How to self-advocate with your small press publisher

[I’m catching up on post-vacation client work this week. Hope you enjoy this guest column from my friend Sam Ashworth, a wildly talented novelist and writing teacher. -ASL]

It’s 1973, and we’re in a suite at the Sherry-Netherland hotel in New York. Three souls have been convened for an all-day meeting: director Herbert Ross—it’s his suite—screenwriter Jay Presson Allen, and composer John Kander. Their job is to break the story for the new Barbra Streisand movie musical, Funny Lady.

After a few hours, lunchtime rolls around, so Kander calls downstairs for room service. He’s been a Broadway composer for about fifteen years now, with credits like Cabaret and Zorba under his belt; aside from the film version of Cabaret, he hasn’t done much work in Hollywood. Allen, on the other hand, came up in the belly of the beast, and is now, at 51, one of the vanishingly rare women making a living as a screenwriter.

Kander picks up the phone and begins to order lunch. Allen hears the words “tuna melt” come out of his mouth, and like lightning she’s up out of her chair.

She yanks the phone out of his hand and covers the receiver. “Who’s paying?” she asks. “Us or the studio?”

Kander thinks. “The studio?”

Allen uncovers the receiver. “Cancel the sandwiches. Bring us three bottles of champagne, three steaks, and a full caviar service.”

She hangs up. Kander is boggled.

Before he can say a word, Allen grasps his face with both hands. “If you don’t use their money,” she seethes, “they don’t respect you.“

From time to time, we all need a Jay Presson Allen in our lives.1

Writing is hard. Advocating for yourself as a writer is much, much harder. The moment we step into the machinery of book publishing, we turn into Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, sucked helplessly through the giant gears of a system we don’t understand and cannot control.2 But at least in commercial publishing—the Big 5 and similar—that machine is reasonably standardized and professional. Each time you Charlie-Chaplin into the gears, they work more or less the same way. And more to the point, you have a literary agent who lives in those gears and can help you find your way through.

Small press publishing, on the other hand—have you ever seen those videos of roughnecks drilling for oil, where two or three filthy shirtless muscled dudes are swinging giant steel pipes and clamps around and silt is geysering out of a hole in the ground and they’re all one wrong move away from having their skulls crushed? Small press publishing is that without the muscles. Every press is different, usually run on a shoestring, and most of the people who run it will be the first ones to admit they’re a little crazy.

This is not a bad thing! The forward progress of publishing—as readers of Anna’s Unhinged Histories know—depends entirely on people who are a little crazy. Small press publishing is mostly made up of beautiful people doing it for love of the game, and it’s desperately important for the state of literature as a whole, but let’s not forget that the French have a word for “lover of the game”: amateur.

The problem with this is that authors also often enter small press publishing as relative amateurs.

• First, most (though not all) authors come to small presses after striking out with agents or traditional publishers.3 So at this point the author has already been emotionally ground into paste, and their expectations dwell in the Mariana Trench. The same is also true of authors who only get one offer of representation from an agent after a long, painful query process. That creates a dependency that can lead authors to think it’s their job to keep their agent happy, instead of the other way around.

• Second, even though there are dozens of good presses out there, it’s still a small world, meaning relationships matter, and no one wants to cause turbulence.

• Third, there’s a serious sunk-cost effect. A book is the work of years. It’s not a spec script or a short story. To restart any submission process means losing at least another year. And if an agent has already taken it out widely, then it’s all but dead in the water.

• Fourth, and maybe most importantly, the money involved is negligible. A $10,000 advance is astronomical in the land of small presses. Negotiating about subrights splits or royalty rates when the pot is so tiny seems like an exercise in vanity, and so many authors don’t bother.

The upshot is that small press authors wind up in a situation where if things do go wrong—and they always do—we don’t know how to protect ourselves.

Upfront, I realize I’m violating a kind of omertá here.

Writing about this is uncomfortable for me. My novel was published by a small press, and a lot of my friends run small presses. I am not trying to foul my own campsite here; I am trying to leave it better than I found it.

I am also not a literary agent. What I am is a writer with a lot of experience negotiating for myself and having people negotiate for me. I’m a novelist, screenwriter, and ghostwriter. I’ve written book reviews, essays, and feature journalism. I’ve had agents (three of ‘em!) as well as a manager and lawyer for the film stuff. I also teach a course at George Washington University called “The Working Writer,” where I try to equip my students with an understanding of the plumbing of publishing and media.4 I do this because I got very tired of seeing good, smart writers’ careers shrivel up and die: not for lack of talent, but lack of industry-navigation skills.

I’ve been hearing these stories for years now, but in the last week alone, I’ve had three different conversations with unagented or poorly-agented (which I promise you is worse) writers in this exact situation, and I wound up getting so worked up that my wife told me to write something so I’d stop venting at her.

1. Alessandro (all names changed) has published three books, including a Big Five novel, but his agent has failed to sell his new book after a year5 and has ghosted him for months while spending most of her time building her social media following. Alessandro at least knew he had to fire his agent; he was just looking for someone to play him some moral walk-up music. If anything, he was furious at himself for not having done it before this woman wasted a year of his life and probably killed a book he deeply cared about.

2. Jodie won a small press contest in 2023. Since then, the press has not only failed to publish the book, they haven’t even laid it out, much less paid out her prize money. The press has barely responded to messages, and it shows all the signs of imminent collapse.

3. A third small press author asked me not to describe her situation in any detail here, since it’s ongoing, but trust me when I say I was shocked by the contract offered.

