Zines and Small Press Editing and Proofreading Services

Small press and zine publishing runs on goodwill, and goodwill is a poor substitute for a written agreement. A press with two people and a Risograph publishes forty contributors a year on the basis of enthusiastic emails, and nobody thinks about rights until an anthology is reprinted, a contributor's piece is anthologised elsewhere, a press folds with stock and unpaid contributors, or a piece written at twenty is something the writer at thirty wants taken down. None of these are unusual and none of them are hostile. They are just the situations nobody wrote anything about.

We edit what small presses, zine makers and independent publishers produce — contributor agreements and rights statements, submission calls and guidelines, editorial policies and mission statements, colophons and credits pages, distribution and consignment agreements with shops, subscription and crowdfunding copy, grant and arts funding applications, catalogue and bookshop listing copy, print specification and supplier correspondence, editorial correspondence including acceptances and rejections, anthology and reprint permissions, community and accountability policies, and the writing itself where a press wants an outside read. Our editors are used to working at the scale you actually operate at rather than recommending processes designed for a house with a rights department.

The contributor agreement is the one document a small press cannot afford to skip, and it does not need to be long. What it needs to say is: which rights the contributor is granting, for how long and in what formats, whether the press may reprint in a later anthology or a best-of, whether it may license the piece to anyone else and on what split, when rights return, what payment there is and when it arrives, and what happens if the press stops operating. A page covering that, written in plain language rather than borrowed from a trade contract nobody involved can interpret, prevents almost everything that goes wrong later. We also draft the takedown position explicitly — whether a contributor can ask for a piece to be removed from a digital archive, and what happens to print copies already out — because small presses face this request regularly, decide it emotionally in the moment, and set an inconsistent precedent either way.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished work and contributor correspondence. We are editors rather than lawyers and offer no view on rights, contract terms or any legal question — an agreement of this kind should still be checked by someone qualified in your jurisdiction. What we can do is make the documents clear, short and honest about what a small press can actually promise.