kelsay books reviews

The Edge of Memory

Curations and Creations of R. A. Burd, Jr.

33 Publishers of Poetry Books & Chapbooks

This list was compiled for your convenience but is by no means exhaustive. Please respond in the comments with additional outlets as well as your experience with the various publishers listed here. This list was last updated on February 1, 2022.

Anaphora Literary Press “Avoid sending query letters without the requirements. When submitting a project for review, always send ALL of the materials by email in a single Microsoft Word attachment. Mailed submissions will not be considered. PDFs and other files that cannot easily be opened and commented on in a modern computer will not be evaluated.”

Blue Light Press “Blue Light Press is dedicated to the publication of poetry, fiction and flash fiction that is imagistic, inventive, emotionally honest, and pushes the language to a deeper level of insight. We are all poets and artists, and our books are respected for their vision, language and artistic design.”

BrickHouse Books “BrickHouse Books (formerly New Poets Series, Inc.) is Maryland’s oldest continuously operating small press. Founded in 1970, with Clarinda Harriss as its editor since 1973, BrickHouse publishes works of poetry, fiction, drama, or artistic nonfiction. We are always looking for submissions of excellent, fresh, non-trendy, literate, intelligent material in any form or style.”

Cawing Crow Press “At Cawing Crow Press we are committed to working with authors from submission through publication, using a collaborative process that is individualized and that takes authors from manuscript to publication in a manner that consistently produces books that are well revised, properly edited, and up to, or better than, current publishing standards.”

Clare Songbirds Publishing House “Previously published poems, stories, essays, excerpts may be included in your manuscript. Please provide publication acknowledgements (title of poem/story/essay, where and when published) in the body of your email. We publish poetry, non-fiction, and short fiction chapbooks (40 pages or less).”

Cooper Dillon Books Cooper Dillon is a small poetry press committed to upholding the virtues of Poetry as a high art and expression of truth, beauty, and sincerity: the values that make poems timeless. We welcome submissions of full-length & chapbook poetry manuscripts. We have a buy-a-book or $10 reading fee for all manuscripts.

Cyberwit “Cyberwit will work closely with you in publishing books of fiction and non-fiction, including: novels, short stories, poems, biographies, autobiographies, psychology, religion, history, health, humor etc. We encourage writers from all backgrounds to submit; it is our goal at Cyberwit to develop a rich and varied literary tradition.

Dancing Girl Press “dgp is happy to accept manuscripts from women poets for publication in our annual chapbook series. We plan to publish a varying number of chapbooks per year chosen from the best of the manuscripts we receive.”

Encircle Publications “Since 2011 Encircle Publications has offered an annual chapbook contest. The winner each year now receives $250, 25 perfect-bound copies of the winning chapbook (with discount on additional copies), royalties on copies sold, discounted promotional materials (bookmarkers/postcards) and marketing assistance. Our authors hail from all over the U.S. and our chaps have gone on to win additional awards.”

Finishing Line Press We read general submissions year round. Please include a $3 reading fee with your manuscript. Submit from 16 to 35 pages of poetry, PLUS bio, acknowledgments, SASE and cover letter (you can pay by check or money order) or submit online using our online submissions manager.

Fly on the Wall Press “Poetry Chapbooks: Up to 32 pages of poetry; Poetry Collections: Up to 70 pages of poetry. No restrictions on individual poem length. Please note, we cannot read submissions which do not follow our guidelines regarding length or without a 2020 book purchase receipt, thank you.” Update: “Now closed for 2020. Our annual reading period opens in Autumn-Winter. Quick [fee-based] manuscript feedback still available at the bottom of this page. For poetry and short story collection submission window updates, subscribe to our monthly mailing list.”

FutureCycle Press “We read manuscripts from July through December. All submissions must go through Submittable; emailed submissions are ignored. Before submitting a manuscript, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with our our Guide for Authors to ensure there are no deal-breakers.”

Ginninderra Press “All Ginninderra Press titles go through an editorial selection and review process; only a small proportion of titles is accepted for publication. We do not accept electronic submissions – hard-copy submissions only are considered. We do not accept manuscripts from writers resident outside Australia.”

Golden Antelope Press “Do you have a creative book project that you would like us to consider for publication? Here is how to get started. What we ask for at present is an email to this address describing your project or manuscript. We publish poetry, short stories, novellas, novels, plays, and creative non-fiction. So tell us what you have and send us a sample. If we are interested we will contact you and ask to see the full ms (doc or docx is fine) if it complete. If we are not interested, we will let you know as soon as possible.”

Headmistress Press Headmistress Press is a small press based in Sequim, Washington. Founded in 2013, the press specializes in poetry by lesbian poets. Notable poets who have published collections with Headmistress include Janice Gould, Joy Ladin, Constance Merritt, and Lesléa Newman.

Hedgehog Poetry Press, The “We are currently only accepting submissions for single-poet-collections via our competitions or by invitation, although in the future we intend to begin to accept submissions directly.”

In Case of Emergency Press “We publish a small number of literary works every year: poetry, short stories, scripts, and longer fiction. If you have a manuscript ready, we’d be very happy to read it and assess it. We accept submissions in March and October each year.”

Kattywompus Press “Submissions are currently closed; check back after spring solstice. We want: CHAPBOOKS: Anything that wants to live on about 30 text pages or less. No genre restriction. FULL LENGTH manuscripts: we consider the first 20 pages; if we like that excerpt, we’ll ask you to send the full manuscript.”

Kelsay Books “Kelsay Books is an independent literary press run by Karen Kelsay, an award winning poet, whose primary focus is to publish beautiful books in a timely manner. Four imprint companies have been established to accommodate a variety of published poets. We accept unsolicited chapbooks and full-length manuscripts year-round.”

Lily Poetry Review “We are currently accepting general submissions of poetry, art and flash fiction for the review, as well as submission for chapbook and full-length poetry books.”

Louisiana Literature Press “Open reading periods for submissions of full-length or chapbook manuscripts will be announced on this website and through our social media accounts whenever the press is accepting submissions.”

Main Street Rag “We select manuscripts through contests, through recommendations from authors we’ve published, and through the submission options listed. On average we publish between 60 and 90 poetry collections every year. It is the genre for which we are best known.”

Mayapple Press “We focus on literature not often celebrated by either the mainstream or the avant-garde. This includes poetry which is both challenging and accessible; women’s writing; the rustbelt/rural culture that stretches from the Hudson Valley to the Great Lakes; the recent immigrant experience; poetry in translation; science fiction poetry.”

Mojave River Press “MRP looks to publish emerging literary talent of all kinds: poets, fiction/non-fiction writers, and experimental authors. Making books is personal here, and we work closely with our selected authors to reify unique and memorable texts.

Origami Poems Project “We prefer & encourage original work see Warranty & Disclaimer below) but if previously published, provide details. A microchap is a downloadable, single-page PDF. Folding instructions are under the ‘Who We Are’ tab. Our goal is to share poetry freely but this doesn’t mean every submission is accepted for publication.”

Pski’s Porch “Here is what we like, generally: poetry that is readable. It can be difficult, it can be weird (we very much like it weird), but it shouldn’t be fashionable. If you adhere to the belief that good poets read lots of contemporary poetry, then we probably won’t like it much. If passion matters just a tad more to you than craft, then we probably will.”

Red Sweater Press “Red Sweater Press is looking to publish book-length poetry and short story collections, with the goal of producing select works of adult and young adult fiction and memoir in the future. RSP also provides editing services and cover design à la carte, if writers are looking to submit manuscripts to contests or other publishers.”

Silver Birch Press “Throughout the year, we issue calls for submissions based on themes (e.g., Self-Portrait Poetry Series, Mythic Poetry Series) and choose poems based on literary merit and how well they reflect the particular theme.”

Silver Bow Publishing “Send only fully-edited, final manuscripts. We report within 3 weeks. Do not use any formatting. Do not use headers or footers. Do not number pages. Send a cover letter and bio along with manuscript via email in Word.docx file.”

Turas Press “Turas Press welcomes submissions of poetry and fiction during the next submissions window. This will be open from February 1st until March 30th, 2020. We are unable to read work sent in outside that window, unfortunately, but we do look forward to seeing your work early in 2020.”

Two Silvias Press “Two Sylvias Press is an independent press located in the Seattle area. We publish poetry, memoir, essays, books on the craft of writing, and creativity tools, such as The Poet Tarot and The Daily Poet.

Unsolicited Press “We welcome unagented authors, authors with agents, poets with parakeets. Whatever flavor author you are, we invite you to consider submitting (we have a less than 3% acceptance rate, so be nothing short of magnificent).”

WordTech Editions “We read for chapbooks in May and June; our reading period for full-length manuscripts is November and December. Deadlines may be extended at our discretion. We will also post calls for manuscripts for specific projects from time to time.”

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Blue Heron Review

“an awake heart is like a sky that pours light.” ― hafiz, tag archives: kelsay books, the february blue heron speaks featured author is kersten christianson.

Welcome to the February 2019 edition of Blue Heron Speaks ! Our featured author this month is poet Kersten Christianson , author of What Caught Raven’s Eye (Petroglyph Press, 2018) and Something Yet to Be Named (Aldrich Press, 2017). These are breathtaking poems of music, light, and nature’s dance. Words float and flicker across the page, as we breathe in these notes on life, filled with sumptuous details. You will want to read, savor, and re-read these poems. A delight to the eyes, ears, and heart—these poems truly sing!

Please visit the Blue Heron Speaks page of our site to read 3 sample poems by Kersten Christianson and to learn more about her work.

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Book review-Midwest Hymns by Dale Cottingham

by Dale Cottingham

Kelsay Books , 2023

reviewed by Lana Hechtman Ayers

Dale Cottingham’s Midwest Hymns are indeed true songs of praise. Though not religious, as the cover image of a church may imply, his poems embody the spirit of the landscape and the people of the Midwest. The subtext is yearning—for home, connection, forgiveness, a sense of peace. The language of Cottingham’s poems is deceptively straightforward, quiet and unassuming, but the images he creates are poignant, cinematographic, and haunting.

Some of the poems hark back to earlier times, as in the opening poem “History Once Removed,” about a one-room schoolhouse relocated to county fairgrounds as an exhibit. The outer building may be newly refurbished but the inside still reverberates with generations of farm children who:

read American classics:

Moby Dick, Walden, Poe,

their feet restless

on that hard wood floor

with some brightness

or shadowed terror

the language revealed.

Other poems in the collection paint a picture of change, as in “Pond Gone Dry,” referencing both global warming and the necessary, though sometimes futile, resourcefulness of the people who dwell on the plains:

Maybe the rains haven’t

come right for too long,

exposing tangled weeds and silt.

It’s like this on these plains,

some ideas thrown up in hope

over time, that fail to take.

The poem “Two Trees,” about entwined trees growing “close as lovers” moves the reader well beyond the loss of flora into the realm of human grief:

Come spring, one tree

wore luminous green,

pungent leaves breathing

April’s warmer air

while the other

stayed a lifeless gray,

as if one died

in the arms of the other.

And speaking of human loss, “In the Kitchen” relates something difficult to express—the waning of closeness that often sneakily progresses in long-term relationships and goes unnoticed until it is too late to reverse:

We chat without conviction

of taking an Italian vacation,

missing accidental happiness

we found in the kitchen,

when evening sifted through the open window,

and words seemed beside the point—

Central to the theme of Midwest Hymns is this portrait of a “Small Flatland Town” with its gravel road, a man tamping fence posts in hard earth, boys riding bikes, a woman at her sink, that culminated in a stunning final stanza:

At the church amongst

the small congregation of houses,

untrained voices raise

a hymn in the evening air,

while two dogs lying

amicably on a lawn

raise their heads

and join the chorus,

singing the darkness in.

