Community and Connection: On the Unexpected Benefits of Publishing Through a Small Press

My first book, a collection of stories called Strange Business, was published by Viking Press in 1992. Like first love or a first child, that first book can make you feel as if nobody’s ever been through this experience in quite this thrilling way before.

I knew I was damned lucky to be represented by an experienced New York agent, published by a trade publisher, edited by a brilliant editor, positively reviewed in Publishers Weekly and The New York Times—an emerging writer’s dream. I also thought it would always be this way.

Scroll forward a few decades. In early 2023 I found myself with seven published books and a few national awards behind me, a new book of stories looking for a home, and no agent to guide it into an uneasy publishing landscape transformed by the pandemic and dramatic corporate changes.

Mine is not, I think, a rare journey. We used to be called midlist, we writers who win prizes and get great reviews but don’t sell in large numbers. I’m not sure trade publishers even use that term anymore. They’re not really interested in middling sellers. No matter the thrill and attention out of the gate, if we don’t make that transition from promising debut to big seller, trade publishing loses interest.

My work is strongly place-based, certainly literary, often historical, though not in the popular historical romance genre, and my new book is a collection of short stories, which are notoriously hard to sell. But we write what we have to write, don’t we? I’m committed to the regional, historical, literary nature of my work, no matter how economically unviable it may be.

I’m also pretty clear-eyed about the challenges in publishing, which has never been easy but seems increasingly tough these days. I knew that an independent or university press would be my best bet, and having had good experiences publishing with a university press, I considered that route.

But around this same time, I began to notice that four writers I admire had works forthcoming from a publisher I’d never heard of: Belle Point Press. I looked them up and found they were really small—a husband and wife team headquartered in Fort Smith, Arkansas—and really new. Less than a year old then.

Now, I’m one who espouses a robust literary landscape that embraces the excellent writing emerging from my own region and elsewhere. I also believe that best sellers and profit margins can’t be the only determinants of what gets published.

But would I trust my work to a small press that was just now launching? Would they be stable enough to see it through, viable enough to get the book distributed, durable enough to keep it in print once it’s out in the world?

Two things convinced me to send that first query: one was that I trusted the writers who’d already entrusted their work to Belle Point. They’re not household names, these poets and fiction writers, but I know the exquisite quality of their work because they’re part of my writing community.

Here in Oklahoma, we have a vibrant literary community. From U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo to bestselling crime novelist Lou Berney, emerging writers like Mary Gray and Chelsea T. Hicks to the Woody Guthrie Poets, we read one other’s work, attend one another’s events.

Our connections spread beyond the state’s borders to Texas and New Mexico, Kansas and Missouri, Arkansas and Tennessee, all through the Mid-South and the Lower Midwest.

Here, collectively, we’re telling the story of a place, whether that’s an intentional part of our subject or not. Buttressed by some of the finest independent bookstores anywhere, we’ve forged a sense of belonging that says our voices matter, our stories matter—our place matters. Trade publishing, with its emphasis on economics and large numbers of sales, may not pay attention, but regionally focused small presses like Belle Point can, and do.

That’s the other factor that caused me to approach Belle Point: their clearly articulated vision, which is so in tune with my own. Founder and publisher Casie Dodd declares her roots in eastern Oklahoma and the hills of Arkansas, her commitment to small presses, independent literature, and local community.

“I want to believe that choosing to value and prioritize the people immediately around us,” she writes in the press Substack, “with a shared vocabulary and history, shared contexts or adjacent meandering ancestral threads, makes our work more honest. It enables our books to go deeper beyond representing A Place or A Voice.”

This is what I’ve been trying to do in my own writing since that first book of stories in 1992. By focusing a sharp lens on a particular place—Oklahoma with its wounded history and complex present—and telling the truth of this place as keenly and honestly as I can, I’m telling a much larger story, as writers from James Joyce to Crystal Wilkinson have done.

And this, as I’ve come to know, is what readers who value my work look for. One advantage of having been around a while is that I know my audience—who they are, where they are, and how they’re most likely to buy books, which is primarily from independent bookstores and online booksellers, where independent publishers are not at such a disadvantage.

In the past I enjoyed personal engagement with my editors at Penguin and Ecco, but a type of translation was sometimes needed: of culture, place, background. Casie understands the language and cultural forces at work in my fiction, and so the editing process has been smooth and especially gratifying. She created a knockout cover for the book—nuanced, evocative—because she so understands the stories’ underpinnings. Casie personally attends book fairs and literary festivals, shows up for book launches, nurtures each of Belle Point’s titles into the world.

I’ve learned that dexterity, flexibility, and a personal touch are hallmarks of this laser-focused small press. Without the resources and connections of a trade publisher, Belle Point is creative about finding ways to get attention for their list. They have a uniquely branded prose chapbook series, for instance, and my nonfiction essay in the series has garnered a good deal of pre-pub publicity for my book of stories. They’re deft at social media and have strong connections with independent bookstores.

I’ll admit I did have concerns at first about distribution with such a new press. But many of my writer friends are poets who always publish with small presses, so I knew there are workarounds. Probably none of us could have foreseen the devastation among independent publishers and writers at the closing of Small Press Distribution earlier this year. But this is where the commitment, dexterity, and flexibility of a small press can come into play.

Over the course of their short life, Belle Point has forged personal contacts with booksellers across the region. Now they’ve negotiated distribution with a national distributor, but their method began with handselling books to booksellers, who in turn hand sell to readers, who, by word of mouth, share with other readers.

These readers and booksellers are an integral part of our literary community. From Poetry Night at Indigenous-owned Green Feather Books in Norman to standing-room-only debut launches at Tulsa’s Magic City Books or The Floating Bookshop in Oklahoma City, from the emerging Creative Writing Center at Literati Press & Comics in OKC’s Paseo Arts District to Black Lit Weekend at Fulton Street Books in Tulsa, readers and writers come together in bookstores to read, listen, exchange.

It’s a positive feedback loop, this connection between independent presses, independent bookstores, writers, and readers. Here, we’re creating a body of literature larger than the sum of its parts, grounded in a recognition that we’re all in this storytelling, truth-telling business together.

The power of community seems to me inseparable from individual commitment to the quality of the work or finding a means to put it into the world. Belle Point Press in Fort Smith, Arkansas, Turning Plow Press in Enid, Oklahoma, Deep Vellum in Dallas, Texas, independent presses throughout the region are integrated, significant forces in our literary communities.

I suspect this kind of connectedness is true all over the U.S., especially in the vast, non-urban, non-East Coast/West Coast middle of the country. Find your independent bookstores, you’ll find your community. Find your community, and you’ll find your readers. Find your readers, you’ll find your press. They’re out there, nurturing the story of us and our vision and this moment into the world.

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The Hungry and the Haunted by Rilla Askew is available via Belle Point Press.