Meet the People Behind Some of Today’s Best Small Publishers Specializing in Crime Fiction

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Bless the small press! We talk a lot about how to make the big publishers accountable and more diverse, but let’s not forget there is another level of publishing where people have the freedom to follow their taste rather than having to justify each book’s profitability. I think most people in the publishing business feel like they could put together a damned good imprint given world enough and time. I do. So I gathered the founders and publishers of some of crime and crime fiction’s best small presses: Paul Oliver of Syndicate Books, an imprint devoted to bringing forgotten authors back into print; Charles Ardai of noir publisher Hard Case Crime; Sara Gran, whose brand-new imprint is Dreamland Books; Gregory Shepard of reissue enthusiast Stark House; Jason Pinter of Polis Books; and the late but welcome addition of Michael Nava of Amble Press. We talked quality, representation, resurrecting old books and conjuring new ones.

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“Why don’t we do it ourselves?”

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Lisa: How long has Hard Case been around, Charles? Was there an inciting incident?

Charles: Yes: I went out for drinks in the winter of 2001 with my old friend Max Phillips, and we lamented that no one published the sort of slender, sexy, high-velocity crime paperbacks we used to enjoy reading. And then one of us (I think it was me) said “Why don’t we do it ourselves?”

Charles: and then it took 3 years to get our first books published….

Sara: Three years is nothing!

Lisa: Two guys in search of sexy paperbacks…I hear the voice over now.

Charles: It felt like forever at the time

Greg: Stark House got started back in 1998 as a family affair, then I took over a couple years later and started reprinting mysteries.

Lisa: What were they printing before, Greg 

Greg: We started with fantasy and a collection by Storm Constantine.

Lisa: What’s your proudest moment, Charles 

Charles: That would probably have to be when Stephen King got in touch to say he wanted to write a book for us.

Lisa: Yeah, I think that counts as a big moment.

Charles: Though I have to say I’m extremely proud of our new book, FIVE DECEMBERS, too, which just got an Edgar nod it dearly deserves.

Sara: Nice, congratulations, Charles

Lisa: How long have you been planning yours, Sara?

Sara: I’ve wanted to start my own publishing company forever, but decided somewhat on a whim last January to just go ahead and do it already

Lisa: What spurred you on, Sara?

Sara: I think the main the main thing was the desire to have a saner life. I knew as hard as publishing a book would be, it would drive me less crazy than navigating the modern publishing environment for the 8th time.

Lisa: And Jason, I think we met right when you were starting up.

Jason: I’d worked for about 10 years in traditional publishing, at 3 of the now-Big 5 and one large independent. And like most editors I always wanted greater control over what I could acquire and publish and lamented the fact that you had to jump through a hundred hoops to do it (and often have projects nixed due to things completely unrelated to the book’s quality or author’s talent). I put together the business plan for Polis Books around 2012, then spent about a year debating whether to pull the trigger because it would be 100% self-financed. So if it failed, most of my savings would be gone. At the time I was unmarried and didn’t have kids and figured if I wasn’t going to give it a shot now, I never would. So I did. We announced in the summer of 2013, published our first book (a digital original) that fall, and started our print list in 2014.

Lisa: How about you, Paul?

Paul: I used to own a bookstore with a used/rare component. I was always fascinated by the out-of-print books that were once considered great or even classic. It grew from there.

Lisa: Hi Michael! Tell us about your press

Michael Nava: Amble Press is an imprint of Bywater Books, an established lesbian small press. The owners wanted to expand their project to publish “across the queer spectrum” with particular emphasis on queer writers of color.  I had been toying with the idea of starting my own queer press but when they offered to make me managing editor of Amble I jumped at it because the infrastructure was already there.

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Goal: Bring back undeservedly forgotten books

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Lisa: I’m prodding you to say the kinds of books you want to publish.

Sara: Paul, working in used/rare books was an inspiration for me as well—there’s a few older titles I would love to bring back into print.

Charles: I’m 100% in agreement, Paul, about the need to bring back undeservedly forgotten books from the past. It feels like a duty to me.

Greg: Sounds like several of us got started through a desire to bring back certain books or a certain kind of book.

Charles: When we started Hard Case Crime, about 2/3 of our titles were reissues of lost old books.

