Publishing Now: A Working Class Guide to Making a Living Off Small and Self Publishing

Publishing now: A Working Class Guide to Making a Living Off Small and Self-Publishing
by Be Oakley
96 pages
Risograph Printed (Flat Gold and Raspberry)
3rd Edition of 400
Dec 2025
Perfect Bound

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Publishing now: A Working Class Guide to Making a Living Off Small and Self Publishing is an 18,000-word/34-chapter guide about my journey to making my small press (GenderFail) a full-time job. The 3rd edition features a complete redesign and re-editing of the entire book with new notes to reflect the 10th anniversary of running the press. As artists and writers, we aren’t taught anything about finding ways to make a living, even for those of us who have undergraduate and graduate degrees. I worked hard and found a way to make a living from my publishing platform, GenderFail, and in this publication, I share how I did it with no business or mainstream publishing experience. This is the professional practice or guide I wish I had when I started.



With GenderFail, I didn’t have any funding when I started, and over the 10 years of the project, I have found a way to do the work I want while also paying my bills. Publishing now: A Working Class Guide to Making a Living Off Small and Self-Publishing is my attempt to offer honest advice, true stories, resources, and other information that can help low-income and working-class people find ways to make a living as artists. This book also acts as a crystallization of my interests and goals as an educator. The title, in part, Publishing Now, is taken from a class I taught for 4 semesters at SMFA at Tufts University. In this, I wanted to give an honest survey and account from the perspective of a working-class artist and publisher. In many ways, this book is the core of what that class intended to share.



Publishing now: A Working Class Guide to Making a Living Off Small and Self-Publishing is imperfect and serves as just one account of one artist. This publication will inspire and motivate other working artists to be transparent and share their insights so we can help low-income and working-class people find ways to make money in the arts.

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