Size Does Matter

One thing I love about publishing is it’s so deeply rooted in The American Way. Almost everybody starts out as a dreamer.

That dream can turn out worse than a hard night of tequila and puking in a smelly Mexican bar. Waking up in a Tijuana alley ripped off down to your colored shorts.

Or maybe without those shorts.

God, there’s nothing worse than a Mexican vasectomy. They usually do it with a dirty switchblade.

That doesn’t happen to everybody. Hey, Benny Franklin ran ink and did very well with it and so did the folks at Random House.

The thing is that they weren’t always household words. Most small publishers today start with a couple of books in their inventory. Too often they are their own books. Lightly edited, and their only critics have been their sisters or the mailman.

It’s hard to predict how a publisher will do once they start out. Most small publishers start off with a writer in charge. That writer may move commas around as well as Charlie Watts beats the bongos, but most of them can’t balance their own checkbooks.

That’s why most small publishers die. Publishing is a game of nickels and dimes for a small press. Most writers don’t understand that.

Bean counters do. They sit at the wheel at most big presses even though they can’t tell the difference between a comma and a semicolon. It’s so hard to bring one of those guys in because they don’t understand art.

Bean counters suck. Screw art. Some of these guys don’t care what they sell. They just understand spreadsheets.

Small presses run by writers and managed by bean counters are a great marriage. I believe in them and have done a lot of work with them.

That loyalty may pay off if the press grows. Gee, look what happened to the guys who believed in Microsoft when they were down to binary code. Now it’s all swimming pools and movie stars, as Jed Clampett would say.

Don’t put off the small guys when you’re begging companies to move your writing. They can believers in the trade and work their asses off. A whole lot of them don’t see a paycheck at first. The money goes into paper and ink. And they scramble like all get out to get on the shelves.

You shouldn’t be ashamed to work with a small press. Many writers are.

It’s like I always say; the future is an awfully big space. It always starts out with a dream.