Sara: Honestly, I want to publish books I like that I know won’t find (or haven’t found) a good home elsewhere! I know that’s not a very official-sounding publishing plan, but it’s the one I’m going with.

Lisa: Absolutely. As someone with the longer or more birds-eye view of a critic, we have to know where the lineages are and where traditions intersect. Crime fiction has a lot of amnesia.

Sara: I’m sure Black Lizard is a huge inspiration to many of us.

Lisa: Oh I still love a Black Lizard. It’s so seedy but on the classy side.

Charles: (And yes: Hard Case Crime was very consciously the new Black Lizard. If that line had kept going, I’d probably never have started my own.)

Lisa: If Black Lizard had kept going is a great party game

Paul: Sara, It’s exciting when something cool turns up and warrants a read.

Charles: Sara, how would you describe the books that won’t find a home elsewhere?

Sara: Books and authors that either have been or would be underserved by a big publisher, in terms of publicity and marketing and position but also in terms of being treated, as an author, with kindness and respect

Greg: I was more inspired by the Black Box Thrillers that Maxim Jakubowski started back in the late 70s, but Black Lizard was a bit of an inspiration as well. That and wanting to be a publisher since I was a teenager.

Charles: I had a shelf of books at home that I loved and that no one I knew had ever read. This was just a way to push them on people.

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If you could publish anyone, who would it be?

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Lisa: If you could publish or republish anyone, who would it be?

Charles: I’ve been hassling Alan Furst for years, but it’s been a no-go.

Lisa: I’d love to know how you all decide on your projects.

Sara: Well, my first book was my own, so that was easy.

Jason: We read both agented and unagented submissions, and of course approach authors we admire or have taken pitches from. Chantelle Osman acquires for our Agora imprint, and we both share submissions with each other. If we have a project we like, we see how we’d publish it, what format, whether it would be a series or standalone, and then make an offer.

Charles: We get about 1,000 submissions per year, and while most are terrible, I read into all of them, and about once each year I find something really great. That’s how we found FIVE DECEMBERS.

[NOTE: FIVE DECEMBERS won the Edgar Award after this conversation, so Charles was RIGHT.] 

Greg: Deciding on projects, I usually go with personal favorites, plus recommendations, and submissions that appeal to me.

Michael: Big Publishing publishes queer writers only in tokenistic numbers and uses them to pinkwash their indifference to queer writers generally.

Charles: You’ll get sick of hearing about it, but FIVE DECEMBERS by James Kestrel — an epic WWII novel that’s just so much more than you think it will be when you start reading — is just a stunning read, and I’m so glad that something like a dozen other publishers turned it down (inexplicably) so that we could be its publisher.

Paul: Syndicate is tiny. Just myself and artist Jeff Wong (albeit distributed by Soho Press/Penguin Random House). So we have a long gestation period for each project and our goal is to be as complete as possible—not just cherry-picking a title here or there but bringing everything back. We’re picky. And we want our efforts to stick.

Jason: I’m proud of so many of our books, but I’m also hugely proud of all the authors we’ve published, authors who are really the next generation of crime writers, or whatever genre they choose. Folks like Alex Segura, John Vercher, Cynthia Pelayo, Rob Hart, Steph Post, Tori Eldridge, Heather Levy, Zhanna Slor, James Queally, Puja Guha, Winnie M Li, and so many more.

Lisa: As I’ve said before, Jason Polis is the Shraftt’s of the crime fiction world.

Sara: Paul what do you mean by “bringing everything back?”

Paul: My favorite thing is watching publishing folks comping to authors I’ve brought back. Ten years ago no one mentioned Ted Lewis or “Get Carter” in marketing copy or a PW review. Now they do. That’s exciting to me. But then again I’m a publicist by day.

Michael: This year I published debut novels by Matthew Clark Davison, who teaches creative writing at San Francisco State, Casey Hamilton, a young Black writer whose book MENAFTER10 was reminiscent of John Rechy, a collection of short stories by another Black writer, Joe Okonkwo whose first novel won the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award. Our current release, Faux Queen, A Life in Drag by Monique Jenkinson, is a memoir about Monique’s journey as a cis-woman through San Francisco’s drag culture where she performed as Fauxnique.

