Gantala Press, a Filipino women’s press that I founded while employed in a private library, celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2025. I reflect here on how we, in our smallness, continue to survive and resist a neoliberal economy and culture as we join the Filipino people’s struggle for national liberation. 

Gantala is an old Tagalog word for “spool” (a reel for thread used in weaving or sewing, works commonly attributed to women). In 2016, a year after our establishment, Rodrigo Duterte came to power and began his attacks on the poor through the “war on drugs” and on activists through the state’s counterinsurgency program. Existing under a blatantly macho and misogynist president, it felt natural for Gantala Press to identify as a “feminist” small press, arguably the first of its kind in the country in recent times. 

In March 2017, we published our first book, a literary anthology entitled Danas: mga pag-aakda ng babae ngayon (Experience: writings by women now). We facilitated paid writing workshops in venues borrowed from friends so we could provide our contributors a token fee. We had no idea how to price our book. The unit cost of printing Danas was Php 226, but we sold it for only Php 350. It was at one of the first pop-up fairs we joined where we learned (from another bookseller) how to compute the retail price of a book: the unit cost of printing should be multiplied by at least three to cover printing costs, royalties, and other expenses. (Big publishers multiply their production cost by five to eight). The correct retail price of Danas should have been at least Php 700.

The “times three method” as I call it,  is how we have been pricing our books for the past nine years. And only in the last two years have we been including other significant expenses, such as fees for the layout and cover artists. The art and layout of our early books were all done by friends pro bono. Even after we started paying our artists we did not initially add that expense to the retail price. While ALL expenses should be taken into account, that would drastically shoot up the selling price, and this is something we take pains to avoid because we want to make our books as affordable to as many readers as possible. In calculating the retail price of our books, we have also not been including:

• fees for editorial work and project management, which I assume most of the time;
• operation expenses such as storage, packaging materials, or food and transportation when selling or delivering books;
• the cost of complimentary copies for authors and contributors of blurbs, introductions and forewords, and anyone who helped in the book’s production and distribution;
• misprints that cannot be sold;
• consignment fees, usually 30%;
• other expenses such as performers’ honoraria during book launches.

We look for other sources of funds to cover the non-printing expenses and keep our prices as low as possible. Most of the time we end up covering these costs with our already small profit. Members of the press also do not charge for our encoding or proofreading work. But despite these limitations, we manage to print at least three books per year (nine in 2021 and 2024). We can do this by selling diligently at small press expos and at the Manila International Book Fair. The rest of our funds we earn from our online shop, bookstore consignments, and community fairs.

Aside from printing, our biggest expense is authors’ royalties. The industry standard is 10 percent of net earnings but more often we have paid our authors 30 percent in royalties, following the principle that each book is not just a commodity but the product of a collaboration between and among cultural workers who are equal partners. We provided 50 percent royalties to the family of an author who was martyred in the people’s movement; and to project partners that are organizations fighting for the welfare of political prisoners, indigenous women, and peasant women. After all, the books were primarily produced in support of their organizations’ campaigns. 

In 2020, we aspired to open a feminist bookstore. The community was supportive and we managed to raise about Php 200,000 in two months. But the pandemic broke, and we had to shelve the dream. We used the money raised to pay our share of the rent of the supposed site of our bookstore. Given the long lockdown, we were unable to maximize the place and it ended up being a simple storage area for our books. The dream is still to have our own space where we can sell women’s books, hold workshops and seminars, and organize exhibitions of women’s artworks. But for now, especially in this economy, we have to make do with working from home: using the kitchen table as an office, handing book orders to couriers in our pajamas, meeting and planning in cramped living rooms.

From the beginning, and especially since I quit my job in 2019 to focus on Gantala, I have been the only full-time staff of the press. I do almost everything from editorial work to coordinating with authors, artists, and printers to packing the books sold online to delivering stocks to bookstores to managing our social media accounts and website to representing Gantala in public talks and discussions. In 2022, I registered Gantala Press as a sole proprietorship for two reasons: to formalize my ownership of the press by virtue of the considerable personal resources I spent in producing our 40+ books and zines; and to be able to engage in business properly — so we can provide official receipts and such. 

Even as a cultural and political practice, a small press is, for the most part, a business and livelihood. But only recently have I been able to receive a monthly allowance from Gantala Press, which is barely enough to pay for rent, food, and utilities. Having an allowance for me and one finance officer (who handles onsite selling) was made possible by a grant supporting human rights activist groups. If that funding stops, I may have to pause receiving an allowance and endeavor to look for other consultancy jobs to survive.

But more importantly, the press as an enterprise has enabled me to spend time and energy as a volunteer for a peasant women organization, something that deeply informs my work as a publisher and writer. Visiting farming and fishing communities, sometimes joining their production work (e.g., planting rice), engaging with social issues through protest actions and educational discussions — all these affirm the need to document and expose, through literature, the oppression experienced by the majority of women, and of the population of the country. In the time of imperialist wars and, in the Philippines, of historical revisionism and a worsening economic crisis, it is even more important now to counter the narratives being churned out by the one percent. Thus, feminist small press publishing is fueled by active involvement in the people’s movement. It was easy for us to decide to boycott the 2025 Frankfurt Book Fair, for example, where the Philippines is Guest of Honor, as we deemed it supportive of a toxic neoliberal system that encourages writers and publishers to make it big in international markets (rather than develop local production and readership), and a genocide besides. 

A significant reason why and how we have managed to continue despite all the challenges is support from our community. Authors waive their royalties, or artists charge us a “kasama” (comrade) rate for their work. Teacher friends arrange for their universities to provide us spaces for book launches or platforms for talks on women, literature, and publishing. And we often receive unsolicited donations from followers in the Philippines and abroad. Recently, an unexpected donation from a supporter in the United States enabled us to print Toward a Nationalist Feminism (2024) on cream paper instead of the cheaper book paper. Someone donated a few hundred pesos for our transportation to a rally. A poetry journal offered their contributors the option to donate their royalties to us; a romance writing group gave us the sales of their books, which supported the printing of a book by women political prisoners; an art organization offered design services and turned over their earnings to Gantala Press; a high school class organized a cultural show and gave us part of the ticket sales. Likewise, friends sell for us; our books have reached readers in the other islands of the Philippines as well as in New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. Readers buy our books to gift to their loved ones, or donate to libraries abroad.

Feminist small press publishing in the Philippines thrives with the support of a community of creators and readers who share the vision to, beyond producing books, ultimately contribute to the broader struggle for genuine peace, justice, and national sovereignty. Its strength is in its smallness, and its reach is of immeasurable possibility.