About Burning Shore Press

Most published writing is boring. This is because it is written for a marketplace, in one sense or another is chopped, sliced, and generally tamed in order that might reach the largest possible audience. In other words, most publishers are purveyors of product, whose main reason for existence is to make the publisher (and in a great many cases their corporate overlords) money -- they are only incidentally interested in the writing itself.

Burning Shore Press has been founded on the exact opposite principles: For us it is the writing that matters and the money that is incidental. While we of course have to make money in order to publish, and at times will no doubt find ourselves constrained by financial realities, in the end we will never base our publishing decisions on these facts -- we will publish what we feel is good, honest writing and let the financial cards fall where they may.

To many this no doubt seems foolish at best and at worst fiscal suicide. This view we simply believe to be wrong. There are a large number of persons who crave honesty and passion and are tired of the corporate media constantly trying to tell them what they should or should not eat, drink, smoke, watch, listen to, read, fuck, worship, think, and dream -- and it those persons we turn for support, not in the exploitive manner typical of current business practices, but in a kind of artistic-financial co-op where writers and readers come together to enrich and support each other's lives.

In regards to the writing itself, we plan on concentrating on west-coast authors, our brothers and sisters on this shore and a group that has been neglected to a ridiculous degree by the east-coast publishing establishment. We believe that California is the most vibrant, insane, beautifully dangerous, and forward-looking expression of Western culture thus far -- and like any great cultural development occurring in a literate society, its myths are both best captured and exploded by its writers. This is not to say that we plan on limiting ourselves to writers from this region: eventually we hope to be a house that features authors from many different parts of this country and the world. True words know no boundaries.