Pick up a book. Hold it in your hands. Feel its weight. Flip through the pages. Let your eyes slide over the text. All those thoughts, all those ideas, all those words, doesn’t it all seems like it’ll always be there?
It probably won’t.
Books go out of print, even great ones. It happens every day. And once a book does go out of print, there’s very little chance it will ever return.
There are many potential obstacles to a book coming back into print. Copyrights can get snarled as they are divided and subdivided through inheritance. The manuscripts used to actually print the books might be lost or may exist only in an obsolete and unusable format. And sometimes books simply fade into obscurity, forgotten by all but a handful of dedicated supporters.
And the situation is worse for writers from groups that have been historically excluded from or under-represented in publishing. The same obstacles that make it harder for such authors to get published in the first place, also make it more likely for them to go out of print and harder to get back into print.
At Voices Renewed, we are dedicated to overcoming these obstacles and bringing these books back in print. We identify noteworthy books that have fallen out of print, work with authors or their families to unsnarl copyright issues, prepare manuscripts copies of books in contemporary printing formats, and identify possible agents and publishers for the work, all with an eye to making these important works available to the public once more.