City Desk Press
The publishing industry is broken.
It has shrunk to a handful of major publishers (the Big 5) and struggling small nonprofit presses starved of grant money. The cost of books is skyrocketing, with the average paperback approaching $20 and hardbacks often costing $35–$40, while the average writer’s share of the financial pie has practically dried up. Many writers now have to do what publishers and editors used to do: edit, publicize and market.
The marketplace is being sliced into ever thinner identity genres, while difficult-to-pigeonhole books with literary merit are often overlooked. More and more writers are avoiding the publishing industry and self-publishing their books.
Self-publishing schemes, such as pay-as-you-go or hybrid presses—often predatory in nature—have sprung up, sometimes charging outrageous fees far beyond what the writer can ever hope to recoup.
Frustration is growing.
There’s another way.
City Desk Press is the world's first publisher of broadsheet novels, printed entirely on 35 lb. newsprint, 22” tall by 14” wide (three inches wider than today’s average daily paper). Publishing on newsprint has a number of advantages, the first being economic. An entire novel costs a fraction of what a traditional book costs to print. It’s light and easy to fold, stuff in your back pocket and read on a plane or train.
There is something familiar, even intimate about newsprint, the feel of the paper in your hands. People, exhausted by staring at screens, yearn for the world that reading on newsprint used to represent. It pushes a lot of nostalgia buttons.
The reaction has been overwhelming. There will be more broadsheet books. And the publishing industry will never be the same.
--John Yewell, author and publisher