The Institute of Network Cultures
The Co-op in Your Head: How to Sustain Cultural Publishing as a Commons?
NL
Amsterdam
HumDrumPress and Sepp Eckenhaussen warmly invite you for this plotting session toward economically sustainable, cooperative models for cultural publishing. Join us at Post-Office in Amsterdam on July 11th!
One of the reasons that many people are enamored by cultural publishing is the seemingly friendliness of the publishing economy. One needs only ‘a bit’ of money to produce a book, yet selling copies can cover production costs and – who knows? – could even relieve the precarity of its producers. For cultural workers who are used to writing a funding application for every project, this seems like a welcome relief from the funding cycles that dominate their lives. But reality is cruel. Even with bigger, more established cultural publishing houses in the Netherlands, most book projects are only rendered (im)possible by the decisions of funding committees or deep pockets of an author.
In this dominant model, cultural publishing houses function as service providers. Authors are expected to deliver a manuscript alongside a bag of money in order for a project to receive the green light. From there, the publisher arranges the production: from proofreading and design to printing, and, finally, distribution. Dictated by funding or institutional bodies, these projects are usually accompanied by strict and fast-paced deadlines, and are, ironically, driven by sales numbers as the most important ‘impact metric’. As we know, the neoliberal state and the market are often inseparable, and the cultural publishing industry is no exception to this.
So, here’s the situation. HumDrumPress have been attempting to develop an alternative to this model by practicing cultural publishing as ‘a commons’. The economic base of the commons is neither public funding nor the market, but the community (or commoners). However, while HumDrumPress now have some ideas and experience in how to do this, they haven’t quite yet figured out what this alternative model looks like precisely in economic terms. The desire and the root of the thought is there… but what are the concrete actions that can guide towards the desired outcome?
This event is a kind of public brainstorming & exchange forum for those interested and active in DIY publishing economies, in general, or in HumDrumPress as a case study and practice, in particular. We will look at different possibilities for cooperative financing and decision-making (think: membership and subscription models, Substack and Patreon initiatives, cooperative or co-working models), note: not as a theoretical exercise, but with real numbers and real people with real publishing (in the broadest sense) projects.
Could it be that to develop a publishing commons, we need to trust the coop in our heads? The revolutionaries of May ’68 in Paris warned people against the ‘cop in their head’ – the internal voice that tells one to obey law and order, stop in front of a red traffic light, and pay at the self-check-out, even if no real cop is watching. The coop in our heads is the positive inverse of this cop – the internal voice that calls for acts of solidarity and mutualism, even when no one is watching. What material infrastructures should we build to foster this coop in our heads?
Practicalities
Location: Post-Office Cooperative, Hoofdweg 403, Amsterdam
Date and time: Friday, 11 July 2025, 16:00-19:00
Registration: This event is free of charge. Please RSVP to hello@humdrumpress.com
Catering: Drinks and snacks will be served, please feel free to bring some - the more the merrier!
Collaborators and Support
HumDrumPress is a small-scale independent publisher based in Rotterdam and Berlin. It was founded in 2021 by Amy Gowen and Wibke Bramesfeld, revise each stage in the traditional publishing cycle to make our publishing processes as communal, open-access, and multi-vocal as possible. HumDrumPress work with methods such as open book events, collective editing, collaborative design, logbooks, and open-access publishing, and are committed to activating the knowledge contained in a publication far before and long after it takes on material form.
This event is part of the economic cycle of the HumDrumPress research project ‘Expansive Publishing Strategies’, which experiments with what inter-dependent, inter-connected, sustainable, durable, and networked models for ‘publishing’. It is also the Open Book event for Sepp Eckenhaussen's forthcoming book Goodbye Poverty Jetset: Art Beyond Precarity (working title).
This event functions as a local get-together of the project Shared Visions: Building a Sustainable and Inclusive Cooperative for Visual Artists in Europe. It is supported by a large community of practice, including Caradt, Post-Office, and the European Union.
Cover image: installation shot of Maria van der Togt's Hard Copy Soft Copy
