If You Want to Publish with a Small Press
Then Publish with a Small Press
Hi Friends,
PROGRAMMING NOTE: Thursday is the return of Q&A THURSDAY. Got a question? Reply to this email! All readers can ask, only subscribers see the answer!
Of the many common questions I get, this one is in at least the top ten. Someone will query me and say I have an offer from a small press, do you want to be my agent? or some variation of that. Sometimes that’s in the original query; sometimes they follow up with new information. Either way, it’s good news. It might not make me jump at the chance to take someone on, but hey—a press is intersted in your work. But here are the things is DOESN’T MEAN, however.
Oh wait: what’s a small press you ask? Well, there are hundreds, (thousands?) and it could mean anything from a press not part of the big five to this person who publishes one book a year. For those who don’t know, the big five are Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Macmillan. You can google all of them and see lists of their imprints to see if the person calling you is from a “small press.” 100% of the time you can tell by the info that comes after the @ sign in their email address.
But there’s also Abrams, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Workman, Chronicle, Sourcebooks, Scholastic, Quirk, and more that are not part of the big five but are not “small” presses either. I know, it’s confusing. Ask how many books they do a year. If you could put all the books they publish in a year in a tote bag, they’re probably a small press.
(Small presses are not bad! They are great (most of the time)! We’ll cover the differences between a small press and a larger press another time.)
Back to the point, when you get an offer from a small press, this is what I’m thinking about:
Have I ever even heard of the press? Maybe so, maybe not. That’s not an automatic no, and I may do a quick Google, but it may also be that I HAVE heard about them, and it’s not good.
Do I like the project? I don’t just take on anything because a publisher wants to publish it. I have to want to work on it, too.
Do I know if they pay an advance? They don’t have to, and I have certainly done deals with low to no advance. But remember, I don’t get paid until you get paid, and if that check is 2-3 years off, I have to be honest about my workflow and financial situation.
A contract at a small press always takes three times as long to negotiate as a contract at a big press. This happens for a number of reasons including, they might not be used to working with agents, they have a small staff and take longer to get back to me, they can’t be as flexible about finanical/royalty terms because their margins are super thin, they haven’t had many decades of agents requesting routine changes, so we have to start from scratch. This factors in to whether I have time to take on a project.
Saying a small press is intersted in your work is not an automatic slam dunk. If you’re submitting to agents and small presses at the same time, you have to ask yourself: what do I want? Do you want to be represented by an agent and published by a larger publisher? Do you want the focus and close work that publishing with a small press can sometimes bring? Do you just want a deal whatever it takes? I recommend against the latter because, as I have said many, many times, publishing is not any port in a storm. If you want to be published by a small press, submit to small presses. Go whole hog into that. If you want to be represented by an agent (and these things are not mutually exclusive, mind you) query agents and talk to them about who’s best for your book. Agents don’t ignore small presses out of hand—or good agents don’t. But coming to me with a small press offer in hand does not make me hop to and answer your query faster. It sometimes signals that you might not really know what you want out of publishing your book.
Don’t forget! Send me your questions or Q&A Thursday this week!
OXOX,
Kate
Do small presses sort of act like a minor league system for the big five? That is, people are likely to gain success and establish their credibility/audience at a small publisher, and then land interest from a bigger imprint later on? I sort of assumed that everyone would prefer a bigger press to a smaller one (larger audience/money/whatever), but maybe that isn't the case.
This was a lot of useful information. Question--why do the big publishers have imprints? And imprints are good, right? They are not small presses; they are part of a big house. Is that correct?