“Mid-Continent” tells the history of growing up in a place and time with elegance and economy:

Too far to walk, we drove cars to buy groceries,

jeans, and magazines in town, where movies

were parceled out to us from the far, exotic Hollywood,

and television said we were going to the moon.

Schools remained open. Opinions spread like fever.

The plough was put to the ground.

Near the close of the collection, “Sunset at Boise City” relates experiences of the young versus the old, and the elders’ feelings not of regret but of the deep solace acceptance and presence bring:

The dogs turn thrice around

before settling down,

boys make the most of the day’s last light,

and old men are content

to let darkness in.

As poet and novelist Rebecca Kaiser Gibson states, “Cottingham renders a cast of individuals, in their profound isolation, with understated love. There is a quiet confidence here that rewards the reader and a restrained language of longing that honors the complexities of living.” Midwest Hymns is a collection of poems that readers, no matter from where they hail, can return to again and again to discover new and deeper insights into how to live with genuineness and gratitude.

ClearwaterHeadshots 2020

Lana Hechtman Ayers , MFA, is a poet, publisher, and aspiring novelist. She’s authored nine collections of poetry, one of which was nominated for the National Book Award. A multiple Pushcart nominee, Lana has won honors in the Discovery / The Nation Award, the Rita Dove Poetry Prize, and the Rhysling Award. She enjoys the Pacific Northwest’s bountiful rain and copious coffee shops. Her favorite color is the swirl of Van Gogh’s Starry Night .

Get Midwest Hymns at Kelsay Books

Lana Hechtman Ayers’ poetry at Escape Into Life

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Last updated on Apr 18, 2024

Book Publishers to Avoid: How to Dodge Shady Author Scams

Becoming a published author is a dream shared by almost every writer. Unfortunately, there are plenty of unreliable companies out there looking to make a quick buck by exploiting those dreams.

To help you protect your work, your bank account, and your dignity, we're going to highlight some of the shady companies you should avoid — and give you tips on how to spot a publishing scam at ten paces.

Types of publishing companies to avoid

The trouble with many dodgy publishing companies is that what they offer isn't usually illegal. They do, however, all manage to find a way to dangle something irresistible in front of authors, making them ignore the voice of caution in the back of their minds.

Publishing services to avoid:

Vanity presses pretending to be traditional publishers
'Literary agents' promising book deals
Grossly overpriced self-publishing services
Marketing packages that sound essential
Writing contests and awards no one has heard of

1. Vanity presses pretending to be traditional publishers

Who wouldn’t love it if a publisher offered to reprint one of your self-published titles or publish your next book, right? You might even be happy to pay some fees to get the ball rolling on the production process.

But that would be a big mistake. No legitimate traditional publisher would ask you to foot the bill. In fact, when acquiring your book, they will pay you an advance. If a publisher asks you to pay for publication, it's likely a vanity press.

Some massively prolific vanity presses you may wish to avoid include:

Page Publishing
Author Solutions

Some scammers even masquerade as Big Five imprints. In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, they started targeting desperate authors with a “publishing package” that cost exactly the same as that received by US citizens in their federal stimulus checks.

These days, it isn’t enough to simply learn the names of unreliable publishers. New vanity presses seem to set up shop each month — and with no “bad press” associated with their names, they’re able to convince many authors to pay for their services. To understand why publishing with a vanity press is a terrible idea, head on over to this post , which discusses the dangers of “paying to publish.”

If you want to work with reliable publishers, browse our catalog of independent presses, all of which have been thoroughly vetted. Sometimes, vanity presses call themselves hybrid publishers, so head to our post on hybrid publishing to better understand that model.

Pro-tip: Wondering whether to self-publish or traditionally publish? Take this free 10-day course to understand your choices.

2. 'Literary agents' promising book deals

Another kind of scam you might be dealing with is an agent scam. If a literary agent unsolicitedly contacts you to offer you a book deal with a publisher or asks you to pay a reading fee, your spidey sense should be tingling pretty hard.

Firstly, literary agents won’t ever contact you directly — unless you’re already a wildly successful author (and even then, most reputable agents would avoid poaching you from your current representation). If you belong to the 99% of authors who’ve yet to achieve major success, the only way to get an agent to represent you and your book is to send them a query letter.

Even if they help you polish your manuscript before submitting it to publishers, an agent should not charge you. They work on commission, and the only time you should pay them is when they’ve successfully helped sell your book to a publisher.

When it comes to agents, it’s best to stick to vetted lists like that of the Association of Author Representatives or our directory of almost 700 literary agents.

Are you suspicious of a certain company? Take this short quiz, which will help you sniff out a predatory business.

Are you dealing with a publishing scam?

Take this quick quiz to see if you're dealing with a legit publishing company.

3. Grossly overpriced self-publishing services

Though self-publishing, by definition, means that you’re doing it yourself, there are companies out there who can give you a hand. In fact, it’s advisable to get editing and designing services from reliable professionals to make sure your book is of top quality.

However, if you don’t have your guard up, it is easy to fall for predators who simply want to overcharge for their services — many of which are tasks you could accomplish on your own. Here are some such ‘services’ to avoid.

Marked-up prices for low-quality editing and designing

Editors and designers are essential to a book’s success — and some companies and individuals will exploit this fact to take money out of your pocket. The worst thing is that they may even quote reasonable costs for self-publishing services, leaving you unsuspecting at first and then end up delivering low-quality work.

When it comes to cover designers and illustrators, it can be easier to tell who’s actually a pro — since their artwork is clearly visible. However, with editors and book coaches whose work is invisible to the reader (if they’ve done their job right), you have to do some research before signing a contract with them. Or… you can search for professionals on Reedsy.

At Reedsy, we vet each professional by verifying their professional experience, ensuring that every freelancer on our platform either has a wealth of traditional publishing experience or is a seasoned and well-reviewed collaborator on indie books. To find out more about how Reedsy chooses its professionals, read more about our selection criteria here.

Getting your book an ISBN

The acronym may make it sound more complicated than it is, but getting an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is not like joining the Illuminati: you don’t need a special introduction or to be someone’s important grandchild. For $125, any author can buy an ISBN through Bowker in the USA or Nielsen in the UK: agencies that issue ISBNs and cannot profit from their sale.

However, plenty of companies will make a big deal out of securing you an ISBN and charge you hundreds of dollars on top of the actual cost when you could just spend 10 minutes on Bowker and do it yourself.

To be honest, most online retailers for indie authors will supply their own identification codes these days. If you’re not planning to distribute to brick-and-mortar stores, you’ll probably be fine without an ISBN. But if you simply must have one, check out our guide on how to get one without paying more than you need to.

Copyright registration

Hamlet holds a copyright symbol, as if to question the need for it.

Now, that’s entirely false , but you’d be surprised how many people believe it. Authors own the copyright to their works before and after they publish them. In the US, registering that copyright simply provides a few statutory rights when it comes to claiming damages — and it should only cost you $45 to apply for it online (as of February 2022). For more details on how to register your copyright, you can check out this comprehensive guide.

4. Marketing packages that sound essential

Selling a book is something that most authors struggle with. (For a primer on the topic, check out this guide .) So it’s no surprise that there are people who will offer to solve your marketing problems for a low, low fee. Let’s dig into some of the miraculous “marketing solutions” that authors are often sold:

Press Releases. Whenever a company has a big new “story” to promote, it will issue a press release and publish it on sites where the media can pick it up. Scam companies will sell you on the idea that the New York Times, Good Morning America, and Newsweek can pick up on your story, but the chances of that actually happening are very slim.

Book Fairs. Every year, the publishing world flock to a handful of book fairs where the rights to publish new titles are snapped up. The big ones are in London and Frankfurt (and Bologna for children’s books), and almost anyone can book a table at these events. Predatory companies will offer to display your book at one of these fairs for a fee. More often than not, yours will be one of the countless books on a table in some unseen corner of the convention floor.

Screenplay adaptations/coverage. Certain publishing companies will offer to write up a “coverage” package to make it easier to sell your book to Hollywood production companies. Others will even get an anonymous screenwriter to adapt it into a Netflix pilot. There’s never been any evidence of successful pitches, but these services will surely cost you a pretty penny.

If you do need someone to help you market your book, make sure they offer services that directly impact your ability to reach your target reader (things like digital advertising and mailing list growth). Avoid companies that offer grand (yet vague) promises of instant stardom.

5. Writing contests and awards no one has heard of

Writing contests are a great way to reach an audience, solidify your writing credentials, and even make a little money in the form of prizes. There are, however, competitions that are little more than money-spinning enterprises. And you can usually sniff them out by the fact that their prizes are not really prizes.

Some contests publish winning entries in a magazine or anthology, which is great. But sometimes, “winning” authors are obliged to pay an “editing fee” for that privilege, which is not great.

Some competitions also award trophies. The catch is that the author is expected to pay for the cost of the physical prize. This isn’t necessarily bad—unless you mind paying $80 for a slab of acrylic. Dozens more have also “won” that month.

In short, read the fine print. To find contests that have been vetted, you can look through this directory of the best writing competitions.

And that covers most of the publishing companies you want to steer clear of in your career as an author.

How to avoid publishing scams

You can take the quiz below to get a quick verdict on whether you’re dealing with a publishing scam, and then read on for more details on how you can do the detective work yourself.

1. Be wary of anyone who contacts you first

It can flatter you quite a bit if someone contacts you out of the blue and offers to realize your publishing dreams. But don’t let the joy of that offer distract you from the truth—that legitimate traditional publishing companies hardly ever contact you first.

If you want to publish traditionally, you have to query agents and submit to publishers. However, there are more authors looking to get published than there are agents and editors to take them on, meaning professionals are often too busy reviewing submissions to contact you. The only people they might reach out to are well-known chart-topping authors.

So if someone you haven’t contacted appears in your inbox, offering to make a bestseller out of your book, alarm bells should be ringing.

2. Tread lightly with any “publisher” that wants you to pay

If you read our guide on vanity presses, you’ll know that traditional publishing works as follows:

The publisher buys the rights to print and distribute your book.
They will polish, package, and publish your book with the aim of selling as many copies as possible.
They will pay you an advance on your future royalties, and you should never pay them anything.

Similarly, literary agents don’t ask you to pay anything. They represent you and will only make money once they sell your book to a publisher. There are no reading fees, editing fees, or legal fees to be paid before the book is sold.

Because of that, any traditional-style publishing company that asks for payment from you is a vanity press at best — and a publishing scam at worst.

In self-publishing, on the other hand, you pay editors, designers, marketers, and printers. But they don’t publish your book; they provide specific services that help you do the publishing.

3. Google them

When it doubt, Google! There is hardly a handier tool than this to verify a company's legitimacy. You can pop the name of the company in question into the search engine and see what comes up.

If the company doesn’t have an official website, you should be suspicious. If there is a website but it looks like it hasn’t been updated since 2005, red flags should be flying.

While you're on the internet, check out Writer Beware, a blog with up-to-date news about publishing scams of all kinds. In the sidebar of the site is a blacklist of companies that have been identified as predatory — if the company you're dealing with appears in this list, it’s a clear no-go.

4. Look at their books on Amazon

Examining the books the company claims to have worked on is also a good strategy. Nowadays, most books are sold on Amazon, so it’s a reliable place to do your research. Alternatively, you can go to Goodreads.

Once you’ve found the books, you want to make sure that each has:

A quality book cover that’s comparable to other titles in the genre; and
At least 10 user reviews from actual readers.

Take some time to check the reviewers. If you see names of other authors who have worked with this publishing company, it’s a sign that the company is unreliable. They may have asked their authors to leave reviews on one another’s books to give each a legitimate appearance since there aren’t any real readers.

