This coming Sunday, April 27th 2025, Duck Prints Press will be joining over 100 other awesome vendors, a handful of food trucks, a bunch of community organizations, and some wellness groups at A Big Gay Market in Washington Park, Albany, New York. The market will be open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. along the Knox St. Mall, and the current forecast suggests we’re in for a lovely day. So if you’re in the area, come on down, take in the tulips, and come hang out at the queerest market in town. Learn more, and I hope to see you there!
Also, in March, I did an interview with Cyren, who runs the market! As far as I know, Cyren’s report on the interview hasn’t posted yet, but I thought it’d be fun to post my pre-interview notes. I ended up saying way more during the actual interview, but this covered the basics…
Name: my actual name is Claire, my pen name is Nina Waters, and my most common online name is unforth.
Pronouns: any, but I prefer strangers use they/them for me
Age: 42
Location: Schenectady, NY
Business Name: Duck Prints Press
Social Media Handles: most places, duckprintspress, though on Mastodon I’m dppunforth, and my personal account on Tumblr is unforth.
1: When Did You First Start Your Business? What’s The Origin Story?
Okay, so in the early twenty-teens, my friend Burdock was considering going into publishing, and so they took on editing a couple anthologies to which they invited me to contribute as a writer. As they considered where to go in publishing from there, we started talking about maybe doing something together, the two of us, and during the summer of 2015, I started doing a lot of research and formulating a plan to do an indie micro press with them.
In college (circa 2001), Burdock was my roommate, and they and I engaged in a prank war. The original idea was for one of us to defeat the other using library books, music from the J-rock band Gackt, and ducks. However, when the time came to actually defeat each other, ducks were by far the easiest of the three to find, so we started attacking each other with ducks – for example, a duck tied to the pull-string light in my room, a bucket of ducks propped over the door of theirs, that kind of thing.
So in 2016, when I self-published my first book, I wanted to put an imprint on the spine, and was still thinking Burdock and I would do this together, so of course I came up with an press imprint name that incorporated ducks!
Time passed, and things changed, and when all was said and done, Burdock didn’t end up opening the press with me (though they are involved as a writer!), but Duck Prints Press stuck. I started more formally planning the business in 2019, and with support from my family, getting it formally started based on the previous years’ planning and research became my covid quarantine project; I’ve been running Duck Prints Press as my full-time job since December, 2020, and we’ve been an incorporated LLC since January, 2021.
2: How Does Your Business Intertwine With Your Identity?
While I wouldn’t say that my business ties to my personal identity (I am aroace and agender), it absolutely ties into my overarching identity as a queer person. The founding vision of the press is to publish original work by fancreators, especially fanartists and fanauthor. I was and am a fanauthor, and I always dreamed of publishing my original work, but there were a lot of impediments in the way: having a family, having a mental illness, the types of queer genre-crossing stories I wanted to tell, and more. I wanted to make a business where people like me, the friends I’d made in fandom, could publish their work no matter what their challenges were. The overwhelming majority of the people I’ve known in fandom are queer, and our focus is on telling queer stories. And that’s what Duck Prints Press does: while I don’t require demographic disclosures from our contributors, I only know of exactly one person who isn’t queer who works with the Press, and nearly all our stories and all our artwork incorporate queer elements. I want to bring these stories and artworks to a wider audience; I want us to tell our stories.
3: Where Was Your First A Big Gay Market? What Was That Like?
My first market was in October of 2023. Despite threatening weather, it wasn’t canceled at first; I went with my mother and a local author who has become a friend to set up in the absolutely pouring rain. The market ended up canceled within an hour of opening, but even with the terrible cold wet weather and the low turnout, I made almost $200 in the two hours or so I stuck out being there. I knew right then I’d be back: the lovely people, the cool crowds, the queer vibes, all of it was impeccable even on a yuck day. On a lovely day? It’s like being at a little mini-pride multiple times a year.
4: When Did You First Feel Like An Artist? Or, Alternatively, When Did You Feel Like Your Business Was Starting To Make Sense?
I started feeling like an artist – specifically, in my case, an author – when I started writing fanfiction. Before then, I wrote a lot but it always felt like something I did for me, something I wasn’t very good at and that no one outside my family would ever much care whether I did it or not. But when I started writing fanfic and sharing it online, I discovered that people actually really liked my words, and I was also able to produce a lot, consistently, at a high level, and I started to think: wow, I can really do this.
Then I had kids and got stupid busy and that good-vibes feeling kind of fell off a cliff, but deep down, I still know I can do it.
Of course, as a publisher, most of the work I put out isn’t my own, so to answer the second question as well: when I saw the interest in our first anthology, both from people who wanted to write for it and in people who wanted to purchase it. Our first anthology got over 100 applications, many of which were absolutely phenomenal, for only 20 story slots. That told me there was interest among fancreators for an outlet like my press for their original work. And then when we crowdfunded the anthology, we sold over 700 copies and raised over $25,000. That told me that there was interest among readers for the kinds of stories our creators would tell with their words and art.
The rest has just been the slow build from that initial success. It’s been a long process, but we’re finally breaking even consistently, and the future is bright.
5: How Has Your Work / Business Transitioned Over The Years?
…well, there’s more of it. All the time, there’s more of it. I also have a lot more help now than I used to; we started with a management team of five people, and now there are like twenty who help me make decisions, edit, publish, and more. I wouldn’t say there’s been a firm transition, like, we haven’t gone from one thing to another, but instead it’s been a slow build, like adding new blocks atop the existing foundation. Sometimes, those blocks aren’t stable and they fall; other times, they prove to be far more load-bearing than I’d ever predicted. It’s just a process of expanding on the parts that work and leaving behind those that don’t.
6: What Are Some Of Your Other Passions?
Well, fandom obviously! The initial plans for this came into being while I was a big fan of the show Supernatural, but in late 2019 I watched a Chinese historical drama called The Untamed, which was based on a boy’s love book called Mo Dao Zu Shi/The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. Unsurprisingly, considering I run a book publisher, I also love to read, and ever since I watched The Untamed, I’ve tumbled deeper and deeper into reading Chinese BL novels – the genre is called danmei.
I also love fibercrafts, though I’m in a bit of a drought recently – just haven’t been in the mood. I sew, embroider, cross-stitch, quilt, knit, crochet, weave, and spin!
7: Any Closing Thoughts?
If you want to start your own business, you absolutely can. Just make sure you have a really solid plan, and make sure you pay attention to pricing your things in a way that’s fair to yourself. Passion doesn’t put food on the table, as I’ve learned the hard way. If I didn’t have a supportive family, I wouldn’t have been able to tough out waiting for my business to actually make money.
Also, queer spaces are more important now than ever. Let’s be excellent to each other, okay? We’re in this together.
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