As mentioned, The Opiate Books is not a business or corporation. Most of what we do comes out of our own pockets, while any of the revenue generated via submissions and publications goes back into financing the next book.
How does this work?
Our main revenue comes from the quarterly magazine, The Opiate. There is a small submission fee (currently, two dollars) to submit works, and we do not pay the contributors or give them free copies. Why? The reality is that each volume sells between thirty to fifty copies maximum, which doesn’t even amount to three hundred dollars in compensation (it’s usually closer to half of that). This brought us to the dilemma of what to do with that sparse income. If we had to use it to print and send a copy of the magazine to every contributor, there isn’t enough regular income to ensure we could always send a copy to everyone (we have an average of fifteen to eighteen contributors per issue). Thus, we don’t want to raise an expectation that cannot be met consistently (plus, the magazine is available for free online, so contributors are still able to see their own work if they truly can’t afford a copy). In past editions, before our print-on-demand shift, The Opiate used to send out copies to contributors, but it ran at a financial deficit of around a thousand dollars for each issue, an untenable situation which we don’t want to return to. The second option would be to pay contributors with the income of each volume, but if we decided to share that income amongst the writers, everyone might get ten dollars at best. Although a “nice” symbolic token of appreciation, it’s still not a very rewarding amount. So, we’ve decided on an altogether different approach.
Why not take that money and invest it in an author? To us, that’s more beneficial than tossing the contributors a few alms, giving back instead by choosing a writer who has been contributing regularly to The Opiate and giving them the opportunity to publish their own work as a book. This is the logic that brought us to the creation of The Opiate Books imprint and why we do not pay contributors or provide free copies. The choice of investing in an author and helping them publish their book instead of any of the other options is truly in tune with our values and with why we do what we do. There are many profit-making businesses out there, we are not one of them. The sales are what they are and, if they do grow, they should grow naturally, with the help of the people that find us and our publications.
By engaging in any manner with this process, whether as a writer who submits or gets published, or a reader who regularly buys our publications, or a bookshop that stocks our magazine and books, you are not helping a small business, since we aren’t one, but you are investing in a community of writers that is investing in itself to grow outwards and to welcome more fearless voices in its circle.
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