Small presses have a long history in Philly. In fact, publishing is one of the city’s oldest industries. Just three years after its founding, the city already had its first printing press. And by the end of the 18th century, Philadelphia had become the center for book printing and publishing in the entire country, surpassing New York and Boston.
Today, centuries later, small and independent presses continue to play a vital role in the city’s literary and intellectual landscape.
Much like publishers back then who helped shape political discourse when ideas like freedom of speech were central in conceiving independence from Britain, today’s publishing houses are increasingly committed to a socially engaged, thought-provoking mission.
To them, the mission does not compromise the quality of content, but rather redefines it, prioritizing voices that have long been unheard and ensuring that publishing remains a space for meaningful encounters and dialogue.
Billy Penn spoke with several small, independent publishers to learn how they are reshaping this legacy, each with their own approach but a shared commitment to promoting diversity, creativity and sustainability.
We are sharing our conversations with them as a series of articles. So far we have spoken to Josh O’Neill (Beehive Books), Linda Gallant (The Head and the Hand), Doug Gordon (New Door Books), Alison M. Lewis (Frayed Edge Press), Malav Kanuga (Common Notions) and Paul Dry.
So, start the presses!
What motivated you to found the press?
I have been obsessed with books and reading my whole life. I write as well as edit. I had some jobs as an editorial assistant, intern, freelance, copy editor, things like that. But as a reader, I felt like I wasn’t finding enough of the weird, quirky books that I wanted to read, so I had been toying with the idea of starting a small press for a while.
I was freelancing out of Indy Hall. I had a membership, but I was working there a few days a week and I met Amanda Thomas, who was at the time freelance designing wedding invitations. She had the design toolkit and I had the editing toolkit, and we decided we were going to try and make a book.
We started with a project funded on Kickstarter that was a collection that selected stories from the end of Sherlock’s career after Moriarty. We did that and there are many very passionate Sherlock Holmes fans all over the world. We got a great response to that project, and we had Kickstarter money left over afterwards, and we were like, “Well, I guess we could do this again.” And we did and that’s how we got started.
We have a bigger team now. Amanda has since retired, but it’s been a journey. We celebrated our 10-year anniversary last year and that was really cool to see.
Tell me more about the team.
I’m editorial director, I’m in charge of general creative direction, a lot of production stuff as well as acquisitions, editing, the whole process of working with authors. Feliza Casano is our marketing and sales director. She handles marketing, publicity, sales, distribution, all that kind of stuff, she’s a wizard. And then we have our project manager, Aubry Norman, who is a bit of a jack of all trades and keeps our editorial calendars for our various books coordinating with each other. She is amazing. It’s the three of us full-time. Everyone else is freelance.
After a decade, would you say you’re still interested in weird, quirky books?
I think we are and always will be interested in weird, quirky books. These days we call it “literature of the rare and strange.” Mostly, in practice, that’s fiction that falls somewhere in the gray in-between between literary and speculative — including gothic horror. We also do some historical fiction that really builds a world and takes you to a different place. And just to continue with the in-between thing, we do memoirs that in some way explore what it is to be at home versus to be a stranger, and to be between worlds. We’re a little goth and a lot nerdy.
And what would you say is your weirdest, quirkiest book?
Oh goodness. A good example is probably the first piece of original fiction that we published after doing the Sherlock Holmes project, which was “The Afflictions,” by Vikram Paralkar. He is a research physician at UPenn, but he also has written fiction. “The Afflictions” is a collection of imaginary diseases. It’s presented in the style of a medieval encyclopedia with a dusty scholar shuffling through the tome. Then there’s different sections with a bunch of weird philosophical imaginary diseases. We had the launch party for that one at the Mutter Museum. It was wonderful.
It’s in its second edition now. It’s been translated into several languages. The Italian edition has added these wonderful little illustrations for each disease and we got the license to reprint the illustrations, and we did a new edition that features those, so they’re all in there now. It’s little black-and-white drawings above the chapter headings.
Do you identify as a small press or an independent publisher?
A small independent press is definitely accurate.
Is staying small important to you, or do you aspire to grow beyond that?
I don’t know what our future will look like. Right now, I like being small enough that we can really give a lot of time and care to the editorial process for each book, and take chances on projects that are a little offbeat that might not easily find space with a publisher who depends on being able to print 100,000 copies as part of their business model.
A lot of our books are more niche than that … My dream for each one of my little books is for it to develop a cult following.
How many books do you publish each year?
We publish about six books a year.
And how does someone publish with you?
We do accept agent and submissions, any time. We also usually once a year in the Spring have an open submissions window where people can send us their manuscripts if they fit with what we’re looking for. I think this year that’s going to open up in May.
We do read — slowly. We’re a small staff and I do tend to have a backlog, but we do like to at least once a year look at unsolicited stuff.
Is it still you reading the books?
Yeah, I mean, it’s our staff and we have a small group of readers that we sometimes enlist to help with the manuscript reading, but anything that gets flagged for me to look at, I do look at myself.
I know that you are drawn to what’s “weird,” but what specifically catches your eye? There’s so much weird stuff, but not that many good stories …
I mean, a good story is essential. There are things that just suit my particular taste, like atmosphere. I really love atmospheric writing. I love if there are kind of artful elements of horror or decay. I like a setting that feels like it’s a character unto itself. I like world-building. I like a lot of physicality and description. And that’s something that will always catch my eye.
Over the years, what are some challenges you’ve experienced?
It gets said a lot that publishing is a business with small profit margins, and it is … We could use six more people at this point, [but] we cannot afford to hire six more people. I think our biggest challenge is just not currently having the room in our budget for new hires, but we are working towards that. We changed to a bigger distributor last year. Our sales numbers have been going up and we’re just trying to build capacity to have a slightly bigger office and a slightly bigger staff.
