Small Presses

Luckily for us all, the publishers of fantasy whose books you see at Barnes and Noble aren’t the only such publishers there are. We also have lots of small presses. They sometimes don’t pay advances, but do pay eventual royalties – the thing is, you don’t pay them to get your book published. And their books do get promoted and distributed and reviewed within the web-world of our field.

Science fiction and fantasy are a hungry field. Readers always want more of it.

From just about the beginning (i.e. 1923, when Weird Tales magazine started), the science fiction and fantasy field has spontaneously generated small presses. In the 1930s, readers of our stuff wanted more than just the stories published in the pulp magazines, and also wanted some of the classics from the pulps to be preserved in book form – so we got amateur magazines like Charles Hornig’s The Fantasy Fan and William Crawford’s Marvel Tales, which published original stories by Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and others; and Crawford’s Visionary Publishing Company, which published the hardcover first edition of Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth in 1935. These were all fairly primitive efforts, but in 1939 August Derleth and Donald Wandrei launched Arkham House with the publication of Lovecraft’s The Outsider, in a comparatively large edition of 1200 professionally printed and bound copies. Arkham House was a small press, working from Derleth’s home in Wisconsin, but it went on to publish the first books of writers like Fritz Leiber and Ray Bradbury.

In the ‘50s, small presses like Shasta Publishers , Prime Press and Gnome Press published professional-looking hardcover editions of classics that had been mouldering away in the old pulp magazines, and gave us the first book publications of writers like Heinlein, Arthur C. Clark, A. E. Van Vogt, and Alfred Bester.

Mainstream publishers eventually caught on that writers like these had a big potential readership, and .bought up the work and gave it wide distribution. But the mainstream publishers might never have noticed them, certainly not as soon as they did, if the small presses hadn’t piped up and shown that there were a lot of readers who wanted those stories.

And that’s still goin on. Small presses like Hippocampus Press, PS Publishing, and Ellysian Press, and many others, are steadily putting out books by new authors. Some are temporarily closed to submissions, or don’t consider unsolicited manuscripts, but … there’s a lot of them. The books aren’t likely to show up at a Barnes and Noble store, but they can get attention from the right sort of readers. Books published by small presses like Small Beer Press and Coffee House Press regularly show up on award shortlists, and frequently win the awards.

As was the case with Bradbury, Heinlein and Clarke, they’re likely to be where the new stars get their first books published.

I hope we’re paying attention!