The last three articles in this series are behind a paywall. This one I’ll make public, because I’m not sure people actually get me these days… So here’s all that I am. And the history of this crazy cause that I call SFWP. Please consider becoming a member for sneak peeks, behind the scenes stuff, and tell-all rants about how publishing actually works. * Last time I said that running a small press was never about the money. Saying that causes incredible internal conflict in my soul, thanks largely to my Scottish heritage from both sides of the family. You know the old joke -- the Grand Canyon was formed because a Scotsman dropped a penny down a gopher hole. Today, SFWP is my only income. In 2017, I tapped out of the 9 to 5 rat race to finally run this company full time. When I had high paying jobs for the first 20 years of this company, I didn’t really care which way the financial winds blew. When SFWP was doing poorly, I could shore it up. When it was doing well, it was gravy. Now that it’s my only source of income, the shifting sands of financial stability (or lack thereof) is doing my head in. In 2017, my own book came out , was cancelled by the publisher five days after release, and then I brought it over to SFWP to try and save it and, surprise, it did really, really well. And it’s thanks to the huge splash We All Scream made that secondary rights interests started to show up on my doorstep. I briefly had a documentary deal with one indie studio, then another one after that, and then a third, and then an audio company wanted to snap up the book after an expose in the Washingtonian . So I had to bring on a subrights agent to rep me and the rest is history. SFWP is now the only small press that has major movie deals under its belt and some of the highest paid audio deals ever paid to an indie press. Our books have been translated into seven languages, and there’s talk of stage adaptations for several titles. Sounds amazing. Magical, even. The reality is different. When I say we signed a seven figure movie deal, that’s true, we did. But it was destroyed by the SAG strikes and all we ever got was a small advance. And the “highest paid audio deal ever for a small press” is 10k, which the author got 60% of and the agents gobbled up an additional 17%. Those percentages were the same for the small advance for the defunct movie deal. As you’re reading this, I’m touring New Mexico, a state very close to my heart. This trip is an attempt to reboot. To get out from under the oppressive fear of whatever is going on in our world today and the sorry, fraught state of the publishing industry. The terror of the unknown, combined with the “books are magic” mentality, means that I have former contractors who think I’m worth millions and want every penny of it, and authors who have grown to hate me over the last couple years because their book didn’t sell millions of copies. And all the while I’m watching the bank accounts slowly empty out. And this is something every press is dealing with, one way or another. The atmosphere of the industry is becoming toxic and dangerous. SFWP began in New Mexico, and that was also a reboot for me. In November of 1997, I went to Santa Fe with the intention of wandering out into the mountains to kill myself. My life was a mess. I had no real family I was close to, and I was suffering from a debilitating nerve disease called Trigeminal Neuralgia (TN), though I would not receive that diagnosis till 2002. By 97, dozens of doctors had all shrugged and said they couldn’t figure out what was wrong. TN is caused, in the textbook cases (there are terrifying variations), by a blood vessel wrapping around one of the trunk nerves in your face. Every time your heart beats, it sends a stabbing, electric pain signal to the brain. The impacted area becomes hypersensitive to touch -- if I took a shower and the water hit my face, the pain would be so severe that I would pass out. A subway train approaching an underground station would cause enough wind to do the same. Turning over in my sleep, my face touching the pillow, would find me waking up screaming. And that was relentlessly every night, every day, every minute since 1995 when the pain first started. With the doctors universally giving up, by 1997 I couldn’t see a way to survive. My uncle, whom I’d been pretty much estranged from since 1985, lived in Albuquerque and he met me in Santa Fe. He knew why I was there. He sat me down by a roaring fire in a rustic bar, the french doors open to a cool November evening and that big, big New Mexico sky, and he asked me, “What do you love doing?” I suppose he was expecting a normal answer like travel, or walks on the beach, or whatever. But, in 1995, when the pain set in and my life took a downturn, I abandoned my first publishing company, which I had started in 1989 in high school. It was called Purple Publications and it was stupid and embarrassing, but I loved it. I loved it. I loved being on the production side of literature. I made a little bit of money and I championed voices that I felt were wild and raw and new. A protest, yes, against being forced to read the classics in high school and then the same ones again in college. But also...something deeper and more important. I told him all this, and he told me, “Well, then do it again. Go home and focus on that.” SFWP was born a few months later, early 1998. The Trigeminal Neuralgia stayed with me and ruled my life until, in 2007, I was cured via experimental and highly invasive brain surgery (vindicating all those people who think I’m brain damaged - I am!). During those first few years of SFWP, I often managed the publication of titles from a hospital bed, or under the influence of a wild cocktail of drugs that doctors gave me after my initial diagnosis in 2002. Brain surgery was the nuclear option -- by 2007, I was on the maximum safe human dosage of a muscle relaxant, an anti-seizure medicine, and…oxycontin, back when they gave it to you like it was candy. It would take me a year to recover from the brain surgery, and three years to recover from those three highly addictive medications. SFWP was not founded for profit, and profit was never on my mind in all those years. It existed to give me hope, to distract me from the depression (and death) spiral, and as an act of defiance against a not very nice world. This attitude didn’t change after I was cured and recovered from a life that now feels like it belonged to someone else. As I emerged a whole person once again, SFWP remained a voice for disenfranchised and fringe authors, and I loved that. We were in the swing of that pendulum I talked about in the last article and small literary voices were on the rise again. I still didn’t care about the money. I cared about the cause. Somehow, from what felt like my death bed, I had created something that was getting noticed. The books I was putting out were getting praise and love and attention. They were impacting people's lives. In the nearly 30 years since I started SFWP to save my life and my soul, I have spent millions on it. And I have never taken a single payment. When SFWP became my sole income in 2017, I only took the money that my own book made. That lasted until COVID, when I applied for government relief money and entered into a contract with hospitals to produce children's books. Amazing money, which I have used to live off of for the last six years. All now gone. It doesn’t always feel like it, but COVID was actually a long time ago. My business plan has always been about living on borrowed time, and never quite sure if I would live to see the sunrise. These days, I’m a bit more jaded, a bit more mercenary. I would like to start making real money and have a staff and maybe have a retirement fund. I never want to go back to the corporate world ever again, working for some tinpot middle manager 25 years my junior and surrounded by button-down sociopaths. (At least the sociopaths in the publishing industry are upfront about it.) But the spirit of the cause remains. Even if I don’t make real money, fine. I’ll find a way to keep this going, one way or another. If I ever have it, I will gladly spend millions more to maintain another 30 years of amazing literary voices. It's not about me. People say my ego is out of control. But here I am giving my life for the authors, their books, their dreams, and their place in our endangered and fragile literary culture. I'm doing all this for them. Not to profit off of them, but because I believe in their voices, and I will fight to the death to make sure those voices are heard. I’ve weathered bad times before. I’ve guided this company through a multiverse of insane and unpredictable global changes. I’m going to hunker down. Our 2028 release schedule (which I should be signing now, and even now is a little late to start) might only see a couple of titles. But that's okay. This is how literature survives. You duck down low and let that pendulum swing. And maybe I don’t make it, maybe I do, maybe SFWP becomes something different, maybe it stays the same. One thing I know is that, while books aren’t magic, our literary culture is. And there will always be magicians who will keep that culture alive.
