Dennis James Sweeney: How to Submit: Getting Your Writing Published with Literary Magazines and Small Presses

How to Submit: Getting Your Writing Published with Literary Magazines and Small Presses – Dennis James Sweeney – New World Library – Paperback – 9781608689361 – 216 pages – $18.95 – February 25, 2025 – ebook versions available at lower prices

This book is described by its publisher as “A comprehensive guide to getting published and building a literary reputation through small presses and magazines — and taking ownership of your own publishing life.” While I am very familiar with publishing marketing lingo, I think this description, while literally accurate, actually undervalues Sweeney’s book. He does offer us much more than just a “guide to getting published.” By talking to writers as a colleague and exploring his own journey as a writer, he turns what could have been a mechanical self help guide into something much more interesting and engaging.

I’ve been on both sides of the process this book is about – as a writer submitting work for publication and more often as a publisher and editor, combing through submissions of all kinds and qualities. This book provides much more than simply guidance, tools and support for writers. In it, Sweeney personalizes what is so often a depersonalized process, and helps writers see themselves as active agents in a complex ecosystem with many levels and activities. And in many ways, he reveals the process of “submitting” one’s work as an almost spiritual practice, not just a means to an end.

All of the podcast interviews I do are unstructured and informal – I like to start without notes or an agenda and see where the conversation goes. Talking to Dennis was truly a pleasure, and I think we ended up having a wonderfully organic and interesting conversation about the independent literary world, contemporary writing, and the role of the writer in that community. Whether you  are already a published author, or a publisher or magazine that works with author submissions, this book has a great deal to offer you.

Dennis James Sweeney is a writer and teacher. His books have been published by small independent presses, including Autumn House Press, Essay Press, Ricochet Editions, and Stillhouse Press, and his writing has appeared in Ecotone, The Southern Review, Witness, and The New York Times. Sweeney lives, writes, and teaches in Amherst, Massachusetts. Author website here.

But the book here.

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Iris Jamahl Dunkle: Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb

Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb — Iris Jamahl Dunkle — University of California Press — Hardcover — 9780520395442 — 416 pages — $27.95 — October 15, 2024 — ebook versions available at lower prices.

“The new history is coming, if you dig through the archives with a new gaze.”—Iris Jamahl Dunkle

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Eric Vickrey: Season of Shattered Dreams: Postwar Baseball, the Spokane Indians, and a Tragic Bus Crash that Changed Everything

Season of Shattered Dreams: Postwar Baseball, the Spokane Indians, and a Tragic Bus Crash that Changed Everything – Eric Vickrey – Rowman & Littlefield – Hardcover – 9781538190722 – 176 pages – $34 – April 16, 2024

I am sure that most of my listeners already know that I have long been a dedicated baseball fan – at least since I was six years old and was captivated by seeing the New York Yankees play the Milwaukee Braves in the 1957 World Series on a tiny black and white television set along with my best friend at the time, Tony Grafton. As a kid, I absorbed baseball history like a sponge, reading everything I could lay my hands on and memorizing the names and statistics of all the great players who lived long before I was born. Even now, I am always attracted to reading books about baseball history, and especially stories I have not ever heard of before.

Eric Vickrey’s terrific book tells just such a story, and while it is about a terrible tragic event that almost no one today knows anything about, his storytelling brings an otherwise obscure story to life for modern readers.

On June 24, 1946, the minor league Spokane Indians baseball team’s bus crashed in Washington state’s Cascade mountains, going off the road and down into a steep ravine, killing nine players and injuring many others.

You do not need to be a baseball history nerd to be captivated by this story because Vickrey spends a considerable amount of the book outlining what happened before and after the accident and exploring the world of minor league baseball in the pre-war and early post-war era. His portraits of the people involved are compelling and based on personal interviews with family members and people who were alive at the time of the accident.

World War II completely disrupted and changed American society in many ways. It had a huge effecy on the major and minor leagues, first during the war, when so many players joined the military that baseball, while carrying on as an important form of entertainment for the folks at home, could not find enough able bodied players to keep the game alive at every level. And then after the war, with hundreds of players returning from military service, the game was suddenly crowded with players of all ages and experience. The Spokane Indians had several top prospects and former big leaguers arrive to play for them that season.

Vickrey explores the lives of three Spokane players in particular—Vic Picetti, Ben Geraghty, and Jack Lohrke—showing the impact of the war on players and their families as well as the challenges they faced in minor-league baseball, and of course, the terrible impact of the crash at the heart of the story.

Eric and I had an entertaining conversation about the players and people, and the tragedy that took place almost sixty years ago that hopefully now will no longer be a forgotten part of American baseball history.

