Tag Archives: small presses

Little Town, Big Exposure: A Visit to the 9th Annual Gaithersburg Book Festival

This column originally appeared in Late Last Night Books on May 20, 2018.

In the opening hours of the Ninth Annual Gaithersburg Book Festival, the skies were an ugly steel gray and the precipitation shifted across mist, sprinkle, drizzle, and steady rain — and still the book lovers came out in force. Sporting umbrellas and rain ponchos, they were ready to hear their favorite authors read from and discuss books at the different literary tents, browse the new and used bookstores and independent booksellers, get their books signed while chatting with those favorite authors, grab something tasty from the food vendors, and go back again for more.

Of the many book festivals that the Baltimore-Washington area now enjoys, Gaithersburg is my personal favorite. Though it often draws over twenty thousand attendees and attracts many nationally known authors, it still has a very intimate feeling. At Gaithersburg, it’s entirely possible for a book lover to chat with an author they’ve admired for years as they both stroll the grounds and take in all the activity.

Participating in the Festival

This year, I was at the festival for more than just simple enjoyment. I’m a board member of the non-profit Washington Independent Review of Books (WIRoB), which is a sponsor of the festival, so I helped to staff our booth to get the word out about our review site.

Even better, though, I had the pleasure of being on two panels. The first was with Elliot Ackerman, whose second book Dark at the Crossing was a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award, and which I had the pleasure of reviewing for WIRoB. Elliot is a journalist, a White House Fellow, and a Marine, having served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

His first two novels take place in and around both of those wars, as well as in the conflict in Syria. His intimate and empathetic stories recognize the shared humanity of all concerned, including those that he once fought against. One point that Elliot made was that we are running out of Afghanis who remember life in peacetime, before the Russian invasion, so that we now have generations for whom war, rather than peace, is the natural state of being.

Shifting gears completely, I moderated a panel called “Drugs, Relationships, and Power,” with two wonderfully talented authors, Kelly J. Ford and Eryk Pruitt. Both of their novels share settings in the South, and both have had their work called “Southern Gothic”.

Kelly’s debut novel, Cottonmouths, centers on a young gay woman who has washed out of college and is forced to return to her parents and their small Arkansas town to pick up the pieces. But she is also drawn back into the orbit of her old unrequited love, Jody, who happens to be running a meth lab on her property.

For Eryk, What WE Reckon is his third novel, and involves the pitched power battle between two fully co-dependent forces, Jack and Summer. The two start out the story with different identities, which they shed like snakeskins, and a kilo of coke in a hollowed-out King James Bible. They are both losing a grip on reality at the same time that they are growing rather tired of each other.

The conversation ranged over issues of identity and the pressure to conform, the sense that even the most seemingly irredeemable characters have redeeming qualities, and the idea that the opioid scourge ravages rural areas in different ways than in urban environments.

Reconnecting with Old Friends, Making New Ones

One of the great pleasures of Gaithersburg for me is knowing that I’ll see a bunch of old and new book-loving friends. I remembered to bring my copy of Leslie Pietrzyk’s acclaimed new novel, Silver Girl, for her to sign for me while we chatted about the challenges of complex plot development. Melissa Scholes Young had already signed my copy of her much-discussed debut, Flood, but she and I were together in the Politics & Prose book tent. And it’s always a pleasure to have a chance to reconnect with Richard Peabody, who continues to be a driving force behind so much of DC’s writing culture.

I’m also a member of the Chesapeake Chapter of the Historical Novel Society, and, because so many of us were going to be there already, we decided to hold our bimonthly meeting right after members Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie finished a panel on their latest book, My Dear Hamilton: A Novel of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton. (And even after all that planning, I got pulled away and wasn’t able to catch up with the group!)

There were so many exceptional panels and speakers, and I know lots of folks like me were running back and forth between tents to try to catch as many as possible. Bethanne Patrick chatted with one of my all-time favorite authors, Alice McDermott, about her latest book, The Ninth Hour, which I also reviewed for WIRoB. In the Michener Pavilion, C-Span Book TV captured all the panels presented there, including Eugene Meyer (Five for Freedom) and Paula Whitacre (A Civil Life in Uncivil Times) discussing their historical renderings of forgotten figures of resistance with moderator Will Pittman.

I couldn’t drop in on Madeline Miller, since her end-of-day panel was the same time as mine. Author of the acclaimed Song of Achilles, Madeline’s latest novel, Circe, is winning rave reviews from all over, including Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s recent review in WIRoB. But I did get the opportunity to have her sign my copy of Circe and chat with her and Jud Ashman, the festival’s founder and now mayor of Gaithersburg, as the 2018 event wound down around us. (I also got to sign a copy of my novel while standing in Madeline’s line. Photographer Bruce Guthrie offered his back as a flat surface, while others snapped photos. I can’t wait to see those pictures!)