5. Ask the community

If you’re still unsure about the company, why not ask fellow writers who have published before? Go to relevant forums and boards and start a discussion. Ask some questions and see if any other author has been through a similar situation. Sometimes, you may even stumble across incriminating threads about writers’ experiences with scammers.

Just remember to find a well-established writer community with a good number of members so that you get as many perspectives on the matter as possible. Once you’ve found a good place, other writers will be happy to help where they can!

6. Ask questions and see if they turn up the pressure

Another tactic to take is to ask the representative of the company you're dealing with a couple of questions. You can pick smaller details, like information on publishing costs, the target market, or distribution channels.

Not only do you want to see their answers, but you can also gauge plenty from their reaction. Seasoned scammers won’t bat an eyelid, but they will try to fluster you — they will amp up the time pressure, urging you to take the deal before it's too late. They will try to panic you rather than answer your question.

7. If in doubt, walk away

After all this research, if you still feel even the slightest bit unsure about this business's reliability, it’s best to decline to work with them. Only work with people you are certain to have the right experiences, expertise, and care to strengthen your book.

Knowing how difficult it can be to find reliable partners in your publishing endeavors, the team at Reedsy has independently vetted over 3,000 publishing professionals before letting them list on our marketplace. You can sign up for free, browse these professionals’ profiles, and send them a request if you’re interested.

Connect with qualified publishing professionals

All editors, designers, and marketers on Reedsy have been vetted.

Learn how Reedsy can help you craft a beautiful book.

We hope this guide has helped you protect yourself on your publishing journey. Stay safe, avoid scammers, and we know you’ll find the right professionals for your book soon enough!

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The official blog of Writer Beware® shines a bright light into the dark corners of the shadow-world of literary scams, schemes, and pitfalls. Also providing advice for writers, industry news, and commentary. Writer Beware® is sponsored by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association.

New Publishers: To Query or Not to Query

Like brand-new agents building a client list, brand-new publishers looking for manuscripts can seem like a very attractive prospect, especially to authors who are burned-out on the agent hunt, or have decided to skip it altogether.

However, like new agents , not all new publishers are created equal.

The advent of epublishing and the cheapness of print-on-demand technology has made it extremely easy for just about anyone to start a publisher, whether or not they have any qualifications for doing so. Inexperienced new publishers may not have the skill or resources to curate, edit, or design high-quality books. They may not know how, or be able to afford, to hire qualified staff, or to create contracts that are fair and author-friendly. Small budgets may incentivize them to shift much of the burden of marketing and promotion onto their authors, and lack of knowledge may hamper what PR efforts they do make.

The consequence for authors: small sales, minimal exposure, and, possibly, an unprofessionally-produced book.

There’s another risk as well. The attrition rate for new publishers is extremely high, especially if (as many inexperienced publishers do) they start up without adequate finances or a proper business plan. New publishers may not realize that it’s best to start with a small list, rather than acquiring books by the handful (overcommitment is a common new publisher problem). They may not know how to evaluate publishing platforms, or work with wholesalers, or manage their budgets (leading to financial problems and logistical log jams). They may be running the publisher in their spare time, increasing the likelihood of time management issues and the possibility of getting sidelined by personal or family problems (this is a depressingly common excuse for nonperformance in the small press world).

The result: delays, mistakes, broken promises–and, ultimately, closure, sometimes less than a year after starting up. Here’s one example , a publisher that opened and closed in six months. There are many more.

Publishers’ closures can be a nightmare for authors. While some do the right thing by their writers, formally releasing rights before shutting down ( here’s one that did this ), the more unprofessional or unscrupulous companies may simply vanish, yanking their websites, terminating their email addresses, refusing to respond to letters and phone calls ( here’s one that did that ).

Even if a publisher no longer exists, having your rights encumbered by a still-existing, unterminated contract may make it extremely difficult to interest a new publisher in your book. Self-publishing could be a problem, too: platforms like KDP require authors to warrant that their rights are free and clear, and if it’s discovered that they’re not–for instance, if Amazon’s anti-plagiarism algorithms flag your book because your old publisher never removed the original listing–your account could be terminated.

Writer Beware has gotten hundreds of complaints over the years from writers left in this kind of limbo by collapsing small publishers and micropresses.

Also, while very small publishers may not have the assets or the debts to justify filing for bankruptcy, larger ones may. Most publishing contracts include a clause allowing for the return of rights in the event of insolvency or bankruptcy–but authors should not count on this for protection, since bankruptcy courts generally don’t honor such clauses. Publishing contracts are considered assets of the publisher’s estate, which can be liquidated in order to pay off creditors. If a publisher declares bankruptcy, its contracts are likely to be frozen until the court can decide whether to release or sell them. (This fact caught many authors by surprise when Triskelion filed for bankruptcy last year.)

Obviously, even established publishers can close or go bankrupt–Triskelion was in business for several years before it got into trouble. New publishers, however, are at special risk, particularly if they’re run by inexperienced people (and it can be hard to find the warning signs, since, as Richard pointed out in his last post , it’s so very easy to jigger a website).

So unless you are absolutely, 100% positive that a new publisher is staffed by people with substantial publishing experience–and maybe even then– it’s a good idea to wait on approaching it until it has been issuing books for at least a year (which means it may have been open for business for even longer). Not only does this assure you that the publisher can take books all the way through the production process, it indicates at least some stability, and lets you evaluate important things like physical and editorial quality, how the books are distributed, and how they are marketed. And it allows time for complaints, if there are any, to accumulate.

Tempting as it may be to join the rush to get in on the ground floor when a new publisher opens its doors, watching and waiting is a much better strategy.

Victoria Strauss

[email protected], 22 comments.

With regards to submissions at Bedazzled Ink; I read through their bumf and came away realizing that they y accept submissions and the author gets nothing. Crazy bedazzled people. In German: Sie haben nicht alle Tassen in Schrank.

Anonymous 3/31,

Both GusGus and Bedazzled Ink are still in business, but if you've been trying for three years to get them to respond to you, I'd guess that they are either seriously inefficient communicators (which would not bode well for an overall publishing experience) or no longer interested (the unprofessionalism of not bothering to let you know similarly does not bode well). I know it's tough to move on from what seemed like a bird in the hand, but that would be my advice.

I received an acceptance from GusGus Press of Bedazzledink.com 3 years ago. I tried to contact them several times since, but got no response. Does anyone have info about this press?

I signed with a small press that ended up becoming an imprint of a larger publisher. Good for me, right? Nope. The larger press closed my imprint but still holds the rights to my books which sell just enough for me not to get my rights back. Now I can't sell the 3rd book of the series and am in a holding pattern, waiting for my sales to tank enough (how can I keep myself relevant in my genre and avoid selling my books?) and, in the meantime, just keep writing because all I can control is my own production. That said, I did not consider the business stability of the small press. They had great editors, it was a wonderful experience, and a complete punch in the face because I wasn't prepared. Moral of the story – look into the actual business before you sign.

Anyone have information on Tell-Tale Publishing Group?

Regarding Kelsay Books, their contract states that the author's rights to publish are granted to the Publisher for 5 years. So, if they fold, rights revert to the author after this period. The contract also states that if the publisher does not publish the work, rights revert to the author. I believe this would protect both parties. Sounds very trustworthy.

Kelsay Books has a 20.00 reading fee. If the manuscript is accepted the book is published with no cost to the poet. They receive 5 free books and are listed on Amazon.

Dear Victoria, Thank you very much for your willingness to give advice to writers. I am a poet. Do you know if Kelsay Books is a subsidy press or a legitimate small press? Their website is unclear. They publish books of poetry in several imprints, including White Violet Press, Aldrich Press and Alabaster Leaves Press. Thank you very much, G.S. Crown

What's with small publishers like New Horizon Press, AMACOM, or Career Press? I am looking at agents and one has lots of titles with these. ranted, I want to get published and my name isn't Stephen King, but are these good deals? Fly by night? Advances? Worth waiting out something better?

Bren–I'm afraid I have no information on Fields of Gold, either positive or negative. Sorry!

Victoria, do you have any information about Fields of Gold Publishing in Brentwood, TN?

Good work again writer beware the only true honest source of information to the on line publishing industry. Publishing on line and copyright law are governed by industry standards, so as an on line author I support writer beware for it’s good work. Well done!!! akadada

Very interesting post. I too am a publisher and owner of a small press (Medusa’s Muse) with one book out and two more in production. Before the book debuted, I put in a year of research on the industry as well as how to run a business. I think some publishers forget they are also a business, and although the business part may be boring, it is essential to keeping your press alive. I spend half my time running the business of Medusa’s Muse, and only 25% on manusctipts (the other 25% is marketing). That’s the reality, and if you don’t want to spend your time managing your inventory and keeping track of royalty payments, then you shouldn’t start a press.

it’s very easy to be trapped by a micropress that yanks the “we’re all family” chain – if the royalties are late or the book releases slow down, suddenly there’s a personal crisis that *must* take precedent over the actual running of the company.

I’ve been trapped by one of these and regret that I never clued in until it was too late. No distribution, no promotion other than having it on a website and the usual suspects and constantly-late royalties due to one crisis or another.

do your homework and don’t be fooled by anyone who plays the “we’re a PARTNERSHIP!” game – it’s a business and should be run as such. If it’s not, then they should get out.

Anonymous 4:03, Still Waves is a “division” of Living Waters Publishing Company, which has been the subject of much discussion lately; you can see some of it here .

Still Waves is run by the 17-year-old son of Living Waters’ owners. What qualifies him to be a publisher? Nothing that I can discover. (At least this is consistent: as far as I can tell, “nothing” is also what qualifies his parents to be publishers.)

Living Waters has recently been spamming Usenet, writers’ forums, and blogs with calls for submissions. Some of their publishing is fee-free, but they also do vanity publishing and they have a kids’ imprint that charges a $50 reading fee.

Hi. I was wondering if you had any information on Still Waves Publishing. They left a message on the Verla Kay boards that looked a bit suspicious. I couldn’t find anything on them when I “googled” them and they had a link to poetry.com which really set off the alarms.

Any info would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

I’m currently evaluating whether to open a very limited small press (reprints, POD technology, with no ambitions to grow beyond micropress status) and I am getting a bit disheartened by how little advice there seems to be for startups. I want to make books available for which there is a proven-but-limited market; but there seems no way of testing it other than jumping into the cold water; and I want to do it with a fair contract (hey, I’m a writer, too), but I can see why so many places end up as well-meaning, but ultimately clueless 🙁

My husband and I have recently opened a small press. Currently, we are still in the acquisitions stage with our grand opening on May 5th. I totally agree with this post and have been only honest and forthcoming with anyone who has any questions or concerns regarding Lyrical Press, Inc.

I’m an author as well, retired actually, with five books currently still in publication. I’ve worked in many areas of the publishing industry (currently, I’m also the art director for Dark Eden Press) and have taken what I’ve learned and what expectations I’ve had in publishers, and brought that to Lyrical.

Our contracts are solid, favorable to both parties. All of our authors have been treated with respect, and we continue to deal favorably with everyone contracted with us. We want everyone to succeed because, let’s face it, if our authors do well, we do well.

My husband and I, through Lyrical, will do our part to help remove the stain on this industry.

Renee Rocco

Over 20 years ago, a professor I occasionally met with and corresponded with (I had never had him as a teacher; an English teacher of mine had referred me to him) made the curious comment that it was an honor *not* to have my book published (at the time I had written my third novel, and he had been discussing with me my first, which of course was the crudest of the three). He said this “because of all the bad books that are out there.” (He meant honor in the ironic way of Nixon’s enemies list–it showed your good stuff to have the opposite distinction than you would normally have sought.)

