Pearl Street Publishing 1997-2012


 

For a number of years this was the Pearl Street Publishing website.
Content is from the site's archived pages providing a glimpse of what this site offered both to writers and readers.

 

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Mission Statement of Pearl Street Publishing

Pearl Street Publishing was founded in 1996. The primary purpose of Pearl Street Publishing is to publish works which will transport the reader to an uplifting place. These works will not be limited by category. They will sometimes be reflective, sometimes challenging, sometimes beautiful, sometimes humorous, sometimes exciting and always compelling.
Pearl Street Publishing is dedicated to publishing the creations of people who dare to act on their dreams. There are those who say that there is no audience for such works; or, if there is, we will not be able to discover it. We knowingly accept this challenge.
Pearl Street Publishing is committed to producing books which will be reread and shared with others. 

 Sherry Seiber, Publisher

 

 

Pearl Street Publishing 

 Pearl Street Publishing is located on Old South Pearl Street in Denver, Colorado. We are housed in a Victorian house  built before the turn of the 20th century. While we honor that heritage, we embrace the exciting  technological revolution that has ushered us into the 21st century. We are committed to the proposition that all of us who love to read will benefit from these marvelous advances. In that spirit, we invite you to browse in the Pearl Street Publishing Online Book Store  which we created in July of 2002. 

 

Summer, 2011
Currents
Online Journal
Pearl Street Publishing 

Sherry Seiber, Publisher 

Spring, 2011

   The Know Something Project, a sister site of Pearl Street Publishing, currently features an in-depth look at the growing, multi-faceted e-book industry. From e-readers such as the Kindle and the Sony Reader to retailers such as Fictionwise and ScribD (and the players such as Simon and Schuster (which just signed on to sell digital copies of some of its titles on ScribD) and Google, e-publishing is on the brink of something big.
ReadGreen is a new initiative that encompasses aspects of electronic as well as print-on-demand publishing. For more information, read Currents, a comment on technology and the  independent press-the last bastion of freedom of expression.

The Gutenberg Project is a must view for all readers. It is a volunteer effort which has produced 25,000 free e-books which are accessible without limitation. These books' copyrights have expired.
The distinction which the Project makes between free of charge and freedom of use is fascinating in this era of "monetizing" everything. From The Gutenberg Project website:

 

This distinction is immaterial if you just want to read a book privately, but it becomes of utmost importance if you want to work with the book:

  • you are a teacher and want to use the book in class,
  • you wrote a thesis about the book and want to distribute the book along with your thesis,
  • you have a literary web site and want to distribute the book to your audience,
  • or you are a writer and want to adapt the book for the stage.

   If the book you got is just free of charge, you may do none of the above     things. You may not even make a copy of the book and give it to your best friend. But if the book you got is free as in freedom you may do anything you like with that book. Clearly free as in freedom beats free of charge.

February 4, 2009

   Amazon's Kindle e-book reader is wondrous and elitist. It is wondrous because a reader can download books directly to the Kindle within 30 seconds anywhere anytime. Recently, I read John Updike's obituary on Kindle and downloaded his last book, The Widows of Eastwick, while sitting by the ocean. In the middle of the night when the reality of the next great Depression sets in, I have downloaded John Adams by David McCullough, The Great Depression and the New Deal by Eric Rauchway, and Bad Money by Kevin Phillips. These titles and others I have downloaded range from  $1.50 to $9.99 which are substantially less than hard copies of the same books. There is no monthly fee for the whispernet radio wave service that brings the books to your Kindle without the need for  computer hook up or wifi hot spot.

   It is elitist, however, because the Kindle costs $349.00 and can only access Amazon's designed-for- Kindle books. Unlike Adobe's PDF format, which is uniformly available, Kindle e-books are not. While we at Pearl Street Publishing have begun designing our books as Kindle books without having to pay fees, the Kindle daily blog continue to discuss the same authors and publishers who dominate Amazon and other book retailers. Tom Clancy was added to the list of exciting new Kindle authors today. Presumably publishers pay Amazon for such advertisements as well as placements as "other books" a reader may be interested in.  It is curious that the book business, in dire straits for many years, would change nothing about their business model except the distribution.  Kindle/Amazon receives 65% of the book price.

