To Go Big or Come Home?

On the Writing Life With Major and Indie Publishers

Frida Kahlo, Still Life, 1951, Oil on masonite

In late 2022, I found myself at a crossroads. It had been four years since I’d published a book, and although it had been named on multiple “Best of 2018” lists and sold enough to earn (minor) royalties, the publisher had declined a paperback run. My agent and I had amicably parted ways after she’d passed on three consecutive book manuscripts. I’d spent 18 months — and about 120 query emails — trying and failing to find a new agent. I was forced to consider the possibility that the publishing world had seen the best I had to offer and decided they could live without it.

During this time, nobody was unkind to me, if you exclude the many unanswered emails and the countless insincere “cheering for you from the sidelines” messages. Most of the agents who read my various manuscripts agreed that they were well-written and had real artistic merit and might even find a readership. Overall, everyone was in fact quite cheery as they made it clear to me that there was no place in major publishing for my work anymore.

One thing I knew for sure: I was never going through the agent query process again. I’ve done it three times now — once for my first book, again for my two novels, and then this most recent round — and it is, by far, the most demoralizing aspect of the writing world. I thought the most recent round would be easier now that I’m more established, but that didn’t mean anything. I was starting over from zero again. Still, I did it because that’s the only way to get a big (or even moderately sized independent) publisher to read your work.

Though I have long proselytized about the value of small presses — to friends, students, other writers — I admit that vain part of me thought, “That’s good for other people, but not for me.” When I reached my crossroads, I still harbored dreams of becoming a Big Deal. I had gotten pretty close, I felt, to leveling up to a new tier of Writer Guy. I’d gotten the rave reviews in the big places, been invited to speak at events in different time zones, been sent on paid publicity tours by my publishers. I even shared a stage with Walter Mosley once. A week after my novel How to Be Safe launched in 2018, the coverage was so significant that one of my fellow Barrelhouse editors introduced me at an event by saying, “He’s going to be too famous for us soon.” Did I even want to be famous? Absolutely not, not even “writer famous” — it sounds like hell. I did want to keep publishing books, though.

I felt like a failure giving up on the conventional path. When I finally said this out loud to a friend, I realized how silly, how elitist it sounded. Wasn’t the actual failure that I was trying to force my work into a place where it wasn’t welcome? That I hadn’t even explored the alternatives?

So I trashed the agent spreadsheet and started a new one. With help from a friend, I compiled a list of 155 reputable publishers that accept submissions from writers without agents. I scoured their guidelines, noted deadlines, and tried to get a sense of their aesthetic. Several of the presses were known to me already, from my years of working with Barrelhouse, though some had changed significantly since the last time I’d checked. Quite a few were new to me. Some that I remembered had disappeared. Others were being accused of scamming authors. At least a quarter of them had barely functional websites with unclear guidelines. I don’t know how many hours I spent on this process, but even the search felt invigorating. I was taking back control of my writing life, to the extent that such a thing is possible.

I was very fortunate that the excellent and well-respected Rose Metal Press had just posted an open call for submissions and that one of my manuscripts fit the call exactly. I submitted it to them, Autofocus, and Long Day Press. For the first time in years, I felt something like hope. That manuscript, titled It All Felt Impossible, was published by RMP that May. Having now experienced both ends of the publishing spectrum — big New York publishers and small indie presses — I’ve learned a lot about what I actually value in this process.

The biggest difference between the big and the small press — and this cannot be understated or minimized — is the money. On my first three books, which were published with Villard, Algonquin, and Liveright in that order, I got contracts for $25,000, $15,000, and $12,000, respectively. With RMP, I was paid $300. This is one reason I don’t begrudge my former agent not submitting to small presses for me — that’s a lot of work to make 30 bucks. You can’t handwave this issue away. To some people, the money is a matter of survival. I’m fortunate to have a steady, secure teaching job, and my wife works full-time as a nurse. Although I would love the bigger contract, I don’t need it to meet my basic needs. Any money I make on writing is a bonus.

Still, $25K can buy some nice things.