I found this to be an odd, catty remark, but he was someone who had longed to write published work and had given up on it, though he could speak to a budding writer as an astute critic. He dealt with his urges to write, he said, as a sort of undulant fever, a lifelong affliction that just had to be tolerated and reduced away. I thought he was betraying a little jealousy or bitterness at my idea that I would try to publish one of my novels—-at the time he said this, I was in the earliest stages of trying to get a publisher, and had only begun to deal with an agent who turned out to be a red herring, Gene Lovitz.

In the years that followed, I stayed on my course of doing whatever I could to publish a first book, because I knew three things were usually essential to this: a sense of the quality of your work (if it is there), belief in yourself, and sheer perseverance in trying year after year. The amount of things I’ve found out about the publishing industry 23 or so years since have been quite enlightening, and no way I could have found these out if I hadn’t tried to publish a book. Certainly the glib information dispensed by various published sources over the years that make the process seem relatively simple aren’t much help to most writers; they certainly are gainsaid by what personal experience shows.

Today, I am surprised how much I would agree with that professor, that is an honor not to have your book published, given what is out there. One book I actually did a review on, John McManamy’s Living Well with Depression and Bipolar Disorder, published in a health series by HarperCollins, is remarkably riddled with copy editing and proofreading errors. (My review appeared in the May 2007 issue of the journal Psychiatric Services.) McManamy’s book is related in type of topic, but not similar in treatment or main points, to a book I wrote that I have recently been seeking to publish. Obviously, given the psychiatric subject matter of his book (and mine), such books may be off-putting enough to a range of publishing professionals (who are laymen with regard to psychiatry), due to their squeamishness about psychiatric issues, that it would take only professionals with certain tastes to handle the books well. Having worked myself as a copy editor and proofreader for over 15 years, I would say that I would not welcome a publisher like HarperCollins doing the bad copy editing job on my book that it did on McManamy’s. And seeing how slow I am to get an agent for this book, it seems to make more sense for me to publish my book by myself, but then of course the big costs would be production, distribution, shipping, and the like.

This is just one example of how one may find that writing a book is like raising your pristine daughter, and then publishing it is like the producer of a dog-and-pony show tarting her up and dragging her across the land like a degraded and debauched Miley Cyrus. So what are we really talking about when we speak as if When a Book Is Ready, then a non-scammer agent takes it straight away to X Unimpeachable Publisher, and it enters the pantheon of Lasting Literature, and the great unwashed need not apply. This certainly is (close to) the set of implications of a lot of younger writers’ views of publishing when they are starting out. But having worked in nationally distributed publishing since 1990, and with my editing work perhaps having reached several times the number of readers that a trade book I could publish would, I feel that a healthy irony about publishing, especially about what a (tawdry) business it can be, is only helpful to your morale.

This is all very interesting. I privately “published” one of my book manuscripts in 1999, even with its own ISBN (with minimal sales, let’s say), and I avoided a whole lot of problems by not trying to publish anyone else’s book as a sort of solo-practitioner small publisher.

And today, as things have developed, with the Internet, (semi-)scams are rife in this area too. In 1999 I did no advertising or the like on the Internet. And never would have considered fishing for authors–as I couldn’t afford to publish someone else’s book in any real sense of the term anyway.

Apropos of your remark “If a publisher declares bankruptcy, its contracts are likely to be frozen until the court can decide whether to release or sell them,” I can say this: as I’ve felt from a more general perspective, when writers talk about being “partners” with the publishers, they should guess again. It looks more and more today as if you should consider yourself someone whose work of art, however valuable in and of itself, is being commodified by a company in a speculative venture that serves mainly that company, with all the (possible) compromises to you as an artist that that entails.

The bankruptcy clause in the Triskelion contract is echoed in my five small-press contracts. Why, I wonder, do the contracts claim immediate reversion of rights to the author if the publisher ceases operation, if this clause is voided by the bankruptcy laws? Why bother having it in there at all? Or is it a comfort-clause for the author, based on a poor understanding of bankruptcy law? If there’s a savvy attorney reading this, I’d love to know the answer. Because having worked with contracts in the construction business and publishing both, they don’t tend to insert meaningless clauses in them…

As someone running an extremely small press, I cannot agree more with this post. I am continually surprised by how many people choose to query us who have never read one of our books.

Poetry Presses Answer Your Burning Questions, Part 2

Read Part 1 and Part 3 of the series.

In part two of this three-part series, we asked poetry presses about the challenges that come with being a small press publisher. This article will give you insights into the barriers they face and how their struggles impact who, what, and how much they publish. We asked the presses the following questions:

What’s the biggest barrier you face in publishing manuscripts?

What conventions or practices in the world of small press publishing do you struggle with, describe some challenges you currently face in the poetry industry, and some you foresee in the future..

What you learn may surprise you.

Unsolicited Press: Dare I say it: money. As much as we all hate money here, given that we all volunteer our time to keep this press alive, there is a price tag to publication. As a small press, we are locked out of national audiences (which we no longer care about…we’ve found our people) because we don’t have tens-of-thousands-of-dollars to spend on a marketing/PR campaign. Beyond capital, sadly, it’s authors who fail to let us know that they have no intention of promoting their books in any form. Seriously. We’ve had authors who pull the “I’m a recluse” card after eighteen months of book development — this is usually after they told us in the past that they love promoting and have no problem holding a reading. And then all of a sudden, they don’t do readings and they won’t tell their friends they’ve even written a book (yes, this has happened). That, actually, may be worse than not having a lot of money.

Damaged Goods Press: Publicity and marketing are on the top of the list as far as barriers go. This is something we’ve worked on improving, but because we operate on a shoe-string budget, out of our home, we don’t have the means to send out tons of review/advance copies, make press kits, or hire a publicist. Social media helps, but really, we rely on writers to help with promotion. This is something we’re very upfront about as well. I think it’s important to be transparent about expectations, and remind people that Damaged Goods Press is a micro-press . We don’t have grant money, donors, or institutional affiliation, so that lack of support does make things harder, but we pay our writers, which is not something many micro-presses do. We work hard to make sure the books we produce are beautiful and something authors can be proud of.

Prolific Press Publishing: Finding the right combination of project, writer, and marketing plan…

As a small press, we have a limited budget. We have to be very selective about what we print. We have to find great books that we think we can sell. By the time we invest in the infrastructure to find books we want to bring to market, the budget is already very tight.

We also have to sell books. It’s not easy to sell books in today’s market, especially books by lesser-known writers. Finding the right relationships, that special synergetic chemistry between the publisher and a highly motivated writer willing to help promote the finished book is probably the biggest hurdle.

Too many writers hand their manuscript to a publisher and assume the success or failure of their book is the publisher’s responsibility. Yes, publishers ought to do their part, but even a truly great book will fail at a small press without a motivated writer. And of the writers who say they understand that self-promotion comes with publishing, many assume they have done their part if they post a link to social media and do a reading that same Saturday. Every little bit helps, obviously, but if it takes a year to publish a book, promoting it one Saturday afternoon isn’t really what the publisher is hoping for. All this being said, there are a small percentage of great writers who are highly motivated too. The biggest barrier is finding that particular writer at a time he/she has a good book ready to publish.

Redbird Chapbooks: I think our biggest barrier is capacity. We receive hundreds of manuscripts each year and we’re able to publish only a fraction of them. Red Bird is 100% volunteer operated. Many of our team members work and/or attend school full-time. They have families, hobbies, and their own writing and artistic practices. Despite all those other demands for their time, they are saying I believe in Red Bird and want to help bring authors’ and artists’ work into this world . They edit, or design, or show up every week to fold and sew books. It’s truly a team effort.

Sarabande Books: Raising funds for general operating costs, which include the money to publish books. Fundraising is at least a third of what I do all day. I would love to spend more time acquiring new manuscripts and editing! Also…really top quality creative nonfiction (essay) is often hard to find. Agents are grabbing these manuscripts up faster than you can blink. And, in these cases, a small press generally can’t compete with commercial publishers’ advances.

BlazeVox: The biggest barriers are the resources available to a small press, which are far and few between. Those resources primarily are time, money, and energy. If we had more of these we would be able to bring out books from authors who deserve to be published. We would also be able to have a higher budget for marketing, publicizing, and advertising. But we make the most out of what we have, so we feel confident in our ability to publish far into the future.

dancing girl press: I suppose time is my biggest obstacle. I work a full-time, 40 hour a week job, in addition to the press and my own creative work, so it’s always hard to find balance. We get so many good submissions, so I am always struggling to decide how much is too much to take on for any given year. I love publishing so many voices, but it’s balanced in terms of what is realistic in terms of time.

Rose Metal Press: The twin barriers of time and money. We’re a small operation with just two people-Abby Beckel and Kathleen Rooney-at the helm, supported by a small and dedicated team of designers and interns. This makes for an environment with a lot of collaboration and aesthetic freedom, but means that we only put out two full-length books a year because we want to be sure that every book we release is beautifully produced inside and out, and that in terms of marketing and publicity, every book gets as much attention as we can muster from the book buying-and book reading-public.

rinky dink press: We try to put out 10 micro-collections/micro-chapbooks per series, two series per year. Like most small presses, we all work for free in our barely existent free-time. In the early days, we had 4-6 students on the editorial board, then our student editors graduated and moved on, so we rounded up former students and community poets. We were terribly understaffed at AWP 2019, but we’re up to 10 editors now, and everyone seems thrilled to be working with the press. So I guess our biggest barriers have historically been staffing and time-management. And spotty social media presence!

Litmus Press: As a small nonprofit publishing non-mainstream work, the biggest barrier to publishing is cost. Our editorial board is made up of volunteers and we have a miniscule staff. In order to select, design, print, and promote these important but off-the-beaten-path works, we spend a large amount of time fundraising and grant writing.

Another New Calligraphy: Another New Calligraphy is a one-person endeavor, so most barriers stem from trying to fit it all in my schedule and/or sustaining the energy to do so. I enjoy handling everything, but having a team would probably help keep me going whenever a sense of doubt starts to cloud my thoughts.

Dusie Poetics: The biggest challenge Dusie faces would be garnering reviews. If there is a magic formula to this, please share. In the early days of publishing placing reviews seemed easier. Since the press is so tiny, authors have to do a lot of legwork as well. Some writers are better are self-promoting and it certainly isn’t an easy task.

Jane’s Boy Press: Time. We’re a very small operation (three people), and we don’t do this with a profit motive, so we all have other work and life commitments. We would love to have the ability for this to be our 9-5 job, but we can’t, and that means we squeeze our publishing work in between classes, work schedules, and families. Unfortunately, over the last two years, we’ve had a “perfect storm” where all three of us have dealt with either health or family crises that have impacted our ability to have the time that we typically steal from other areas to keep things moving at the pace they were when we started. We’re just beginning to develop something in the way of forward motion again.

Black Lawrence Press: We’re limited by the number of books that we are able to publish per year. As we continue to grow, we hope to be able to publish more titles on an annual basis.

Kelsay Books: The most time-consuming factor is working with poets who edit and change their work after we have begun the layout. We have an excellent team at Kelsay Books, and our goal is to showcase the manuscripts we receive in the most beautiful way possible and to do it promptly. And for the poet to love their book and make the process run smoothly. We are always trying to streamline the publishing process to make it more efficient, cut down on wait time and eliminate miscommunication. I work hard to maintain our house style and standards while trying to blend in the poet’s ideas for their book.

Our goal is to make sure each book we finish has a happy ending as far as our poetry clients are concerned. While we appreciate there will sometimes be differences of opinion during the process, our end goal is to ensure that our poets feel satisfied that there has been a job well-done.

