11 Indie Presses That Will Boost Your Writing Career
Top-Tier Indie Presses accepting un-agented & unsolicited submissions of full-length books
If submitting to lit mags is a clunky ride through a dirt road with no end in sight then submitting full-freakin’ length manuscripts of your BOOK (oh my god, you’ve got a book!) is that same clunky ride down that same dirt road but now make it super dark and spooky with random wisps of visions floating all around you as you try to figure out why the hell you are trying to go anywhere on this path in the first place. Which is all to say, welcome to indie lit, where none of us really know what we’re doing but somehow some of us get really good results.
I have a full-length poetry collection that I’ve just started submitting this year. I cannot imagine how much more daunting it might be to submit a full-length prose collection or a novel. For a while, I had a huge list of places I was going to submit but over the last few months I have whittled this down to a few handfuls. I figured, if I’m going to try and be a “successful writer”, I might as well first shoot for the moon, right?
There are presses that will publish your work and then there are presses that have the potential to transform your career. Even if your book doesn’t become a bestseller, having them be your first or second publisher will definitely turn heads in the indie lit world, and likely set you up with a lot of options for where to go next. Sure, indie presses might not be the first places that come to mind when you think “bestseller”, but honestly, neither should the Big Five (think Penguin and so on).
Major publishers have countless imprints and publish a huge plethora of literary flavors and genre variations. Many books whose authors get huge advances fail to live up to the hype. And do you know what’s worse than a first book that didn’t get a huge advance? Like, way way worse? A first book that did get a huge advance and then fizzled out.
Indie presses — as stressful as the whole journey can be — are a little easier. They won’t give you tons of money, but they will publish your book and, well, boost your writing career. Especially these eleven:
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