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Check this: Jump ahead to the present and it nice to note that the Kindle proved to be so successful that its price has dropped noticeably. Of course you could buy a fancy Kindle Oasis E-reader with a 7" High-Resolution Display (300 ppi), Waterproof, Built-In Audible, 8 GB, Wi-Fi for over two hundred dollars, but there are also much less expensive Kindle models now. My favorite is the Kindle E-reader for under $100. And of course there is now a Kindle app for your phone and other table devices. I just finished a move for my parents from their home in DC to Hart Heritage Estates, a senior living facility in Maryland where I live. A year earlier I had scouted all the local homes for seniors in the Bel Air area of Maryland. I was interested in Hart Heritage Estates because not only did they have assisted living options, they also offered respite care. I was considering moving my parents in with me and wanted to have the option in case I needed to take some time off to take care of  myself. But after discussing the idea of my becoming the main care taker form my elderly parents, we all decided that it would be better for all of us if they moved into a home for seniors. I introduced my parents to reading books on a kindle. Being able to increase the font size made a huge difference for them. My mother who was a prolific reader adjusted quickly to this new method of reading. She loved the fact that she could make the font larger and was surprised when she saw how the back lighting behind the copy gets lighter or darker depending upon where she was reading. My father complained a bit, but finally also adapted.

In 2009 Sherry Seiber, Publisher of Pearl Street Publishing was spot on to recognize the juggernaut that e books would become. The convenience and ease of access to thousands of books is overwhelmingly seductive to readers everywhere. My parents still own books, but they now do the majority of their reading from their kindles.

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    Change has come to the book business; there is no doubt of that. HarperCollins' earnings are predicted to be down 90% at the end of their fiscal year in June of 2009. Now is the time to make change meaningful. The wondrous technology behind Amazon's Kindle could be used to inform the reading public of fresh voices from independent presses as well as the already well-known authors from mega media corporations. As we celebrate Black History Month in 2009, we recommend two books whose authors are the change. One Sister's Song by Karen DeGroot Carter and Lady Bird by Sheryl Mebane.  Both these books deserve to be read.
  
ReadGreen

   As we watch the global markets in turmoil and hear we are on the brink of another world-wide Depression, it is time to ReadGreen. We recently launched Offerte, The Burnt Offerings by Jon Marie Broz, a poetry collection, whose varied formats reflect Pearl Street Publishing's ReadGreen concept. Offerte is available in hardback or paperback via print-on-demand technology. A reader can purchase either format when ordering Offerte through Amazon. The book is then printed and dropped-shipped within 48 hours. Offerte and other Pearl Street books are available as Kindle e-books, as well.

   There is more to ReadGreen than saving the paper and fossil fuels required to distribute hard copies of books. The revolutionary aspect of reading green centers on our belief that individual freedom of expression must be advanced throughout the world.  We were pleased to be recognized by the Yale Review as an independent press publishing new voices that deserve to be heard.  But recognition of the historical fact that the "independent press" has always been at the forefront of  publishing fresh voices and new ideas, is not enough.

   Through ReadGreen,  we are committed, not only to utilizing technology to produce and distribute the written word, but to tearing down barriers to freedom of expression wherever they exist. 

Always Current

    Pearl Street Publishing is located on Old South Pearl Street in Denver, Colorado. We are housed in a Victorian house  built before the turn of the 20th century. While we honor that heritage, we embrace the exciting  technological revolution that has ushered us into the 21st century. We are committed to the proposition that all of us who love to read will benefit from these marvelous advances. In that spirit, we invite you to browse in the Pearl Street Publishing Online Bookstore,  which was created in July of 2002, so long ago that PayPal was not yet owned by E-Bay.

 



 

Submissions to Pearl Street Publishing

  • Pearl Street Publishing is interested in submissions of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. The only limitation on submissions is the creator’s imagination.
  •  Please read themission statement for further guidance.
  • We offer an open submission policy as specified on this page in our electronic submission guidelines:
 First Step: e-mail a query regarding your  completed work: 
  • The query should consist of a summary of your manuscript which includes the nature of the work,  the number of words, and a description of your work. (250 word or less)
  • The query may contain a biographical note.  (50  words or less)
  •   We do not accept proposals. The work should be completed before you e-mail the query.
  • This query must be in the e-mail itself. We will not download attachments.
  • The e-mail address is thepearlteam@aol.com 
The Next Step: We will review the query to see if it meets our publishing needs. If so, we will request electronic transmission of a synopsis and/or the completed manuscript.  Thank you for your interest in Pearl Street Publishing.

 



 

Pearl Street Publishing's
First Book Contest
Dedicated to Hannah Amgott

Pearl Street Publishing is dedicated to publishing the creations of people who dare to act on their dreams. It is in this spirit  that we instituted the First Book Contest. This contest will be renewed in the spring of 2012.

Previous winners 
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Hannah Amgott click: In the Year of the Oxmemoir and poems
-Eric Anderson: Enough, a novel. 

 



 

Pearl Street Publishing Writing Fellowship

The Inspiration

The Pearl Street Publishing Writing Fellowship evolved as we developed our publishing venture. Our mission to publish the works of those "who dare to act on their dreams" has attracted a number of works by people who are not professional writers. In some instances, we have received submissions which have such promise that we decided to create a writing fellowship. The  fellowship  provides the writer with the editorial support required to produce a publishable manuscript. The Writing Fellowship also provides a stipend and, upon completion of the Fellowship, an offer of a Pearl Street Publishing contract.

