by Holly Lyn Walrath
- Any creative endeavor that springs out of grief is worthwhile.
You had expected your father to die eventually. Ever since the quad bypass of the early 2000s. Your father certainly expected it, given how many times he said he hoped he’d make it to the next big thing—your graduation, your wedding, your first book publication.
What you didn’t expect was the Parkinson’s. How it riddled his brain and took away his words. How, by the time your first poetry book was published, it was already too late for him to read it. All those lost words needed a place to exist; as if by publishing books, you could draw them back from the void.
Poetry is perhaps the most rational vessel for grief. But it’s also a vessel for community. In starting a small press, particularly with a focus on poetry, you will find yourself holding the vessel, and your job is to fill it with works that matter. And when those works start to fill up the hole the grief caused, you will realize you are the vessel too.
- The financial stuff only compounds year by year.
Yes, you should pay the taxes (although if you make a mistake, the tax guys are pretty kind to small businesses) and set up the business licenses per your country and state. Yes, you should file copyrights for your books. You’re a steward of the authors you work with, so it’s your responsibility to do this correctly.
But no one tells you that when you publish several books a year, every year the financial stuff gets harder. My advice: Fight tooth and nail to keep things small for as long as possible. There is simplicity in small. It’s like a poetry chapbook—beautiful in its shortness, holdable. The bigger your community gets, the more time and energy it will take to pay the bills.
- No writer ever negotiates the money in a contract—and they should.
There will be far too many contract negotiations. There will be plenty of questions from authors—and those are just fine—but also, there will be too many impatient agents used to dealing with big publishers and not humans. For the love of your own peace of mind, hire a contract lawyer to consult on your contract, build it from a contract that came from a reputable, larger press, refer often to the SFWA sample contract and Author’s Guild sample contract, and relax knowing that it’s solid.
Be as transparent as possible. List your rights in any submission calls and offer sample contracts to those who ask, so writers can learn what a good small press contract looks like. Authors will hardly ever ask for more pay, even when they should. Bemoan the authors you couldn’t publish because they wanted to wait for more money, but be proud of them when they succeed.
- Amazon is a necessary evil, but that doesn’t make it a god.
Yes, you should probably list your books on Amazon. Yes, it’s where books live or die on the internet. Yes, you’ll need to learn about the algorithm and keywords. But also: Yes, Amazon is currently being pumped full of AI works. Yes, Amazon raises its rates on small press publishing each year. Yes, Amazon is probably shadow-banning marginalized writers. And also: No, Amazon is not the only option. There’s Ingram, Draft2Digital, and even more low-key options like Lulu. No, you don’t have to use Amazon if you don’t want to. But also: Yes, you should learn to be flexible if you want this thing to be sustainable.
- Formatting will take up far less time than you think, unless it’s poetry.
You’ll probably learn more than you ever wanted to learn about printing. It’s useful if you have a print background, but not entirely necessary. The formatting won’t take as much time as you expect, with the caveat that poetry is the exception. Poetry formatting is like a living thing. You’ll find yourself constantly making concessions for the goal of accessibility. This is worthwhile because the goal is getting the books into the hands of readers, and ebooks allow readers with accessibility needs to read your books.
- “If you build it, they will come” doesn’t always apply to small presses. It’s more like “If you build it, they’ll complain it isn’t getting built fast enough.”
There will be days when you’ve received 10 emails from authors wanting to know when their book will be published, and you will send the same, rote response that essentially boils down to “not yet,” but inside, you will want to scream: “If you stopped emailing me, I could actually sit down and finish the work!” You will not be perfect. You will answer 30 or more emails a day. Some days, you will want to yeet your computer into the void and hope the emails destroy themselves in the process. You will contemplate whether there is a virus you could engineer that would make emails eat themselves alive. You’ll never really learn sustainability; you’ll just learn how not to drown while treading water.
Publishing, especially small press publishing, especially poetry, is slow. Speed does not make it better; it makes it worse. All that formatting? It takes a careful, hyper-focused eye to ensure the reader gets the best possible experience.
But along the way, there will be volunteers. Volunteers who slush read. Volunteers who beta read. Volunteers who proofread. Volunteers who run newsletters and write social media posts. Volunteers who give advice and feedback. Volunteers who make you feel less alone.
- A community is like an amoeba that you can hug.
You will eventually learn that no small press operates with just one person. The community will eventually grow beyond you, which is the biggest lesson. They become the audience and the sounding board. They become the people you thank on panels; they soften the blow of all the hard truths for those in the back who ask, “So how do you do it all?”
One day, you’ll wake up and realize: I built it, and now there are a hundred volunteers or more. You’ll realize that what you really built was a community.
Explore more articles from SPECULATIVE POETICS
Holly Lyn Walrath is a writer, editor, and publisher. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in Strange Horizons, Fireside Fiction, Analog, and Flash Fiction Online. She is the author of several books of poetry, including Glimmerglass Girl (2018), Numinose Lapidi (2020), and The Smallest of Bones (2021). She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Texas and a Master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Denver. In 2019, she launched Interstellar Flight Press, an indie SFF publisher dedicated to publishing underrepresented genres and voices.