Scenes: Raw Dog Screaming Press: an Interview with Jennifer Barnes

Could you briefly describe Raw Dog Screaming Press’s history?

My husband John Edward Lawson and I founded R.D.S.P. in 2003, but the press’ beginnings go back a little farther than that. Our first foray into editing was with an online zine, The Dream People. From our work there, we realized how many challenging and exciting authors were not getting to the marketplace because the publishing industry didn’t want to take a risk on new and different material. It seemed to us that if a book couldn’t be fit neatly into a category, such as “Mystery” or “Romance,” then it wouldn’t be published. But our favorite works crossed genres and broke rules. We soon decided we could fill that gap and began publishing novels, anthologies, and collections in print.

Cover, The Kyoto Man

What’s in the future for R.D.S.P.?

Next year, we’ll be celebrating ten years in publishing, and we plan to essentially re-launch the press. The future for R.D.S.P. is community. We believe that social networking has changed the relationship between reader and author, and it’s also changing the business relationships. Authors have the ability to bring their work directly to the public; many of the middlemen are obsolete. But doing everything on your own is a daunting, if not impossible task. So we want to create a community where authors, editors, and readers can come together and everyone has a hand in creating great literature. To facilitate this, we are currently overhauling our website with community-based features. We’ve also just launched a new imprint, Dog Star Books, to publish science fiction adventure titles, and taken on a new editor, Heidi Ruby Miller, to oversee the imprint. It’s an exciting time for R.D.S.P.

What is your role in the publishing scene?

The publishing industry has changed radically since we started the press nearly ten years ago. At that time, our mission was to publish the works other publishers considered unpublishable from a marketing perspective. Back then, we felt the gatekeepers were keeping too many people out. Now, with the explosion of self-publishing and new small presses, the complete opposite is true. Literally anything can be and is being published. While we are thrilled with the democratization of the industry, it presents a whole new set of challenges. So many works are rushed to market now without editing and no marketing plan. Books that could have been great are being released while still in the formative stages. There are so many books available that most are only ever seen by a handful of people. So we now feel our goal is to set the example with high-quality work produced in a professional manner and give authors an infrastructure—a home base—from which to launch their works on the world.

How would you characterize the work you publish?

We try to publish books that transcend categorization. We look for complex ideas and storytelling as well superior writing on the sentence level. This is the double-edged sword we live and die by. It’s how R.D.S.P.’s name was made, and it also keeps us from settling into a comfortable niche. As an editor, I admire both the ability to string together flowing phrases into beautiful paragraph long sentences as well as prose with such spare precision that a complete story can be told in less than a page. I’m also drawn to the purely real and gritty while at the same time having a love of the speculative. This is how we’ve wound up publishing authors like Eric Miles Williamson alongside Michael A. Arnzen.

Who is your audience, and in what ways are you trying to reach them?

We’re trying to reach people looking for something new and different. We’ll take anyone! I’d like to think our readers are as eclectic as the works we publish. We’ve got a solid contingent of genre fans and a strong...