Big presses also have a ton of money to throw at publicity. This is not just hiring people to make all the phone calls and leverage relationships and go to the fancy cocktail parties where they can hand-deliver books to tastemakers; it’s sending sales reps directly to indie bookstores across the country, printing thousands of advance copies, taking out ads in trades, paying for you to fly to other cities for readings and book festivals. It’s spending more on design (though many small presses are also producing beautiful books) and, if you’re a big enough deal, hiring people to run social media for you. The gap in resources between Liveright and Barrelhouse is so vast we may as well be on different planets. It’s like they’re driving a sports car on the highway and we’re on the shoulder trying to keep up on a scooter.

Just because they have those resources, that doesn’t mean they’ll use them. For my first book, Bury Me in My Jersey, published in 2010 when I was 26 and didn’t understand the slightest thing about how this industry works, I received a phone call from the publicist Random House had assigned to me. “Just so you know,” he said, “you get six weeks with me. After that I’m moving on to the next thing.” He, and most of his team, had recently been assigned to the launch of a million-dollar franchise. If that failed, people would lose their jobs; if mine failed, nobody would even notice. Though he’d spoken as plainly as possible, I didn’t really believe him until he flat-out stopped returning my emails after week six. I did four events for the book, three of which I’d arranged myself. (Occasionally, for reasons that remain opaque to me, publicists at big houses will discourage authors from setting up any events on their own, costing them many legitimate opportunities.) It received very little coverage, though again I had managed to work some contacts to get local reviews. When the book went out of print just before Christmas, nobody told me. Maybe that book wouldn’t have succeeded even with a robust marketing push, but they had decided in advance it wasn’t going to do well, and then did their best to let it die quietly, far away from the book they cared about.

With my next books, I had a dramatically better experience with the publicity teams, who worked hard on my behalf and were responsible for some of the highlights of my professional life. Even still, the calculations are cold and ruthless. The moment they’ve determined you are not going to become a breakout star, they are moving on, and they may not even let you know.

A small press doesn’t have the luxury of purposely letting you fail. At Barrelhouse, we publish two books a year (in addition to 1 or 2 chapbooks and a print journal). We need to do everything in our power to sell as many books as possible, not just because we want to honor the author’s work, but because if two books in a row are disasters, that might be the end of the press. I can see how a reader may view this tenuousness as a negative; you don’t necessarily want to feel like your book’s performance is the determining factor in whether the lights stay on at Barrelhouse HQ. But it does mean that each person on our staff will be working on every creative angle we can find to get books into stores, get reviews published, and get the author lined up for events. This has been my experience at RMP too, where they have been working tirelessly to connect me with interviewers, help me place various essays and excerpts, and schedule readings. They’ve done more for this book than Random House did for my first book, and it’s not even close. They don’t have the resources to match the publicity apparatus of my novels, but I have never doubted that they are deeply invested in helping the book reach as many readers as possible.

The other big difference, the area where big publishers simply can’t or won’t compete, is on the level of artistic risk you’re able to take. If you’ve attended any writing conferences or gone through an MFA program, you’ve almost certainly encountered one of those grim panels of jaded publishing professionals: an agent, a couple editors, maybe a publicist, assembled to give you the straight story of how to get your book published. If you’ve attended one of these, you know how discouraging they are. It’s a long list of don’ts: don’t write short stories, don’t write a novella, don’t write a memoir unless you have a scandalous story, don’t query an agent unless you have X number of followers on social media, don’t submit a novel unless it has some cultural tie-in, don’t follow trends but also don’t ignore the trends, don’t expect agents to reply to your emails, don’t at any point ask whether the incentive structure of this system makes any sense. It sucks.

My grad students typically leave these meetings having processed the message that whatever you’re working on is wrong. They want to know what to do instead in order to become marketable. I tell them to make the thing they believe in, and I’ll help them find a small press that will actually value the writer instead of treating them as a necessary evil.

At a small press, you can find editors who are excited to work with books that are misfits in that other world. Books that don’t fit neatly into the 80,000 to 120,000-word multigenerational saga that every agent says they’re looking for. Books that are bizarre and funny and have unique voices and take chances on the sentence and structural level. It is an ecosystem full of people who celebrate writing and seem to enjoy reading books, discovering strange and innovative new ways of telling stories.

