About Yard Dog Press
About 1988 or so--at least that's when I first noticed it--the publishing industry started to be gobbled up by major corporations. Magazines that had been mid-list were hacked and replaced with more profitable ventures. Authors who had been mid-list either had their advances and their print runs sliced or were dropped entirely. New authors were bought up and thrown to the wolves--if they made it in the narrow window they were allowed, they had a career--if they didn't, their careers ended without ever really starting. Trying to get a truly new concept or story idea through unless you were already established as a mega star became practically impossible. Publishing houses that had once taken chances on new ideas now belonged to the same people who put cotton on a stick to remove the wax from your ears. They no longer cared about blazing trails; they wanted the same story that made so much money the year before. In fact, they wanted four thousand of those same stories. If you wrote something different, they just flat weren't interested unless they could find some way to make it LOOK like that previously successful book. Cover artists found themselves drawing the same kinds of pictures for the same kinds of books. Make it big, make it bright, make it flashy, make it movie-of-the-week quality.
As if all this weren't enough for writers and artists to deal with, enter the age of dueling political correctness. Now not only did every story have to be basically the same as the last big seller, but one also had to be careful not to tread on the toes of either the far left or far right political correctness minions. Under these conditions, new authors found it harder and harder to make a nitch--much less stay in it. God forbid if you happened to write something truly different or imaginative.
It was about this time that my best friend Brand Whitlock (artist supreme!) and I started to talk about starting our own publishing house. As usual, we talked a lot. Years later, early in 1996, we finally stopped talking and actually started our first publishing venture--YARD DOG COMICS. The Comic did well, so in 1998 we started making chapbooks as well. Then early in 2000 we received our first shipment of perfect-bound books.
We have phased out the comic book now and are focusing on books. Not the sort of books you'd find in your grocery store, and not the kind of main-stream bubble gum crap you can expect from the mega corporate houses. We aren't afraid of the unusual; we embrace it. We don't take the stories that can be pigeon-holed. We don't give a d__n if extreme leftists or extreme rightists are distressed. We don't care if intellectuals aren't impressed. A Yard Dog Press book has to be SciFi, Horror, or Fantasy. It has to be entertaining, well-written, and above all else, not the sort of thing you are likely to find anywhere else.
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