For our second installment of MicroPress interviews I sat down to chat with Chris Andrecheck, one half of Woodbridge Farm Books out of Windsor, Ontario. I appreciate Chris taking time out of his busy schedule between work and raising his brand new baby to get candid with me. I think it’s a really fun one.
The gritty:
•Woodbridge Farm Books was founded in 2018, originally as a residency series that then began publishing peripheral works by their attendees, and following the onset of Covid, transformed into a publishing-first enterprise.
•WFB publishes two main series of writing, Writers at Rest (writers writing about things other than writing) & Birders on Birds (self-explanatory). They are also publishing their first foray in poetry chapbooks this year.
•WFB does not currently have open submissions and does not maintain a slush pile, soliciting works instead, in addition to collaborating with PIBO who picks the authors for Birders on Birds.
•WFB chapbooks cost roughly 6-8 dollars to produce (excluding labour), and have print runs of up to 500 (their Atwood title is that upper threshold); Writers at Rest averages 100 copies, and Birders on Birds 200.
•Contributors receive 10 author copies and an author rate on additional copies.
CL:
I wanted to chat about Woodbridge Farms, right?
CA:
Woodbridge Farm Books. I always put the S on the end of farms too and my business partner corrects me every fucking time.
CL:
I still say Safeways instead of Safeway. And when I was in Atlantic Canada the S’s get tacked on to everything.
CA:
Well yeah and that's where a lot of my family's from, and I lived there for all of high school and first four years of university [at Saint Thomas University].
I went for their Bachelor of Applied Arts in journalism, and 9/11 happened while I was at school. So all five of my courses were just analyzing 9-11 journalism all day every day. And I fucking hated it. And ended up dropping out. And then the next year, they changed their partnership from New Brunswick Community College to the CBC. I was like, you fuckers, I probably would have stuck with it if I would known I'd be doing an internship at CBC radio. Instead of going to a community college for a year.
CL:
That's very real.
CA:
So I switched to the English department.
CL:
All roads lead to the Canterbury Tales eventually.
How long have you been making books with Woodbridge Farm books?
CA:
I think we started around 2018. It started as a writer's residency that Grant, my business partner, had because he's got a house out on Lake Erie. And so he'd set up a writer there for a week and they'd just come out writing. At the end of the week, they'd do a reading of whatever they were working on. And Biblioasis put out the first book that led to Woodbridge Farm essentially with the poet, Jesse Eckerlin.
So that one, that first chapbook was done by Biblioasis. But, you know, we got talking and it's like, “well, it's a chapbook. We've both worked in publishing for years. Why don't we just do our own press and just to make a few bucks to support, you know, buying wine and cheese for the the reading.”
That's essentially all we were planning at the time and then the pandemic happened, so the writing residency shut down and never really continued. And we had to re-imagine sort of the press when we came out of it.
CL:
That is a huge shift. Particularly going from an experiential or a para-press to just doing the thing that was ancillary. I'm glad that it exists still, that the vestigial organ wiggled off and grew some of its own legs or whatever. That must have been hard. So which of Jesse’s book was that was that? Thrush?
CA:
Yeah, it was Thrush.
CL:
Okay. Okay. I do have thrush. I have not I don't have thrush, but I have a copy of Thrush.
So you re-imagine the press coming out of out of the pandemic, how many books have come out of the program, including out of the residencies, to date now?
CA:
The “Writers at Rest” series I think has five or six books. The “Birders on Birds,” which is basically how we re-imagined the press, was partnering with PIBO1 and launching a bird book series, has three, including the Atwood. And then this year we started, don't know how it's gonna go, a poetry series. We put out our first book this fall. So somewhere around 10? 12?
CL:
Yeah, and so writers at rest is writers describing things they do outside of their writing practice in a literary style?
CA:
So I just looked it up. Writers at Rest, we have five books.
CL:
Was Writers at Rest the initial focus coming out of the pandemic then?
CA:
That was actually more part of the residency at the start. Because they were all working on bigger projects, but we wanted to have something to launch to pay for the residency and whatnot, help with funding it. And there's not a lot of chapbooks that we can find around that are nonfiction, so we thought that'd be a fun different angle to do.
