About Repaper Press

Mission & Values

1. Startle Camouflaged Assumptions into Sight

Imagine we're trying to study purple moths, but these moths blend in so well against their preferred purple damask wallpaper habitats, they can be almost impossible to see. Some people are convinced purple moths are mythical creatures—others ask why the walls are ending up moth-eaten if these moths don't exist to cause the damage.

Now imagine we can craftily change the background, say from purple to neon green, without disturbing the wall's surface. Any present purple moths will stand out in contrast, making them far easier to observe.

Some of the most persuasive and revealing studies into gender discrimination look at how people respond differently to the exact same resumes, descriptions, musical auditions, etc. when they believe the candidate is one gender versus another. We're here to extend that research technique to fiction, and let readers be the researchers.

Our Strategy:

• Rattle loose assumptions in how characters of different genders are written.
• Rattle loose assumptions in our own minds, in how we read characters of different genders.

2. Offer a Safe Harbor

Many people have had to resign themselves to reading stories (or watching films/television, or playing video/computer games) with their guard up, knowing they will likely see queer characters killed off, female characters threatened sexually or outright assaulted, and male characters mocked for having emotions.

Even if we try to be conscious of harmful tropes in the media we consume, there are likely still some that slip under our radar, affecting how we judge ourselves and how we judge other people.

Many people live with the real-life versions of these limiting, painful narratives, and would like a break from them in their reading—would like to become immersed in enthralling, tense, and beautiful imaginary worlds, without worrying they'll be casually stabbed in the back. That's not to say bad things can't happen in fiction, just that we believe they shouldn't happen because of a character's gender identity or sexual orientation.*

Our Strategy:

• Increase the volume of work in which all readers can see people—people like them and people not like them—depicted as human first.
• Increase the volume of work in which people who have historically not been well-represented in fiction can read themselves represented.
• Repaper the classics.

3. Inform and Inspire Cultural Change

Our Strategy:

• Host and facilitate analysis into the intricacies of language, narrative, perception, and identity on the Repaper Press blog. (Submission Guidelines)
• Inspire established authors and copyright holders to make their work available in a "repaperable" format.
• Inspire writers to write specifically for this platform—short stories, novellas, and books. (Submission Guidelines)
• Inspire better writing across the fiction-writing world by demonstrating how much more interesting stories are when they treat characters as humans rather than tropes.

Our Roadmap

Current Focus

• Works in the Public Domain - Process and release 5 fiction titles each month from the public domain.
• Works Under Copyright - Partner with authors, estates, and publishers to make their titles available in a "repaperable" format.
• Original Works - Publish original short stories, novellas, and book-length fiction. (Submission Guidelines)

Upcoming

• Artwork - In the near future we'll be inviting artists to submit cover art and illustrations, which users will then be able to select from to add to their ebooks. Artists will receive royalties and retain full creative ownership. You guys are already producing this art, reimagining the genders, ethnicities, body types, and romantic pairings of characters in beloved stories, and it's gorgeous!
• Nonfiction - This won't be about pretending we can rewrite history, or about appropriating the achievements of men, but rather about revealing how, as the default gender, men and their achievements have been written about, and how that treatment might read with different pronouns.

What About Race?

In a text-based format, because characters are almost always referred to by pronouns, their gender is explicit. That makes swapping gender identity straightforward: just find all the he/she pronouns and a catalog of common gendered words (man/woman, girl/boy), and make them interchangeable with words that indicate other gender identities.

Sexual orientation is less straightforward, because it might only become explicit if the character has a romantic plot or subplot. If they do, you can configure the genders of their romantic interest(s) to match the sexual orientation you want the character to have.

Similarly, if the text doesn't explicitly state a character's race, it is not a straightforward matter of swapping out one word for another. And when race is referred to, it is often in descriptive ways that are difficult to identify programmatically—hair color or texture, eye color or shape, etc.—compared to the simplicity of identifying pronouns and gendered words in text.

The problem, of course, is that one of the assumptions we clearly need to challenge is that a character is white and straight by default.

How can we best address this issue, without inserting new material into the original text? We have some ideas, but we'd love to hear your input. What role can artwork have? Would identity options for characters be more powerful than pronoun options? Tweet us your ideas @repaperpress.