Hello, reader. This is Jeffrey Dinsmore, one of the three founders of Awkward Press. What you see here is a work in progress. For the past 6 months or so, I've been working diligently with my friends and partners Kyle Jarrow and Clay McLeod Chapman to start a new publishing company called (as the URL implies) Awkward Press. Frankly, I don't really know why I'm doing it. A few years ago, I helped start a company called Contemporary Press, a noble experiment that has not yet met with the kind of crashing financial success we were anticipating. Indie publishing, I discovered is hard and costly and, for the most part, a complete waste of time.

And yet, here we are, shamefacedly throwing another corpse on the fire of the publishing industry. I'd love to say I'm starting Awkward because I'm deeply dedicated to preserving the fine art of reading, but the truth is, I don't even read that much myself. Well, I shouldn't say that. I'm always reading something. It's just not often that I'm actually finishing it.

And this, in a nutshell, is why Awkward exists. It's selfish, really. For as many books as there are out there cluttering the shelves of the bookstores, it has become incredibly difficult to find something I'll want to finish. Oh, I'm sure I could zip through a paperback bestseller about a vampire lawyer or cat detective or whatever those books are about, but those kinds of books always leave me feeling a little empty inside afterwards. Or I could slog my way through a classic, as I just spent the last 4 months doing with Crime and Punishment, but those kinds of books aren't often a lot of fun. What I'd like to read is imaginative, well-written fiction that isn't afraid to be entertaining. I don't know where to find it. So I guess I'm going to have to publish it myself.

Although this process has been going on for a few months now, we're nearing the final stages of printing our first actual collection. We've assembled 5 great stories by amazing writers who deserve to be more well-known than they are. Hopefully sometime in the Fall of 2008 or Winter of 2009, we'll have our book all together and available for sale. We're doing our best to keep the cost somewhere around $6. In addition, all of the copies will be numbered, so you can have proof that you're getting a genuine collector's edition sort of thing. We don't really expect to make much money. We just want to have something to read.

We're going to use this blog to update our progress. As you can see, it's not real beautiful. This is because I'm programming it myself and I don't know the first thing about programming. If there are any amazing web programmers out there who hate their day jobs and want to contribute to something that might be interesting, please contact me at jeffreyd@awkwardpress.com. In the meantime, please add your name to our mailing list and I promise we won't spam you.