Vulgar Press

Notes towards a History


Vulgar Press was established in 1999 without too much planning, knowledge or (to tell you the truth) thinking.

I was dismayed that a book I wanted to teach (Dorothy Hewett’s Bobbin Up) was out of print so I thought I’d publish it to get around that problem.

At this stage I was editing overland and had made extensive links around the edges of the industry. One of whom was Hewett herself. I had a brief chat with her and decided to republish the novel. Vulgar Press was born.

I had a literary political context out of which I operated: I wanted to publish (fictional and non-fictional) stories from the left or by working class writers that would not get a look in elsewhere. I also wanted to publish out of print working class novels.

I also had a good practical knowledge of how to curate a book. I think that Vulgar Press books are all well put together.

But I really didn’t know what I was doing, especially in an administrative or business sense. I knew nothing about pricing, bookkeeping or business management and my capital amounted to $4000 and some decent desktop publishing equipment.

I hit the ground running. Spamming my email networks (a lot easier to do in 1999) offering Bobbin Up for sale for the price of $18.95 + postage. Promoting the book in any avenue I could find.

I also had to think about getting the book into bookshops.

So I visited Readings on Lygon St and spoke to the buyer who said they’d take 5. I went up the road to that shop that no longer exists and they said they’d take 2.

2 shops down 198 to go!

It was clear that if I wanted to get the book into the hundreds of bookshops in Australia I was going to have to do it differently.

Kevin Pearson from Black Pepper recommended the distributor Dennis Jones and I’ve been with him since.

First think DJ let me know was that my price was silly and was designed to make me lose money. I needed to set the price at 6 (not 3) times the unit cost if I wanted to make a profit.

Nonetheless, BU was a success. We sold 4000 books in two print runs over 10 years. So were the other early VP books

• Yossi Berger’s A Kind of Violence
• Jeff and Jill Sparrow’s Radical Melbourne
• Michael Hyde’s Max

Tens of thousands of dollars were rolling in (from both direct sales and bookshops) and I was managing to pay authors some decent royalties. After a very short time it felt as if the press was already a success. In cultural and literary terms it was. But it was also already failing financially because the costs were never going to be covered by the income.

Even though I had taken on Dennis’s 6-times rule, I had neglected to include my own extensive labour and overheads into the pricing. It was a time bomb waiting to go off.

Flushed with success I applied for Ozco funding and got it – to publish 3 works simultaneously, one by Michael Hyde and 2 by emerging writers.

The books bombed, despite brilliant publicity. This seemed to be the beginning of a long downward slope in which the press looked ever less likely to be a successful publishing company and ever more like a serious and worthwhile hobby.

I made a lot of other dumb decisions that I can go into later if people really want to know.

I achieved a lot of my cultural goals, publishing over 40 mostly terrific books.

Highlights include

• Mark Phillips’ history of 3RRR
• Adam Muyt’s Maroon and Blue
• AL McCann’s Subtopia
• Sandy Jeffs’ Flying with Paper Wings
• Neil Boyack’s Transactions

Financially the press has bottomed out and it’s very hard for me to imagine it continuing, especially as a self-generating enterprise. The silver-bullet book that we all hope for just never materialised for Vulgar Press.

One of the reasons I became a publisher is because I love print books and the idea of making them. This relates to my failure to take e-books seriously. Some of our books are e-published by DJ’s Port Campbell Press but I just don’t get excited by the look of them or their yet less than impressive sales figures.

However, that’s me. E-books are probably a significant component of the way an independent publisher needs to operate. Prohibitive costings evaporate when you don’t have printing and warehouse expenses. It’s just not for me.