The David Equation by James A. Moore

I thought the following was a cool little essay on the small press written by James A. Moore. I’m posting it here with the permission of the author. In the future, you’ll see more content like this posted between Delirium announcements. You can check out James A. Moore’s website here. —SRS

The David Equation.

Yes, David, as in David and Goliath. Oh, don’t go getting all romantic on me or thinking that I’m getting all soft-hearted about the subject of small presses, because, frankly, it isn’t going to happen. I’m a realist when it comes to my writing and where I’m willing to spend the money I manage to have for good old fashioned reading.

Here’s the thing, there are a lot of small presses and unpublished authors out there. I figure if you look at the published novelists who have run the publishing gauntlet of writing outlines, sending off blind proposals, spent a small fortune on SASEs (self-addressed, stamped envelopes), paper, printer cartridges and postage, to say nothing of completing manuscripts and then, finally, getting accepted and then multiply that staggering list by say, a hundred, you might get a fraction of the sheer volume of unpublished writers out there. A very small fraction.

The same equation works fairly well in this day and age in comparison to the number of small presses, micro-presses and photocopied fanzine publishers in comparison to the heavy hitting publishing moguls.

So why then, does anyone look at the odds and think they have a chance? Well, because we all have to start somewhere. I have a personal suspicion that you could probably find at the very least, thousands of websites that are filled with the works of writers who desperately want to get published, and I have no doubt whatsoever that the sheer volume of fan fiction sites, should all the stories be published simultaneously, would wipe out the paper supply for most third and second world nations.

But we all have to start somewhere.

Does that mean that you or I, as consumers, should fork over our hard earned money to buy a book like that? No, not necessarily. While I feel for every starving writer out there—and depending on the month, you may rest assured I count myself among them—I am not now, nor have I ever been, the sort of person who buys a book for the sole purpose of helping put food on the tables of the writers who have not been as fortunate as I have been.

I’m in it for the stories, folks. I’m in it for the thrill of a good read. Just like I go to restaurants for the ambience, the food and the service, I buy my books for the atmosphere, the plot and the storytelling. Have I ever been burned? Oh, my, yes, more times than I care to think about.

But you want to know something interesting? I’ve been burned less often buying small press books than I have been buying mass markets paperbacks. Why? Well, I suppose it’s because the small presses try harder. A good number of the mass market companies need to have X number of books out each and every month. Sometimes, when they’re running a little low on the numbers, they will put out books that were basically purchased as filler material. Sometimes, if they think a certain trend is making a come back, they’ll glut themselves with a hundred books by damned near anyone they can find who will sell to them at a low price, and have those novels out their doors as fast as they can in the hopes of catching the residuals from the flavor of the week. Why? Because they need to fill those spots and because they can. It’s just that simple.

Small presses can’t do that. With most of the small presses, one book that bombs is enough to ruin their fiscal year and just possibly drive them out of business.

So here’s the thing; small presses often can’t pay as much up front for stories, and a lot of times that means they can’t get the biggest names in any given field. Mind you, there are always exceptions and there always will be exceptions. A surprising number of major hitters will gladly provide a story, novella, or in some cases even a novel to a small press, if they think that press will do a good job. But they are the exceptions, not the rules.

So let’s look at this concept for a second, shall we? A small press wants to make a book, and they want to sell it, but they can’t get any of the best sellers to answer their phone calls. Trust me, stranger things have happened. What should they do? Fold? Call it quits? Randomly select the best of the fan-fics on the internet to print? No. They do what every writer does when submitting a story and what every reader does when they pick up a book by someone they’ve never read.

They take a chance on an unknown. Every press, every magazine is run by someone who has a vision of what they would like to see produced. None of them—and I mean legitimate small presses, not the folks who promise to print a thousand copies of your book for you if you can but invest your life savings to have your personal collection of articles on sand sharks with your favorite illustrations by your three-year-old child to back them up—can afford to throw out a hundred pages of fluff if they want to keep their visions alive. Believe me; they’re going to be picky. If they’re any good, they’re going to be successful. Word of mouth is a powerful tool.

Does that mean that every single story in a collection will be a gem? No, but the odds are a lot better than you think when it comes to the small presses. The authors they choose and the stories they select are often not by names you recognize off the top of your head, but think about it. Would you throw away your dreams just to fill a few pages?         

We all have to start somewhere. Writers start somewhere too and damn few of them start at the top of the food chain as it were. For every chance the small press publisher takes, there’s at least one writer who is taking that chance by the side of the publisher. In most cases, the upfront money is minimal at best. It comes down to risking everything on the hopes that someone will notice.

Some of my favorite writers have barely been acknowledged yet. A good number of them have never had a mass market sale and are dreaming of the day when it will happen. Like the off-off Broadway actors and playwrights, they had to start small and hope. A friend of mine once called this separating the wheat from the chaff. I don’t think he was wrong. Word of mouth is a powerful tool with publishers and readers alike. A good small press is a powerful first step for talents that might never be seen by the big publishers. It’s easy to fall into the slush piles and never be heard from again. But that word of mouth I was talking about has made more than one editor dig through a pile of blindly submitted manuscripts looking for that one package—complete with SASE—for a story by a name that they’ve been hearing good things about.         

Me? I’m still in it for the story. I always have been. I just tend to look to the smaller presses for the works that are worth seeing more often than some. And I tend to be pleasantly surprised a lot more often than I am disappointed.