Dostoyevsky Wannabe: New Horizons of the Publishable

The proposed project is a practice-led autoethnographic study of new forms of publishing as evidenced by the work of Dostoyevsky Wannabe, an indie publishing press to which I am attached both as practitioner, co-owner and co-founder. Dostoyevsky Wannabe (hereby occasionally referred to as DW) is an open source-like DIY press that utilises print-on-demand technology to publish books by a huge array of writers including, on occasion, the self-published work of its owners. It operates within, and at the intersections of, two main competing models of publishing in the 21st century-the 'cultural mission model of publishing' (Greco 2005) and, what might be named, 'the Amazon model of publishing' (see McGurl 2016). Whilst the former of the two might perhaps be more likely to see itself, or at least project itself, less as one model of publishing than as the very essence of publishing, the latter elides the legitimacy of the conventional publisher whilst throwing emphasis upon the author, and sometimes, the customer. Despite differences in age-the cultural mission model spans a number of centuries, whilst the Amazon model stems mostly from the 21st century-it would perhaps not be unreasonable to suggest that both publishing modelsmake up what Rachel Malik names the dominant "horizons of the publishable" (709)in the 21st century with regard to their common ubiquity. In contrast, my central hypothesis suggests that the alternative publishing model derived by Dostoyevsky Wannabe positions itself in such a way that it can take aspects from both dominants models as well as importing strategies from fields outside of literature, while at the same time remaining fluid and unintelligible enough to both look towards the possible creation of newly configured horizons of the publishable in the 21st century at the same time as acting to critique existing dominant types.