AK Publishing: A Day (or so) in the Life
We thought people might be interested in having a behind-the-scenes peek at the things that go on at AK Press. (It’s not all as glamorous as you’d imagine!) What follows is a little window into the world of publishing at AK Press. I (Zach) will try to give occasional updates that will give you folks an idea of what sort of things we do in order to work with the book trade.
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AK Press is both a publisher and a distributor. For books that we publish, we use another distributor to 
handle direct distribution to booksellers and wholesalers: Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, who are based in Minneapolis. We’ve been with them for about eight years. The publishing world has two “seasons,” Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter, and for Consortium these are from April–August and September–March. Each January and July we begin the process of announcing books for the following season. We’ve got a number of deadlines coming up in the next five weeks, including tipsheets (which function as a quick reference sheet for each book); a sales call (where we try to excite the crew at Consortium with our latest foray into anarchist publishing. “Honest, it’ll sell!”); then descriptions and cover art for Consortium’s seasonal catalogs; and shortly afterward, the sales conference, where we put on our chinos and penny loafers and WOW the sales reps. All of this, at least six months before the season’s first books are ready.
One benefit of jumping through all of these hoops so early is that we’re organized to put together our own catalogs. In recent years, AK has been releasing between three and five catalogs of its own each year (geared towards stores, individuals, or libraries and professors) and it’s a big help to have all the copy written and front cover images available for those.
Each season, we also handle the book trade side of things for the CounterPunch folks (hence the co-published titles). They choose, edit, and handle production for their books and we take care of printing and distribution. For the Fall/Winter (2009–2010) season we are announcing seven AK titles, and CounterPunch will likely have three titles ready to co-publish.
The AK Press books we are currently announcing for that season—and that you can therefore expect between September and March—include:
Jeff Conant’s A Poetics of Resistance: Strategy and Symbol in the Zapatista Communiques, Being a True Tale of a Possible Better World in its First Untamed Imaginings Cindy Milstein’s Anarchism and its Aspirations Margaret Killjoy’s, Mythmakers & Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Fiction Nunzio Pernicone’s, Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel Seth Tobocman’s, You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive (20th Anniversary edition) Kolya Abramsky (ed.), Sparking a World-wide Energy Revolution: Social Struggles in the Transition to a Post-Petrol World Juan Suriano’s, Paradoxes of utopia: anarchist culture and politics in Buenos Aires, 1890-1910 (This is Chuck Morse’s translation of Anarquistas: Cultura y Politica Libertaria en Buenos Aires, 1890–1910.
Our next steps here at AK are to assign coordinators to shepherd these projects along through the final stages and to completion, though typically, we have been working on these projects for some time already. The folks in the publishing department here are constantly juggling multiple projects that are in various stages of completion. It can be a bit dizzying at times.
We’ve got four projects at the printer right now (Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism; A History of the French Anarchist Movement, 1917 to 1945; Shutdown: The Rise and Fall of Direct Action to Stop the War; and a CounterPunch project, Tennessee Reed’s Spell Albuquerque), we’re announcing next season’s titles, and seeing various books through their many stages. And on top of all that we’re constantly receiving new submissions as well as working on acquisitions. Actually… It is as glamorous as you’d imagine!
And if these books sound good to you (they certainly do to us) then please consider signing up as a Friend of AK Press and receive all of them!. Individual support for our project is crucial to keeping these books coming.
As a final note, every project we put forth has been voted on by the entire AK Press collective. There’s plenty of conjecture that circulates about how we’re structured or who makes decisions here. For those less familiar, please read our “About AK” statement. Otherwise, just feel free to ask! It’s amazing what a little communication can achieve.