Reasons not to date a small press publisher

Note: this list refers to the traditional male small press publisher. In the case of the new generation of female small press publishers, change He to She and delete preliminary point.

He will have a beard

1. He will be broke
2. He will not want to go on holiday
3. When he goes on holiday he will visit every bookshop within fifty miles
4. He will already have a partner, better off than himself
5. He will talk non-stop about how terrible Waterstones is
6. Apart from when complaining about Amazon
7. Or moaning about the Arts Council
8. He will have friends who are poets
9. He might be a poet
10. At launch parties everyone will ignore you unless you are a writer
11. He will start work at 6.30am
12. His idea of fun is a book launch 200 miles away
13. His idea of nice wine is Kwiksave BOGOFF, left over from a book launch
14. He will not own a car, and can't drive
15. He will ask for lifts in your car, without knowing he is doing it
16. His office will be very untidy, spilling over with unsaleable books
17. It will not be clean
18. On principle he will only publish books that lose money
19. He believes in the creative economy while contributing nothing to it
20. He resents successful small presses
21. He will not have a pension plan
22. Other than you are his pension plan
23. He will never retire
24. His share of the phone bill will be 80%, but he will pay only 50%
25. He will have authors staying who have travelled 250 miles to read for twenty minutes to an audience of seventeen
26. You will have seen the same seventeen people at every reading for thirty years
27. 50% of his income will go on buying books
28. He will talk to you at length about the book he is editing
29. He will ignore your advice when you suggest changes or wonder who would buy such a book
    30. He knows the names of every book reviewer in the UK. None of them know his name
    31. He anxiously scans the review pages of the Guardian every Saturday even though his last book review in any broadsheet was in 1992
    32. He will give you a copy of his own published novel, which did not get the attention it deserved
    33. He mutters