What's a Micropress?

A micropress generally is a press the pushes only 1 or 2 books a year. For Asiatic Light we are taking hold of the term to basically mean a press that doesn't seek to emulate the static model of the established larger publishing houses. We are looking for the underdog. We are seeking to innovate new methods of reaching the people. We want to empower authors to not hand over their souls to the publishing houses and encourage them to be involved in the full life cycle of their books.

We fully understand that in the end we still must deliver quality. We just want to shine the light on smaller guys who might not have had the chance to shine.

Though what follows below is refering to Canadian micropresses we fell that it directly refers to what we are working to accomplish.

Micro presses should not only be raucous and punky – there is plenty of room for nuance and variety. Difference, in fact, should be activated and celebrated fully in micro presses. The trouble is, in Canada, it isn’t; the micro presses are far too homogenous and timid and thereby right in step with our mild and mainstream brand of big press literature. If this were beer, by comparison, micro breweries would be spewing out the same innocuous bilge as the big breweries, instead of all the wonderful bocks, stouts, wheat beers and others that have really livened up suds in this country in the past twenty years. Sadly, the same can’t be said for micro presses. What’s needed is more passion, courage and conviction to be bold and blunt on the printed page at the micro level. Given that many writers get their start in micro presses, it just might lead to more dynamic literature at all levels of Canadian publishing. Micro press generalizations: US and Them.