November of this year marked our 2^nd anniversary of producing chapbooks. We couldn’t be more proud of the titles we’ve published—titles written by authors passionate about keeping the craft of writing alive. Each one is a testament to the fact that literature is not, and will never be, dead.

I don’t know where you stand in the great e-book debate, but I personally believe that they will be critical for keeping literature open to new voices in these difficult economic times, due to their financial and physical accessibility. At Folded Word, we have made it our mission to offer 99cent e-book versions of our print chapbooks during the pre-order period because we want to make it possible for any reader to support the artistry of our authors. These e-chaps are formatted to play nice with all e-reading devices and have “speech to text” turned on for the visually impaired. We thought that with all the free e-reading apps out there, at this price and functionality our e-chaps would fly off the virtual shelves. But they haven’t.

In trying to figure out why, I’ve come up with a few questions for you:

1. If you read chapbooks, how do you acquire them?
2. If you don’t read chapbooks, what is the main reason for your reluctance?
3. Do you feel that buying e-books (whether chapbook or book length) encourages publishers not to produce print books?

To weigh in on any of the questions that apply to you, either leave a comment below or send me an email (editors [at] foldedword [dot] com). I can assure you, by the way, that Folded Word is committed to keeping book craft alive—a commitment that can be seen in our signature chapbooks and broadsides. In fact, the sale of e-(chap)books makes it more possible (not less) for us to produce future print titles by increasing cash flow with few additional time demands.

We have some amazing chapbooks available that could truly use some love. If you aren’t familiar with our chapbook list, please explore our chapbook blog at http://foldedchaps.wordpress.com. If all our social-media followers/fans took a chance on just one 99cent e-chap, we could make the close of this year very merry for our chapbook authors. It could also be the highest-yield investment in the arts you’ll make in 2011.

Whether you join in the discussion or not, whether you purchase a chapbook or not, we want to thank you for being part of The Fold. We would not exist without you.

Cheers & Happy New Year,
J.S.

Investment Opportunities:

Common Symptoms of an Enduring Chill Explained by Ben Nardolilli
Girl, Wolf, Bones by Nora Nadjarian
On Cloud 285 by Nathalie Boisard-Beudin
Snowing Fireflies by Eric Beeny
When the Cats Razzed the Chickens by Mel Bosworth
The Wait of Atom by Jessie Carty

To purchase e-books directly from us, click on the title you want and then select e-book in the options drop down box at the bottom of the page. Both .epub and .mobi files are available from our shop (http://foldedword.bigcartel.com).

To purchase e-books from Amazon for the Kindle, please visit the Kindle shop for your country and type “Folded Word” in the search box to see your choices.

From PICFIC
Simon Kewin: “Square on the Hypotenuse“
S. Kay: “At the Altar“

From unFOLD:
bl pawelek: “The Heat of Sound“
Nathalie Boisard-Beudin: “Golden Globes“
Peycho Kanev: “Freedom“
Karyn Eisler: “I Wake As“
Cameron Mount: “Self of Cards“
Patrick J Connors: “(Re)Birth“

We apologize for the late announcement of this information. We did send in the entry packet well within deadline, just forgot to share. Please join us in congratulating these intrepid writers who brave (and surpass) Twitter’s constraints.

Help us get the anthology in the black by buying the print book directly from us at http://www.foldedword.com — and we’ll throw in an e-book of your choice from our site, FREE

Cheers!

Your Folded Friends

It’s Official — Folded Word Press volumes are on the shelves of Poet’s House, in Battery Park, NYC.  Our first anthology, On a Narrow Windowsill, is also available at the venerable independent bookstore BookCourt, on Court Street, in Brooklyn.

Cheers!

Mel Bosworth: “I Fixed” in FREIGHT
Nora Nadjarian: “Breadcrumbs” in GIRL, WOLF, BONES
Julie Corbett: “Colours of Honey” three poem series in HERON 4
Ben Nardolilli: “Pulmonary Manifestations” in COMMON SYMPTOMS OF AN ENDURING CHILL EXPLAINED
John Sibley Williams: “Building Over and Again” in FROM COLDER CLIMATES (forthcoming Nov.)
Cameron Mount: “Self of Cards” in unFOLD

We are very proud of the range in both form and voice represented in our entry packet. Please join us in congratulating these writers whose dedication to word crafting makes reading such joyful pleasure.

Also, we updated our submissions page to reflect the change.

Cheers!

Should have mentioned that unFold took a Twitter break after Santosh Kalwar’s “Malignancy” ran on June 1, but we didn’t want to worry you.  Anyway, it’s all good — kept posting on the blog and resumed on Twitter with “The Piracy” by Marina Hope Wilson, on Sept. 26.

And this is cool – at the end of October, we’ll run a Twitter retrospective of all the poems that appeared on the blog between June 1 and Sept. 26.

Hope all is well with you.

With the end of the calendar year will also come the closing of PicFic, our fiction Twitter-zine. October’s SPOILER issue will be our final issue, and the rest of the year we will post the last few months of stories from the PicFic blog onto the PicFic Twitter account–something we’ve lagged a little behind in.

But with the closing of PicFic comes a new and exciting adventure. Folded Word will start accepting submissions for mini chapbooks that will feature 10-24 tweets at the beginning of 2012. More news on mini chaps will come as soon as we iron out the wrinkles, and then we will announce when/where submissions open. In the mean time, we hope you stay tuned.

While we are a bit sad to move out of the serial publishing of Twitter fiction, we know that we are leaving the genre in good hands. Nanoism and 7×20 are two of our favorites, publishing strong work and edited by PicFic contributors. We just feel that we have more to offer the form via printed single-author collections. And don’t worry, the PicFic archive will remain where it is so you can always go back to read your favorites any time!