Bearded Bard Inkworks!

Because I am clearly mentally unwell, I have started a small press, Bearded Bar Inkworks. A micro press really. The micro-est of presses. Because clearly I did not have enough to do. So I thought I would take a moment to explain my rationale behind why I did this:

Credibility?

So when you upload a book to Amazon, they ask for your press. And most indie authors basically just make something up. Myself, I have used 'Broken Oak Publishing' as an obscure callback to where I grew up. Most folks just ignore that. Sometimes though folks will actually look up the press if they haven't heard of it. And if they don't find anything they move on. I've had it happen to me at least once I've been told, and who knows if it's happened more times from folks who didn't bother to reach out.

Now if someone looks, they will find that yes, there is a site for a press who publishes my books. Eventually there will be more authors than just me on there. But for now, my operation is micro-fractionally more credible if you squint your eyes just right.

RPG Content

More importantly, I am planning to start doing a lot of more serious work in the indie rpg space. It's one of my favorite hobbies, and I want to make more of an effort to take my works in the space and make them better. I want to turn the best ones into physical zines, and start putting out rpg content based on my books.

As part of this, I want to partner with other authors who write similar books to mine, and release periodic zines featuring game content based on our books. This is going to be my mechanism for doing that.

Events

It doesn't happen often, but every so often you hit an event that will not allow you to share booths with your fellow authors. They want each author to have their own space (since I have only encountered this at corporate run cons, I suspect this is a cash grab). So by having a press, I can apply as a press to some cons, and invite authors to sell through me for that event. Then I can just cash them out at the end of the weekend. Similar to how Ben Meeks does Sidestreet Books. This is a super niche reason, that I suspect will happen only very, very rarely. But it's nice to have as an option in my back pocket.

Intangibles

A lot of things I do, I do them to lay the groundwork for future growth (which this is partially that (looking at Brian Keene's Manhattan on Mars)). But a lot of times, I will do a thing banking on there being intangible benefits, either expected or not. For example, once the zine side of things gets up and running, I hope to be able to use that to get into more, different con spaces, and guest at different types of conventions. I also think working with my author friends to put out silly zines based on our books is going to be fun. And seeing that authordom is often lonely, working with someone on something as stress free as a zine I think will be nice.