GUEST POST: Ellie Sipila, Common Deer Press

Today I welcome the lovely Ellie Sipila, owner of the new publishing house Common Deer Press, which opens its doors in just two short days. She asked me to host her for a guest post, so I asked her to tell me a little bit about her publishing house and what makes it unique and interesting. 

With that I welcome Ellie to the blog!

I’ve been asked a few times to describe the kind of manuscript I’d like to receive at Common Deer Press. And you know, that’s kind of like asking an expectant mother what kind of baby she wants to have. Something robust, easy on the eyes, fun, and…awesome. We hope our children will grow up strong and intelligent and capable; we hope they’ll do us proud. But what do we want specifically, like, detail-wise?

That’s a very difficult question to answer when your main requirement is unusualness. I mean, if we really were talking about a human baby we could say something like, “I want a baby with a large nose,” or “I’d love my son to be born with a 1973 David Hasselhoff head of hair,” or maybe, “I hope little Sally has an extra toe on her left foot but not her right.” With books though? Well, excellent writing, yes. Authors that are agreeable and easy to work with, definitely. But when trying to describe specifics..? Impossible.

Common Deer Press has committed itself to giving homes to those manuscripts that have all the artistry in the world but also something else. We want submissions that are experimental. We want to be surprised. We value creativity and bravery—we want our authors to feel confident in their weirdness. We believe that writing, like all the arts, is based on subjectivity. We want to step away from the mainstream while still upholding extreme quality. What does that mean, exactly?

We have no idea. But we do know it when we see it.

Common Deer Press is a small house made up of passionate people. We like to approach our tasks as a team. We not only want manuscripts that are different, but we want to operate a little differently as well. We prefer to run our house as a partnership with our authors. After all, we have the same goal. We really don’t get too fussed when saying which genres we do and do not like. It’s safe to say that kissing books are not our thing, nor are touching chick lit stories. But if you have a series of interconnected short mysteries all told from the points of view of a crazy old woman’s houseplants…throw it at us. That, we’d like to see.

And that’s it. That’s our requirement. Unusualness. The stranger, the better. The more creative, the better. The more times it’s been rejected for being to oddball…you guessed it. We want to see it.

www.commondeerpress.com

www.facebook.com/commondeerpress

@AHerdOfDeer