Amid all the current talk of the flailing publishing industry, it’s nice to know that there are still publishing projects that prioritize stories before sales, and books before some vague idea of the vast, digital future. Madras Press, the brainchild of Sumanth Prabhaker, provides a home for those “clumsy, ill-fitting stories,” whether in length or content, that are “made perfect when read in the simplest possible way”—which is to say individually bound, in beautifully designed and unadorned little books that might not be able to find a home anywhere else in the world.

Additionally, Prabhaker has adopted the mandate of donating all the proceeds of the books to charities of the authors’ choice, a choice that suggests that Madras Press is blazing new artistic and altruistic ground of its own. Following the release of the first four Madras novellas (Aimee Bender’s The Third Elevator, Rebecca Lee’s Bobcat, Trinie Dalton’s Sweet Tomb and Prabhaker’s own A Mere Pittance), The Fanzine spoke with publisher and writer Sumanth Prabhaker about how he got Madras Press off the ground, his thoughts on publishing, and what he’s got planned for the future.

How did the idea for Madras Press come about?

The initial idea was just to publish a story of mine, because at eighty pages long and with no exposition, it didn't seem worth trying to pester an established publisher about. And maybe more importantly, it wasn't the kind of story that would really benefit from being marketed as a trade book, with blurbs and a prominent barcode and all the other non-story stuff that gets packaged into most books. That decision created a lot of limitations for me—I wouldn't be able to distribute the story widely, or rely on someone with actual knowledge and experience to do a P&L [Profit and Loss] form—but it also freed me from retaining a lot of the aspects to commercial books that don't really have any place being attached to a story.

It wasn't until after I'd come up with the model for the shape and size and layout of the book that I began to hear about other people who had stories that might benefit from a similarly customized format. That was probably part of the attraction, or at least part of what convinced the other authors that it wouldn't be a horrible idea to send their work to a tiny new publisher—that the format of the books fits the content, and not the other way around.

Why channel the proceeds to charities, rather than to the authors?

When I was just beginning to put this project together, the only book I could count on being able to publish was my own, and it just seemed to me like a nice way to do things.  I'd never thought of my stories as commercial products, and I don't think they'd perform very well against trade books in competing for people's money.  Or at least I don't like to think of them in that way.