As an extra bonus, many of the huge staff of volunteers participated in an after-party at Greene Growlers, where author E.A. Aymar hosted an episode of “Noir at the Bar”, with a number of festival authors reading from their gritty works. Participants included Con Lehane (Murder in the Manuscript Room), Alma Katsu (The Hunger), Alan Orloff (contributor to The Night of the Flood), Shawn Reilly Simmons (Murder on the Rocks), Aymar (editor and contributor to The Night of the Flood), Owen Laukkanen (Gale Force) and my personal favorites and new-found, book-loving friends, Kelly Ford and Eryk Pruitt.

Save the date for the 10^th annual Gaithersburg Book Festival, May 18, 2019. I’ll see you there!

Another Busy Book Season

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Hope you’ll join me for one or all of these upcoming events:

MWA Howard County: “You Only Debut Once: What Every Author Needs to Know Ahead of Publication”, Thursday, March 15th, 7-9 p.m. at the Owen Brown Community Center, 6800 Cradle Rock Way, Columbia, MD 21045-4809. Join me at this free event as I share some of what I learned before and after the release of my novel in 2015. Learn how to make the most of the publication calendar, and be prepared to make the very most of your launch, because yu only get one chance to have a first release.

Maryland Writers’ Association 2018 Writers Conference, Friday and Saturday, March 23rd & 24th at the BWI Airport Marriott. I’ll be presenting a two-part talk called “Publishers, Publicists, and a Reading Public” just before and just after lunch. That second part better be pretty scintillating. I’ll be discussing the importance of knowing your publication goals, the pros and cons of small press publishing, and what to expect in working with a publicist.

2018 Washington Writers Conference, Friday and Saturday, May 4th & 5th at the College Park Marriott Conference Center (Friday from 6-8:30 pm and Saturday 8-5). I’m chairing this conference, which is one reason I’d love to see everyone there, but I’m also moderating a panel on debut authors across genres–including biography, memoir/journalism, novel, and short stories–and publication paths.

Book Review: The Bowl with Gold Seams

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This review originally appeared in Late Last Night Books on 20 November 2016.

I’ve written frequently about my admiration for small-press publishing, folks who are driven more by their love of the written word than by any expectation of making a commercial killing. It’s that willingness to simply go with what they love that leads many small presses to build impressive catalogs of work by authors of remarkable talent. This month I’m highlighting another example of this marriage of small press to big talent.

I originally heard about Ellen Prentiss Campbell from several sources almost simultaneously, one of which was our shared publisher. As small presses go, publishers don’t come much smaller than Apprentice House Press, run out of Loyola University. Of unique note, though, Apprentice House is both non-profit and student-run. Students learn by doing; authors get unparalleled input into the creative process behind bringing a traditionally published work into print. What is perhaps most remarkable is that the students work as a team to choose the projects for which they’d like to offer a contract. Kudos for their selection of Ellen’s novel.

THE BOWL WITH GOLD SEAMS, Ellen Prentiss Campbell, Apprentice House, 2015, 221 pp.

“What is broken is also beautiful.” This is the lesson taught by kintsugi, a Japanese ceramic art form in which objects are purposely broken and then mended with golden joinery, thereby making them even more beautiful and more valuable.

In Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s gorgeous, quietly nuanced debut novel, The Bowl with Gold Seams, it is time and experience that combine to mend that which has been broken in the main characters.

The novel’s basis is a brief footnote in World War II history. When they rolled into Berlin, the Americans captured Japan’s ambassador to Germany and his retinue as they attempted to flee. Close advisor to Hitler, Hiroshi Oshima was considered valuable bargaining collateral in negotiating for release of American POWs as the war in the Pacific dragged on. The entire captured embassy staff and their families were taken to the U.S. and interred at the already-historic Bedford Springs Hotel in tiny Bedford, Pennsylvania.

Campbell’s approach to relating this story is intriguing, with a long prologue and epilogue in the story’s present day that bookend the main story of young Hazel Miller, raised as a Quaker by her father in Bedford between the wars. He runs the town’s jail according to Quaker principles, instilling in Hazel the concept that “people can do bad things without being bad people.”

She and Neal Shaw find each other on the first day of school; after graduation, they marry just before he ships out for the Pacific. Almost immediately, he is listed as missing in action. When it’s announced that the ambassador and staff will be held at the hotel, Hazel decides to take a job there. She finds herself intrigued by the Harada family: Japanese Takeo, reserved, severe, and as beautiful as a marble sculpture; his statuesque, high-strung, and musically talented British wife Gwendolyn, and their lonely thirteen-year-old daughter Charlotte who is trapped between two worlds.

