About Open Arts Press
Independent publishing, creative communities, and tools built from the work itself.
Open Arts Press is the umbrella for a small group of publishing projects: books and literary work, online creative communities, and software for the practical problems editors and site owners keep running into.
The publishing comes first.
The software, communities, books, and magazines grow out of the same editorial work rather than existing as separate businesses with the same logo.
What we do
Three parts of the same operation.
Creative sites
We operate communities and magazines where writers and artists can publish, submit, read, discuss, and experiment.
Books and publishing
Open Arts Press publishes books and other independent work, including projects that grow out of the creative sites.
Publishing software
Our WordPress and XenForo tools come from real editorial needs: submissions, contributor directories, publishing workflows, exports, maintenance, and community management.
Creative network
Four live sites, for now.
Each site has its own voice and history. Some may eventually be combined; the important thing is preserving the work and the communities while making the overall Open Arts Press identity clearer.
Open Arts Forum
Poetry, fiction, art, discussion, workshops, and publication.
Ten Million Flies
Offbeat literature, visual work, satire, oddities, and experiments.
Clock Radio Magazine
An independent literary publication with its own history and identity.
Kiss My Poetry
A poetry-centered home for readers, writers, and new work.
How it fits together
The sites create the problems. The press turns some of the solutions into products.
Running active literary and art sites means dealing with submission systems, contributor records, publishing schedules, image handling, member tools, editorial handoffs, exports, maintenance, and the hundreds of small frictions that generic software rarely understands very well.
When we build a useful solution for our own sites, we can turn it into something other publishers can use. That is why the software side of Open Arts Press belongs here: it is part of the publishing work, not a detour from it.
Writers and artists
Looking for somewhere to send work.
Open Arts Press projects accept creative work through their own editorial channels. Start with the submissions page to see the current options.