Lasavia Publishing is a New Zealand based independent publishing collective. Our aim is to create a thriving community of artists and writers to support independent publishing.
We have three imprints: 99% Press for fiction and poetry; TP Press for non-fiction; and Beansprout Press for Children.
‘When Leila Lees and I first considered establishing Lasavia Publishing, less than one in a hundred manuscripts submitted to publishers reached publication. The situation rapidly became far worse than that. In 2015 Random/Penguin announced that they would publish one new fiction writer in 2016. Manuscripts submitted to publishers were, and still are, routinely returned unopened. ‘Mechanisms of exclusion’ as Foucault called them, are rife in the present publishing climate, particularly in New Zealand. One of them is the refusal of major publishers to consider ‘Science Fiction’, a term very broad in its application, covering just about everything that does not conform to this country’s particular, and restrictive, form of social realism – anything that mixes genres, or bends them, or crosses genre boundaries, or exhibits excessive imagination.
Publishers distrust the wild card, that which might put readers too far out of their comfort zones, as if comfort was somehow the purpose of literature. Both writers and readers lose out. Real grass roots work is lost or supplanted by celebrity culture. Only indy publishers, who don’t have to carry the overheads of big publishers, will be light enough on their feet to thrive in the new publishing environment.
The name 99% Press was inspired by the Occupy movement which, so quickly it seems, has become a part of history. In literary terms, many of those 99% are writers whose work is not being published because it does not conform to current publishing parameters.
Tipi Press was conceived in a similar spirit. A lot of literary and social comment never makes it to print because of ideological framing. The same could be said of works that explore the edge of mind body and spirit.
Beansprout Press arose from the awareness of how important it is that children have access to a wide variety of books that foster the imagination and make books fun.’
Mike Johnson, Editor of Lasavia Publishing