270. Working with a Small Press with Ari Rosenschein

Author and musician Ari Rosenschein discusses the pros, cons, and fun facts about working with a small press that can help your writing journey.
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Visit Ari's website:
https://arirosenschein.com/

Find Ari on Instagram:
https://arirosenschein.com/

Get a copy of Ari's book, Dr. Z and Matty Take Telegraph:
https://amzn.to/3U2Xyty
About "Dr. Z and Matty Take Telegraph"
It’s the late ’90s—the final days before smartphones and the internet changed the teenage landscape forever. Zack and his mother have moved from Tempe to Berkeley for a fresh start, leaving behind Zack’s father after a painful divorce. A natural athlete, Zack makes the water polo team which equals social acceptance at his new school. Yet he’s more drawn to Matthias, a rebellious skater on the fringes, who introduces him to punk rock, record stores, and the legendary Telegraph Avenue.

As their friendship intensifies, Matthias’s behavior reminds Zack of his absent dad, driving a wedge between him and his mother. Complicating matters is Zaylee, a senior who boosts Zack’s confidence but makes him question his new buddy, Matthias. Faced with all these changes, Zack learns that when life gets messy, he might have to become his own best friend.

Dr. Z and Matty Take Telegraph is about how a friendship can challenge who we are, how we fit in, and where we’re going.

About Ari:
Ari Rosenschein is a Seattle-based author who grew up in the Bay Area. Books and records were a source of childhood solace, leading Ari to a teaching career and decades of writing, recording, and performing music. Along the way, he earned a Grammy shortlist spot, landed film and TV placements, and co-wrote the 2006 John Lennon Songwriting Contest Song of the Year.

In his writing, Ari combines these twin passions. Coasting, his debut short story collection, was praised by Newfound Journal as “introducing us to new West Coast archetypes who follow the tradition of California Dreaming into the 21st century.” Award-winning author Jeff Zentner calls Rosenschein's young adult novel Dr. Z and Matty Take Telegraph "a keenly and compassionately observed coming-of-age story that glows with truth and yearning."

Ari holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch Los Angeles, and his work appears in Short Beasts, Drunk Monkeys, Noisey, Observer, PopMatters, The Big Takeover, KEXP, and elsewhere. He is Global Editorial Content Manager for Roland, helming the legendary musical instrument company's article platforms. Ari lives with his wife and dogs and enjoys the woods, rain, and coffee of his region.

Transcript

Jennia: Hello, I'm Jennia D'Lima. Welcome to Writing and Editing, the podcast that takes a whole person approach to everything related to both writing and editing. Author Ari Rosenschein is visiting today to explain what you can expect after your manuscript is acquired by a small press And we'll also talk about some of the pros and cons with working with one. This is "Working with a Small Press."

Jennia: Well, first, it's lovely to have you here!

Ari: Yes, Jennia, I'm glad to be here too! This is great!

Jennia: If you'd like to just start off by telling listeners a little bit about yourself and your work.

Ari: All right. My name is Ari Rosenschein, and I am an author and musician who lives in Seattle, Washington. I'm originally from the Bay Area, and my work encompasses a number of different styles, from literary fiction to young adult. My current release, Dr. Z and Matty Take Telegraph as a young adult novel. And a few years earlier, I published a collection of short stories, interconnected short stories called Coasting. But I also write sort of contemporary fiction. I'm working on some stuff more in that vein, and I am a music journalist for work, so I write in a couple different styles.

Jennia: Yeah, that's a huge range.

Ari: It is kind of. It's funny, I didn't think of myself—I really intended to only be a nonfiction writer. I went back to school at a certain point in life. I'd always written and wanted to be a nonfiction writer and write journalistic editorial stuff about music and some—maybe some cultural stuff, and fiction kind of called me.

Jennia: Very fun! So, first, I think it's important to define what we mean by small press So, how would you define that?

Ari: That's a really, really good question, because there are so many different types of small presses out there. In my case, I've worked with a small independent publisher for this book. They are called Fire and Ice YA.

Jennia: Okay, heard of that one! Yeah!

Ari: Yeah, they're a division of sort of a—still a small publisher, but they're called Melange, and they have a romance arm and also, like, sort of more of a contemporary fiction. They have contracts. There's no hybrid element to it. It is not a paid service in any way. They're a traditional royalty-pay publisher. So to me, that has been one of the definitions for small press that I've chosen to kind of stick by. Because there's so many opportunities out there. There are hybrid presses who will make beautiful books with you, but you are paying them money, and it's a different, energetic exchange, I think.

