The Birmingham Free Press is a multi-service publishing company. We offer illustration, layout, work with printers, and specialize in Print on Demand in cooperation with Amazon.
The flagship publication of the BFP is the Broadsheet Newspaper that has been published periodically since 1997. More a art project than a commercial venture, The Birmingham Free Press is a place where writers and illustrators can showcase their work. As a commitment from the beginning, everything published in The Birmingham Free Press is copyright by the individual creators. The Broadsheet has a typical print run from 5000 to 10,000 and is distributed, free, throughout the Birmingham municipal area. Aesthetically, the BFP is designed to look like newspapers from their heyday. It is always printed in black and white with a traditional masthead and a full page of comic strips. The content has always been politics, crime, arts and entertainment, satire, and, when we can find someone to write it, sports. |
Newspaper publishing in America is protected by so many laws you can comfortably put boxes in almost any publicly owned location and print anything you like, as long as its not libelous or obscene, by community standards. Really, anything, if it’s true, can be printed, even if it’s just true that someone said it—as long as you source them.
Newspapers are extremely cost effective, too. Newsprint is cheap. I like the look of the black and white. Color takes something away. There is a loss of gravitas. The New York Times didn’t have color on its cover until 1997. As far as I’m concerned, it was all down hill from there. |
Most newspapers aren’t even broadsheet anymore. A broadsheet is about 15 by 23 inches. Today’s newspapers are usually tabloids or Berliners. Smaller paper sizes that just don’t have “it.” They look silly in those old newspaper boxes that they don't fill.
A gothic font header is important too. If you are going to make a newspaper, have it look like a newspaper. You wouldn’t make a wedding dress that looks like a pair of overalls. We followed the same formula with The Jones Valley Sentinel. The Sentinel was a community newspaper with positive information about the Fairfield area of Birmingham. The paper was free and made money through advertising. |
Interested in the newspaper game?
Explore your options with The Birmingham Free Press.
Explore your options with The Birmingham Free Press.
When I first started exploring print on demand the typical startup cost for a new magazine could be around $100,000.00. Looking at the new technology, it seemed it might be possible to do it for nothing. That’s a game changer. Just to test out the formula, I decided to start a magazine.
I have always loved masterful painting and in the past few decades, representational art had really made a comeback. There are people living today creating some extraordinarily complicated and beautiful paintings. . |
The idea behind Post-Modern Times was to send out inquiry letters to artists from around the world to see what their philosophy of art is. I requested a brief statement and some print quality images that I could run in the magazine. Almost every artist I contacted agreed to contribute. So I had all of my content without spending any money. And it was good content. All of these artists were incredibly talented and thoughtful.
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I did end up hiring a philosopher from Bosnia to write some essays on aesthetics. I paid him $300, but he had offered to do it for much less. I couldn’t pay him less than $300. The guy is brilliant.
There are a number of print on demand programs out there. I tried Post-Modern Times on several. It takes a lot of time and effort to format things right. Eventually, I decided that Amazon is the best overall. Mainly because it is so seamless to get a product from conception to a reader’s hands. |
Interested in publishing a magazine?
Explore your options with The Birmingham Free Press.
Explore your options with The Birmingham Free Press.
The advances in technology has allowed everyone to be a publisher. The only thing that stands in the way of someone and their dreams is a little know-how.
Once I had figured out the formula, making books and magazines became rote. Like so much technology, what was once the product of a team of experts has moved to the hands of creative individuals. Developing content is the work now. Under the umbrella of The Birmingham Free Press, I started producing original and public domain books. |
The internet went crazy over the discovery of a Victorian children’s book with the intriguing name of Little Baron Trump and his Wonderful Dog Bulger. Supposedly it has a bunch of surprising coincidences that reflect the bizarre presidency of Donald Trump. It didn’t. But it is a delightful and imaginative tale of a genius kid that has a lot of exciting adventures. Very much in the tradition of Oz or Alice in Wonderland.
Public domain works are easily available online. It is just a matter of downloading the text and formatting it in InDesign. Tedious work, but necessary. Creative Suite has made publishing much easier than it was when we worked with production cameras, zipatone, and rubylith, but the final product looks just the same. The biggest difference is everything is toner now and not ink. |
In addition to Little Baron Trump, I published a version of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.
Most of the work for both of these projects was the illustrations. Coloring books, children’s books, cookbooks, comic books, fiction, nonfiction, biographies, memoirs, histories are all easy to publish today with little budget and effort. The Birmingham Free Press provides all publishing services for authors. We can take a manuscript and format it for Amazon, filling in any missing skills in the creation of a book. We provide illustration, layout, editorial services, formatting and production. As much or little as an author needs. |
Interested in publishing a book?
Explore your options with The Birmingham Free Press.
Explore your options with The Birmingham Free Press.
After publishing Post-Modern Times, I began to realize how much aesthetics, as a philosophical tradition, had largely disappeared. There was still a lot of work on the philosophy of art, but it was just answering the question of “what is art?” with the answer of, “pretty much anything.”
Aesthetics used to mean the study of Beauty with a capital “B.” Kind of a tough nut to crack when nobody really believes in it anymore. There was a time when philosophers wrote tomes on this stuff. Most long enough ago to be in the public domain. David Hume’s Of the Standard of Taste is one of the most digestible and concise examples of this. Since it is in the public domain, I was able to downloaded it, use wiki commons to gather illustrations, and produced a tidy edition of the work in a weekend. I also publish Kant’s The Critique of Judgement, which is a lot more dense, and written in German. Amazon gave me a hard time about the translation and I had to prove the translation, itself, was also old enough to be in the public domain, too. |
Today is a great time to be an author. Print on demand is the standard. All the big publishing companies provided was distribution and publicity. That’s the job of distribution firms and publicity agencies. There are so many opportunities for publishers today. And, unlike before, if you see a typo, it can be fixed.
Over half of all book sales, online and off, are through Amazon I’ve produced portfolios, chapbooks, catalogues for the gallery’s exhibitions, etc. If you have a book you would like to publish, contact The Birmingham Free Press and we will make it a reality. |