You’re growing!
We are growing! Growth has its challenges, but especially in a business like publishing, where you’re paying for the print run long before you’re being paid money for the books. So it’s tricky and it’s really challenging, but there are ways around it. I did look at the interview with Josh at Beehive and he was talking about doing the presales on Kickstarter. And especially if you have books that are really nice design objects, like that’s the way a lot of small presses go. It takes some creativity.
Do you still use crowdfunding for your publications, or what’s your current model?
We do not. We have a fairly traditional model right now. That was for the first book, and our books are not anywhere near as expensive to produce as the gorgeous books that the Beehive is doing.
I’d like to talk a bit about Philadelphia. Do you think there are any challenges or benefits to being based here as a publisher?
I think there’s a lot of benefits to being based here as a publisher. It’s affordable enough to give you, again, that freedom to experiment that you wouldn’t have if you were trying to, say, lease an office in New York City. But you’re close enough to the historical center of U.S. publishing in New York to go to events to meet up with people sometimes. I think the small press world in general is a lot more dispersed across the country just because of that affordability. You want lower overhead, so you’re not going to go to the middle of the most expensive cities you can find. You’re going to be in different places, and communications have improved so much over the last 20 years that it’s a lot easier to stay connected and to work together as an industry even when you’re not all in the same city.
But Philadelphia is very quirky, it’s very creative. If there’s going to be a place where you’re just showing up and you’re like, “Hey, I made some weird shit,” Philly is a place where people are going to be, “Oh, give me some of that.” So, it’s great for a sort of publisher with a little bit of an offbeat and Gothic bent. One of the biggest independent publishers here is Quirk, like their name is Quirk, so …
But there’s also really deep roots here for books and publishing. There’s stuff tucked away around every corner, like the Library Company Archives. There’s the Rosenbach Library. You can go tour the house Edgar Allan Poe used to live in, and it’s fun to be part of a tradition like that.
Do you feel part of a community here?
I think we do make a lot of effort in Philly to connect our community. It’s not always easy because, especially if you’re running a small press, that’s a massively time- and energy-consuming job. I wish I had the energy to be out there talking to people every day, but I can’t do that and also edit and produce and publish books. But we do have events like the Philly Publishing Happy Hour that happens quarterly. It’s great for anyone who’s looking to connect with the Philly publishing community.
I’d like to hear your thoughts on national issues, particularly when it comes to the government deciding what we can or can’t read. What are your opinions on this?
I’m opposed to all forms of government censorship. Stop telling people what they can read. It can be really discouraging seeing the mechanisms that are being put in place to stifle free speech, to limit the voices of marginalized authors, and I will keep making my books, because as long as I physically can put these voices out there, I’m going to do it.
Speculative literature often provides narratives that challenge control and the “way things should be,” with themes like dystopia. Do you find that these themes recur in the works you publish?
To some extent. We had a recent novel come out called “A Brutal Design,” which is a very surrealistic take on an experimental city out somewhere in a desert that claims to be a workers paradise and ends up being pretty fascist.
I tend not to, personally, work with fiction that has too overt of a message. Speculative fiction can be a great tool for exploring possibilities for ways society can go wrong and sounding the alarm about totalitarianism and stuff like that. It definitely does, and that’s an important purpose. But if we’re looking at fiction and always trying to just identify the moral of the story and take that away and nothing else. I think we’re missing a lot of what fiction can do to bring us into a variety of points of view and eventually be this chorus of voices that helps us to see reality in new ways.
Looking ahead, what are some of your plans for this year? Are there any upcoming books or projects that you’re excited about?
We just released a novel on Tuesday called “My Therapist Says This Grief Journal Is a Good Idea.” It’s written in the form of a journal, but it’s fiction. And then, we have four books coming in our Fall-Winter season. We’ve got a lot of stuff coming out!
Do you still enjoy publishing books? Is it something you wake up excited about, despite all the hard work?
I love making beautiful things with language. I think that’s one of the reasons that I’m much more oriented towards fiction and storytelling than nonfiction, because the power of words to build a world and to communicate experience on so many levels to sound beautiful, just in like the sounds of the prose, that’s all stuff that I’m so passionate about that I will never get tired of it.
You asked about censorship and silencing and that’s important as a political issue for the publishing industry. I think also fair and equitable wages are another important political issue. Chappell Roan in her Grammy speech was talking about record labels needing to treat their artists as employees and give them a livable wage. The publishing industry needs to be doing that too for writers, for editors, for freelancers, for all the people whose massive amounts of labor go into producing a book.
If I could change anything about the publishing industry, it would be to give consumers of books a better understanding of how much work it takes to produce a book and what you’re paying for when you pay for a book. Because even if you’re not taking the discount on Amazon, even if you’re paying full cover price for a book, if we were really compensating people adequately within our industry, that price would be higher. But I don’t think that consumers are going to be willing to pay higher prices for books until they better understand the labor involved. I would love to see more leadership from the Big Five publishers on that, because they have a lot more bargaining power than we have as small presses.
Would you say it’s important for readers or potential readers to understand that when they purchase a book from you, they’re supporting all of this — the fair wages, the labor and the entire process behind it?
They’re supporting three people who each are working more than a full-time job. They’re supporting a writer who toiled for probably years to write that book. They’re supporting a designer who has to make the cover. They’re supporting our extended distribution and salespeople at our distributor. They’re supporting booksellers, small, independent booksellers who are such an important part of this ecosystem.
There is this ecosystem that needs to be protected and cherished for writing to be an art form that can keep happening. Nourish your local ecosystem, shop at independent bookstores.
