Do I Dare?

Turn my personal Substack into a "follow me while I attempt launching a publishing house?" account...

Hey everyone. Once again, it has been too long.

First, thanks to everyone who has forgotten about your subscription to this substack and has not requested a refund. I like to think you’re still doing it out of a little sliver of belief that your 60 bucks a year/8 a month is doing some good, and so please allow me to reassure you — it is. I’ve taken a lot on in the last year (gladly, albeit insane/overly ambitious/naïve/pick-your-words-of-skeptical-judgement) and so yea, when I can keep my head down on these new projects and have $60 miraculously appear in my bank account that I use to feed myself or pay down my American credit card, it’s a massive help — stick with me!

The update:

Since last fall I’ve been seriously focused on launching the Paris based literary & arts journal SOUVENIR Magazine with Kyle Berlin and we did it y’all, and we are still doing it. In the beginning it was truly out of the passion of our own hearts, our own pockets, and the pockets of a few close friends and family members who believed in us. Slowly but surely subscriptions and sales are on the uptick, and generous strangers and professional acquaintances are donating larger sums to cover the operating costs. Perhaps you’ve been following along — if not, I really recommend checking out our substack, following on instagram, but more interestingly becoming a subscriber to the print magazine which also gives you access to everything online. We pay our contributors (well) but we’d really like to be able to start properly compensating our team (and maybe even ourselves!) Every subscription makes that possible, and if you know one of those folks with money burning holes in their pockets, well… we can help lighten their load by accepting their generous tax deductible donation. Have them get in touch: augusta@souvenir-paris.com. We have big hopes and dreams for this project to grow beyond just a print magazine into writers workshops, residencies, community events, and artist development. Voila! In ADDITION to all that…

… Samuél Lopez-Barrantes and I have been — little by little — bringing to fruition a dream we have shared since we met over five years ago — Kingdom Anywhere our indie English language publishing house based here in Paris. Again, inspired by the numerous talented individuals we meet every day here in this singular city we have been lucky enough to call home, Kingdom Anywhere has gone from an idea, an experiment, a side project to a real life French SAS company with the beginnings of a team, structures, editorial calendars, branding, and an official launch coming later this year and the more days I can spend, uninterrupted on setting this up the sooner it becomes real and the sooner our patient authors’ work can be released into the world.

SO, as a thank you to those who already support me here (and in countless other ways) I will be sharing what I can of the process along the way in words and images.

A few KA behind the scenes moments over the last few months

What you can expect: an announcement before the end of the summer about our debut title that will officially launch us into the realm of publishing, which we intend to disrupt and question at every possible turn. The title will be co-authored, edited and designed by myself and Samuél Lopez-Barrantes and will be offered in a hybrid double feature special collectors edition and standard paperback. Pre-sales will launch by the early fall and we hope to be able to have them in hands in time for the holidays so long as we can stretch every hour in every day from now until then.

We have three more really exciting releases lined up for 2027! We will sell primarily in France directly to bookstores and via events. Print-on-demand will be available in the US and collectors editions will be available to any willing to pay for international shipping (might be cheaper just to come to Paris for a weekend and pick it up in person…)

Follow Kingdom Anywhere to stay updated on releases. We will have some interviews with our past authors who took the leap with us early on when we were only just figuring out if this was something we wanted to do for real for real so head over to the Substack for those.

Thanks for being here y’all. Here’s to building something a little bigger than ourselves that brings people together, encourages empathy, and gets us off those pesky little screens in our pockets.

x Augusta