CL:
Totally. The last time I did a call for my microzines, I said “I would love to see fiction. I would love to see an RPG system.” And it's one page with eight panels so it's a cover cover and then six panels of content, it's not large right but I would like to see things that aren't poetry. I got way different pitches. And so I think there is a feeling out there that people have things they want to produce in small or as ephemera that are interesting reads that aren't lyric or whatever, you know, like I think there actually is no shortage of people wanting to try writing that way. So it's nice to have spaces for that.
So you've got the Birders on Birding. And you have an Atwood book.
CA:
It's about birding with her husband.
CL:
You cold-called Margaret Atwood? You looked her up in the phone book or?
CA:
Well, the Birders on Bird series is partnered with Pelee Island Bird Observatory. And she is actually a part of that organization. It's her and her husband are big birders. And she knew that we donate like 10% or something of our proceeds to PIBO. They basically had a royalty on all our chapbooks to help support the organization. So she was keen on doing something to help support them.
CL:
Yeah, that's crazy. So what does a print run look for everyone? I imagine Atwood, I mean maybe you didn't change the print run for Atwood, but what does the print run look like for most of the books?
CA:
The Writers at Rest series, it's usually around 100. The Birders on birds, we do 200 because PIBO tends to buy 50 to 100 of them sort of to start off. And we launched it at their big birding event on Pelee Island. So there's some built in sales there.
For Atwood, we did 500. Last I knew, and it hasn't even been a year yet, I think we had around 70 left.2
We bound them all in one night. Two weeks after my child was born. It was a nightmare.
CL:
So what's the book craft? Is it a saddle stitch or do you have a long stapler?
CA:
We sew them. We stitch them.
CL:
I hope you put the baby to work, like, two weeks, that’s old enough to quit mooching. 500, that's a lot of handmade books.
CA:
We were extra stupid with the Atwood and did French flaps too. So we had to do like three fucking folds. They look awesome, but it was just one thing after another kept delaying the book so that we had no choice but to finish producing them once they were printed in three days.
CL:
And so what are those books retail for, I guess?
CA:
The Atwoods we sell for $20.
CL:
And for the rest of the series, is it, like, are they comparable sizes of books?
CA:
Yep.
CL:
And then are the rest of them $20 or are they—
CA:
—$15. And for Writers at Rest, $10, but we might be bumping it to $15. It's a lot of work.
CL:
Yeah, so you're saying it took three, basically three days of a few of you together to put 500 books together?
CA:
Three people, three days. Full days. Basically from when I got up to when I went to bed, folding the covers in the three spots, folding the interiors, collating them, punching the holes for the sewing, and then we all got together and sewed them one night.
CL:
That's a yeoman's job, right? I've been rereading the Canterbury Tales, so everything's yeoman. It's like, oh man, I touched my toes today when I put my socks on, I'm such a yeoman.
All the books are handmade, all the books are hand-stitched. And where do you print them?
CA:
There's a company in Toronto that we order all our paper stock from now, mostly. Because we use pretty nice, fancy papers. We use 70 pound cream linen textured interior stock. And then a mohawk felt cover stock. I think that’s what your poetry book cover is, isn't it?
CL:
I didn't know you had my poetry book, Chris. I wouldn’t know. Probably. It really muted the painting that ended up on the cover in a weird way. But also the first like 20 in the print, like when they sent me the box, really didn't look as good as the rest of them. So I was really disappointed when I unboxed it. Wow. It's quite a...Yeah. They do make a nice book.
CA:
Yeah. Yeah. So we use that same sort of cover stock. It works better, I think, with typographic covers. Sort of limited printing, because like you said, it does mute the painting a little bit, but it does add to the production values.
CL:
Not that I want a glossy book. When I started initially talking to them, I was like, “you have to let me find a cover.” And they're like, well, we could do something. I was like, “I will sue you guys if you give my book a bad cover. I'm not fucking joking. Like, this matters so much to me.” I judge books by covers. It is such, it's an indicator of press sensibility, but also the writer's taste. If a writer has really bad taste or a writer doesn't fight for a really good cover, then I'm like, you know, like, a good cover expresses a well-roundedness as an artist.
But anyway, before I really start talking about myself, we're talking about the paper.
CA:
We have a local guy who does the printing for us. He's more one of those little commercial printers where people go to do business cards and whatnot. So it’s like: “it's not what you've ever done before. I'm going to bring you my own paper. Then I'm going to bring it back to you for trimming after we produce the books.”
He doesn't even charge us for the trimming. He just charges for the print job. He turns it around in a day, every time.
