Submitting your book to small presses

How to deepen your research into independent publishers (and let them know in the cover letter)

Last post, I shared my big list of resources for finding small presses and literary magazines where you can submit your writing. This list is a good start! It will help you become familiar with the literary landscape and get an initial sense of which venues might be a fit for your writing.

But for those of us submitting full-length books, the process of deciding which small presses to submit to can be significantly more complicated. If you’re submitting a book, you’ve likely worked for years on it! Who you entrust with your writing is no small decision.

Photo by Annelies Geneyn on Unsplash

Submitting to a small press is not like submitting a book to a Big 5 publisher. Writers who want to publish with the major, corporate publishing houses typically have a literary agent, who makes up a submission list, communicates with the publishers, and negotiates a deal. This process requires little familiarity with the specific publishers on the part of the author, except when it comes to making a decision between offers.

Small press submissions, on the other hand, require the writer to communicate directly with the small press they submit to. This means having familiarity with the press is an especially powerful tool in your tool belt. When publishers see that you know who THEY are, they become a lot more interested in knowing who YOU are. This is the work of community: speaking a shared language and working together toward a shared mission.

That’s why I’ve assembled a few pointers for how to deepen your research into small presses where you might submit your book (or chapbook). If these pointers are helpful, you can pre-order my book How to Submit: Getting Your Writing Published with Small Presses and Literary Magazines, which has lots of additional information and support for your submitting practice.

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How to Deepen Your Research into Small Presses

Ideally, you’d begin by taking a look at resources I discuss in my last post, “Where to submit your writing.” Once you’re ready to look more deeply into small presses, the following steps will help you strengthen your familiarity with the independent publishers you’d like to submit to:

1. Check out several books published by each small press you are considering.

Buying books is a great way to give back to small presses whose work you value, and it allows you to incorporate small press books into your reading life. This can be an important part of getting involved with the communities you will eventually be asking to support your work.

But you don’t have to buy books from every single press you want to consider. Requesting from the library—or requesting that the library purchase them—is a great way of getting your hands on a lot of books at a time, even if you don’t read them all cover-to-cover. If they are not available through the main catalog, you can usually find small presses’ books through Interlibrary Loan.

When you get the books, hold the books in your hand and ask yourself how you would feel if this was your book. Are the books high quality? Do you like their design? Do they fit your idea of what a book should look like?

2. Find out how their books are distributed.

Distribution is central, because it determines how and where your books are sold, which in turn determines who is able to buy them. Small presses often have a harder time getting distribution with the major distributors (because their smaller scale leads to a higher relative cost), so it’s a meaningful issue whose solutions can vary widely across independent publishers.

Small press distributing practices have just changed massively due to the closure of Small Press Distribution, but smaller distributors continue to help independent publishers reach a wider audience. One of those distributors is Asterism, initially founded as a cooperative distributor, which has taken on a lot of the presses who used to distribute with SPD. Other small presses distribute through networks such as the Chicago Distribution Center, or find a way to distribute with the major distributors. Still other small presses only sell through their website and at local events.

All of this determines whether readers can purchase books through bookstores and major online retailers, since independent bookstores often prefer to work with larger distributors and Amazon has its own ever-evolving terms for presses and distributors. Where do you want your book to be available, both online and in person? Will your book be accessible where you want readers to find it?

3. Research other authors who publish with the press.

Look up other authors from the presses you are considering: Do these authors have the outcomes you want as an author? Is their media presence what you want yours to be? Do they have writing-related jobs as a result of their publications? Did they turn their book into a meaningful profile in the literary community?

4. Check the publisher’s presence on social media and online.

Everybody has a different take on social media, so it’s worth checking to see if a small press’s take will align with yours.

More specifically, will the press get the word out in a way that feels right to you? Will they build a strong website for your book? Do their books receive coverage in venues you appreciate? Does their messaging and support for authors link up with the strategies you use as a writer?

5. Ask around and/or meet them in person.

Finally, community is an essential resource for those of us submitting books. Do you know anyone who has experience working with the presses you are considering? Can you find interviews with the editors of the press ? Learn as much as you can anecdotally, from unofficial sources as well as the official ones.