Eric Vickrey is a lifelong baseball fan who enjoys researching and writing about the history of the game. He started as a contributor to the Society for American Baseball Research BioProject. His first book, Runnin’ Redbirds: The World Champion 1982 St. Louis Cardinals, was published by McFarland in 2023. In that book he records the story of the 1982 Cardinals from Whitey Herzog’s rebuild to the final out of the Fall Classic.

“Eric Vickrey has done tremendous research and gives us this well-written, gripping tale in remarkable detail.” — Marty Appel

Author website
Buy the book

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Jon Wlasiuk: An Alternative History of Cleveland

An Alternative History of Cleveland – Jon Wlasiuk – Illustrated by Libby Geboy – Belt Publishing – Paperback – 9781953368799 – 244 pages – paperback – $19.95 – October 15, 2024

This is a terrific book published by the very fine independent Belt Publishing (now part of Arcadia Publishing, a company that specializes in books about locales). Belt has long focused on books about the midwest, specifically the rust belt from which its name derives. One of its goals has been to dispel myths about the midwest and its places, not just for outsiders, but for the people who live there themselves who often do not realize the depth of the places they inhabit.

Jon Wlasiuk’s Alternative History of Cleveland is unusual and surprising. Based on the title of the book, I was expecting to be reading a Howard Zinn style political history of the city, but what Wlasiuk has done is to write a much more inventive, somewhat personal, and thoroughly engrossing narrative that takes us from the geological underpinnings of northast Ohio, through the comings and goings of indigenous peoples, and into the modern historic era, weaving together ecology, sociology, geography, arts and culture, to open our eyes to a place that so many have failed to fully comprehend. The theme throughout is that city and nature are thoroughly intertwined, and there are many people today working to make Cleveland a better place for people and nature to thrive together. Wlasiuk’s vision of the city and its environs is one that all of us can relate to, wherever we ourselves inhabit the earth. It’s a wonderful book I can highly recommend.

Talking with Jon about this book was rewarding and enjoyable for me – I hope you will feel the same after listening to this episode.

Jon Wlasiuk was born in northwest Ohio and earned a PhD in environmental history from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He has taught at colleges throughout the Great Lakes region, and now lives in the Slavic Village neighborhood.

Illustrator Elizabeth (Libby) Geboy was born and raised in Wisconsin, and lives in Colorado. Her illustrations translate favorite subjects in the natural world, specifically food, flora, and fauna into art.

Buy the book.
Belt Publishing

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Publishing Talks Interview with Jack David of ECW Press

I began Publishing Talks a number of years ago as a series of conversations with book industry professionals and others involved in media and technology. Most of these interviews originally involved the future of publishing, books, and culture, talking with people in the book industry about how publishing is evolving in the context of technology, culture, and economics.

Later this series broadened to include conversations to go beyond the future of publishing. In an effort to document the literary world, I’ve talked with a variety of editors, publishers and others who have been innovators and leaders in independent publishing in the past and into the present.

These conversations have been inspirational to me on many levels. I have gotten to speak with visionaries and entrepreneurs, as well as editors and publishers who have influenced and changed contemporary literature and culture. I’ve also had the opportunity to speak with a number of friends and colleagues I have met or worked with during the many years I have been in the book business.

More recently, I’ve been talking to book folks about what is going on in publishing today, quite often about the changes in marketing and promotion that have marked all media industries as social media has overwhelmed traditional media, creating an extremely complex and constantly changing environment.

One thing is certain about publishing – there are no final answers, but there are many really important questions that we should be asking all the time.

ECW is a terrific independently owned and operated Canadian publisher, now celebrating its 50th anniversary. I’ve known Jack David, one of its co-founders, for a long time. He is a really smart guy, and notably has managed (with the help of partners and a great staff) to create a thriving independent publishing business across the five decades the book business has changed the most in its history. It is decidedly difficult to be a book publisher in any time and place, but I think being commercially viable for a half century and being based in a relatively small market country with a geographical spread greater than the US makes ECW’s success even more remarkable. ECW does things its own way, to its advantage, in the long run. Unlike most publishers, they publish their own audio books. And their list is built the old fashioned way – through the enthusiasms of its editors. There is much here to be admired and learned from, not just for book publishers, but for anyone interested in media in the modern era.

Talking to Jack about books and culture is always fun. Getting to talk to him about book publishing for this podcast was and is a distinct pleasure I hope you will enjoy as much as I did.

Editor’s note: this interview runs longer than most (60 minutes)

Here is what ECW says about itself:

“ECW is Entertainment. ECW is Culture. ECW is Writing.”

Publishers Weekly recognizes ECW Press as one of the most diversified independent publishers in North America. ECW Press has published close to 1,000 books that are distributed throughout the English-speaking world and translated into dozens of languages. In the next year, we’ll release 50+ new titles and will continue to support and promote a vibrant backlist that includes poetry and fiction, pop-culture and political analysis, sports books, biography, and travel guides. Books by writers whose names you know and love — and by those who we’re very pleased to introduce for the first time. Who are we? After three decades, we still get asked about our name, those three little letters: ECW.

