Velaria Press publishes its first book in four languages.
For a publisher with a single title in its catalogue this is not a reasonable decision. A translation costs more than a print run, and nothing guarantees that a German reader wants a noir set in Zanzibar. We did it anyway, for the same reason this imprint exists at all.
A book is born in one language. It does not belong to that language.
Small publishing houses almost always begin the same way: someone has a book and nobody will take it. It is an honest origin, but it produces a strange object — an imprint that is the container of one title, and that ends when the title does. Velaria does not intend to be that. A catalogue is built slowly, one book at a time, but it is only built if you decide to build it before the second title, not after.
So it is worth saying now what we are looking for.
Books in which place is not a backdrop: if the story could happen elsewhere without changing, the place was decoration. Characters who do not ask to be liked. Decisions that cost something, and go on costing for years after they are made. We are less interested in the moment someone chooses than in the way that choice comes back to them.
We do not have a genre. We have an inclination.
On the “why now” there is little to tell. Independent publishing has never had a good moment and will not get one. Waiting for permission is itself an editorial decision: it determines that the book appears later, or not at all. That permission is no longer required — and those who keep looking for it are choosing too, even if they would rather not say so.
What remains are the duties the permission never covered anyway. A serious edit. A translation made by someone who knows the register and not only the language. An ISBN of our own. A cover that holds up both as a thumbnail in an online catalogue and in a reader's hands in a bookshop. These are the dull parts of the trade. They are also the only ones that separate a publisher from someone who has uploaded a file.
None of this should reach the reader. Care is noticed only when it is missing: a typo that interrupts, a line translated with the right word and the wrong register, a sentence someone softened out of caution. They are small accidents, and each one moves you a step further from the book.
That is why we care about language, and not out of purism. A novel is made of choices of register: who speaks, how they speak, what they leave unsaid. A translation that flattens a vulgarity or rounds off a blunt sentence is not translating, it is correcting. We would rather the reader met the book as it was written, even where that is uncomfortable — and that our own part stayed invisible, because that is where it has worked.
The first book is out now. The second will come when it is ready, and not before.
Velaria Press