Scenes: Main Street Rag: An Interview with M. Scott Douglass

Cover, Blue Suburban Skies

Could you briefly describe Main Street Rag’s history?

It’s so colorful, it’s hard to be brief, but we started in 1996 with as a saddle-stitched poetry magazine of about 32 pages. In 1999, we published our first saddle-stitched chapbook, which sent us off in a new direction. In 2000, we converted to perfect binding and were sending it out to places to produce it for us, but that was expensive and the production quality was erratic. We tried to find someone local to do it, but no one in our area wanted to touch short-run perfect binding. That spelled opportunity to me, so we went out and invested $150K in building and equipment, bought a binder, trimmer, and (eventually) a printer. Producing four issues of a literary magazine does not justify this kind of expense, so we started soliciting our bindery capabilities since we figured that if we had that much trouble finding someone local, others might be in the same boat. And when you have over $100K worth of equipment, you gotta feed the beast. Then we started doing books. In our most productive year, we printed nearly 200 titles through our production house, about half of them on one of Main Street Rag’s titles, the others for other publishers. This year, we will produce about 100 projects—most of them our own since many of our customers have run off to join the POD circus.

What is your role in the publishing scene?

To give an outlet, a voice, to authors who may not be able to find one elsewhere for whatever reason; to put out work we appreciate and respect and hope that others will as well. Since we are a small publisher, I don’t see us ever hitting the best seller list, but we do publish good work by good authors, and occasionally it garners attention from bigger publishers. I’m happy to say that many of our authors have moved on to bigger publishers with the means to further their careers. I’m not happy to see them go, but I feel good about the fact that Main Street Rag contributed to their getting where they are.

Detail from Cover, Shortly Thereafter

How would you characterize the work you publish?

Eclectic. Personally, I lean toward the quirky, and I try to instill that in those I recruit to edit Main Street Rag projects. That’s about as close as I could come to wrapping what we do up in a bow. I’m very fond of the novella genre, which is why we created a series for them. I like to think of myself as a poet, and since that is where Main Street Rag has its roots, we will publish over thirty poetry books and chapbooks this year. The short fiction anthology concept—particularly when there is a binding theme—has been successful. We will continue to offer those, though there will be a few upcoming twists. We will continue to offer short story collections and novels down the road, but only when the project and the author are well suited to our marketing scheme.

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

That’s funny. When we started the magazine, our specific target was non-academic. Now, most of our best-selling titles we have are those written by academic authors and sold in academic settings. Again, though, when you publish between sixty and ninety titles a year, most books and authors will have their own audience. I have fairly strong political opinions, and I think that attracts authors and readers of similar disposition and opinions, but we also publish work by authors with whom no one at Main Street Rag has anything in common.

Detail from Cover, Enlarged Hearts

I think the real trick to this gig is to publish what you like, then seek the audience afterward. How do...