At first the acronym was self-descriptive: Essays on Canadian Writing (the name of the journal of literary criticism we started in 1974). But as the company grew and changed, our name, in our minds, also changed. We’ve heard the company called Essential Canadian Writing, Excellent Contemporary Writing, or, more recently, Extreme Cutting-Edge Writing. And these names have been, and still are, appropriate. But now we realize that each of those letters represents a particular strain of ECW Press’s diverse passions — Entertainment, Culture, Writing.

ECW Press

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B.A. Van Sise: On the National Language: The Poetry of America’s Endangered Tongues

On the National Language: The Poetry of America’s Endangered Tongues – B.A. Van Side – 978-0-7643-6814-1 – Hardcover – 176 pages – September 28, 2024 – $50.00 – Schiffer Publishing

“…breathtaking testimony to the demographic richness of the U.S. and the beautiful diversity of its linguistic landscape.”–Booklist  

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Oliver Radclyffe: Frighten the Horse (A Memoir)

Frighten the Horses – Oliver Radclyffe – Roxane Gay Books – 978-0-8021-6315-8 – Hardcover – 352 pages – $28.00 – September 17, 2024 – ebook versions available at lower prices

This is flat out a remarkable story told by a remarkable person. We live in a time when people are so often simply categorized into identities, as if the naming of a version of self somehow explains who a person is. Labels do not tell stories: gay, straight, queer, trans. All are too reductive to have any meaning whatsoever. Every person is a complicated being, and most of us contain multiple versions of ourselves. Sometimes those versions simply do not make sense.

Oliver Radclyffe started out life as a relatively protected and very privileged girl in England, who married a man and had four children, moved to a wealthy Connecticut suburb and had what seemed to be a perfect life. But his inner life was far from resolved and the tensions of an emerging self could not be reconciled until he eventually came out as a lesbian, risking a great deal in order to establish an identity that reflected his inner being.

But that turned out to be a way station on his ultimate journey. There was still more work he had to do before his ultimate transformation to being a man, one who is also an active parent, still learning from his children, still in the process of becoming. As we all should be.

Aside from this being an incredibly engaging story that takes place in the same town I grew up in, the courageously deep and honest sharing of his story was for me a journey toward understanding, both for the writer and for me, the reader. By exposing so much of his story and his struggles to become himself, Oliver has created what is truly an essential guide to understanding the trans experience. Even for the many of us who believe in the multitude of human identity and being need to understand as fully as possible what it actually means to be a trans person. If you are fortunate enough to have a trans person in your life, this book should be the next book you pick up.

While I am certain that every person’s story is unique and that Oliver is not a stand in for every gay or trans person, female or male, knowing so much about his ongoing journey to becoming his authentic self is incredibly valuable for others, whether we are ourselves gay, straight, trans or something else.

I can’t recommend this book enough. Go read it right now. Let me know what you think of it.

This review blurb says it all for me: “The finest literary telling of the experience of gender transition that I’ve ever read. It’s a terrific, expansive story because the focus of this warm-hearted man always returns to his children. He’s simply a wonderful parent, and that’s what keeps the reader turning the pages.”—Kate Bornstein, author of Gender Outlaw

Author website
Buy the book

Author photo by Lev Rose Water

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Publishing Talks Interview with Ken Whyte of Sutherland House

I began Publishing Talks a number of years ago as a series of conversations with book industry professionals and others involved in media and technology. Most of these interviews originally involved the future of publishing, books, and culture, talking with people in the book industry about how publishing is evolving in the context of technology, culture, and economics.

Later this series broadened to include conversations to go beyond the future of publishing. In an effort to document the literary world, I’ve talked with a variety of editors, publishers and others who have been innovators and leaders in independent publishing in the past and into the present.

These conversations have been inspirational to me on many levels. I have gotten to speak with visionaries and entrepreneurs, as well as editors and publishers who have influenced and changed contemporary literature and culture. I’ve also had the opportunity to speak with a number of friends and colleagues I have met or worked with during the many years I have been in the book business.

More recently, I’ve been talking to book folks about what is going on in publishing today, quite often about the changes in marketing and promotion that have marked all media industries as social media has overwhelmed traditional media, creating an extremely complex and constantly changing environment.

One thing is certain about publishing – there are no final answers, but there are many really important questions that we should be asking all the time.