Damaged Goods Press: Honestly, peopling and “getting out there,” or making space for big literary-focused events like AWP, regional book festivals, and things like that. Being able to carve out the time and money to travel to these events is often a huge barrier and keeps us away from meeting with our literary peers.

Another New Calligraphy: The burden of needing to constantly produce more work is certainly a reflection of general social expectations, but it’s damaging all the same. Poets seem especially sensitive to the idea of being judged based on their output. In truth, I don’t care if you have 300 publications or if you’re trying for the first time. Do I enjoy your work?

Prolific Press Publishing: Many publishers subsidize large bookstores by allowing wholesale returns for any and no reason. This contributes to some 90% of publishers going out of business in their first few years. They try to offer the same terms as other publishers, but because of the subsidy policies designed to benefit bookstores, they lose money before ever getting big enough to turn a profit. Once a publisher reaches a certain size, the damage this practice causes can be absorbed, but in some important ways, only because others are crushed by these same policies. The only winners are the bookstores, and I’m all for supporting a bookstore that cares, but if they cared, they wouldn’t engage in practices that hurt writers and publishers.

Not only do many bookstores buy books at wholesale prices, lots of books in order to meet buying quotas that give them the biggest discounts from distribution chains, they send back the books (often before even unboxing them) at the publisher’s expense. In fact, many bookstores won’t buy a book unless they can buy it wholesale with a return policy. No other industry does this. This practice has been going strong since the Great Depression, and in recent years, many small publishers, including Prolific Press, have taken a stand. We don’t allow wholesale returns. We already offer wholesalers deep (very deep) discounts.

We believe allowing wholesale returns hurt writers and the publishing industry as a whole.

The struggle is real , as they say, because the convention is to allow bookstores to get away with this practice. It comes down to integrity. The way the industry works, in this regard, is wrong. Admittedly, taking this stand isn’t good for our bottom-line, but on the other hand, if we have to compromise our integrity by not acting on our convictions, we should be in some other business.

I think we’re doing the right thing. We don’t foster an environment where some people profit at the expense of others. We compete in the marketplace, and we stand on our own. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Unsolicited Press: It starts with an upheaval of the entire publishing industry — with bookstores ordering books that are not returnable (or if they are returnable, then a set returns window) and doing their job of selling the books. In what world does it makes sense for the main point-of-sale outlet (bookstores are essentially sales reps with a physical manifestation of a catalog on their shelves) to be permitted to buy product at a killer deal, and then have zero obligation to sell the products? And then when their meager sales tactics fail to move product, they can return the books in whatever condition they want for a 100% refund? Doesn’t that seem odd? I’m not advocating that the bookstores take all the risk, but bookstores need to be more than libraries with cashiers. Currently, they reap all the rewards of a book sold (or unsold) while the author and the publisher get the short stick. If you saw the condition of returned books from retailers, you would be appalled to learn that they got a refund. Ninety percent of the returned books cannot be resold due to their condition. The author loses the royalty. The publisher loses the cost to print the book…we all lose the sale. But the bookstore? They walk off with a full wallet.

Redbird Chapbooks: One of the issues we continue to struggle with is reaching new audiences. We don’t have a large advertising budget, so we need to be really intentional about how we try to grow.

We’re lucky to be located in a really strong literary community, benefiting from lots of talented authors, literary art centers, and Rain Taxi’s annual Twin Cities Book Festival.

A few years ago we were able to participate in the AWP Conference when it was in Minneapolis. A lot of authors from all over the country learned of us for the first time in those short few days in 2015. We’re listed in some of the common databases – Duotrope, Poets & Writers. We have also provided titles to the Poets House annual showcase three years in a row now and know that authors and bookstores have discovered us that way. All that helps, but it would be great if we could reach more people.

Dusie Poetics: I would like to have better publicity and reviews done for all of the work Dusie publishes. I have considered having a review at dusie.org to get more reviews out into the world as well. I offer books or pdfs to any potential reviewer but nothing compares, it seems to having the poet’s enthusiasm when marketing, publishing and selling books. Dusie has long published free e-chaps online to attract greater audiences.

Litmus Press: Some of our bigger challenges have to do with visibility. With a small staff and limited budgets, advertising in relevant publications (print or online), travel support for author readings, and attendance at book fairs and conferences can be prohibitively expensive.

dancing girl press: Most presses & journal run on a shoe-string budget, which makes it harder for them not to charge reading/submission fees. But if you charge people to submit, you shut out a lot of voices who cannot afford to throw down $10 or more every time they send a manuscript out. Which limits your pool of writers to those privileged enough afford it. I can see both sides, the publishers that are trying to make do, and the writers who want to get their work out there, and both sides suffer. I’m not sure there is a solution beyond more support for everyone involved.

Kelsay Books: I struggle with the business model that seems widespread, where retail stores want to return unsold titles to the publisher. And shops that insist on authors paying large processing fees to add poetry books (on consignment) to their store shelves.

This October will be my eighth year publishing poetry books. I have edited a little over six hundred titles. It has taken some time to find printing companies that work well with my company. Some have higher shipping costs, some charge handling fees; others have inferior quality paper. They may do a fantastic job but have poor customer service. It all comes down to trial by fire. I have spent hours and hours of my time searching for the best team—the printers I use, my cover designer, our layout editor, and our copyeditor—they are all excellent to work with and professional, considerate people.

BlazeVox: By my nature, I struggle with convention. And in the world of small presses there are many kinds of conventions we follow in hopes of doing the right things to get our books noticed. But the thing I struggle with most is an essential aspect to our work, the practice of rejection and acceptance. A large part of the workload in small press publishing is rejecting many fine manuscripts; and that is a very difficult task and at times can be demanding. I write poetry and my work is rejected more times than accepted. It is a thing to get used to in life in any creative endeavor, but it never ever feels good. So I, along with our editors, am always cognizant of the struggle all writers all go through to get our artwork out there.

rinky dink press: Presses have to be realistic and have sustainable expectations, and sometimes that means cutting corners, but we think it means more DIY and less flashiness, fewer high-priced collections that cater almost exclusively to other poets. We make beautiful little things that contain impactful words for a dollar. If there’s something you want to see, i.e. a paradigm shift, you can’t wait for the industry or the university to come around. If we learned anything from punk (and grunge), it’s that you have to make the waves, not just ride them.

Sarabande Books: Returns. Steep discounts. We do have terrific distribution, so I’m not worried about that.

Jane’s Boy Press: Just trying to make the whole system work with three people. I think any small press that is run by a handful of people (or sometimes only one person) who truly care about what they are doing are constantly struggling to make what they do happen and balance it with the reality that it doesn’t pay the bills.

Jane’s Boy Press: Visibility is an issue. If you walk into a Target or a Walmart, they aren’t going to stock poetry unless it’s on the Times Bestseller List . This means going to dedicated bookstores, which still are often focusing on the most popular and classical poetry, and not picking up some of the less obvious choices for their shelves. If you find an independent bookstore that knows their niche, you’ll find a goldmine of wonderful books to read. But you usually have to search pretty hard or go directly to publishers’ websites or know what it is you’re trying to find.

Another New Calligraphy: Promotion is a definite struggle, and one I commonly see other small publishers lamenting. It’s easier than ever to share your work with the world, which is incredible from an evolutionary standpoint. It just makes standing out even more difficult, a problem I’m sure will increase exponentially in the future.

Unsolicited Press: What we are seeing is the effects of vanity publishing. Authors submit and when we talk contracts, they want to know how much to pay. They also want to know when they can provide their cover art. They want to decide everything down to the size of the font. These are all signs that they’ve been through vanity publishing of some sort. They don’t realize that they paid a publisher and that’s why they maintained ALL creative control. It can be a shock to them to find out that publishing doesn’t work that way. When we come across these writers, we say this: everybody in the publication of a book has a role, and the writer’s role is to write, not to format the book, not to make the cover…we have layout experts and designers who complete those tasks. That’s not to say that we don’t make every step of the process a conversation because we do, but we must also remember that an author is always too close to the work to make final decisions on a book’s development.

For the future, I see this getting worse.

Damaged Goods Press: Small press poetry does not make money. It’s a labor of love for so many presses, and Damaged Goods is no exception to that. Even though poetry is on the upswing in popularity, it is still a marginalized form of craft and not taken as a seriously (publicity-wise) as fiction and nonfiction work. I don’t really see this changing anytime soon, especially since we can’t all be Andrews McMeel Publishing, the super popular press that released Rupi Kaur’s NYT Bestselling poetry books.

Prolific Press Publishing: With the advent of cheap publishing platforms like KDP and Ingram, we have found it challenging to draw a bright line between traditionally published poets and self-published poets. We’re in the publishing business, and it’s genuinely hard for us to tell the difference sometimes, particularly as platforms now allow writers to brand themselves as their own publisher by way of an ISBN imprint.

If we are having trouble navigating these new waters, others are surely having the same troubles. The question for our company is this: If someday readers no longer recognize a legitimate difference between full publishing and self-publishing, what will that mean for Prolific Press?

It’s an interesting question, particularly as it has always been, and remains today, a prestigious accomplishment to be traditionally published. This is the currency that makes professional publishing possible.

To complicate these distinctions, some presses have very misleading practices, requiring writers to pre-sell books or otherwise guarantee sales. Those are obviously vanity presses, but they blatantly lie to writers by insisting they “aren’t a vanity press, and don’t publish everyone”, and this predatory atmosphere is not only deceptive but serves to confuse writers, often derailing their chances at success later on. After all, publishing houses know the worst offenders in the publishing industry, and when those names show up in a writer’s biography, many publishers simply reject work they might otherwise have accepted because they don’t want to risk tarnishing their own image by publishing a writer who has a relationship with a vanity press.

For now, we have a challenge to ensure Prolific Press stands apart from the pack, both in quality and integrity. I think we have, do, and will continue to, but the moment any company takes their reputation for granted, mediocrity will surely set in. For our part, we work harder than we have to, provide more than we promise, and always strive for perfection. I think that we can maintain our edge if we never compromise on those values.

Sarabande Books: Funding is key. Once upon a time the Mellon Foundation and the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Fund offered sizable grants to independent nonprofit literary publishers. Some of this money went towards special projects, but there was a bit leftover for operating expenses, too. The NEA is currently the most reliable and generous granting we’ve experienced. And there have been difficult moments in the past when even that was in danger.

dancing girl press: Because everyone is running presses mostly as a labor of love, it’s hard to keep momentum and funds to keep going. A lot of presses and publications have shuttered over the years because they didn’t have the money or the person-power to sustain them. Even university-affiliated presses have funding problems, where they might have been more stable in the past. I keep seeing articles about the resurgence of poetry’s popularity and hope maybe this means good things for the community.

BlazeVox: There are many challenges we face daily, but we do it with a brave face. In poetry failure is built into the system so most of us are prepared for it to happen, and when it does, failure is found to be momentary. Success for a poet is found in a finely written book that is well designed. Everything else is out of our control. We strive for a good publicity campaign that will help the book receive reviews. We hope that readers find our books and they enjoy not only the words but also appreciate the book-shaped box in which the poems arrive. We already know that books sales in poetry are slim. That may be the largest challenge we face. Not just for our press but also for all other presses and distributors who endeavor to bring poetry to the public. It is a challenge we accept wholeheartedly. I think that this will always be a challenge to anyone who publishes poetry, be that today or one hundred years from now. But we don’t find this kind of concern troubling; it is the nature of poetry.

Redbird Chapbooks: Big picture we face the typical structural challenges – financial constraints and resource scarcity – that every organization faces.

