his whole catalog. These are people whose careers hang in part on his press's stability and its image. If he really does shut down, their books might very well be lost. Something similar on a smaller scale happened with Zoo Press a few years ago, and I'm still not sure what the people who'd published with them ever did. I heard that one author got his about-to-be-released book picked up by another press, but that has to be the exception. Most the dozens and dozens of BlazeVOX authors could honestly be looking at, "wow, I effectively no longer have that book." Appalling irresponsibility.
People have come up in arms about how many books BlazeVOX has put out and how this makes them an admirable entity in contemporary publishing -- on one hand, yes. But if they've been doing that on an unsustainable funding model, and hiding those ongoing instabilities, which really does look to be the case, they moved a bunch of people into a shiny new housing development built over a massive sinkhole. Eventually it was going to collapse, without any contingency plan in place for where these poets and their careers could live.
For my part, I'll post all this over here, but I feel so unwelcome in the local scene that I'm not even getting into anything on live discussions. They've got 40+ people liking Facebook posts about how great BlazeVOX is and how awful its critics are; I don't think I even have 40 people in my very loosely-defined "friends" list who post regularly. Most of those don't give a rat's ass about poetry. Or, probably, about me, which says nothing about me or about them and plenty about digital-age "friends." I'll go as far on something like this as to make a public record of my own thoughts, but getting into it with the people right around me -- I don't even go to their events and they don't go to mine; we might as well live in different countries, and there's no bond there on which I could rely to expect people to be any more respectful of what I have to say than they have been of what this Brett Ortler person has had to say. It'd be feeding myself to this many-headed monster, which at the moment is out for a lot of blood and not a lot of self-reflection. Dissertating has me a bit anemic and vitreous in many ways; they'd tear me apart. I wish Brett sterner strength than I'm feeling, and lots of support on- and offline. Fortunately, I think he has both.
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