CL:
Asking this question earlier this week [the premise of this whole interview series] I pissed off one person who I guess I'm not gonna do an interview with anymore, but, what are your costs, if you exclude labour in making one of these books? Or making a run of these books?
CA:
I always have to calculate it. Because we're trying to legitimize a business. When we did the Atwood, we got incorporated to protect ourselves and whatnot and do contracts and everything. I do have to calculate this stuff for accounting now that we're officially incorporated. You know, print run of say, 100, because it's easier for me to make these numbers up off the top of my head. The printing usually costs around 250 covers and interiors, full color, because we've been doing more color than black and white lately.
CL:
For the 100?
CA:
Paper costs, it depends if we can really buy bigger bulk amounts, which we have been. Usually around a buck or two a book. So I would guess our cost per book to produce is somewhere around like six to eight dollars.
CL:
And that's all without labor, right?
CA:
That's without any labor, yes. You don't calculate labor in the publishing industry or you start seeing negative numbers.
CL:
That’s the thing that I'm most interested in when I talk to people, because some people are like, “oh yeah, I'm happy to lose money. My cost on a press is like 200 bucks a year, and I give everything away as ephemera, so I never really make it up.” It's like, oh, really?
And then, you know, even just working with one really kind of stratospheric, cosmic entity like Atwood, like you're describing, it's like, oh yeah, we incorporated to protect ourselves and to protect ourselves, because we're working in a space where it's like we need formal infrastructure to support us and protect ourselves, and protect our authors. That's interesting. Because you're kind of in a really weird space compared to most of the people I talk to in that sense. That's really fascinating.
And thank you for being c a n d i d. The sub-sack is called Candid Lit. I was gonna call it canned lit after this old parody book. It's like a fake history of Canadian literature. It hasn’t aged great though.
So you're doing this to, I mean, not necessarily earn a profit, but to do it in a way where you can actually have a business and continue doing what you're doing.
CA:
Yeah, that's the hope, that's the plan. We want to make profits because we do like that we're supporting this like birding organization, this group. And if we start running, you know, like a lot of presses, negative numbers, then we're not going to be able to do that going forward.
CL:
And so what's your business partner's name again?
CA:
Grant Monroe. He's a librarian. He works with several libraries out in the county. He's like management of the library.
CL:
Okay, cool. And you are a Canada Post worker.
CA:
Yeah.
CL:
So like what's the distance like, I guess for Grant it's different because Grant manages books or book accounts or whatever. But what do you feel the distance from Canada Post to your job is? Is it like a relief? When I talk to somebody who's a professor, they're like, “I teach them how to make books. And then I go home and then I make books,” you know, for some people, it's very 1:1, right?
CA:
I hated that. Yeah. When I worked full-time in publishing I never read, I never wrote. That was work, and I felt so disconnected from the book world, the deeper I worked in the book world. So Canada Post being completely separate is amazing for me. It makes this passion project something I actually care about and want to do.
CL:
I really like that. I've always been a big fan of having two or three jobs and being a little over full-time. Having two or three part-time jobs and getting about 60. And just to keep my brain from being too mad at any one of them at any one point in time, right? And that might be a little bit of ADHD. I don't know. Hard to say.
You do have a history with with publishing like you worked with Biblioasis. Where are they based?
CA:
The publishing offices and their book shop are in Windsor.
CL:
And you're in Windsor? Ontario is like a paint splat to me. It's just, it's indecipherable. I'm just not convinced it's real yet. And so how long did you work in that industry for then?
CA:
I worked for Biblioasis for like eight, nine years, something like that.
CL:
Do you give contributors copies or do you have an author rate or, like, what's quote-unquote compensation look like for them?
CA:
We give them a certain number of copies, I'm pretty sure it's 10. And then they also get a discount if they want to buy additional copies.
CL:
Right now you mostly solicit work. What are the benefits of soliciting? I guess you get to fine tune what the house style is, or what the energy is. Do you just get to pick people you really like, or is it more serendipitous?
CA:
A large part of it is serendipitous because it's more determined by PIBO and whatnot. But, you know, before that, when it was more tied to the retreat, it was still picking people that we liked or respected and wanted to, or liked and respected, and wanted to work with. It's not exclusive. I either like or respect you.
CL:
I hope I'm in one of the two camps, because I know there's probably a third camp that involves neither of those things.