Jennia: Right.

Ari: In the case of Fire and Ice, they are a publisher. They are not one of the big five, and they are print on demand, which is different than some of the publishers that I've encountered in, say, the sort of more literary fiction, you know, sort of authors and poets. There's still sort of a boutique, bespoke world of people pressing 50 to 100 copies or maybe 500 copies and selling them, you know, in those ways. Or maybe even traditional presses who press boxes of books and if they don't sell, they are returned. This is sort of an interesting midway point in that they are print on demand. And it is some of the same tools that are available to self-published authors also. But they do have a sort of structure and platform as a publisher—Does this make sense?

Jennia: Yeah, no, and I'd love to go more into some of this too. So the tools that are available, for instance, if you'd like to explain a little bit more what that means and what some of those tools are?

Ari: Absolutely! My first, and I'll just give examples from my own work, if that's okay—

Jennia: Perfect, yes!

Ari: —My first book, Coasting—uh, Coasting was originally published by a small publisher called Pen Name publishing which became Magnolia publishing And then eventually I got the rights back to the book. And when I got the rights back to the book, I ended up creating my own version with a similar cover, but a little bit redesigned by my friend Corey. And I redid the interior and kind of did some stuff that I wanted to do, in terms of adding some new blurbs and things like that.

Jennia: Right.

Ari: Those were all handled through IngramSpark which was the initial sort of, I think, distributor and sort of bookmaking tool I guess you call—it's sort of like all one-stop shop they distribute to bookstores. It seems to be sort of the industry standard, and it is accessible to all writers. It is not the easiest platform in the world, but it's also not the hardest platform in the world. And you kind of get in there, and you bring your book into it, and you can create a book as an independent author, with or without a publisher, that is available to all bookstores. And if you want to go read at a bookstore, they can look into the IngramSpark catalog and find your book with a[n] ISBN number. And bookstores seem to really trust IngramSpark. I've seen that—that's sort of what I've seen. That is a tool that is available to everybody. The current publishers that I'm working with, they use Amazon as their primary fulfillment. Like, you know, bookmaking, art... And those tools, again, are totally open to independent authors, KDP, I believe, is the name of their service. I get the feeling it's quite user friendly.

Jennia: That's what I heard, yeah. That it's pretty easy to figure out on your own.

Ari: Absolutely. And Melange, which is sort of the parent publisher, they put out a lot of books And so those tools are totally available to authors. And when you're in that Amazon ecosystem, if you want to do Kindle Unlimited, which a lot of writers do, especially genre writers. I think romance writers benefit from it a lot—

Jennia: Yes.

Ari: —from what I understand (both laugh). And epic fantasy writers—anything where you're kind of getting paid by the page or where you're, you know, like you're getting readers by the page. I publish less frequently than some of those writers, so neither of my books are in Kindle Unlimited. But those are different tools that you have. There's also—I keep finding new tools. There's a tool called Book Brush, which helps you make really nice 3D renders of your book cover and place them in different scenarios. Is this sort of the stuff you were thinking?

Jennia: Yeah. And even more specifically, so what does a small press offer in terms of tools that you might not have had on your own or might have been out of your scope of understanding?

Ari: Yeah. Well, in this case, Fire and Ice - Melange have a really, really early sort of fastidious editing process. You know, they set a publishing date. We knew it was coming out. It was, like, May was going to be the launch. There's a little bit of wiggle room, but it was going to be May. And then I had a certain number of months to turn [the] final manuscript in. And then from there they kind of walked it through a process that involves a proofreader, multiple proof rounds, a sort of final edit with the editor-in-chief of the company, then another round of sort of print galley edits that went to two different times through—So there was a really nice built-in sort of structure of checking where someone like me, who is constantly finding, "Wait a second! That interior quotation mark really needs to come before the question mark at the end of that sentence. It's a phrase from this—" like, I just, I just go deeper and deeper and deeper until I can't really see anymore except for commas.

Jennia: (laughs) Yes!

Ari: I'm just that kind of person. But so they really—they're very helpful in that way. They also had have a team of different designers that they pull from, and I can't say enough about that process. They gave me sort of a sheet to fill out with access to a number of different stock photography sites. Not necessarily to use, to pull from them, exactly, but to give them sort of an understanding of what I wanted. And what they came up with for this book is so exactly what I want. It's like they somehow, you know, extrapolated from all these sort of different elements. They took it all, the designer, Ashley, and came up with something completely unlike any of the images that I gave them. Yet there were no edits. Like, it was—like often I've heard people say, "You know, I went back and forth a couple times. You know, I told them, I really—"

Jennia: Right, yeah.