Some of our current considerations include pricing, reliance on volunteers, and risks of plagiarism/copyright infringement.

There is a limit to what a reader will pay for a book of poetry. Costs are increasing, margins are shrinking, but at what price does a reader choose not to purchase a book? And does that price offset enough of the costs?

When Red Bird was founded, we made some conscious decisions around accessibility and author compensation. We didn’t want reading fees to be a barrier preventing authors from having their collections considered. The founding members were finishing up our MFAs together and all of us knew how quickly those fees added up in any given year. We also thought that chapbooks should be affordable so that audiences would be encouraged to purchase an author’s work. And we thought that authors should receive payment when their books sold. All of these became variables which play in to our pricing and our ability to sustain our operations.

We have some amazing volunteers and I am so grateful for all that they do with Red Bird. There are hundreds of hours of work that go in to each title. We do what we can to share the responsibilities across a large group. That said, each and every one of us have other obligations vying for our time. Sometimes people need to step away, to pursue other things. An unexpected illness, the birth of a child, a major deadline at work – all of these things can take unexpected precedence and as a press we need to be able to react and to keep projects moving to honor our commitments. It requires strong communication between our team and our authors. And it requires flexibility.

Copyright infringement and plagiarism is another challenge in the industry right now. I’ve seen a lot of conversations online lately about a recent instance where a poet used several lines from other poets throughout a collection. The ethical and legal ramifications of copyright violations can be significant.

Litmus Press: Funding. Especially consistent government funding, which is always under threat.

Dusie Poetics: I find a lot of what is often considered ‘hot’ is sometimes a click or bandwagon. I would like the academy to have a more radically inclusive attitude. Must we all write a pained narrative? There is surely room for other forms that precede the page whether in tone, style or form—there is surely a place where the publish-ability on the account of a poet gives freedom for true experiment to occur (whether that is for success or failure—it is the process of which that can be most exciting).

rinky dink press: Poetry is as much an industry of “performance” as it is “page,” so that’s something that we’re always trying to broach, and by broach I mean bridge. Phoenix may not have the most well-integrated poetry community in the country, but I’ve straddled the community/university line since the late 90s, and though I consider myself more community than university, we need poets who are willing to share the stage and the page, acknowledge their strengths and differences and bring all of those strengths to the table in order to grow the audience of readers and listeners. Poets have to be outside and inside, in the suburbs and in the heart of the city. We have to make poetry part of the vernacular in our communities again.

Be sure to also check out Natalie Gasper’s other three series. Bookstores Answer Your Burning Questions: Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , Part 4 , Part 5 , + Part 6 Libraries Answer Your Burning Questions: Part 1 + Part 2 Literary Agents Answer Your Burning Questions: Part 1 , Part 2 , + Part 3

Website: anothernewcalligraphy.com

Twitter: @ANCalligraphy

Instagram: @anothernewcalligraphy

________________________________

Website: https://www.blacklawrence.com/

Twitter: @BlackLawrence

Webpage: http://www.blazevox.org Facebook: facebook.com/geoffrey.gatza Twitter: @GeoffreyGatza

Website: http://www.damagedgoodspress.com/

Twitter: @DamGoodPress

Website: http://www.kristybowen.net/

Website: http://www.dancinggirlpress.com/

Twitter: @dancinggrlpress

Website: https://www.dusie.org/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dusiepoetics/

Website: https://www.janesboypress.com/

Twitter: @JanesBoyPress

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/janesboypress/

Website: https://kelsaybooks.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KelsayBooks/

Website: https://orchardspoetry.com/

Twitter: @BooksKelsay

Website: www.litmuspress.org

Twitter: @LitmusPress

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/litmuspress/

Instagram: @litmuspress

Website: https://prolificpress.com/

Twitter: @ProlificBooks

She serves as the Executive Director for Red Bird Chapbooks , where she also edits and designs books and gets to discover new authors. In her past life she has been a transportation executive, a number cruncher, and an airplane mechanic.

Website: http://www.redbirdchapbooks.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/redbirdchapbooks/

Instagram: @redbirdchapbooks

Website: https://rinkydinkpress.com/

Twitter: @rinkydinkpress

Instagram: @rinkydinkpress

Facebook: @rinkydinkpress

Founding editor Rosemarie Dombrowski : https://rdpoet.com/

Co-editor-in-chief Shawnte Orion : http://batteredhive.blogspot.com/

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press , as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait , a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She teaches in the English Department at DePaul University , and her most recent books include the national best-seller, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (St. Martin’s Press, 2017) and The Listening Room: A Novel of Georgette and Loulou Magritte (Spork Press, 2018). She lives in Chicago with her spouse, the writer Martin Seay . Her World War I novel Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey is forthcoming from Penguin in 2020.

Website: https://rosemetalpress.com/

Twitter: @RoseMetalPress

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rosemetalpress/

Website: www.sarabandebooks.org

Twitter: @sarabandebooks

Instagram: @sarabandebooks

Facebook: @SarabandeBooks

Twitter: @GorhamSarah

Instagram: @sarahgorham7107

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sarahgorham54

Website: http://www.unsolicitedpress.com/

Interviewer

NATALIE GASPER is an internationally performed poet whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Write Launch , The Hickory Stump , The Remembered Arts Journal , Noon by Arachne Press, and ellipsis…literature & art , amongst others. She works as an interviewer and reader for The Nasiona , and is an editorial intern with a prominent New York literary agency.

Twitter: @nataliegasper

nataliegasper.home.blog

Featured image: Photograph by Teddy Tavan on Unsplash.

Hepato-Poetics: A Brief Polemic Against the Moon and Heart

“Hepato-poetics: A Brief Polemic Against the Moon and Heart” is part memoir and part reading journal. It is also my attempt to highlight poetry that deals with the liver, as opposed to the more frequently-used […]

Joseph Pennell, "In the Jaws of Death, Rolling Bars for Shells," lithograph, 1931, Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art.

Memory Unfolded: Interview with John Z. Guzlowski

Born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, JOHN Z. GUZLOWSKI came to the United States with his family as a displaced person in 1951. His parents had been Polish slave laborers in […]

Walter Gramatté, "Woman at a Window," watercolor over graphite, 1922, Gift of Ruth Cole Kainen, National Gallery of Art.

Facing the Fears of Memoir Writing

Memoir writing can be terrifying. Having it read can be worse. It can also be deeply satisfying. That look into the interior can produce both soothing revelations and dredge up uncomfortable monsters. But the fear […]

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Poetry by Karen Kelsay

Poetry Publications
Book Reviews
Amytis Leaves Her Garden-Blurbs
Sample Poetry

Purchase on Amazon

Of Omens That Flitter

February 2018

(Big Table Publishing)

Or email for a signed copy

Amytis Leaves her Garden

wins the AML award:

Citation for: Amytis Leaves Her Garden

In choosing Amytis Leaves Her Garden, my sense of being a poet, who loves catching a glimpse of the world through eyes that are not my own. I don’t wish I had written Amytis Leaves Her Garden, I am instead in awe of how Karen Kelsay has been able to catch a wisp of time or place and transport me there, with clarity and imagination.

Clearly, this is a collection of poetry that bears the hallmarks of Mormon life and the ideals of Mormonism’s gender ideas. “A Proper Man” (pg 23) is one of the poems that at first left my feminist self bristling, as did several other poems that seemed to be focused on only the sunny side of life. Then “Summer In Italy” (pg 46) is the reminder that searching for beauty, comfort, the sublime, in the midst of each sorrow, trial, and the unexpected *is* what and who Mormons are.

As with the review of any poetry books, there are few poems that didn’t connect, and yet even in those, as a reader, I felt there was still beauty in trying to see how all the other poems inform that disconnect. In the end, personally not having a place to walk into a poem, does not take away from the majority who made me laugh, weep or smile,

While the subject varies from poem to poem, each sheds beauty on sweet moments that are here and would be gone, if not for Kelsay’s brilliant poetic snapshots.

What other poets say about Of Omens That Flitter

The poems in Of Omens That Flitter have such a beautiful and persuasive rhythm—and the vocabulary is a delight. (I’m thinking of “wentletrap” in “The Courtship Hour”—wow.) The title poem, that first sonnet, opens up the whole book. There are alluring poems, like “An Evening in May,” that combine the natural world and the world of relationships is such rich ways. The poems about ageing and relationships especially because of their direct vocabulary are some of my favorites: “Outlooks” and the poignant “Summer in Italy.” “The Tortoise and the Hare” is quite an incredible portrait—memorable and painful. Karen fearlessly tackles complex situations in these poems, and I am so glad to have the book on my shelf.

Molly Peacock

Karen Kelsay’s third full length book of lyric poetry, Of Omens That Flitter , is a moving collection of new and selected poems, both in form and in free verse, showcasing the musicality, care, and craftsmanship that have become the hallmark of the author’s work. The shifting courses setting the tone in the opening sonnet reappear throughout, and provide the reader with deeply spiritual meditations on the theme of change—from youth to old age, from life to death, from summer to winter, from doubt to belief. The touching poems about her family, her travels, her faith, and her life in California and in England are infused with wisdom and humor, enhanced by an inspired and graceful combination of plainspoken language and striking sensual imagery. Her treatment of light and shadow, for example in “The Courtship Hour” and “Needlepoint in Blue,” is particularly fine. In his search for a definition of pure poetry, scholar of philosophical theology and literature James Matthew Wilson states, “Poetry never appears so powerfully as a gift or revelation as when it finds words for the invisible life of the spirit.” In Of Omens That Flitter Karen Kelsay has indeed found those words.

Catherine Chandler

This is a book of poems by my publisher, so it behoves me to be, at least, polite. However, no need to worry. These are the sort of poems I like. They rhyme and they scan and they make sense. In other words they are unlike the sad general run of poetry these days. Well of course they are. Karen Kelsay started Kelsay Books in order to show the flag. I joined her, firstly because she accepted the book I sent her, but also because she is doing what needs to be done.

There’s plenty here about death (a poet’s biggest gun). Death is the straight-faced man who stares far off . There are ghosts and more than a whiff of Tennyson, with poems called The Lady of Shalott and Mariana . Many of the poems don’t rhyme, which doesn’t suit my prejudices. Cats stalk through the book, which does. In fact the book is full of small, furtive animals and birds about their business, which could well be killing each other. Even the plants are on the move, an orchid and a hemlock intertwine forever.

This is a very visual poet. She makes you see, and see in colour what’s more. Lots of whites and blues and golds. Here and there a yellow, a green, a pink.

Omens? What are they omens of? Disquiet and concealed violence. And underneath everything sadness. Sadness.

John Whitworth

_________________________________________________

What other poets and editors say about Karen's books:

Karen Kelsay's Lavender Song is a delectable collection of perfect quatrains, tercets, and the occasional sonnet—a poetic gathering that the Elizabethans would have called “a garland of Delights.” Kelsay's subject matter runs the gamut from nature and music and the season to English homes and Irish fairies, as well as from Suzanne and the Elders to Anne Bradstreet. In a literary scene where oversubstituted feet make too many allegedly formal poems unrecognizable, Karen Kelsay's limpid iambic pentameters are a welcome respite and a joy to peruse.

Joseph S. Salemi , Editor of TRINACRIA

Reading these poems is like handling some lovely hand-made, carefully-wrought artefact from an age when craftsmanship and elegance still remained sovereign virtues. Karen Kelsay eschews cheap gimcrack-trendy modernisms and postmodernisms, and instead evokes a more organically traditional aesthetic and praxis. It is refreshing to read poetry that, far from urgently straining for effect and ersatz novelty, quietly and touchingly speaks to more durable human virtues. Yet within this exquisitely traditional poetic vision, Ms. Kelsay addresses concerns that are as relevant today as they ever were, and she does this from her own unique perspective, and in her own authentic voice. This is poetry that enriches the reader: and thank goodness such poetry is still being written!

