Mission Statement
As we move into 2026, we have been reflecting on our practice a lot, in terms of what is going well, and what we aren’t particularly happy with. Luckily, we are overwhelmingly satisfied with how everything is going. We have published twelve books in 30 months, and every single book has sold out its printing run several times over. The only thing that can really put our achievement in context would be to juxtapose it against an image of where we started. No one invited us, we had neither start-up capital nor any reputation, and we hope that we have earned the interest of readers and authors through the diligence of our practice; we did not get this far because people like us! Quite the contrary; we are difficult, personal, and emotional. Whether people like us or not, we still recognise that Becoming Press depends on every single person who has taken the risk of buying our books, and in doing so dignifying the literature of a group of outsiders. To believe that we and the authors we publish are worth listening to, you practice a radical politics of recognition; we love you, and we are indebted to you. The authors who have taken the immense risk at working with... just a couple who cut their teeth in Cyprus. These authors lent their names and their careers to support us, and we see it as our mission to dedicate ourselves to caring for your work long after its publication.
Becoming Press is, first and foremost, an editorial project, not a publicity company, one which decided to pursue commercial activity instead of other forms of funding. We proactively made the decision a long time ago that the kind of literature we were interested in, and the kind of operation we could run as a pair, would better suit a commercial route. This decision means that we have to meet our audience in the middle, to pay attention to what our readers think and to understand their needs, because it is only from the readership that we can sustain ourselves. It was, however, a decision that brought with it immense challenges; we poured every spare cent from our coffee shop trinkgeld into Becoming, for years, taking nothing out of it for the first 36-months. We believe that a significant element of the recognition we get from people involves the kind of worldbuilding we attempt to do, where we try to have a clear editorial pattern to the works we publish, and so on. With this in mind, we want to continue running Becoming Press as an editorial project, our attention is directed towards the editorial project, not publicity.
That being said, we are doing our best, and we have stocked our books in stores from New York City, to London, and Beijing. We are independent in this respect, too; we do not work with distributors. We prefer to work with shops directly, to know where our books are, to know whose hands they are in, to make alliances with booksellers in more concrete or direct ways. We like to visit the stores and do events there, when it makes sense. We come with no promises of a certain sales volume, a number of book stores holding a book, or even a book launch, honestly, we pride ourselves on being a net publisher, aloof, dematerialised—but we love to reciprocate, if you come with a willingness to get your hands dirty, we are, so to speak, down.
All of these aspects create the conditions we need to reciprocate the risk involved in pursuing what we call minor theoretical literature. With no distributor, no publicist, no sponsors or funding, we are able to pursue the projects that we believe are always hitting the intersection between what we want to do with this editorial project, and what we perceive to be of value to the people who engage with us. The mystery of Becoming Press is found in the simplicity of its operation: an author sends us a text, we turn it into a book and the factory delivers it to our apartment. When someone buys the book, we get an email, we make a package and write a customs form and take it to the mail. The rest is just being a girl online.
We would like to add a dedicated thank you to Berlin. From trying to book our Anmeldung, to on-boarding with an accounting firm, and from learning Dative case to standing in long queues for every nightclub, it has been spiritually exhausting. We are dead. That being said, the community here has been very supportive and as aloof as we are, we are proud to be here with you in this city. From New Models to The New Center, to ProQm, Miss Read, Hopscotch, Wirklichkeit, K. Verlag, Do You Read Me?, SheSaid, Trust, and so on and so on. Theorie endures in Berlin.
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