Ari: —with Ashley, it's somehow she read into the heart of the book and it has this—it feels very much like a YA book, which I've heard is really important, that your cover art signals the genre.

Jennia: Yeah, exactly. That's something that I've talked a lot about with authors that I edit for, and just conversations we've had coming up, and then even conversations with other editors I'm friends with. And the importance of a cover, because we do judge a book by its cover. We do figure out what genre it is. "Is this something I'm interested in? Is it not something I'm interested in?" Without even picking it up and reading that back of the book summary. And so that's the importance, I think too, of working with a place that already has these vetted, experienced cover designers who know all of that and know how to execute it.

Ari: Bingo. And the same can be said of the interior. Carolyn at Fire and Ice, who did the interior, has done so many books There are things that she implicitly just kind of knows. There's a number of poems in the book. You know, she found ways to make the—the poetry look really, really smooth. Her font choices, like, there's just a lot of little choices. And I know this because (laughs) I had to do the same thing for my book. I had to do the interior when I got it, when I got the rights back to the first book

Jennia: Mhm.

Ari: I handled the whole interior myself. And it really was, like, all of a sudden, there's all these choices. It's like, "What do I do when there's a scene change? Am I going to be a triple asterisk person? Am I just going to be a white space person? Am I going to be a little line person?" And then there's all these tools like Vellum and stuff, which I actually didn't use. I used a simpler builder. But there's a lot of options. So somebody who has that experience with doing many—hundreds and hundreds of books they just kind of come in and they're like, "Yeah, I get it." It just looks really nice. And then all the back matter as well is really handled nicely. That stuff I find with Fire and Ice being part of their little infrastructure has been really helpful. These are the positives of working with a press. You fall into their rhythm.

Jennia: Yeah. And they already have a plan figured out. They know due dates, they know roughly how long something's going to take. Because I've seen that happen before with people who are self-publishing, especially when they're new. They might not understand that edits are going to take this amount of time or that they need to book someone out this far in advance. So then when you are working with a small press they've already laid that all out for you, and it's just, you know, one more thing taken off your plate that you don't have to worry about.

Ari: It was really comforting. And I can also say that for somebody who has a little trouble letting go, (Jennia laughs), this was actually also very beneficial. Because I found when I reformatted the other book every time I would find one thing off, I could just keep re-uploading different versions to IngramSpark—

Jennia: Ooh yeah.

Ari: —and it was easy to sort of feel like, "Oh, it's never really done." No, there's something about saying, "The book is done. This is the book." And I believe with the publisher there's a finality—

Jennia: Yeah.

Ari: —to it, you know? They offer very fair deals, so I'm not going to be—you know, we can see in a couple years how everybody's feeling about it. But I do notice that a lot of their writers seem to write multiple books with them, series and stuff. So that indicates to me that people find them to be an ethical and cool publisher to work with.

Jennia: Ohh, exactly. That's definitely a sign that people are pleased when they return over and over and over again. Not a bunch of people with, like, one standalone and then they leave to go publish their books somewhere else or even self-publish after that, yeah.

Ari: Absolutely. Yeah.

Jennia: Yeah, were there any cons that you'd associate with working with a small press or anything at least from your experience?

Ari: I can speak more to my previous experience.

Jennia: Mhm.

Ari: And this is not to put anyone down, because I know everybody who works in publishing is not doing so to become rich. We all are driven by a desire to express ourselves and to curate words in a beautiful way. I preface what I'm about to say with that. The publishers that I worked with on my first collection, one of them, Pen Name Publishing, I seem to have come aboard sort of maybe at the end of a cycle. They'd put out a lot of books and it just seemed like the thing was humming. And I loved the look of their cover art. It was a tumultuous release because soon after the book's release, they closed and kind of transitioned to the co-owner sort of taking it over, but under a different name. And I felt very much like I don't know enough about self-publishing to take the book back yet.

Jennia: Mhm.

Ari: And yet I don't know what this new sort of subsidiary—or not even subsidiary, sort of new version of this publisher is going to be. So, you know, I did—I signed up to have my book kind of transition to the new publisher. Nothing bad happened, but that publisher was not active. It was no longer an active platform. You know, for a while they were, and my book had already come out and I'd already done many readings. And at that point I was sort of like, "Don't really know where this goes... Like isn't really up—" The publisher isn't really doing anything anymore, in fact—And then at a certain point they said, "Hey, you can keep your book up through us with this ISBN and this name, but we're not really a publisher anymore. And at that point I was sort of like, "Okay, the choices are learn how to do this all myself—

Jennia: Right.

