HOW OLIVER WORKS
NOTE:
CLICK HERE FOR THE
OLIVER ARTS & OPEN PRESS CATALOGUE
1) SUBMITTING TO OLIVER
Manuscripts, projects, or books can be submitted to The Oliver Arts & Open Press electronically or by regular mail. If electronically, they should be sent as Word documents attached to emails. However, queries must precede these submissions, since we can't open any attachments if we haven't heard about them ahead of time or don't know who they're from.
Electronic submissions, and inquiries preceding them, should be sent to
Submissions by regular mail should be sent to:
Eric Larsen, Publisher and Editor
The Oliver Arts & Open Press
2578 Broadway (Suite #102)
New York, NY 10025
Inquiries can be made also by
calling the press at 212-866-7425
2) THE BRUTE FACTS OF BEING A PUBLISHER WITHOUT ASSETS
The Oliver Arts & Open Press is an organization without an endowment or investable assets but with the highest of aims and the belief that those aims can be achieved.
Having no investment resources means that Oliver can't pay advances—and that it will in fact instead ask authors to pay for the readying of their own books for production. It will ask authors to support the cost of seeing their books through the process of copy-editing, proofreading, cover development, and uploading to the printer.
On the other hand, with Oliver there is no royalties schedule favoring the publisher in recouping of expenses. Once an Oliver book is on the market, all earnings from it are split fifty-fifty between author and publisher. Reprint rights, translation rights, and all other rights remain with the author, with the exception that earnings from film or video adaptation (or from option for film or video adaptation) are shared at 25% to the publisher and 75% to the author. Contracts are for two years. After that time, the author is free, on ninety days' written notice before the end of the first or subsequent two-year period, to relinquish all ties with Oliver and retake complete control of his or her property.
The idea underlying the Oliver arrangement is that, by publishing the very best books—those ritually ignored, dismissed, considered too difficult or politico-culturally too truthful or revealing by the mainstream industry—Oliver will in time achieve a reputation on and for its merits as the publisher most uncompromisingly dedicated to truth, merit, and aesthetic and intellectual achievement beyond the ordinary and familiar. The Oliver imprint will come to provide an uncompromised prestige and a unique identity to those novelists, writers, and poets who publish with it.
That, at least, is the hope, and it is what Oliver lives for.
Decades ago, when George Balanchine was urged to establish a ballet company in New York, he said "But first a school."¹ In the case of Oliver, we might say this: Oliver may have money someday. But first, the books. (On the subject of money replacing merit in the literary arts, here's an à propos piece, though you'll have to scroll down for it: "Oliver, Gregory Marszal, and the State of Poetry.")
3) THE FUTURE OF OLIVER
The Oliver Arts & Open Press exists because, in the view of its founders, publishing in the United States, generally, has lost its conscience, courage, intellect, and, one might even say, its mind. The publishing "industry," as it's called, very likely didn't say farewell to those attributes in the same order as they're listed here, but the fact is inescapable that these four virtues have in fact been lost by the publishing enterprise in very nearly equal degrees of completeness. And their loss—in all American institutions but certainly not least in publishing—has resulted in and continues to result in massive cultural, social, and intellectual degradation, loss, and harm.
In an opposite direction, and to the fullest extent of its ability, Oliver aims to do good rather than harm, and to do it by publishing the best and most meaningful work it can—often work rejected or ignored by "mainstream publishing," an entity that Oliver sees as being made up of the conglomerates, the few remaining presses of a certain financial independence, the academic presses, and even the so-called small presses, which generally imitate their bigger brothers.
Unlike other publishers and presses in the nation, Oliver refuses to be limited by prefabricated or fossilized notions of "familiarity," "accessibility," or "propriety" in matters of genre, subject, attitude, or agenda. That's why it's called The Oliver Arts and Open Press.
As for material that Oliver will accept for publication under its imprint, the editors look for and will seek to publish only work they consider to be of the highest excellence, merit, interest, truth, and authenticity. Those will be the sole criteria for selection.
¹See Jennifer Dunning, But First a School: The First Fifty Years of the School of American Ballet (Viking, 1985).
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