I recently had the opportunity to (virtually) meet and talk to Kenneth (Ken) Whyte, founder and president of the Toronto based Sutherland House publishing company. I discovered Ken through his excellent and thoughtful newsletter called SHuSh, where he writes about a wide range of book industry matters as well as people and books he is connected to or has published. Ken started in journalism and magazine writing and publishing, wrote nonfiction books himself, and then started Sutherland House. One might reasonably question why any sane person would start a commercial publishing house in the current troubled media environment, but Sutherland House appears to be successful and is clearly well run and intelligently managed. I thought it would be interesting and valuable to talk to Ken about his thinking about books and publishing. He is an innovator and clearly a smart publisher who has figured out how to sell books.

We talked about a wide range of subjects and concerns that will be of interest to anyone who follows current publishing and media trends. We talked about the current state of Canadian publishing, which is simultaneously similar and very different from the US publishing scene. And we talked as well about many of the challenges and opportunities that exist for publishers and authors in Canada and the USA alike. We talked about AI and its actual uses in publishing, consolidation in retail and how publishers must navigate markets, author income issues, ebooks, book pricing, changes in the overall media landscape, and much more.

From the Sutherland House website:

At Sutherland House, we believe in the power of a distinct aesthetic, and each of our publications reflects the unique essence of our brand. From inception to launch, every title undergoes meticulous market testing to ensure its resonance with our discerning readership. All of our books are simultaneously published in both Canada and the United States, supported by robust sales and distribution channels in both countries. 

Kenneth Whyte was editor-in-chief of Saturday Night Magazine, founding editor of The National Post, editor and publisher of Maclean’s, president of Rogers Publishing, and founding president of Next Issue Canada. He is the author of The Sack of Detroit: General Motors and the End of American Enterprise and The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of Willian Randolph Hearst.

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Abraham Chang: 888 Love and the Divine Burden of Numbers

888 Love and the Divine Burden Numbers: A Novel — Abraham Chang — Flatiron Books — Hardcover — 978-1-250-91078-3 — 400 pages — $29.99 — ebook $14.99 — May 7, 2024

“You are obsessed with Robert Smith and company, Morrissey and Marr, and Gahan, and Gore. You spend hours ruminating on their obtuse Anglo references and overanalyzing their overly clever lyrics –how these pasty British men sing of a life through jangly guitars with jutted-jaw irony, and someone manage to reflect your preferred, parallel worldview: repressed, depressed, well-dressed. The chimes in ‘Pictures of You’ give you chills.”

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Publishing Talks Interview with Leah Paulos Press Shop PR

Publishing Talks began years ago as a series of conversations with book industry professionals and others involved in media and technology. Most of these interviews originally involved the future of publishing, books, and culture, talking with people in the book industry about how publishing is evolving in the context of technology, culture, and economics.

Later this series broadened to include conversations to go beyond the future of publishing. In an effort to document the literary world, I’ve talked with a variety of editors, publishers and others who have been innovators and leaders in independent publishing in the past and into the present.

These conversations have been inspirational to me on many levels. I have gotten to speak with visionaries and entrepreneurs, as well as editors and publishers who have influenced and changed contemporary literature and culture. I’ve also had the opportunity to speak with a number of friends and colleagues I have met or worked with during the many years I have been in the book business.

More recently, I’ve been talking to book folks about what is going on in publishing today, quite often about the changes in marketing and promotion that have marked all media industries as social media has overwhelmed traditional media, creating an extremely complex and constantly changing environment.

One thing is certain about publishing – there are no final answers, but there are many really important questions that we should be asking all the time.

I recently had the opportunity to (virtually) meet and talk to Leah Paulos about some of these questions. Leah is the Founder and Director of Publicity at Press Shop PR and Book Publicity School, and has worked in books and media for over 25 years. Leah has spoken on book publicity at Columbia School of Journalism, CUNY Graduate Center, and as part of her regular workshop series, Book Publicity for Literary Agents. She’s been a magazine editor and a writer, before shifting careers and becoming a book publicist in 2006. She launched her own business, Press Shop PR in 2012 and has worked on campaigns for over 300 authors since its launch, including for ON TYRANNY by Timothy Snyder, MARCH by Rep. John Lewis, and WELCOME TO THE UNIVERSE by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

In 2023, Leah launched Book Publicity School to bring professional PR support directly to authors, as so often today, book publishers require their authors to lead their own publicity efforts. With workshops and coaching programs, Book Publicity School provides authors with tools, strategies, and know-how to effectively advocate for their own work.

With an ever increasing abundance of book product in the market, every author and every publisher is desperately trying to figure out how to reach readers. Our creativity and ability to innovate are constantly being challenged. We need more conversations like this one to help spur us advance our thinking. Authors and publishers alike want to know what works, what doesn’t. And what is on the horizon. Since everything is changing all the time, the only way to keep up is to talk to as many people as possible about what they are doing and what they are observing. I hope this conversation will therefore be useful to writers, publishers, and readers as well.

Please ping me if you have any questions or ideas spurred by this discussion.

Press Shop PR website

Book Publicity School website

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