Paul Christian Stevens, Editor of The Chimaera Literary Miscellany and The Flea Broadsheets

Karen Kelsay is a courageous poet: courageous to imbue her poetry with love, compassion, empathy and spirituality at a time when such things are out of favor in literary circles. For those of us who still believe that art should be moving, her poetry is like a breath of fresh, lavender-scented air.

Michael R Burch, Editor of The HyperTexts

These poems rehearse their subject matter with charming magic of language, sorcery of phrase, the spell of measured, proper words. It is music, chant, and liturgy, the commonplace ensorcelled.

David W. Landrum, Editor of Lucid Rhythms

The joy Karen Kelsay evinces in her new book Amytis Leaves Her Garden is real and sustained. A virtuoso of subtle descriptive twists, she carefully chooses each word at its peak of ripeness, then plucks it, so to speak, from the inexhaustible tree of her personal eloquence.

However, whether making a general observation or acknowledging some strand of her own memory and experience, Kelsay remains at all times an astute observer. And what she makes of these small occurrences is neither ordinary nor small. This book consists of fifty subtle and well-constructed poems, all of which may be read and re-read with pleasure, for the beauty of their language and their imaginative force. Karen Kelsay is not only accomplished and prolific; she respects language. In addition, she is also attuned to pleasing the intelligent reader. In this harsh uncaring world, Amytis Leaves Her Garden presents an elegant respite; something to enjoy. It is also a testament to a life well lived. Karen Kelsay is a poet to watch.

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The lasting impact of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the U.S.A.’

Steven Hyden’s “There Was Nothing You Could Do” explores the blockbuster album, which turns 40 next month.

There’s a reason “Bruce Springsteen” is still a viable Halloween costume in 2024, and that reason is “ Born in the U.S.A. ”

The blockbuster album, which turns 40 next month, capped a dozen-year ascent to superstardom that turned a critically adored, ambivalent-about-fame singer-songwriter into a pop icon on a scale inhabited only by Taylor Swift and Beyoncé today.

The Boss’s red-bandanna-and-sleeveless-flannel-shirt phase was only a blip within a performing career that has now spanned more than half a century. More than a dozen Springsteen albums have been packaged behind portraits of his invariably careworn mug; only “Born in the U.S.A.” came swaddled in an Annie Leibovitz close-up of the denim-clad Boss-terior. But it was this synthesizer-heavy era that made Springsteen a permanent celebrity beyond the sphere of music fandom — and made it possible for the 74-year-old to continue filling stadiums even now, despite how profoundly the America beyond them has changed.

The disappearance of that metaphorical breadbasket, wherein the workaholic Springsteen briefly became an unlikely figure of national consensus, is the subject of ride-or-die Springsteen fan Steven Hyden’s new book, “ There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ and the End of the Heartland .” If the book can’t explain the slow fade of a country that at least seemed to want consensus — which, as Hyden observes, also confounds Springsteen’s podcast co-host Barack Obama — it is at least an astute and briskly written look at the circumstances and legacy of an album whose outsize popularity has made it paradoxically divisive among Tramps Like Us.

As Hyden points out in his preface, almost no serious Broooooce fan claims “Born in the U.S.A.” as their favorite. It was too contemporary-sounding, too accessible, representing the only time Springsteen directed his hopeful but essentially fatalistic worldview at fickle listeners who’d never sit still for the 43 relatively down-tempo minutes of “Darkness on the Edge of Town” or the bleary-eyed introspection of “Nebraska.”

The latter album was released in 1982 as the marathon “Born in the U.S.A.” recording sessions wore on like a Stanley Kubrick film shoot, and the two LPs are inextricably linked. (Musician and writer Warren Zanes’s 2023 book about the making of “Nebraska,” “ Deliver Me From Nowhere ,” is good, but Hyden’s is more broadly curious.) The song that would become “Born in the U.S.A.’s” title track, with its widely-misread-as-jingoistic chorus and cannonball drums, first appeared as an acoustic, percussion-free lament during the bedroom sessions that begot “Nebraska.” Like many “Born in the U.S.A.” outtakes, that somber version wouldn’t get an official release until the “Tracks” box set in 1998, near the end of a decade when Springsteen more or less embraced the notion that his time as a mainstream unit-shifter had passed. His solo acoustic tour behind his 1995 folk album, “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” covered a greater span of time than the “Born in the U.S.A.” tour had, albeit in much cozier venues. Springsteen opened these shows by asking punters to keep quiet so they could hear the songs — hardly the behavior of an aging rocker worried about his market share.

Hyden came of age during Springsteen’s ’90s wilderness era, and he’s previously devoted books to Pearl Jam and Radiohead — bands that became huge during the decade when Springsteen’s influence was at a low ebb. But that perspective helps him to perceive the long arc of the Boss’s career. He opens the book by recalling his first exposure to “Born in the U.S.A.” as a tyke — a little-discussed but important constituency for multiplatinum albums in this era. As with the contemporaneous megasellers “Thriller” and “Purple Rain,” “Born in the U.S.A.’s” bright production and sheer ubiquity made it a powerful gateway drug for impressionable music-obsessives-in-waiting. I’m like Hyden in this regard — a guy who first decided I was a Bruce fan in grade school, years before the self-loathing and political disenchantment elucidated in “Dancing in the Dark” and “My Hometown” would hold any rational meaning for me.

Hyden is an imaginative cultural omnivore, which means his critical examination occasionally takes the form of something like fan fiction. What if, for example, the Boss had decided to pursue his flirtation with acting — something we’d later get a taste of in the John Sayles-directed music videos for “Glory Days” and “I’m on Fire” — and agreed to star in “Taxi Driver” screenwriter Paul Schrader’s melodrama “Born in the U.S.A.” in 1979? In our universe, Springsteen simply pocketed the title of Schrader’s screenplay, repaying the filmmaker by writing a title song for the movie that was eventually released as “Light of Day,” starring Michael J. Fox and Joan Jett. But Hyden builds out this alternate timeline, wherein Springsteen, not Richard Gere, plays the lead role in Schrader’s “American Gigolo,” and then Springsteen, not David Bowie, writes and performs the title song for Schrader’s kinky 1982 remake of the ’40s horror flick “Cat People.” Not profound , maybe, but fun to ponder.

Or what if Springsteen had followed up “Born in the U.S.A.” with a sequel album made up of leftovers from the same sessions? Hyden presents his suggested track list for “Man at the Top,” the 1985 Springsteen album that never was (though all its songs are real), awarding it four out of five stars in an imaginary Rolling Stone review. More intriguingly, he posits a future-past wherein the early-’90s emergence of stars like Billy Ray Cyrus and Garth Brooks persuades Springsteen that heartland rock has gone country, and he repositions himself accordingly.

Your appetite for these kinds of fanboy thought experiments is a reliable gauge of whether this book is for you. If Springsteen’s red-headband, swole-arms incarnation is the only one you’d recognize at a costume party, it might not be. But if the sight of a bejeweled, haunted-looking man with slicked-back hair and a goatee makes your brain say, “‘Tom Joad’-era Bruce,” it definitely is.

Chris Klimek is a writer, critic and podcast host in Washington.

There Was Nothing You Could Do

Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The U.S.A.” and the End of the Heartland

By Steven Hyden

Hachette. 272 pp. $32

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Why Are Divorce Memoirs Still Stuck in the 1960s?

Recent best sellers have reached for a familiar feminist credo, one that renounces domestic life for career success.

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An illustration of a laptop computer dropping inside a stew pot, along with a tomato, an apron, a spoon and a spice shaker.

By Sarah Menkedick

Sarah Menkedick’s most recent book is “Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America.”

“The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own,” Betty Friedan wrote in “ The Feminine Mystique ,” in 1963. Taking a new role as a productive worker is “the way out of the trap,” she added. “There is no other way.”

On the final page of “ This American Ex-Wife ,” her 2024 memoir and study of divorce, Lyz Lenz writes: “I wanted to remove myself from the martyr’s pyre and instead sacrifice the roles I had been assigned at birth: mother, wife, daughter. I wanted to see what else I could be.”

More than 60 years after Friedan’s landmark text, there remains only one way for women to gain freedom and selfhood: rejecting the traditionally female realm, and achieving career and creative success.

Friedan’s once-provocative declaration resounds again in a popular subgenre of autobiography loosely referred to as the divorce memoir, several of which have hit best-seller lists in the past year or two. These writers’ candid, raw and moving exposés of their divorces are framed as a new frontier of women’s liberation, even as they reach for a familiar white feminist ideology that has prevailed since “The Problem That Has No Name,” through “Eat, Pray, Love” and “I’m With Her” and “Lean In”: a version of second-wave feminism that remains tightly shackled to American capitalism and its values.

Lenz, for example, spends much of her book detailing her struggle to “get free,” but never feels she needs to define freedom. It is taken as a given that freedom still means the law firm partner in heels, the self-made woman with an independent business, the best-selling author on book tour — the woman who has shed any residue of the domestic and has finally come to shine with capitalist achievement.

It is not the freedom for a woman to stay home with her child for a year, or five. The freedom to stop working after a lifetime toiling in low-wage jobs. The freedom for a Filipina nanny to watch her own children instead of those of her “liberated” American boss. The freedom to start a farm or a homestead or engage in the kind of unpaid work ignored by an economy that still values above all else the white-collar professional labor long dominated by men — and in fact mostly fails to recognize other labor as valuable at all.

One of the paradoxes the divorce memoir highlights is that women’s work is made invisible by a society that disparages it, and the only way it becomes visible is through the triumphant narrative of a woman’s escape from it — which only reinforces its undesirability and invisibility.

In Maggie Smith’s 2023 memoir “ You Could Make This Place Beautiful ,” Smith details the critical inflection point when her poem “ Good Bones ” goes viral, her career takes off and her marriage begins to implode. She tells a reporter from The Columbus Dispatch: “I feel like I go into a phone booth and I turn into a poet sometimes. Most of the other time, I’m just Maggie who pushes the stroller.”

Nothing threatening, nothing meaningful. Just a mom pushing the stroller in the meager labor of women — until she slips into the phone booth and transforms into an achieving superhero.

This is not to diminish Smith’s work, a unique and highly refined series of linked essays that build into an emotional symphony about marital breakdown. Her intention is not, like Lenz’s, to condemn the institution of marriage or to rejoice in her release from hers, which is complicated, excruciating and tender. Her depictions of divorce clearly resonate with readers and offer solace and insight into a common experience of heartbreak. But it’s worth asking what exactly is being celebrated in the huge cultural reception her memoir, and other popular divorce memoirs, have received.

Leslie Jamison’s book “ Splinters ,” published the same day as “This American Ex-Wife,” is an exquisite, textured and precise articulation of the collapse of her marriage, all nuance and interiority where Lenz’s writing is blunt and political. But here, too, we get a female narrator for whom freedom and acceptance ultimately signify professional success. Jamison is much more vexed about this formula, but in the end she settles for lightly querying rather than assailing it. She jokes about how her editor is stressed about book sales while she’s stressed about her baby sleeping on airplanes, and mocks this as a “humblebrag”: “ I don’t care about ambition! I only care about baby carriers! ” She rushes to clarify in the next sentence, “Of course I cared about book sales, too.”

Herein lies the ultimate paradigm, the space no woman wants to explore: What if the modern woman didn’t actually care about book sales? About making partner? About building a successful brand? That would be unthinkable. Embarrassing. Mealy, mushy, female.