With spare language and a clear-eyed approach to exploring difficult themes, Bowl packs an emotional punch. Characters are flawed and human, and the author avoids caricatures of virtue or villainy. The anger and suspicion of the locals at having the Japanese among them is palpable, and understandable given the still-active fighting and recent horrors of Bataan. Hazel starts out wondering how she will be able to tell these exotic-looking foreigners apart, but quickly learns to see and treat them as individuals.

In particular, she takes Charlotte under her wing, despite Takeo’s initial disapproval. He’s concerned that his daughter’s mixed heritage makes her stand out too much already, and wants to protect her from being “the nail that sticks out” and therefore “gets pounded back in.” But Hazel is drawn to Charlotte, the product of two warring parents who belong to two warring countries. Hazel comes to grasp the natural affinity between the Quaker and Asian philosophies of finding beauty in simplicity, and in using stillness and shared silence as a tool for divining a path forward.

In the prologue, Hazel and Charlotte are brought together again through Hazel’s position as the head of a Quaker school, just as the school is hit with a crisis that places Hazel at odds with the school’s board in discerning the best path for all concerned. She and Charlotte decide to visit Bedford Springs together and face their shared past, even as Hazel understands that she’ll need to confront the outcome of choices she has made.

The Bowl with Gold Seams is a reminder that first recognizing and then choosing the right path is a life-long effort that takes courage and a willingness to learn from earlier failures, to work actively to heal what is broken. The seams may show, but there is beauty in that, too.

Historical Gold from INDIEFAB!

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indiefab-gold-imprint On June 25 at the American Library Association’s annual conference in Orlando, Foreword Reviews magazine announced the winners of the 2015 INDIEFAB Awards, which recognizes the best work in independent publishing. Up the Hill to Home, which was a finalist in both general and historical fiction, won the Gold in the historical fiction category.

“Foreword’s INDIEFAB judges are the key to our winners selection process, and, in our minds, the most foolproof way to choose award-winning books,” said Victoria Sutherland, publisher of Foreword Reviews. “We work with a librarian and bookseller in each category to provide us with an insider’s perspective on what would do well on consumer and library shelves. Using industry professionals confirms the trade quality of a book.”

Last May, the Foreword Reviews 2015 summer issue highlighted Up the Hill to Home in a feature article as one of eight debut novels to watch.

Direct Submissions: Traditional Publishing, No Agent Required

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This blog post also appeared on the Indie Book Week blog on 27 May.

It’s hard to overstate the changes to the publishing landscape over the last decade. The doors to the gates that regulated who got published have effectively been blown off their hinges, and authors are now awash in possible avenues to get their work out into world. For those trying to navigate their way through all the choices, the field seems to narrow to two primary options. On one end of the spectrum is self-publishing, where the author is in total control of the entire process, which can be both a joy and a nightmare. On the other end is the traditional two-step of finding an agent in order to find a publisher, in which even the first step can be a multi-year process. There is, however, a third, middle-ground, option, called direct submission.

In traditional publishing terms, direct submissions are often referred to as over the transom, when an author submits a manuscript directly to a publisher without an agent. These manuscripts end up on the publisher’s slush pile; if they are read at all, it is typically by the most junior staff with a few moments free. But there is a growing number of publishers—usually small publishers and university presses—that work primarily or even entirely through direct submissions. These presses expect to work with authors throughout the publishing process, and that close relationship is one of the best things about working with a small press that accepts direct submissions. Authors often have significant input into the design and layout of the cover and interior of their books, something that even big-name authors rarely get. Small presses are often willing to take chances on books that are outside of the mainstream. They aren’t expecting their books to be John Grisham or Stephen King blockbusters. It’s worth remembering, though, that Tom Clancy’s debut novel The Hunt for Red October was a direct submission to the Naval Institute Press, which had never even published a novel before, and which still accepts direct submissions from authors at any time. It’s more typical for small presses to have open reading periods at set times of the year, in which authors can submit manuscripts by a certain date. Others hold contests in which the winner is published. Some publishers charge a reading fee for direct submissions, but that fee should be nominal; you are not paying them to publish your book. Literary Marketplace offers a list of direct submission small presses free to their registered users.

The downside of working with a small press that takes direct submissions is generally a lack of resources. A small publisher might help to develop a marketing plan, but the author will primarily or even solely be responsible for execution. Authors may need to find and pay for their own editing. Even at the big houses, though, it’s the new normal for authors to do a significant amount of their own marketing. As for editing, an increasingly scarce commodity, it is often the agents who do the lion’s share.

As an author, you can certainly do everything a small press would do for you, from cover design to distribution, and you could do it on your own timetable, but for a novice there’s a steep learning curve with lots of potential landmines. For me, direct submission was the right choice: it allowed me a lot of creative control and a relatively short publication timeline, while also producing a product that gets “credit” for being traditionally published, and giving me the peace of mind of knowing that I wasn’t in it alone.