CA:
Honestly, it's also a time thing. We both have full-time jobs and don't necessarily have the time to go through a big slush pile. And some people are disingenuous and will take a slush pile and never look through it. And we just want to be up front with people. If we are going to accept submissions from people, we'll let you know. But right now we're not doing that. We don't want you to waste your time. Send it to someone else instead of hoping we'll read it.
CL:
I think too, if if they really are, if they have this really great literary sort of pseudo bird thing, maybe they can just talk to you, right? Like, it might make more sense just to know what what you're doing. You're not scary people. Maybe Grant is scary. I haven't met Grant. Maybe he has little horns and a forked tail or something.
So Jesse Eckerlin's Thrush is kind of the proto-Woodbridge Farm Books book, put out through Biblioasis. And it was poetry. And now you’re going back to poetry.
CA:
And now we started doing poetry this year.
CL:
So what does like selling look like for you? PIBO is a big event, so there's probably a lot of sales driven there. Authors can, you know, get their discounted copies. Is web commerce a huge part of your business, or do you go to markets?
CA:
Web commerce was huge for us this year. Really? After the Atwood at PIBO event, our website exploded for the next couple weeks with sales coming in.
CL:
Did Atwood convert to multi-book purchases?
CA:
It did actually. A lot of people wanted to then get the whole Birder series.
CL:
And so there's three so far. Is it tough to find birder writers that are writing something that you're interested in publishing? Or does that kind of just get funneled in through PIBO?
CA:
That gets funneled in through PIBO, because it's whoever their Birder of the year, doing their talk at the thing, is.
CL:
What’s your dream chapbook for Woodbridge Farm? Who's your dream author? Blue Sky, like you could run five different series and money was no object, what would the things you want to be publishing look like?
CA:
I mean, there has been talks, very preliminary, probably never happen, of moving into trade books, very slowly, like one a year. I personally love to expand doing more non-fiction on nature and whatnot. I'm a huge hiker, outdoors person. Until the baby came we used to camp like three, four, five times every summer.
Grant’s a mushroom guy, he forages for mushrooms. He hasn't killed himself or anyone else yet, so he's pretty good at it.
CL:
Yeah, I think there is a benchmark with mushroom foraging that, if you haven’t met it, you're not alive.
So what's the gap between if a chapbook costs you two to three hundred to kind of put together, and a trade book is costing thousands, what does the gap look or feel like to you? Do you think there’s a tidy continuum between what you're doing now and putting out a trade book here, or do you think that that's like two unique jobs?
CA:
It's hard to say. I mean it it's why we've talked about it many times but never really committed to doing it yet because it does become more work for sure, and we've said from the start we always wanted the press to be fun. And not interfere with our jobs, not push us to where we're not having fun anymore where it is just a job.
And that's why I say if we do ever move into trade publishing, it would be very slowly. Dip our toes in the water and see how it feels.
And I don't know what it would take to get us there. I mean, basically the right book, first of all. Some sort of guarantee of sales, not a literal guarantee, but we know that if it's anything like the birding stuff, something very locally based that people locally would buy it in order for us to move into it and to take the risk.
CL:
I don't want to hear in six months that it's happened. I want to hear in like six years that it's happened. I don't I don't do good with change.
I know I said like blue sky, but I don't think that's even that, you know, I think that's totally feasible. Just get Atwood to give you a book, right? She could just hand another thing over, right?
How was it working with Atwood? Is she a normal person?
CA:
There was very little interaction. Most of the design and the contract and the book work was through her agency. And then I unfortunately couldn't make it to the event, so I didn't get to meet her. Grant was at the event and met her, and she was apparently very pleasant and very supportive.
In many ways she was an easier intermediary than the agent was because she just wanted to get it done because it was supporting PIBO and whatnot and the agency, you know they want to obviously make sure she's treated right and you know they'd be like “well okay we'll have to go to Atwood for this” and they'd always come back right away being like, “yeah, she approved.”
CL:
Well, I mean, maybe I'll interview her next to talk about, you know, her relationship to small press. I could just cold call her, I think.
CA:
Yeah, sure. She'll go for it.
CL:
She might. Maybe not. I am still from Alberta.
Chris Andrechek is co-publisher and production manager at Woodbridge Farms Books. He lives and writes in Windsor, Ontario.
Pelee Island Bird Observatory.
It sold out in the interim since we conducted this interview.