To qualify for a writing fellowship the applicant must have completed a work and have a profession other than writing . We consider all of life’s important work a profession. Parenting, homemaking, and care taking are obviously included. Indeed, the inspiration for The Pearl Street Publishing Writing Fellowship is Nellie Kollister, maternal grandmother of the publisher, Sherry Seiber. She was a mother and homemaker in rural Ohio in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet, she somehow found the time and energy to organize a family band and to write poetry. Although she died when  her granddaughter was a year old, her legacy lives on vividly in her poetry.


The Recipients

Sheryl Mebane was the first recipient of the Pearl Street Publishing Writing Fellowship for her novel, Lady Bird.   Sheryl received her PhD in Chemistry from Berkeley in 2003. To order and learn about Lady Bird and her author click:

    

From Lady Bird : "A harmonica moaned, reaching deep inside. Down-home bass throbbed from the radio to her chest. Honey locked into the steady pulse, released into its space, exhaled."

With one breath, a story of three women begins in word and sound.  Honey, a songbird of rare quality, soars out of segregated Eastern North Carolina only to face deep betrayal and the high price of her talent.  Her daughter Passion writhes under Honey’s shadow, taking dangerous turns to avoid the musical salvation that is her birthright.  At a desperate time, a straight-laced stranger named Freida enters Passion’s world and becomes, in one afternoon in Brooklyn , the chance for peace that Honey defies death to seize.  In the final section, “Naming thunder and wind,” Freida’s past threatens Honey’s supernatural intervention in a struggle for Freida’s identity and her newly freed heart. 
             Through the power of the women’s tales, the novel follows the fourth central character, the music.  Each chapter is a song, building into three sets that form the lyric soul of the women’s lives, tracing the legacy of the music with the complexity and varied pace of jazz.

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      Sheryl’s life has been marked by the ebb and flow of three main pursuits: music, writing and chemistry. Sheryl Mebane was born and grew up in North Carolina he has two older sisters and both her parents are retired high school science teachers. Early in school, she seized upon revelations of the mysteries of music, which gave her a sense of the power behind what she heard around her.  She also explored language, expressing herself through creative writing, and was first published in a statewide collection of student writing at eight years old.  She began melding her musical and literary interests in a high school project in which she composed percussion music inspired by the works of James Baldwin and performed the composition for a school assembly.   Sheryl also presented a chemistry research project that systematically tested materials for drumheads to the International Science and Engineering Fair.  She gave the commencement address at her NC School of Science and Mathematics high school graduation after a draft of the speech won her the honor.
     In the four summers during her undergraduate career, Sheryl explored the outdoors, taught inner city Boston youth drumming and chemistry, interned in the Letters Department of Newsweek, and studied jembe drumming in West Africa, all funded by her Morehead Scholarship. 
     During her time at UNC, she also ran an elementary school creative writing competition for an honor society, composed and premiered pieces with the UNC Percussion Ensemble, and served as section leader for the marching band’s drumline. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a BS in Chemistry and Highest Honors for a thesis in her Creative Writing minor.
     Sheryl earned her doctorate in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in the fall of 2003.  Her studies include work in simulating ultrafast solution dynamics of inorganic compounds uses molecular dynamics as well as a project in chemistry education that chronicles and analyzes the impact of heterogeneous classes on the achievement of African American chemistry students in an inner city school.  Sheryl has also presented a poster of her original research in physical and inorganic chemistry at an American Chemical Society National Meeting and attended a conference on environmentally responsible chemistry.  Currently, she is working part-time on several research projects in education and is exploring various opportunities, including publishing more accessible versions of her education research. 
     Throughout her course of study at Berkeley she has continued to pursue writing with a passion.  She completed the first Pearl Street Publishing Writing Fellowship and completed a Poetry for the People course with June Jordan. Sheryl is also a jazz musician and composer. She continues to perform and write music with the trio the Tangria Jazz Group, which she joined a few years ago. The trio's first CD, comprised entirely of songs for Lady Bird and including two originals by Sheryl, was released in July of 2003.   

 



Vyshali Manivannan for her novel Invictus which she describes as being "the story of a bioroid, or living robot, named Phalanx-his conflicts with himself and his environment, his struggles with identity , his search for deeper meaning." In addition to being a talented young writer, Manivannan was  recognized early for achievements in the scientific field and planned to pursue this interest in college. Her intent in writing Invictus was "to show that moral decency is crucial to science and that the strength of human emotion cannot be underestimated."  She has changed her career path to writing.