But later in “Splinters,” Jamison skewers the cult of male, capitalist achievement: “My notion of divinity was gradually turning its gaze away from the appraising, tally-keeping, pseudo-father in the sky who would give me enough gold stars if I did enough good things, and toward the mother who’d been here all along,” she writes. I felt an electric optimism reading this. If feminism wants to tackle patriarchy, it needs to start with that pseudo-father and his metrics of a person’s worth.

Jamison struggles toward this in “Splinters.” She wants so badly to be remarkable. To banter about the Russian G.D.P. while she spoon-feeds her toddler, or to impress arrogant lovers who critique her conversation as only “85 percent as good as it could be.” At the same time, she yearns “to experience the sort of love that could liberate everyone involved from their hamster wheels of self-performance,” a love that will “involve all your tedious moments.”

Yes , I found myself saying, I want to read about this love . A mother love that is radical, creative, affirming, even and especially in its difficulty and tedium. Jamison almost gets there, but returns ultimately to the affirmation that it’s OK to want more: “quiet mornings at my laptop, tap-tap-tapping at my keyboard.”

It is certainly OK, and natural, to want more. But what I find most exhilarating in this beautiful book is the possibility that it’s also OK to let go of wanting. It’s OK to not write a best seller, to not hold a prestigious title, to not start your own brand. It’s OK, even, to not try to find yourself, that most American of quests.

Divorce, sure. Ditch the toxic men, strike out on your own. But there’s nothing new or radical there. The radical is in a feminism that examines care as profound, powerful work and centers rather than marginalizes mothering, as both a lived act and a metaphor. We must let go of this half-century-old notion that the self can be “found” only after the roles of “mother, wife, daughter” have been rejected.

With friends, Jamison recounts lively anecdotes from a trip to Oslo with her daughter in order to prove that her life had not “‘gotten small,’ a phrase I put in quotes in my mind, though I did not know whom I was quoting.” Yet in this phrase lies another way of living: letting things get small, in a world that sees and celebrates mostly superlatives, and getting down to the level of the local, the intimate, the granular, the home.

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When Reese Witherspoon is making selections for her book club , she wants books by women, with women at the center of the action who save themselves.

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The Orchards Poetry Journal: Winter Issue 2021

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The Orchards Poetry Journal: Winter Issue 2021 Paperback – December 6, 2021

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Print length 147 pages
Language English
Publication date December 6, 2021
Dimensions 6 x 0.34 x 9 inches
ISBN-10 1639800840
ISBN-13 978-1639800841
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Kelsay Books (December 6, 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 147 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1639800840
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1639800841
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.34 x 9 inches
#8,651 in Poetry Anthologies (Books)

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Collection: Available on Kindle and in Print

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Being Animal
A Most Terrible and Deadly Season: Poems of War
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Defensive End Chris Kelsay Highlights
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Peregrinatio by Gloria Heffernan (Kelsay Books, 2023) ~ Poetry Book Trailer
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COMMENTS

33 Publishers of Poetry Books & Chapbooks
Kelsay Books "Kelsay Books is an independent literary press run by Karen Kelsay, an award winning poet, whose primary focus is to publish beautiful books in a timely manner. Four imprint companies have been established to accommodate a variety of published poets. We accept unsolicited chapbooks and full-length manuscripts year-round."
Kelsay Books
Kelsay Books is an independent literary press run by Karen Kelsay, an award winning poet, whose primary focus is to publish beautiful books in a timely manner. Four imprint companies have been established to accommodate a variety of published poets. We accept unsolicited chapbooks and full-length manuscripts year-round. View Our Cover Showcase
Book Reviews on Published Titles
Book Reviews on Published Titles. Gae Alexander ~ My Side of the River. Terry Allen ~ Rubber Time. Also by Allen ~ Waiting on the Last Train. Brian Allgar ~ The Ayterzedd. Also by Allgar ~ An Answer from the Past. Bob Ambrose ~ Between Birdsong and Boulder: Poems on the Life of Gaia. C.B. Anderson ~ Roots in the Sky, Boots on the Ground ...
Testimonials
In my mind, Kelsay Books sets the standard for publishing poetry. Jim Landwehr. Since 2021, beginning with Winter in Halifax, I have published three collections under a Kelsay Books imprint, and am immensely gratified by the author-friendly diligence of Karen Kelsay and her team. Further, I have read at least 35 books that Kelsay has published ...
Kelsay Books
Kelsay Books. 2,050 likes · 89 talking about this. Kelsay Books is an independent press run by a hard working editor, Karen Kelsay, who is on a mission
A Conversation about Publishing with Karen Kelsay Davies
Oh the wonderful people you meet as a poet! Below is my conversation with poet and publisher Karen Kelsay Davies, the founder and publisher of Kelsay Books, which is a publishing company with four different imprints. Kelsay Books is fast expanding, which is so exciting! I met Karen through Victorian Violet, the journal Karen edits.
Kelsay Books
Gail Goepfert, associate editor at RHINO Poetry, is a Midwest poet and photographer and teacher. She has three book publications—A Mind on Pain (Finishing Line Press 2015), Tapping Roots (Kelsay Books 2018), and Get Up, Said the World (Červená Barva Press 2020).Recent publications include One Art, The Night Heron Barks, and Inflectionist Review.
Kelsay Books
Kelsay Books is an independent literary press run by Karen Kelsay, an award winning poet, whose primary focus is to publish beautiful books in a timely manner. Four imprint companies have been established to accommodate a variety of published poets. This publisher does not accept direct, unsolicited submissions, except for these active projects:
Amazon.com: How to Become Invisible: 9781639804771: McCarthy, Mary: Books
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Kelsay Books (November 25, 2023) Language ‏ : ‎ English. Paperback ‏ : ‎ 64 pages. ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1639804773. ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1639804771. Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.82 ounces. Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.16 x 9 inches. Best Sellers Rank: #515,836 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books) #1,301 in Poetry by Women.
Kelsay Books
In her collection, The Handheld Mirror of the Mind ( Kelsay Books, 2018), we journey through themes of loss, grief, our shared humanity, and the complexities of the inner life. With great tenderness and lyricism, Guarnieri skillfully navigates these topics. Her graceful descriptions of the natural world provide a vivid magic, as if painting ...
Amazon.com: Daybreak and Deep: 9781639801558: Thompson, Jessica D.: Books
The Amazon Book Review Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now. ... "Daybreak and Deep," was published in the fall of 2022 by Kelsay Books and was named a finalist in the American Book Fest Best Books of 2022 for Narrative Poetry. "Daybreak and Deep" has also been nominated for the 2023 Eric Hoffer Award.
Book review-Midwest Hymns by Dale Cottingham
Kelsay Books, 2023. reviewed by Lana Hechtman Ayers. Dale Cottingham's Midwest Hymns are indeed true songs of praise. Though not religious, as the cover image of a church may imply, his poems embody the spirit of the landscape and the people of the Midwest. The subtext is yearning—for home, connection, forgiveness, a sense of peace.
Book Publishers to Avoid: How to Dodge Shady Author Scams
2. 'Literary agents' promising book deals. Another kind of scam you might be dealing with is an agent scam. If a literary agent unsolicitedly contacts you to offer you a book deal with a publisher or asks you to pay a reading fee, your spidey sense should be tingling pretty hard.
New Publishers: To Query or Not to Query
Regarding Kelsay Books, their contract states that the author's rights to publish are granted to the Publisher for 5 years. So, if they fold, rights revert to the author after this period. The contract also states that if the publisher does not publish the work, rights revert to the author. I believe this would protect both parties.
Arguing the Just War in Islam
By John Kelsay. 263 pp. Harvard University Press. $24.95. A correction was made on. Jan. 27, 2008. : A review on Jan. 6 about "Arguing the Just War in Islam," by John Kelsay, misstated the ...
Poetry Presses Answer Your Burning Questions, Part 2
Kelsay Books: I struggle with the business model that seems widespread, where retail stores want to return unsold titles to the publisher. And shops that insist on authors paying large processing fees to add poetry books (on consignment) to their store shelves. ... We strive for a good publicity campaign that will help the book receive reviews ...
Quiet Poetry by Karen kelsay
Karen Kelsay's third full length book of lyric poetry, Of Omens That Flitter, is a moving collection of new and selected poems, both in form and in free verse, showcasing the musicality, care, and craftsmanship that have become the hallmark of the author's work. The shifting courses setting the tone in the opening sonnet reappear throughout ...
Old Age and Young Hearts: Books, Kelsay, Rae, Judie, Reynard, Ellen
Teachers, Scholars, Truth Seekers, Mothers, Wives, Aunts, Widows, Nature Lovers, Grandmothers, Poets, and Sages -- all women, who all happen to be over the age of 60, share in the wisdom gained over the years through their own unique voices, beautifully woven together through this anthology of poems "Old Age & Young Hearts" (edited by Judie Rae and Ellen Reynard, who also contribute their own ...
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Our Books' Reviews Videos Book Trailers Recorded Readings Accepted Poets 2022 2023 2024 ... Kelsay Books, Poetry Publisher, Formalist Poetry, Free Verse, Bookstore. Skip to content. Submit. Close search. Submit. Kelsay Books. Search Log in Cart.
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Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, by Salman Rushdie. In his candid, plain-spoken and gripping new memoir, Rushdie recalls the attempted assassination he survived in 2022 during a ...
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James Patterson finishes Michael Crichton's book, with explosive results. "Eruption," trailing clouds of publicity, is the summer's ultimate literary mashup. Review by Ron Charles. May 25 ...
Review of Walter Mosley's Easy Rollins mystery, Farewell, Amethystine
Books Book Reviews Fiction Nonfiction May books Summer reading. Walter Mosley again shows why he is a master of crime fiction. In Mosley's new Easy Rawlins novel, "Farewell, Amethystine ...
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Kelsay Books, Poetry Publisher, Formalist Poetry, Free Verse, Bookstore. Skip to content. Submit. Close search. Submit. Kelsay Books. Search Log in Cart. ... Our Books' Reviews Videos Book Trailers Recorded Readings Accepted Poets 2022 2023 2024 ...
The Best Crime Novels of 2024 (So Far)
Under the Storm, by Christoffer Carlsson. When the body of a young woman is discovered in an incinerated farmhouse, resolution was swift: It was murder, her boyfriend did it, case closed. But for ...
Home
She is a proclaimed lover of words and is often spotted in Laurel, Maryland dallying in mushroom rings. Paperback: 88 pages. Publisher: Kelsay Books (February 18, 2021) Watch the book trailer for Home Kim Malinowski earned her B.A. from West Virginia University and her M.F.A. from American University. She studies with The Writers Studio.
'There Was Nothing You Could Do' by Steven Hyden book review
The lasting impact of Bruce Springsteen's 'Born in the U.S.A.'. Steven Hyden's "There Was Nothing You Could Do" explores the blockbuster album, which turns 40 next month. Review by ...
Why Are Divorce Memoirs Still Stuck in the 1960s?
May 25, 2024, 5:00 a.m. ET. "The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own," Betty Friedan wrote in " The Feminine ...
The Orchards Poetry Journal: Winter Issue... by Books, Kelsay
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Kelsay Books (December 6, 2021) Language ‏ : ‎ English. Paperback ‏ : ‎ 147 pages. ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1639800840. ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1639800841. Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.4 ounces. Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.34 x 9 inches. Best Sellers Rank: #5,097,928 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books) #7,464 in Poetry Anthologies (Books)
Available on Kindle and in Print
Kelsay Books, Poetry Publisher, Formalist Poetry, Free Verse, Bookstore. Skip to content. Submit. Close search. Submit. Kelsay Books. Search Log in Cart. ... Our Books' Reviews Videos Book Trailers Recorded Readings Accepted Poets 2022 2023 2024 ...

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