Random Media Guy

One advantage of being an editor at a literary magazine was that it ended any conversation initiated by the question “So, what do you do?” with a single sentence. “Interesting” was the most representational reaction to my answer, if not the most common. “Bo-ring” was the most honest. (Yes, someone did say this to me once and I wanted to kiss her for it.) The fact was that that was what I was, and there was little more I could have said about the job that anyone asked, or cared, to hear. I have since discovered that from an employment standpoint the title of lit-mag editor is not a door-opener either, and the fact I was at it for so long only highlights my folly rather than marks me as a dependable, dedicated worker. Therefore it was probably inevitable that—while I waited for someone to glean general indispensability from my very particular resume—I would find myself cast into a variety of far flung endeavors over the year and a half.

The Launch of a Concern and a Community

 After a more than a year of meetings and preparation, we are prepared to make public a new big idea in small press publishing: Fifth Star Press, a not-for-profit book publisher of trade nonfiction and fiction with a local focus on Chicago culture and history. There would seem to be, you might say, something audacious (if not flat out nuts) about starting a publishing company during the worst economy in 70 years, at a time when the one thing people think they know about books it that they are going away. However we are entering into this enterprise with the exact opposite mindset.


We conceived of Fifth Star as an antidote to the impersonality of the Kindle and other electronic readers. We have nothing against such gadgets; however, our research has indicated that while e-readers have become the indisputable favorites of mystery, romance, and science fiction readers, the print medium remains the destination of choice for readers of non-genre fiction and nonfiction. We believe that offering the majority of people who prefer books to electronic devices the sort of book they want to read is a good business model.


Our mission is twofold: we hope to bring popular and marketable books to a broad audience and we seek to prove that a lean, sales-oriented model of publishing can prevail at a time when so many publishers are closing or scaling back their operations.


Our first books will be out in the spring. I will be saying a lot more as the publication date nears and more about how this model fits into our view of the current state of publishing in the weeks and months to come.