A highly charged tale of a living robot’s quest for redemption, identity, and survival despite destructive enemies?and allies.
In a society that has yet to accept the idea of infusing metal with a life of its own, Phalanx, a bioroid or “living robot,” is created as a scientific achievement. Unable to construct for himself the “human” identity he desires, Phalanx strives instead to win his creator’s approval—at any cost. Invictus chronicles the highly charged journey Phalanx is forced to undertake in order to reclaim and redeem himself from the external forces that would control him.


About the Author
Vyshali Manivannan attends Dartmouth College, where she is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in English. The daughter of a Physics professor, Vyshali decided to become a writer at age eleven. She wrote and completed Invictus by age fifteen, when she won a Pearl Street Publishing Writing Fellowship.

“Since the completion of Invictus,” Vyshali notes, “I have drafted the first two novels of a planned trilogy, separate from Invictus.  Because I can’t help multitasking, the third of the trilogy is temporarily on hold and currently I am working on another, separate novel. I am majoring in English and am considering pursuing a career in writing and perhaps in teaching, as well.”

Vyshali Manivannan on Travel and Writing  

Japan

Two summers ago, I spent three months in Japan on a language study sponsored by Dartmouth, and I shared my experiences with two homestay families and roughly fifteen of my classmates. I was doubly foreign—American and Sri Lankan—in a country suspicious of foreigners, but a country that nevertheless welcomed me as a visitor, a student, an observer, and a writer. It was difficult to establish a niche for myself in Japanese society, but I loved the country itself: its punctual transportation, the rush of suited men and women through its train stations and its streets, the press of people on Tokyo’s Yamanote train at seven-thirty in the morning. Tokyo became for me a home, a place to watch businessmen as they jostled for seats on trains or strode through the dripping summer heat armed with three layers of clothing as a guard against evidencing sweat. I am in love with big cities and with their people, and Tokyo is the epitome of that.

Sri Lanka

The following winter, I traveled with my family to Sri Lanka, the homeland of my ancestors, for the first time. We drove to Batticaloa in the half-light of a waning moon and a handful of stars, surrounded by a natal presence of language that never before existed for me outside my home. The roads were without demarcation; cars and motorcycles and bicycles (often with two clutching at a seat and maybe a third upon the handlebars) raced in all directions, claiming all parts of a no-lane road. There was the quick sudden illumination of six large grayish bodies, trunks half-lifted quizzically, eyes ghostly pale in the peripheral flash of headlamps. I spent a month in Batticaloa among relatives whom I had never seen before, and the entire trip was like that: swift realizations and illuminations, as vast as elephants on the side of the road. My heritage is something I now recognize and accept. Formerly this was not always the case.

Italy

Italy’s air was crisp when I flew into Rome last year. The houses were mud-pink or white, the green palm trees a gentle contrast against the blue sky. Landing in the airport, I caught a glimpse of a stripped sea like a block of cerulean without sand or skyline to ground it. I visited the tourist attractions of Rome, Florence, and Venice. Italy’s art snatched my breath and left my fingers weak for inspiration and wanting ability. There is nothing more powerful than witnessing the grand masters; there is nothing more insidious than admiring the work of the masters and comparing it to your own. I discovered I am also in love with smaller cities, artistic hubs throbbing with life from a variety of countries. Florence claimed me for its own, and the waters of Venice reflected sun and gondoliers’ songs, hypnotic in the fishy air.

France

   I visited Paris after Italy and was compelled to love its people. It was the city that, for years, I had idealized as a center of art and sophistication, where authors would sit street-side in cafes, cradling notebooks in their laps, sipping espresso, observing the tides of life around them. The city did not disappoint me. It was there that I felt completely at ease as a writer for the first time. I was the recipient of more than a few knowing smiles. The waitresses did not hurry me. I suspected that others of my kind frequented cafes like this, and the thought was encouraging. Life seemed less lonely, in Paris .

Ireland  

  I spent the last three months on a Dartmouth foreign study program, studying English literature in Ireland. I took courses at Trinity College in Dublin and shared a house on the outskirts of the city with four other Dartmouth students. After having experienced cities like Rome, Florence, and Paris, though, Dublin was slightly disappointing. I had expected a city; I discovered a large town. Still, I enjoyed it thoroughly and my experience was a rewarding one. Dublin was dirty, crowded, filled with jovial faces and bodies draped in sweaters and coats and hurrying to offices and shopping malls. The winter season was marked with spiking rain and sharp, biting winds. The ongoing sense of independence and the slow pace of classes left me plenty of time to dedicate to my own projects and to exploring the countryside. Ireland’s countryside was beautiful, deeply green and fresh, and the Irish people were extremely friendly and helpful. There was an instant sense of belonging as soon as I stepped onto Irish soil. 

Future Plans

Studying and living abroad have helped me develop as a person and have also honed my skills and discipline as a writer. My latest adventure involves traveling on a grant from Dartmouth to write a historical fiction story based in my ancestral home of Sri Lanka. 

 


 

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