Ari: —or just sort of take the path of least resistance and not see (Jennia laughs)—and not see royalties and stuff because they're not worrying about it. And it's not—it wasn't a huge amount of money because I wasn't incentivized to promote my book that much because it was already sort of—it had already sort of come and seen its thing. So myself and another author on that publisher, Magnolia, were sort of the two last folks. And her name is Autumn Lindsey. And she has a book called "Becoming Aileen," and she took her rights back and republished it, a beautiful edition of her book. And I kind of was, like, looking over, like, "Okay, well, Autumn did it" and it empowered me. And I'm like, "You know what? Autumn did it. I'm going to do it." And thus began the long process of transferring a title within IngramSpark. Many customer support emails wanting to make sure that Amazon reviews that I've—I'm so proud of.

Jennia: Oh right, so you don’t lose those, yeah.

Ari: I just—they're so precious to us writers. And, like, some of them were written with a lot of care, I could tell. And I just—the thought of losing everything and starting completely from ground zero. So it was a slow process of about a year. It's stressful. This is the trade off of working—and I've had this experience in the music business as well. There's a lot of stress around that process. I would say that is the hardest thing for me, is sort of the—it's exciting at first to work with the publisher, and then at a certain point you're like, "Well...you know," and I hear a lot of authors talking about this rights return and like what they do with those books It's a real thing. Especially if you start writing like 30, 40 books you're going to have many different books in many states of publication. Stuff that's out of print, stuff that's with a publisher you don't talk to, stuff that's with the publisher you're still working with. And so that's kind of—I'm learning about this process now.

Jennia: Yeah, I think that also touches on the importance of looking at the contract and making sure you really understand it and that you even think about these scenarios even though they might never happen. But what if they do? And does the contract protect you against those? That is one of the, finger quotes, "cons" that I see come up with a small press. Could they close suddenly? A lot of small presses do close within the first two to five years. It's just a fact. They just do. And part of that is, well, do they have another person who's going to be ready to take over in case person one has to leave for whatever reason? Life takes them a different way. They can't match these obligations that they've already committed themselves to. Whatever. So then are you also prepared for that to happen and how are you going to handle it and deal with that too?

Ari: You just hit the nail right on the head because that was exactly my scenario. It was, like, it was so exciting. Everything was humming, and then it was, like, "Oh, I may have to be on my own again here." And what does that mean as a sort of newer writer? We were talking about contracts and I definitely found there were certain things—This contract was fairly straightforward and it was easy to navigate, but there were a couple things I was looking for, in particular, audiobook rights—

Jennia: Oh yeah.

Ari: —and, like, film rights. And I loved the fact that this was really like, we're worried about eBooks, and we're worried about print sales for now. And those other things are—those are yours. And it was very clearly spelled out, and that was something that made me trust them—

Jennia: Yeah.

Ari: —implicitly. I was like, "You know what? That's great." Because I'm learning more about audiobooks and it's easy to just think, "Oh, these things will kind of work themselves out." But the truth is, the audiobooks, it's another—it's actually a different publication. It's a different edition, and it really is almost like another book And having that power just in case, you know, a really neat audiobook publisher becomes interested in the book, that it can have a second life. That was something I wanted to have, that flexibility. So yeah, that was something I was looking for.

Jennia: That's a really good point I'm glad you brought that up, because I would guess that a lot of people going in, especially if they don't yet have that industry knowledge, that might not be something that they even think to look at or that they're even thinking about yet. Because they might still have that same mindset of, "I'm going to worry about the book first, and then whatever comes after is what comes after." But by then, they might be unhappy with the terms of the contract, and now what?

Ari: Exactly! This happens in the music business a lot. I will say many elements of publishing I had sort of the early experiences in music to train me on.

Jennia: Mmm.

Ari: You know, especially, like, reading contracts, not being so excited that you perhaps sign yourself into a restrictive situation. Sometimes zero percent of zero is still zero (Jennia laughs). Sometimes it's like, "You know what?—

Jennia: Right.

Ari: —This is the moment to make a move." Sometimes it's easy to be like, "Oh, well, I'm just going to be really careful. I'm not ever going to sign anything." And then there's also an aspect of life that is taking chances and saying, like, "You know what? This is not the only book I will write. This is not the only record I'm going to ever make." And maybe partnering for a period of time with a press like you said earlier, there is a sort of pro and cons—

Jennia: Mhm!

Ari: —thing. It's a—I think of it as a collaboration, and I like that. I like that this becomes part of the story—

Jennia: Mhm.

