As the owner, managing editor, art director, and acquisition editor of Jugum Press: I’m a grown woman and I can do what I want.

And thanks to POD technology, I can finally answer to the siren call of freedom I first heard from the bearded, bushy-browed former CPUSA activist in the Southern Oregon College copy shop:

“Freedom of the press belongs to those who own the press.”*

The Jugum Press editorial staff (i.e., me) published 11 titles this year:

• 2 fiction series, 2 titles each: “Accidental Heretics” and “Rain City Comedy of Manners”
• 3 nonfiction titles in the “Voices of History” series
• 8 titles in the “Opera en Español” series

The Jugum Press editorial staff chose these titles because of personal acquaintance with the author, translator, or copyright holder.

OK, joking aside, I spent 35 years deep in professional/technical publication, where I was not the copyright holder, but learned and practiced most all aspects of publishing, and lived through the shift from DRIVING to the typesetters’ shop in the middle of the night to BEING the typesetter at home in the middle of the night.

To build Jugum Press’s list quickly this year, while learning yet more publishing technologies, I chose fiction and nonfiction works that I was acquainted with and that I believe have interest to various audiences—some of which will always be such small audiences that mainstream publishers will never bother to invest in the topics.

So, before I roll out the Jugum Press announcements for new titles in the “Voices of History” and  “Opera en Español” series, I just want to say how thrilled I am that we now all have direct, low-cost/no-cost freedom of the press.

Freedom of the press no longer belongs only to those who can present a compelling marketing case (and a strong writer’s platform) to a New York publishing house. Or those who can afford to pay a vanity press extortion prices for access to ink and paper.

Conceivably, you can now publish broadly with nothing more than access to the internet, including composition, formatting … and the 100 other picky tasks.

The Jugum Press editorial and acquisition team also has enough in the pipe to last through 2014, so we** are still not accepting unsolicited manuscripts.

* I searched to find attribution for this quote, but out of the first 25 links, the only one that included a footnote hid the notes behind a scholastic paywall. So, I guess the original thought must have come from some damn communist and is now in the public domain.

** Where “we” indicated both the editorial and material me.