About Duplex Press

Duplex Press is a retirement project to publish a variety of titles of recent vintage. I wrote several of them myself. I translated and edited another (Suddenly Jews by Hartmut Ludwig). I found an important historical work buried in obscurity and made a book of it (Creating the Eastshore State Park, by Norman La Force). As a pandemic project, I collated a quarter-century of underground satirical broadsheets by Carol Denney into three huge tomes (Pepper Spray Times books).

My writings from earlier lives are listed elsewhere. Penguin Random House in London continues to publish my 1974 translation of Karl Marx’s Grundrisse. My writings on addiction recovery — Empowering Your Sober Self, Recovery by Choice, and How Was Your Week — are listed by LifeRing Press. Some miscellaneous pieces are on my long-neglected nicolaus.com website. Various other articles and countless blog items are floating around somewhere.

Like other self-publishers, I rely mainly on amazon’s KDP for printing and distribution for Duplex Press titles. The traditional option of buying boxes of books from a printer and shipping them myself is history: been there, done that. Amazon’s Print On Demand (POD) business model is cheap, fast*, and good-enough quality. The main problem with it is that most bookstores won’t carry amazon titles, and Jeff Bezos is a giant asshole. A significant number of my potential readers won’t order anything from amazon, and I can’t blame them. So I’m working now to cross-list recent titles with IngramSpark, a rival POD colossus that supplies tens of thousands of retail bookstores. Ingram’s is a privately held family firm headed by John R. Ingram, a Republican who seems to have confined his political involvement to state and local issues in Tennessee.

If you have a manuscript that you think might be a fit here, contact me. For an unknown author, self-publishing can be a good option. Traditional publishers, if they accept your manuscript at all, will make you do the promotion and pay you peanuts. With a self-publishing effort like Duplex Press, you still do most of the promotion but you can come out with a better percentage. That’s why self-publishing is booming.

— Martin Nicolaus, Publisher, Duplex Press LLC

• Or was fast until amazon’s recent layoff of 16,000 workers. My most recent order of author’s copies from KDP was delayed for more than two months and was shipped in individual envelopes, 50 of them, instead of in a box. Insane.