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“I talk too much, so going on podcasts is a very good use of my time.”

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Charles: It’s true — a small press can ignite a revival of interest that then catches fire in the bigger world. Black Lizard reprinting Jim Thompson was key to his Hollywood revival, and noir.

Paul: Book PR is where stoicism goes to die.

Sara ; I’m always thinking (as an author as well as a publisher) that there’s gotta be some GREAT! NEW! IDEA! to get attention for books other than the review circuit. But I never come up with anything! Social media is hit or miss and things can sour very quickly.

Lisa: We have room at CrimeReads but we also can only spotlight so many.

Jason: There was one NYTBR a few years back where they reviewed four titles, and it was like the 19th in a series, 21st in a series, 9th in a series, and another guy who’d written 50. And I told them they were consciously holding down a generation of crime writers to give space to authors who didn’t need it and wouldn’t benefit from it.

Lisa: How do you see podcasting fitting into this ecosystem?

Jason: I feel like podcasts are for the most part like blogs. They likely don’t move the needle all that much, but you can’t always count on reviews in large outlets, so you need to sometimes take a lot of singles rather than hope for the home run.

Charles: I love the idea of podcasting, but mostly because I love the sound of my own voice. I haven’t yet overcome inertia enough to go and buy a microphone and learn to use the software…

Sara: I talk too fucking much anyway, so going on podcasts is a very good fit for me and a good use of my time.

Michael: I think Amazon reviews do carry weight—I’m more likely to read those reviews than the  NY Times when I’m looking for a book. We regularly reach out to a gay reviewer in the top 100 reviewers group.  I’ve heard Goodreads has become something of a toxic sewer. Is that true?

Lisa: What would a home run look like, Jason?

Jason: Reviews in the NYT, LAT, NPR, generally anything on TV

Sara: Jason I think that’s exactly right—it can help to go for lots of smaller things rather than the ONE BIG THING.

Lisa: That’s true overall as writers, Sara 

Charles: I think TV is basically impossible unless you’re already a big name (or in the news for some other reason).

Lisa: We can’t all count on the big venues, so we have to use strategy.

Michael: Sara, especially for queer books, it’s important to find the niche reviewers, review sites who actually talk to the audience we are trying to reach with our books.

Charles: But NYT, LAT, Washington Post, NPR — not impossible

Sara: Also smaller independent venues like podcasts etc are, I think, much more open to writers who aren’t NYT bestsellers in general. It’s a more fun place to hang out, I think.

Greg: I consider myself a niche publisher, so I’m never looking for the BIG THING. But a NYT review would be nice.

Jason: Charles, those outlets are definitely not impossible, but for small presses we have to scratch and claw to get into them. At a Big 5 if they acquire a book at a certain level they know they’ll get that kind of coverage.

Lisa: And Michael part of me says go after the non-niche person every so often. Isn’t that how your audience might expand?

Michael: Lisa yeah, you have to try to do it all.

Lisa: A lot of places won’t do pieces on reissues. Which is dunderheaded.

Charles: I’ve been glad to see reissues covered in the publishing trades — that can help build a certain baseline of sales, at least to libraries

Greg: Agreed. So many of these books haven’t been available for over 50-75 years.

Paul: I think it’s about the long tail of a project too. Not everything has to happen in the first month. If you can find ways to grind out the year with small or medium publicity/events/marketing you can stack it all up. Don’t get me wrong. Home runs feel better and work faster.

Lisa: Absolutely. That is an upside of technology: a lot of OOP books available

Michael: Paul, I agree, for small publishers you have to play the long game.

Jason: What angers me beyond anything is when I see “year-end” roundups that have 20 crime novels and not one from an independent press. Those people don’t deserve their jobs.

Charles: Agreed, Jason. Those year-end roundups drive me crazy. It’s the same books everyone heard about all year long.

Sara: Paul, that was a big motivation in wanting to start my own company—putting everything on those first few weeks of sales, well, I get why big pubs do it, but it saps a lot of the joy out of the process and breeds competitiveness rather than friendship.

Sara: But the funny thing those “big book” don’t always sell well either!

