THIS WEEK
Company Spotlight Monstrous Regiment
IS MONSTROUS REGIMENT’S FIRST FULL-LENGTH
WORK OF FICTION
Monstrous Regiment hits the heights with focus on subjects outside the mainstream
Monstrous Regiment scooped the Scotland National Book Awards’ headline prize with Ely Percy’s novel Duck Feet, despite the micropress only coming into existence in 2017
J
Caroline Carpenter @carolinec1988
10 18th February 2022
ust a few years aſter launching, independent micropublisher Monstrous Regiment scooped the Book of the Year at the Scotland National Book
Awards (formerly known as the Saltire Book Awards) last November with Ely Percy’s Duck Feet, its first full-length work of fiction. This achievement is even more impressive when you bear in mind that the press is a two-person operation, with founders Ellen Desmond and Lauren Nickodemus only working on it part-time, and mainly on a voluntary basis.
The pair set up the Edinburgh-based press in 2017 to platform working-class writers and publish works that tackle topics of intersectional feminism, sexualit and gender. Considering whether their vision has changed in past few years, Nickodemus says: “Both yes and no.
Our belief in publishing the things we don’t see enough of on bookshelves and the impact they can have remains true, but we have also learned a lot about navigating the publishing industry and running a business over the past few years, which has informed how we get to the point of publishing what we have a vision for.”
She explains that “pacing ourselves and keeping our capacit in mind” is essential, as they both work for the press around their full-time jobs. “It can be frustrating, and we used to be quite ashamed of it, but we have learned to slow down. We now have a ‘do fewer things but do them beter’ moto,” she says. This was put into practice last year when the pair decided to “slow down and weather out the pandemic a bit, instead of ploughing through and ignoring the challenges”. Nickodemus describes this as a “strange perk” to being such a small business—“not having to pay office rent or staff salaries meant that we could decide not to commission new products for a moment. Bigger presses likely didn’t have this option.” Duck Feet was the only title Monstrous Regiment released last year, as it chose to concentrate on sales and marketing rather than commissioning or working on other
ELY PERCY’S DUCK FEET
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