Small Press Poetry: 9 Truths Before You Sign
Nine plain truths about small press poetry publishing, from someone who packed the orders: what presses pay, what contracts hide, which red flags matter, and why small is often the right size.
The entire first print run of my friend's debut spent a month in her publisher's spare bedroom, stacked between a treadmill and a crate of the previous year's title. Three hundred copies. The publisher drove ninety of them to a book fair in her own car and sold them one conversation at a time. That bedroom is not a failure of poetry publishing. That bedroom is poetry publishing, and the sooner you understand it, the better your decisions get. Small press poetry is where most living poets actually live, and working with these presses is a specific craft with its own money, its own manners, and its own traps. For two years I read manuscripts and packed orders for a three-person press, and I have watched poets thrive or sour based almost entirely on what they expected walking in. Here are the nine truths I wish someone had handed me on a card.
Truth 1: Small Presses Are the Main Event, Not the Consolation Prize
Poets sometimes treat a small press acceptance as the thing you settle for while waiting on the big houses. The arithmetic says otherwise. The large trade publishers put out a thin shelf of poetry a year, most of it by poets who already have several books. Nearly everything else, which means nearly everything, comes from presses run by two to five people, often around day jobs, often at kitchen tables. If you write poetry, the small press world is not a stop on the way to the real industry. For poems, it is the real industry, and it has been since long before you or I started submitting.
What Small Press Poetry Money Actually Looks Like
Truth 2: there is no advance. Or there is a token one, a hundred dollars and a warm email. Nobody is hiding this from you; the margins on a book that sells four hundred copies at eighteen dollars simply have no advance inside them. A press that promises big money up front deserves more scrutiny, not less.
Truth 3: royalties are modest and often arrive partly as copies. A common arrangement is ten percent of net receipts, or a stack of author copies you can sell at readings at full cover price, which is frequently where a poet's actual book income comes from. Read the word net carefully: net of printing? Of distribution? Ask. Good presses answer cheerfully.
Truth 4: you are the marketing department. The press will announce the book, list it with a distributor if you are lucky, send a few review copies, and post about it. Everything else, the readings, the local bookstore consignment, the newsletter, the launch, is you. Poets who resent this have a hard time. Poets who accept it before signing tend to sell three times the copies and stay friends with their publisher. Building a small audience before the book exists is the single best marketing move available, which is one reason I tell poets to keep publishing individual poems everywhere they can while the manuscript circulates. Contest visibility helps too: our monthly contest at Writory draws poets from more than fifty countries, every entrant gets a five-criteria score breakdown, and a placed poem with a certificate behind it is a concrete line for the cover letter your future press will read. If a poem is sitting finished on your desk, it costs you nothing to test it.
Truth 5: The Editing Is the Best You Will Ever Get
Here is what the money truths buy you. A small press editor chose your book against their own free evenings, and they will read it the way nobody at a large house has time to. During my press years I watched our editor spend forty minutes on one line. The poet had written:
The winter took everything we had saved.
The editor's query in the margin said only: took how? winters have mouths. The line came back as:
The winter ate the seed potatoes first.
That is the whole small press bargain in one edit. No advance, and in exchange, someone stares at your sentence about winter until it grows teeth. The poet cried a little at the launch reading when she got to that line. I was stacking chapbooks by the door and I remember thinking no royalty statement would ever measure what had just happened.
A big press prints your book. A small press stays up at night worrying about it.
Truth 6 and 7: The Contract Matters Because Everyone Is Nice
This is the part poets skip, precisely because small press relationships feel like friendships. Sign nothing on warmth. The five clauses to read twice, in order of how often they cause grief:
- Rights granted. The press needs print rights, probably ebook rights. World rights in all languages forever should give you pause for a poetry collection; ask why they need them and what they plan to do with them.
- Term and reversion. Truth 7 lives here: reversion is the clause that saves you. When the book goes out of print, or sales fall below a stated number, rights should return to you on written request. Presses fold. Editors burn out. A clean reversion clause means your poems do not sit in legal limbo when life happens to good people.
- Subsidiary rights. Anthology and translation splits. Fifty-fifty is common and fair. Silence is not.
- The option clause. Some contracts give the press first look at your next book. Fine. A clause that obligates your next book on the same terms is not fine.
- Author copies and discount. How many free, and at what discount can you buy more? You will sell books at readings for years. This boring clause quietly decides your income.
None of this requires a lawyer for a standard poetry contract, but all of it requires reading. Ask questions in writing. A good press has answered them a dozen times and will not flinch.
Truth 8: Money Should Flow Toward the Poet, With One Honest Exception
Distinguish quirks from red flags. Quirks: slow email, a website from 2016, covers designed by the publisher's cousin, a launch delayed a season. All normal, all survivable. Red flags are different in kind:
- A press that accepts your manuscript and then quotes you a production fee of hundreds or thousands of dollars. That is not publishing; that is a printing service wearing publishing's coat, and you should at minimum know which one you are buying.
- No physical evidence. Order one of their books before you submit. If the object is shoddy or never arrives, your book will be that object.
- Contracts they resist explaining, or verbal promises they will not put in the contract.
- A catalog where every author seems to have paid, and none has a second book anywhere.
The honest exception is the contest-and-fee ecosystem: modest reading fees for open periods and book prizes are how many legitimate presses keep the lights on, and that is a different thing from charging an accepted author for her own acceptance. Fees to be read: normal. Fees to be published after acceptance: ask hard questions.
Truth 9: Loyalty Is the Currency, and It Is Traded Both Ways
Small press publishing runs on a resource no contract mentions. The poets a press fights to keep are the ones who hit deadlines, answer proofs inside a week, show up to other authors' launches, buy from the catalog, and say thank you in the acknowledgments and mean it. The presses worth keeping do the mirror image: they pay when they say they will, they keep your book in print past its birthday, they pitch you for festivals years later.
I have seen a poet torpedo a warm relationship by publicly griping that her book was not in airport bookstores, a thing her two-person press could no more arrange than a moon landing. And I have seen a press hand-sell a five-year-old collection so persistently that it went to a second printing, because the poet had spent five years being a joy to publish. Neither outcome was in the contract. Both were earned. If you want more of the practical craft-and-career groundwork that gets you to this stage, the essays in our writing tips shelf cover the road from single poems to a manuscript worth a press's evenings.
Why Small Is the Right Size for Poetry
A poem is a small machine that does one large thing to one reader at a time. It has never been a mass product, and the presses shaped like poems, small, stubborn, personal, are not a compromised version of some better system. They are the system that fits. The spare bedroom with the three hundred copies emptied out by spring, one reading and one conversation at a time, and that book found the several hundred readers who needed it, which is several hundred more than a warehouse full of unread hardcovers finds. Go in with clear eyes about the money, read the reversion clause, be the poet they brag about at the book fair. Signed that way, a small press deal is not settling. It is the best seat in the only house poetry has ever really had.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.