In all three of these cases, authors were confronted with the work of years either going up in smoke or crassly lowballed, and worse, they felt like there wasn’t anything they could do about it.

Jodie had tried her best to engage with the publisher, sending emails delicately crafted to avoid sounding pushy. There was a lot of “Maybe my email is acting up” and “Just in case this got buried.” What saddened me about this was how much apology got baked into the act of asking for something to which she was inarguably, contractually, entitled. Jodie told me she felt like she was just too “nice” to be as aggressive as her situation demanded.6 She believed they only had good intentions. But sometimes, good intentions are the asphalt on the road to Hell.

Jodie kept repeating a line I hear a lot: “I don’t want to burn any bridges.” At any level of publishing, this is a reasonable fear! But at this point, this bridge was the one on the River Kwai, and she was Alec Guinness. There was nothing worth saving on the other side. They had sat on her book for three years, done nothing with it, and were failing to communicate with her. Even if the press did come around, they were clearly in no position to be good stewards of her book.

That’s why, as the gospel of St. Patrick Swayze in Road House teaches, I want you to be nice. Until it’s time to not be nice.

Notably, at this point in the movie, one of the bouncers raises his hand and asks, “How we ‘sposed to know when that is?”

“You won’t,” says Swayze. “I’ll let you know.”

A good literary agent is Swayze. They’ll let you know when it’s time to not be nice, and then they’ll kick Ben Gazzara’s ass for you. But what if you have to be your own Swayze, your own Jay Presson Allen? How do you do that?

Well, first of all, my advice is to watch Road House. That will remind you that pain don’t hurt. Once that’s done, you should reach out to other people who’ve worked with the publisher or agent. Believe me, they’ll talk to you. This is something everyone should do before signing anything, but it’s never too late. Knowing other people’s experiences will help you gauge whether any problems that crop up are one-offs or something more endemic.

It’s better to be a problem than a pushover

Read your contracts carefully and politely ask about anything you have the smallest question about. Suggest changes wherever you see fit. If you really need professional help, the Authors Guild offers full legal services and contract review for between $100-149 per year, which isn’t bad given that they also help with websites, marketing, and more. They also offer a model contract that you can use as a guide.7

It’s not a bad thing to be thought difficult. Rather, it is meet and good to go into a business relationship—and make absolutely no mistake, these are business relationships, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something8—with the other party well aware that you’re scrutinizing every detail.

If you are not getting the clarity you need from your press, stop being quite so nice in your emails. Same is true of an agent who seems distant. Don’t be rude, but do not apologize. Do not gift them excuses like “maybe this got lost in the shuffle.” You do not need to accept getting lost in the shuffle. If they did lose you in the shuffle, that is their problem, not yours, and it is their job to rectify it.

If you feel the deal that’s being offered is inadequate, you have every right to ask for better terms. The press might say no, but what they won’t do is be so shocked, shocked I tell you that they’ll tear up the contract and scatter it to the winds. What most will do—as long as your asks aren’t ludicrous—is negotiate and do what they can.

It’s true that for a lot of authors in this situation, the amounts of money involved here are so low that all this hardly seems worth the trouble. So why make a fuss?

Because Jay Presson Allen was right: it’s not about the lunch, it’s about respect.

When I say we deserve respect, I don’t mean noblesse oblige from publishers. I mean respect for ourselves and the work we have done to get here. I used to write a column for The Rumpus, and one of the things I loved was that the then-owner, Marisa Siegel, had a pot of money each month that she divided among her writers. It came out of her pocket, so the payments were tiny and fractional—you’d see $5.76, $13.19—and you could opt out, but Marisa wanted you to take the money. It meant a lot to her to be able to pay writers something, however little. I appreciated that $5.76 more than I did much bigger payments from larger outlets, because it came from a place of respect.

We can’t expect caviar service from publishers. What we should expect, however, is that they will demonstrate an actual financial commitment to us. A pledge to extend themselves financially is a pledge to extend themselves in other ways, too—but it will not be given freely. We have to demand it.

And if the value of your book has more to do with, say, getting a teaching gig, learning to negotiate here will only embolden you going forward.

I get it. The atmosphere we’re all breathing out here is an asphyxiating heat dome of bad news about the state of the literary world. “It’s harder than ever,” we hear. “Books just aren’t breaking through.” “Don’t expect too much.” All this conditions us to act like a permanent underclass, to be content with whatever scraps we’re offered. But it’s not our job to comply in advance.

In many ways, publishing contracts are crude blunt estimates of a writer’s potential. An advance is calculated from a publisher’s assumptions of profit and loss. An agent’s time investment is often a measure of how far they think you can go. To advocate for better terms and treatment, even if they don’t count for much in hard currency, is to affirm your own faith in that potential. It is to say that this book didn’t set the world on fire, but who’s to say the next one won’t? It is to say confidently that you plan to be here for a long time, and that your ceiling is wherever the hell you say it is.

At the end of every semester, I send students off with the same advice:9 You cannot expect others to take you seriously unless you take yourself seriously. We do not know what we will become, but in the meantime, we owe it to ourselves not to resign ourselves to the tuna melt.

Samuel Ashworth is the author of THE DEATH AND LIFE OF AUGUST SWEENEY, a novel about the rise and fall of a legendary chef, told through his autopsy. His work appears in the Atlantic, Eater, the Rumpus, and many others. He lives in DC, teaches at George Washington University, and used to write regularly for the Washington Post until it was murdered by the coward Jeff Bezos.