We recently connected with Kathleen Rooney and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Kathleen, thanks for joining us today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard.

Rose Metal Press, the publishing company I co-founded with Abigail Beckel in 2006, diverges from the trade publishing industry in that we do not pay massive advances, which essentially gamble away huge sums on projects that might not earn it back. Rather, we offer modest advances and then have a royalty structure that is extremely favorable to the authors if and when their books do earn out. We also resist the urge to publish more books than we can effectively promote. We don’t want to just drop a title into the big ocean of titles published every year to see if it sinks or swims on its own. Instead, we publish only 2 books annually so we can support each author as much as possible by sending out review copies, setting up interviews and round tables, placing related essays and promotional pieces, and holding readings and events at bookstores and venues around the country. By focusing on building personal connections with authors and their books and on sustainability, we’ve been able to foster our authors’ careers and also stay viable in a tough industry for 18 years and counting. If our press were a person, it would be heading off to college, which is amazing.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

As Abby and I were finishing grad school at Emerson College in Writing, Literature, and Publishing, we looked at the literary landscape and realized there were tons of books that deserved to be published, but that would not–due to their strangeness and to marketability concerns–get chosen by the mainstream publishing industry. We decided that Rose Metal Press would focus on those worthy and beautiful books and give them the home they would not find elsewhere. By concentrating on hybrid genres–prose poetry, lyric essays, novels-in-verse, image-and-text, collaborations and so on–we’ve expanded the range of options open not just to writers, but to readers who want to read more adventurously.

In 2011, when I co-founded Poems While You Wait here in Chicago with my friends Dave Landsberger and Eric Plattner, we decided to have all the proceeds from our poems on demand go to support Rose Metal Press, a 501(c)(3), and the cause of publishing these hybrid books. The mission of PWYW to provide the public with an unexpected, unpretentious encounter with poetry dovetails marvelously with the mission of RMP.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

We live under a capitalist system, one that places profits above all other priorities. I resist this every day in my teaching, which encourages students not to be efficient and fast and “know” things, but to be contemplative and slow down and understand things, a process which takes time and effort.

Related to that, Rose Metal Press chooses books that we believe are valuable in an aesthetic and intellectual way, not just books that will maximize our profits. We balance our books and stay in the black, but our priority always is the literature itself and the human people who make it.

And with Poems While You Wait, we are very much invested in the relationship between commerce and art–we sell poems at a suggested $10 per poem rate. But that’s not capitalist in the sense that we could charge way more and concentrate on maximizing our earnings, but we don’t want to make the poetry inaccessible to all customers, so we strike a balance between illustrating that poetry is worth paying for, but that it’s not out of reach financially. We also do a lot of events where the poems are free to the requestors (having been paid for by the host organization).

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

Rose Metal Press has an active social media presence, of course, but more than that, we have a newsletter and email list where we provide (sparing, not spamming) updates on our titles and projects, and we have an annual subscription drive, because our subscribers are crucial to what we do. We ask them not just to give money, but to join us in our mission of promoting hybrid genre literature and its authors.

Contact Info:

• Website: rosemetalpress.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/poemswhileyouwait/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rosemetalpress
• Twitter: @rosemetalpress
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuR6es–HtA&t=2s&pp=ygUUcG9lbXMgd2hpbGUgeW91IHdhaXQ%3D

Image Credits
Beth Rooney