9 Indie Presses Who Win Awards Faster Than Taylor Swift
Disclaimer: We don't actually know how fast Taylor Swift wins awards. Presumably...fast.
Indie presses can be harder to demystify than lit mags. For one, more (bigger?) dreams are riding on them. Perhaps not the dream of publishing a bestseller or a big payout as might come with the Big Five (and, as you might learn with a little digging, is actually not even close to the norm). But dreams of entering the market with a bang, of making solid (and “fruitful”) connections, book tours, getting “indie-famous”, and then “crossing over” to the “mainstream”. Lots of bunny ears here, because, well, many of these terms — when really broken into — aren’t as binary as we might think them.
Still, when you’re submitting your manuscript to different presses or if an agent is shopping it around, it is good to have some knowledge on the scope of what a press can offer (even if it’s a “best-case” scenario). Below, I present you 9 indie presses that have consistently published not just quality work but also books that go on to win major awards or become notable and popular in other ways/through other channels. While it’s good to remember that a book’s success cannot be genuinely engineered or replicated, dreaming is still the backbone of writing and publishing in many ways. So, check out these presses, explore their backlist, see what they’ve got in their 2024 catalogs, and dream (and submit!) away!
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