Seven CirclePress was founded in 2008 by Seth Jani, a young, aspiring poet from New England. It was initially started as a means for Seth to showcase his work and distribute his countless boxfuls of poorly made chapbooks.
After exploring the present publishing market Mr. Jani discovered that what he sought in a publishing model, namely passion and commitment to quality not credentials, was hard to come by (or so he thought at the time). In light of this he opened up SCP to the wider community of poets and began accepting unsolicited submissions.
SCP is a purely grass-roots operation. Mr. Jani has no experience with any institute of higher education and his editorial insight is fostered only by his natural love of the written word and years of self-propelled study.
Each submission to SCP is read with the utmost care but inevitably the work is ultimately accepted or rejected based upon if it happens to meet the editor’s/s subjective tastes.
It should be remembered that SCP is the basement-brewed project of one lonely young poet and that though we try to engage multiple editors in the selection process (which is implied by our incessant use of the plural pronoun “We”) often times Mr. Jani is the sole editor and the selection process just involves him sitting alone in a basement somewhere staring at submissions for hours on end.
SCP is also a supporter of new, innovative publishing techniques and concepts, which means we employ the use of such things as Print-On-Demand (via lulu.com) and Creative Commons licensing.
You should also be aware that at the moment SCP is simply a pocket-change propelled activity. It is no one’s livelihood and no one is making a fortune from it. Whatever proceeds are made from the sale of the press’s printed material gets funneled directly back into the project. With that said note that none of the authors published by SCP receive any royalties or monetary payment for their work, but are supplied with contributor copies, something we hope to continue to do as long as it remains financially possible.
Again…SCP is a basement-brewed grass-roots operation. We are relating this information because we want all potential readers and submitters to be 100% clear on the nature of this publication. If you have any question about how it all works that hasn’t been covered here (or about anything else involving the literary world) please feel free to send your inquiries to Seth Jani at editor-in-chief@sevencirclepress.com.
With that said we encourage you to do all you can to help support DIY culture, which includes such things as reading the work of all the fantastic writers on our site, helping to spread the good word whenever possible via your own pretty mouth and by visiting our links page (and then their link pages) and checking out as many independently run venues as you can handle.
It’s because of readers and writers like you that quality art can continue to exist in an age that is as saturated with inauthentic expression and character as ours.
Thank you.
