When Kate Gale cofounded Red Hen Press in 1994, the desktop publishing revolution was just getting started. Without quitting their day jobs, Gale and her partner (and now husband), Mark E. Cull, purchased Adobe software and began typesetting books in the hope of putting Los Angeles publishing on the map. Thirty years in, Red Hen has grown from a micropress into a publisher of some 25 books each year, with a back catalog of more than 1,000 titles. Red Hen is part of a community of independent publishers—Gale calls them her “cohort” rather than competitors—who are committed to putting out books without the support of a university or a corporation.
During testimony from Penguin Random House’s proposed acquisition of Simon & Schuster in 2022, witnesses referred to independent presses as “farm teams,” implying that small presses are both amateur and intended to cultivate talent that will later be picked up by the big leagues. On the contrary, small presses have proved themselves to be strong competitors, with their own loyal writers and readers, collections of accolades, and growing legacies.
This article appears in Issue 27 of Alta Journal.
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“It’s very easy to feel invisible in Los Angeles, like you’re not sure that you’ve done anything that anyone in L.A. has noticed,” Gale admits. Being part of a publishing community, “it feels like it’s worth it all, and I’m not just somersaulting in the dark.”
Red Hen Press
- Founded: 1994
- Cofounder and managing editor:
Kate Gale - Specialty: Imaginative narratives that might be overlooked by mainstream publishing houses.
- Notable awards: Afaa Michael Weaver, author of A Fire in the Hills, received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.
- What makes a book right for Red Hen Press? “I’m looking for a book that surprises me in some way,” Gale says. “I used to always say I was looking for a book of the West, in the sense that I was looking for a book that wouldn’t have gotten published in New York. Now that we’ve published some New York authors, I guess I can’t really say that anymore.”
- A key voice in deciding if a title has potential: The marketing team.
Unnamed Press
- Founded: 2014
- Cofounder and publisher: Chris Heiser
- Specialty: Literary fiction and select nonfiction by authors who bring vision and conviction to what they’ve written.
- Notable awards: Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists issue included The Border of Paradise author Esmé Weijun Wang, and Jennifer Croft won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her memoir, Homesick.
- How has your team handled the rise of self-published books? “Some authors do well financially with self-publishing, often because they have platforms or marketing experience along with, as is the case for all of us, some luck sprinkled in,” Heiser says. “That said, we feel fairly well positioned in this world of print-on-demand. Editorial and design expertise has never seemed more valuable in terms of making books, along with being an active participant in literary and arts communities around the country.”
- A moment that captures the joy of the job: “When you open an attachment from a stranger’s email and begin to read something remarkable.”
Semiotext(e)
- Founded: 1974 as a journal; 1983 as a book publisher
- Founder: The late Sylvère Lotringer
- Specialty: Literary fiction, critical theory, and activist/polemical genres.
- Notable awards: Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams won the Goldsmiths Prize in 2022 for their work in Diego Garcia.
- What inspired the creation of Semiotext(e)? “Lotringer saw the journal [which spurred the creation of the press] as a way of transporting and exchanging ideas between Europe and New York and as a vehicle of collaboration between artists, writers, critical theorists, and activists,” says coeditor Hedi El Kholti, adding that he and coeditor Chris Kraus “have followed the spirit of this original model.”
- Values that guide editorial decisions and publishing choices: “Friendship, engagement, necessity, generosity,” El Kholti says.
Rare Bird Lit
- Founded: 2010
- Founder: Tyson Cornell
- Specialty: Exciting works by new authors with commercial potential and vinyl audiobooks recorded in-house.
- Notable awards: Arroyo, by Chip Jacobs, was a Crime Reads most anticipated book of 2019; Vow of Celibacy, by Erin Judge, won a Bi Book Award; and Black Sheep Boy, by Martin Pousson, won the 2017 Pen Center USA Award for Fiction.
- How does audiobook production work? “We have two recording studios in the Los Angeles area,” sales and marketing manager Alexandra Watts explains. “We either have authors or third-party narrators come into our studio to narrate the books, then we edit and publish alongside the print and e-book products. If the authors are musicians themselves, we often like to record them or work with them on the music selection.”
- Notable collaborators: Jerry Stahl, William T. Vollmann, and Bella Thorne, as well as North Figueroa Bookshop (see “Ask a Clerk!”), which houses the offices of Rare Bird Lit and Unnamed Press.•
