Sick & Tired Publishing was founded in 2022 by author, creator, and disability advocate Styna Lane.
By this point, they had published three novels, as well as three books of poetry, and wanted to find ways to combine their passion for literature with their disability advocacy.
They had already started a discord dedicated to disabled writers, but it didn't feel like enough.
After speaking with many other disabled writers about the struggles they've experienced with the publishing industry, as well as speaking with disabled readers about what types of books they'd like to see, Styna decided to use their knowledge and experience to start a publishing company that focuses on accessibility and disability representation.
The company founder is a disabled author who has built their platform and community around disability and intersectional advocacy for years.
Accurate inclusivity of systemically and socially marginalized communities in general is important to us, so why only require elements of disability representation in every book we publish?
Because disability is the one demographic that crosses all others.
Literally anyone can become disabled at any time, and (statistically) most people will find themselves disabled at some point in their lives.
Around 10% of the world's population lives with a disability.
Around 26% of the US population.
That's about 1 in 4 people.
And yet, even being the largest minority group in the world, disability still manages to be one of the most under-represented in media.
Disability tends to be intentionally hidden in media, because it's not considered "palatable" or "appealing" to average media consumers.
But many of us "average media consumers" are disabled ourselves, and we want to see representation! And accurate representation, specifically. Not the feel-good 'inspiration porn' or 'side-character-is-disabled-as-a-plot-device' representation we're often stuck with.
Disability exists at every possible intersection in the population.
And we want to show that because we want to see that.
And due to the inherent intersectionality of disability, we expect this will simultaneously lend to the representation of many other marginalized groups as well.
We don't require our books to be disability-centered, but we do require elements of accurate disability representation to be present in each book.
Because we as a community deserve to be represented and seen.
As we are a small independent publisher and can only release so many books per year, we prefer to work with authors who have lived experience in the disabled community, especially since the publishing process can often be so inaccessible to many disabled people.
That being said, there's obviously no ethical way of verifying whether or not manuscript submissions are written by disabled authors, so submissions are on the honor system, and ultimately we make our final manuscript selections based on the content.
But we do hope you will choose to leave these currently limited spaces to those within the community.
Note that we do also offer hired services aside from standard publishing, and we encourage anyone interested to utilize these: Sensitivity reading, video consultation, chapter critiques, etc.
More information can be found under the "Services" dropdown in the menu bar.
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