A Little Behind-the-Scenes for Writers: Why We Need Small Presses

When I began to think about trying to publish my novel HIDING EZRA, about the real-life events of my husband's grandfather, I dutifully did my research and talked to other published novelists, and they all told me I needed to write a good pitch letter and focus on agents and publishers who seemed a "good fit." I knew immediately that I was in trouble: I knew my story was not an easy one to categorize.

Some strongly advised me to tap into strong anti-war sentiment that was raging in the Bush years, since the book is about a man who decides to go AWOL during WWI because of family hardship, but that would have been a travesty because it would have been false, untrue to both the real events the book was based on and the integrity of the characters I'd created who felt no such political or philosophical motivations.

Others advised me to build up the love story even more, and spend more time focusing on the women in the story, Ezra's sister Eva and his girlfriend Alma, because "women buy novels, not men." But I was confident that the women were already carrying as much weight in the story as they could and it was Ezra who had to be the spine of the book or there was no book at all. Besides, you can't 'force' a story in one direction or another with that kind of commercial motivation!

After more agents than I could count turned me down with almost identical responses--" You write beautifully but I just don't think I could sell this book."--I thought my next logical step was possibly a university or college press, but those, too, turned it down with almost identical statements.

By this time, I'd been trying to get this novel published for 8 years. I'm not getting any younger. One dream died, but a new one was born, made possible by the fact that neither the commercial publishing industry nor academia control everything these days.

I published my novel with a small press, Little Creek Books, without a lot of the marketing infrastructure and budget of the bigger commercial and academic publishers. They've done a great job with the resources they have. I've worked hard to find creative ways to get the word out, too. And guess what? The book is continuing to sell steadily and is ranked in the top 10 to 20% on Amazon pretty regularly,(it fluctuates wildly, of course, but somebody is ordering and it isn't me. :-) )and is actually selling better than some of the books that came out from much bigger publicity machines about the same time.

Now why am I telling you this? I'm sure many will say, "just to brag." But they would be wrong. My point is that the Smart-Set, for lack of a better word, is wrong. They were sure no one would be that interested, that the book wouldn't sell. But it is selling.. People are interested in the story, and they love both the characters and the world portrayed in the book. It is selling still, over 10 months after publication. Many, many of my readers are men who have astonished their wives by reading a novel. The book has been adopted by a college and a middle-school as a required book for a class.

It seems to me that mainstream publishing is going the way of mainstream popular music. Sure, there's still really good work coming out from the both the mainstream recording industry and publishing industry, too, but there is a lot of derivative dreck, too. At the same time, the mainstream is turning down good work in both music and literature. Now, that fantastic music and literature does usually find a way out into the world anyway, given the brave new connected world we're living in,but the patron has to be really savvy and determined to even find out about them.

I'm thankful people are still willing to write or publish books today when there's so little money in it. We need small presses for the same reason we need all the alternative media for music. If you keep narrowing and narrowing the pipeline for anything, you get less of it, and a smaller and smaller number of people control it. Never a healthy environment for art.....