Here’s the big difference: On one side, you’re dealing with people who are motivated to say No as quickly as possible. On the other, you’re dealing with people looking for reasons to say Yes.

As publishing conglomerates consolidate and become more top-heavy, everyone involved has become even more risk-averse. Sometimes this manifests in fears of imagined social media backlashes. The moment I finally realized I was wasting my time querying was when a widely respected agent told me she couldn’t take a chance on my novel manuscript because one of the main characters is pregnant, and, in her words, “I’m not sure we can be pitching a book about pregnant people after there was so much controversy about Blonde.” What controversy about Blonde? Who even remembers this movie? I’m not writing books for people who think like this. I don’t even understand people who think like this.

I always knew It All Felt Impossible was destined to be a small press book. It’s short. It’s a memoir in essays, and I’m not a celebrity. The essays themselves are about the day-to-day, trying to capture a particular sense of having lived an unextraordinary life. Had it somehow defied the odds and ended up at a big press, I am certain they would have forced me to spice it up, to make the essays more “topical.” They wouldn’t have even understood what I loved about the book in the first place.

Many accomplished writer friends — people with two or more large press books — have found themselves at a similar crossroads in recent years. The work is good, but they’re told there’s no room for it anymore. It doesn’t matter that they have a track record of success. Sometimes it’s because the book isn’t “timely” or “urgent” or “relatable.” Sometimes because the decision-makers possess a tragic lack of imagination. There is very little interest in developing a long-term relationship with a midcareer author. The industry is obsessed with debuts because they know (or think they know) how to market an “emerging” voice.

As anyone who has ever attended the AWP conference knows, the small press environment has its own quirks and dark sides. A small press can disappear overnight. Some did, last year, when Small Press Distribution abruptly closed down and defaulted on their debts. Sometimes a small press is just three people who have been friends since grad school and then one of them has a kid, and one gets divorced, and the other gets really busy at work, and it becomes too much for them to handle. Sometimes a small press is a singular weirdo who makes beautiful and unlikely objects in his studio apartment for three years but then flames out and burns all his bridges. Sometimes a small press, for all its efforts and love of writing, cannot grasp the business side of publishing and your book never finds any readers. Sometimes people abuse the little bit of power they have. It can get ugly.

Here I must confess, if not for the reader’s sake then for the sake of my conscience, that for all my lofty ideals, I still do harbor a petty fantasy of my new book succeeding so fantastically that agents begin sending me emails, emails which I will allow to fester in my inbox for four months before I reply with a two-sentence brush-off that promises I will be cheering for them from the sidelines. But let’s be honest: If an editor reached out to me today with a big-money offer on my novel, there’s a good chance I’d take it. Since writing the first draft of this piece and its publication, I have signed with an agent — this was the one final query I was allowing myself, with a new agent, someone who has been publishing with small presses for a decade and who I knew would share my values. The list of submissions for the novel manuscript is evenly split between indie presses and longshot big houses, and I’ve already told him that in the unlikely event it comes down to a choice between more money and less artistic freedom or less money and shared artistic vision, we’re taking option two.

I have always been comfortable in the small press world, but for a while I let myself forget why I was doing all of this in the first place. I’d forgotten even what kind of writer I wanted to be and who I was writing for. Everyone involved in making these small press books is doing so because they are devoted to books. They become evangelists for the work they publish. They are trying to make money, or at least break even, but because profit is not the primary motive, the atmosphere is different at every stage. The real currency of the small press world is in the community that grows around presses and their authors. It’s in showing up for a reading series at a dingy bar in Baltimore, a bag full of your books slung over your shoulder, and meeting three other people who are out there doing it too. Not because they think this is going to make them famous, but because this is where they want to be. I would never want to undo my experiences with my first three books, but now I feel like I’ve finally come home.

Tom McAllister teaches creative writing at Rutgers-Camden and is the author of four books. His most recent book is the essay collection It All Felt Impossible (Rose Metal Press, 2025).