Ari: —of that book It's like, "Yeah, it had that cool cover that Ashley did. And yeah, I love those interiors that Carolyn did in the way that the poems look in the book. It never would have been like that if I had done it myself." And then at the end of the day, though, it is your own words. You know, sometimes we get these books back, and we see editions in bookstores of books that have been out for so many years, and they keep getting new life in different editions.

Jennia: Yeah, that's true too. Or even just how we've talked before on this podcast with other guests about how trends have changed. And so a book that might have been popular when it came out and then it has more of a slow period. It's almost like it goes into hibernation for ten or twenty years. And now that trend is spiking again and suddenly there's new renewed interest in it from a whole new generation of readers.

Ari: I think of, Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume (Jennia chuckles). One of my absolute favorite books when I was a kid. It's young adult fiction. I was obsessed with it, and every book that Judy Blume ever wrote, pretty much. And there's recently been a new edition of it that I saw, and it had like a text bubble on the cover and I was like—

Jennia: Oh yeah, I've seen that!

Ari: —I was, like, "Wow, we are truly marketing to a different generation." Because there was—there are no texts. It's a real like 70s book. Yeah, that's awesome.

Jennia: So related to contracts I was going to bring up, did you look into these small presses or do any research on them before you submitted your manuscript, and the importance of that?

Ari: I looked a lot on Writers Beware. Writers Beware is a site that kind of can sort of point out some less reputable practices and publishers that engage in them. I kind of sent my book out widely without going to too many agents and too many big publishers. I kind of just went to small publishers because it was important to me to get it out. I wouldn't say like that week, you know, it wasn't that soon—

Jennia: Right.

Ari: —but I didn't want to wait two and a half to three years for a querying process. I wasn't sure if this was the right book for that. But when I was looking for publishers, I kind of—I wrote to lots of little publishers, some real hipster ones, that—again, this is because a YA book I focused on on YA publishers. I even spoke to a few hybrid publishers because I just kind of wanted to know a little bit of what was out there. And I quickly found that while there are some that are better than others, it was not the route for me. It is a pay-to-play environment, which is—I can absolutely see the purpose for that. I don't know, I could see reasons to do it, but it's quite expensive. It was not the right choice for me. And from the smaller publishers, there were actually a few, not a ton, but there were a number that, three in particular, that had some interest in the book. I came down to two, and the one that I went with, Fire and Ice, had a shorter term—

Jennia: Hmm.

Ari: —than the other one. This was kind of me putting my foot back in the water of traditional publishing after a number of years of just doing essays, and stuff online, and journalism. The contracts, they differ greatly. I would say getting a chance to look at a few—you know, like, to get almost to the finish line with two in particular—

Jennia: Yeah.

Ari: —I feel like, "Okay, cool." I feel like I kind of got a little bit of the lay of the land of this sort of small press world as it is in 2024. It's going to likely change quickly, and I think it would have been different if this had been for a literary fiction novel and with a more kind of boutique, non-print, on demand type of publisher. And I'm interested to see what those contracts would look like. I have other books that I'm working on. Maybe I'll find out more soon, hopefully.

Jennia: And come back and have a whole new episode just on contracts (laughs).

Ari: That would be awesome!

Jennia: Well, are there any places where people can see you next or any upcoming projects they should know about?

Ari: Yeah! That's great. Well, my book comes out on Tuesday, May 7 (well look at that date—get a copy now from the link in the description!). I'm going to be doing some readings for Dr. Z and Matty Take Telegraph. I have one in—

Jennia: Oh fun!

Ari: —Yeah! I have one in Seattle. That's Ada's Technical Books, which is a really sweet bookstore and cafe in Seattle. But I'm also looking to reading in the Bay Area, in Oregon, and a number of other places. In Vancouver, British Columbia. So hopefully—yeah, in Los Angeles too. So I'm hoping those all come together. But you can find the book on Amazon, my website, arirosenschein.com—(spells it out) a-r-i-r-o-s-e-n-s-c-h-e-i-n-.com—and pretty much everywhere books are available. Which is one thing I really like about the publisher. It's through Smashwords words and all these library systems. You'll be able to find it easily.

Jennia: Excellent way of making that last comment come full circle (laughs). Perfect.

Ari: No problem.

Jennia: Thank you so much!

Ari: Cool!

Jennia: Thank you for listening and make sure to check out the show notes for more information, including Ari's links. And then please join me next week when bestselling thriller author and podcaster, Steven James, who wrote one of my favorite writing craft books Story Trumps Structure, will be visiting. Thanks again!