Last week, Montreal’s Cinema Politica launched its first book, Screening Truth to Power: A Reader on Documentary Activism, a compendium of writing by filmmakers, activists, and academics to mark the non-profit organization’s 10-year anniversary.

What began as a screening series of independent political films at Concordia University has, over the past decade, expanded into a vast network of more than 100 community and campus chapters across Canada and beyond. True to the organizations’s independent, anarchist roots, co-founders Svetla Turnin and Ezra Winton decided to self-publish the book “ and come up with a distribution plan that excludes chain bookstores and multinationals like Amazon.

Q&Q talked with Winton about the self-publishing process.

How did the book come together? About a year ago at our board meeting we were talking about the approaching ten year anniversary of our organization, and we felt like it would be nice to have some kind of cultural artifact that serves as a marker, that acts as interpretive material for the films, and that also would give us a chance to articulate this important intersection between documentary and activism that we are so invested in. We just said, “Well, why don’t we make a book?”

Why did you decide to go the self-publishing route? Since we know designers and printers, we thought we would do it ourselves.

The person who designed our website and basically everything for us is Kevin Lo and he designed the book. We’ve worked for the last 10 years with the same printers here in Montreal called Kata Soho. They’re a community printing press and very much connected with the activist community, so we knew we’d work with them.

Did you ever consider going with an established publisher? We didn’t, because we wanted to be able to control the content and the price, so we could keep the book accessible. Also, working with an academic process is a very slow process. We had a tight time frame.

We’re getting really good response from the book. If we don’t go bankrupt from doing this, we’re thinking of doing another one on a related subject and approaching an academic press to collaborate.

How did you choose contributors? We just kind of used a snowball procedure where we contacted filmmakers and academics that we knew. For instance, a filmmaker named Shannon Walsh, whose films we’ve shown, wrote a chapter. Another academic in Atlantic Canada, Darrell Varga, I heard him give a really great talk about documentary and utopia, and we asked him if we could publish the talk.

The second tier was approaching activists and people we work with. We asked Kristen Fitzpatrick at Women Make Movies in New York to write a short piece, because they’re one of our favourite distributors. And then Svetla and I wrote a long introduction where we tried to give shape to this abstract idea of documentary activism.

Will there be a digital edition of the book? There will be. We’re focusing on selling the hard copies right now. As we approach a break-even point, we’re going to release an ebook version that will be cheaper.

How did you approach practical publishing decisions given that you’re pretty new to this? It’s been a steep learning curve and kind of ad hoc decision making for sure. Three people have been advisers on the book: Marc Glassman, who ran the Pages bookstore in Toronto for over 30 years; Larissa Dutil from the Co-op Bookstore here at Concordia; and David Widgington, who ran a small publishing company called Cumulus Press from 1998 to 2008. We’ve been able to get some advice from them like how to price the book, which turns out to be quite tricky.

What’s your distribution plan? We have a four-pronged approach. We printed 1,000 books. We’ll be selling books online through our website. We’ll sell them at events like the Social Forum in Ottawa, the Anarchist Book Fairs, and other independent book fairs. We’re also hoping our local chapters will sell them at their events. We’re giving them a bulk price so they can use the book as a fundraising tool as well. Then there are the independent bookstores and libraries.

We’ve decided not to work with Amazon because of their poor labour record. I guess Amazon is increasingly the way people are getting their books, but the flip side of it is that there are fewer and fewer bookstores.

This interview has been edited and condensed.