Even better, you can meet the editors themselves! If you go to AWP (or another, smaller book fair), you stand a pretty good chance of running into small press editors at their booth. You should be careful not to try to “pitch” your book or have a transactional conversation. Instead, ask the editors about their books that season, buy one or two, and get a feel for their ethic as a press. Just stopping by their booth will tell you a lot about if they are the right fit for you as a writer.

The Small Press Cover Letter

Your familiarity with the small presses where you submit will also allow you to tailor your cover letter, so that you can let editors know why you believe your work is right for them. Cover letters for book-length manuscripts help editors get a sense of you as a person, writer, and literary citizen, as well as communicating why you believe their press is right for your book.

This is particularly important because you’re asking for a major commitment from editors when you submit a book. They’ll invest months of their time and energy into publishing you, and you’ll work closely on everything from editing to promotion. Some small presses publish as few as two books a year, and many publish fewer than five or ten. Each book they publish becomes a representation of their press. Choosing who to publish is the beginning of a long-term relationship.

Doing your research, therefore, is essential to submitting to a small press. While this research will help you make decisions about which presses to submit to, as I describe above, it will also inform the introductory paragraph of your cover letter. This introductory paragraph may even expand into multiple paragraphs if you have a lot of familiarity with a specific publisher.

In these paragraphs, you should communicate how your book intertwines with the publisher’s catalog and mission. Is there a book from the press that has been influential to you as a writer? Do they have a mission that is important to you? What do you admire about the press and their catalog? What made you want to submit this specific book to them? Your answers to questions like these will help the editors understand how you would fit in their catalog.

If you mention your personal connection to the press, however, make sure it is coming from a genuine place. You don’t always have to say something complimentary, because you can’t have read multiple books from every single publisher. If you have only done light research on that press in preparation for submitting, it’s better to say less.

These introductory paragraphs are also an opportunity to include a description of your book that suits the publisher to whom you’re submitting. This description should include word count, genre, and title, but it should also go beyond these basic details. You might give a pitchy description of your book’s plot. You might describe the book’s genre and style, if the press is attentive to matters of form. You might describe your intended audience, or your book’s relationship to the publisher’s mission.

How you tailor these paragraphs, of course, depends on where you are submitting. A chapbook micro-press, for example, might appreciate a cover letter that is personal, DIY, and not too pitchy. A press whose mission addresses a specific community might be interested in your and your writing’s relationship to that community. A large indie press might expect a cover letter that is more like a query letter, in which you emphasize the marketable qualities of your book alongside a bio with your most impressive achievements. Communicate in a way that fits each publisher’s style, catalog, and goals. Your research will be at the core of the decisions you make while writing this cover letter.

At the end of the day, your cover letter builds a connection. It tells editors why you’ve submitted to them and why you believe they might want to publish your book. You’re showing that you speak a shared language, then offering your contribution to a conversation they have already begun.

A Couple of Resources

If you’re interested in thinking about submissions from the point of view of a small press editor, check out Samuel Moss’s Introduction to Submitting Your Manuscript to Presses on the 11:11 Press website.

For a more expansive (but now defunct) resource, you can access Entropy’s Small Press Database of 230+ interviews with small press editors through the Wayback Machine. Some of the images might not work and the pages take time to load, but it’s worth digging through to find gems of wisdom about submitting to small presses. I built this database, with inspiration from Janice Lee, during the years that Entropy was active, and it remains one of the strongest resources for hearing directly from editors about small press publishing practices.

If you’re looking for a more comprehensive guide to submitting your writing, you can also take a look at my book How to Submit: Getting Your Writing Published with Literary Magazines and Small Presses, which is now available for pre-order.

What It’s All About

At the end of the day, as I like to remind us, it’s not all about getting published. Small presses inspire us, they give to us, they help us imagine new writing into being by charting the most radical possibilities for it.

This means that researching small presses isn’t just about publication, either. A growing understanding of the small presses publishing today will inspire your writing in unforeseen ways. In other words, having a sense for the many editors and audiences who might read your work expands the possibilities of your writing. The more you read and research, the more vibrant your writing practice will become.