For the Indie at Heart

Joshua Fields Millburn

In my past life as a professional designer, I found that designing business cards for myself was one of the harder things a person can do. After all, a business card should concisely tell something about you — something the person on the receiving end will remember and associate with your personality or style.

The burden we all carry when trying to express who we are as people hinders this exercise, because we know too much. Our burden is a burden of knowledge, and it’s a heavy, cumbersome load to carry when you’re trying to be quick and agile. The details clutter the core principles you want to express. It’s kind of a pain in the ass.

The same could be said of coming up with a slogan or tagline for a business you’ve started. A business generally isn’t quite as round as a person in terms of history and complexity, but if you’re building something that’s shaped by philosophies you hold dear, and if the foundation of the company is the community surrounding it — which is itself full of people with ideas and interpretations of what the focus should be and which direction the business should go next — you quickly find yourself in a personal-business-card-designing-style situation where everything seems either too focused or too broad. Too general or too specific. Too quirky or too serious.

It’s with this in mind that we took to the Asym Community to ask the denizens of the new publishing world what they thought we should use as a tagline for Asymmetrical Press — the imprint of our company, under which we publish neat things we love from authors we invest in.

A lot of fantastic ideas were presented, but none quite captured what we were trying to do, either leaving something out or putting too much emphasis on one thing or another. We were thrilled with the amount and quality of participation, but still had a head-scratcher on our hands.

The solution came late one night, when after a marathon session of formatting our new book, Chapbook (which features work by our first two authors, Chase Night and Shawn Mihalik, alongside we three founders), Joshua stood up from his chair (where he had been hunched for hours, making sure the text was presented as perfectly as possible) and walked over to my room, where I was putting the final touches on the cover, back, and spine of the paperback edition. He leaned in the doorway and said, “I think I might have come up with our tagline. Accidentally.”

He had me open the book file and turn to the dedication page, which read “for everyone who’s indie at heart.”

The intent of that dedication was to capture the essence of our entire approach to publishing. We think all options are equally viable on a large scale, and although some make more sense than others at different points in an author’s career and for different types of work, we’re in full support of self-publishing through a service like CreateSpace, finding an agent and getting your work published through a Big Six entity, or publishing all of your work for free on a blog. There are so many different ways to publish these days, the important thing is that you do publish and get your work out into the world — the vehicle that gets it there is far less important.

What we do encourage is that authors retain as many rights to their work as they can along the way so they can maintain its artistic integrity from beginning to end. This won’t always be possible, but it’s worth striving for. This is an attitude that, in the music or film world, would be attributed to the independent artists and directors. The folks who look for the best path from themselves to their audience, and then take it. No matter how treacherous the footing may be.

To us, that’s what it means to be indie at heart. Whether you’ve got a book deal with Penguin or a handful of readers on Amazon, you decide to do the best work you possibly can and you do it for the love of the work. You do it because you can’t not.

We tweaked the dedication a bit for concision and clarity, and now it serves as our slogan, tagline, and in a way, our purpose statement.

Asymmetrical Press: For the Indie at Heart.

We’ll strive to live up to this phrase with our works and efforts in the indie publishing community. Because we can’t not.