Jason: And I cannot tell you how many times I’ve pitched a book to an outlet and within 20 seconds received an email from their ad sales department, essentially promising a quid pro quo. I can’t afford a $10k ad, but I guess if you can you’ll get that coverage.

Michael: I think LGBTQ books are still counter-cultural, discounted by the mainstream. In some far-off time maybe, people will look back and see the most important books were not on the top 10 or 20 lists but books that were ignored. That’s why I am so happy that Paul is reviving Joseph Hansen who is a great crime fiction writer, full stop.

Paul: Thanks for that. Michael also wrote an excellent intro to FADEOUT.

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“We had to manually retype manuscripts by Erle Stanley Gardner. It was fun, actually.”

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Charles: I’m curious how everyone’s finding the breakdown of physical vs eBook sales?

Sara: I was shocked that my print sales are higher than I imagined! Good shocked, obviously.

Paul: What’s funny about that is that the process is still somewhat analog. I send my books out to be “keyed in” by someone. Proofing and copyediting to follow. A lot of OOP properties don’t exist in a digital format until someone sees them back to print.

Greg: Ebooks now account for almost half our sales.

Charles: We had to manually retype manuscripts by Erle Stanley Gardner and Donald Westlake. It was fun, actually.

Sara: Charles!!!

Greg: But I’d still rather be known as a print publisher!

Sara: I’m inspired by some of the writers who’ve reached huge success just through self-published ebooks—not necessarily what I’m reading, but I think it’s interesting.

Michael: My friend Sheldon Seigel whose first mysteries were published by Putnam, took them back, self-published and is doing quite well. His most recent book got 1000 Amazon reviews, he says.

Charles: Wow! 1000 reviews is very impressive.

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A Little Romance

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Charles: It’s encouraging to hear from other folks going through the same struggles! Helps you keep at it.

Sara: You guys are tremendously inspiring.

Greg: I certainly want to wish everyone well! As someone who doesn’t travel, this has been interesting.

Sara: Romance is a fascinating area of publishing. I think it may be the best-selling market.

Lisa: It is! 

Sara: But it’s still strangely invisible.

Jason: I think with romance, one of the benefits of self-publishing is that authors can publish as fast as they can write. If they were working with a publisher, large or small, they may not have control over that schedule, and I think romance readers tend to be very binge-y.

Charles : I grew up in an apartment filled with thousands of romance novels — my mom would read 10 in one night

Lisa: I’ve started getting some ARCs and they are fascinating.  

Jason: Sara, when I worked at one of the Big 5, the publisher of their romance line said, “Other books get all the press, but our books keep the lights on.”

Charles: So yes, the appetite of a romance reader is beyond anything in our genre

Greg: I thought it was an invisible market, too, until I went to work for Zebra back in the mid-90s. Sorry, mid-80s.

Michael: There’s a whole subgenre of gay romance written by straight women for mostly straight women, very explicitly erotic, that’s got huge followings. 

Charles: Same thing is true of M/M slash in the fanfiction world

Lisa: And like everything on the internet, we devolve into talking about sex.

Sara: What are we doing with our lives we should all be publishing romances! My agent reps a lot of romance writers and I got to meet with some of them, such smart and interesting people with really deep knowledge of self-publishing and small presses.

Sara: You mean EVOLVE, Lisa!

Lisa: The thing I love about small presses across the board is the level of enthusiasm. After getting pitched a million girl gone stories it’s great to get a book by Sara Gran, or Alex Segura, or Cheryl Head.

Michael: Lisa, actually a lot of those M/M romances are also crime fiction.

Jason: Lisa, That’s why I loved working with Alex, and how he encompassed so much about what we’re trying to do. He took a well-worn trope—the P.I. novel—and told it in a way and with a character and setting we hadn’t seen before in that genre.

Lisa: Yes! It wasn’t rocket science, it was a much better paper airplane. Meaning it had the mark of the maker on it, and it was fun.

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Curious about our panelists’ small presses?

Sara Gran is the founder of Dreamland Books.

Jason Pinter is the founder of Polis Books.. 

Charles Ardai is the founder of Hard Case Crime. 

Greg Shepard runs Stark House Press.

Paul Oliver is the founder of Syndicate Books.

Michael Nava is the managing editor of  Amble Press at Bywater Books.

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