Why (and how) I chose a small press publisher

My first novel was released almost three years ago now. I can’t believe it’s been three years, to be honest. It’s been an interesting experience because while I had been writing short stories and getting a few of them published, people who knew me were kind of like, “eh, whatever,” and didn’t seem to really understand what I was doing. I also kept a lot of my writing side to myself. In other words, I didn’t run around promoting myself as an author, and people didn’t see me that way.

But then when Holy Fudgesicles was published that all changed. All of a sudden I had to “come out” as a writer and start pushing my book, my blog, and my brand. Not that I’m good at pushing, but I had this book and I wanted people to read it.

Anyhow, since it has been three years, so I’d like to share some thoughts about my experience. But first, let’s start with why I chose to use a small/medium press to publish my novel.

Why I chose a small press publisher

To answer that, let’s start at the beginning. I wrote the first draft of Holy Fudgesicles as a NaNoWriMo project. Lucky for me, however, I had planned most of the plot points and characters in my head when we were flying back from Australia earlier that year.

(Side note: Even though I considered myself a discovery writer at that point, I realize now that I wasn’t. Just because I didn’t have a written outline didn’t mean that I didn’t have one in my head.)

November came, I got 50,000 words written and called myself a hero!

Since I took Stephen King’s publishing advice as gospel, I decided to do what he said and start sending out queries to agents. The first agency I queried wanted ten pages with the cover letter, and then a few days later sent me an email saying they wanted to see the complete manuscript. The were a pretty reputable agency too, so after I sent it off, freaked and danced around for 30 days waiting for the response.

The response came, and they were ultimately not interested. What can you do, but send out another query, right? So I did.  Another query every week for the next fifty-one weeks. Not a single one asked for a full manuscript after that.

Yeah, it kind of sucked, but I knew that was a common thing. Finding the right agent for your book might take years. But after about 40-45 non-responses or form letter rejections, I started looking into publishers that take unagented submissions and decided to query them (while still continuing to query agents.)

There were a lot out there, so before querying, I set a few standards I’d follow.

What to look for with a small or medium press

Anyone who has followed the business of writing and publishing can tell you that there are scams everywhere. Dishonest and immoral companies are out there looking to profit off the dreams of writer hoping to be published. Because I didn’t want to get scammed the very first rule I had was:

Publisher pay you; you don’t pay them.

Take that to heart. A real publisher will not ask your for money. A real publisher will not ask you for money. I said that twice so that it sinks in.

I also looked at longevity. I had read that a great number of business fail in the first year, and assumed publishing houses would be the same way. I looked for publishers who had been around publishing at least 12 books/year for at least 5 years.

Finally, I checked Amazon to see if their books were listed and receiving reviews.

My decision

Wings ePress was either the second or third publisher I queried and the first to ask for a full request. They passed my tests: 1) No fees 2) had been around for well over a decade publishing 3-4 books each month, and 3) authors had lots of reviews on Amazon. (Note: I will say I made one judgement error in this case. The authors receiving a decent number of reviews were primarily Romance authors. I didn’t think to check books by the publisher in my genre. It might not have affected my final decision to sign with them, but it is something I would check, should I consider a small press again.)

My only big concerns were that (at the time) their covers were atrocious and their website was terribly outdated. But I couldn’t find any negatives online about their business practices, editing job, or level of professionalism.

So in the end, I signed a contract with Wings and have been able to say I’m a traditionally published author for three years now. Yippee!

I’ll be back tomorrow with some of the pros and cons of signing with a small publisher, but in the meantime if you’ve got any publishing stories (good or bad) to share with our readers, leave ’em in the comments section!