Small Press SFF Might Sometimes Be Harder to Find — But It’s More Than Worth the Effort

One of the most interesting books I read this year, I read two weeks ago because of a post on Bluesky that I just happened to see. The book had come out in August, but I didn’t hear of it until the last week of November. Because of an assignment, I spent months this year searching for science fiction new releases, combing through various websites and resources, asking for recommendations, talking to other readers and writers. Still, it was the random luck of social media that brought North Continent Ribbon into my awareness.

Ever since then, I’ve been thinking about small presses, and how we do—or don’t—find their books. They aren’t always on bookstore shelves. They don’t get the media attention many major publishers’ releases do. Distribution is a huge issue, and maybe more pressing than ever in the wake of Small Press Distribution’s closure. Many small presses can’t afford to spring for inclusion on some of the (not cheap) sites that other bigger presses use to reach booksellers and reviewers, like Edelweiss and NetGalley. Awards nominations are a matter of awareness: if nominators don’t know about the books, they’re not talking about them or writing them on those all-important little ballot lines.

Small presses are in some ways facing a version of the same thing any book publisher is: nearly vanished books coverage in major media, endless competition for everyone’s eyeballs, the vagaries of trends, the limits of distribution, the foibles of that one retail website I wish we never had to talk about again. But they’re doing it with smaller staffs and fewer resources. They are the classic underdog, and I feel like SFF readers could do a little more rooting for them. It’ll take a little effort on our part. It’s effort well worth making.

First, a word about terms. If there is a firm definition of what constitutes a small press, I don’t know what it is, and I don’t know that anyone could get people to agree on it anyway. To my mind, a small press is always independent, but an independent publisher is not necessarily a small press. Self-publishing is its own thing, different from small press publishing. The term “micropress” has also come up, and the best I can do in terms of defining small vs. micro is that micro tends to be a single person, and small more than one. But I do not know the number of staff at most presses! So I’m using small to cover presses that range from Stelliform (one person) to Tachyon (no idea; definitely more than one). Forgive the imprecision.

There are a few smaller presses I think are moderately well-known among SFF readers. Tachyon is one; they’ve been around since the 1990s and have had books on plenty of awards lists. You might know Subterranean as the publisher of special editions, but they also publish original work. Small Beer Press published Kelly Link’s first collections, and so many other excellent books as well.

There’s so much more out there to find. There’s Neon Hemlock, the publisher of North Continent Ribbon, which publishes “speculative fiction, rad zines and queer chapbooks.” There’s Tenebrous Press, which published Dehiscent, a slim little novella I haven’t been able to get out of my head. Meerkat published The Ragpicker, about which Kerstin Hall had a lot of very good things to say. ECW published Premee Mohamed’s The Annual Migration of Clouds and Suzan Palumbo’s Countess (about which Alex Brown had many good things to say). There’s Stelliform, which published the winner of the 2023 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, Arborealtiy. There’s Atthis Arts, Undertow, Rosarium, Aqueduct, Luna Press, Psychopomp. There are so many more I’ve not yet heard of.

Anyone who reads small press work will cite their own favorites. And because the world is so wide, and publishing so specific, and distribution so complicated, you may or may not have heard of them. It’ll take more work to find their books, maybe. But it’s also kind of fun. If you have a certain kind of temperament—the kind that liked hunting down obscure albums in the pre-internet age, say—it may be a familiar sort of work. It is the work of trying to find art outside the larger corporate sphere. 

(This is not to say anything against art published within the larger corporate sphere—where there are also, always, authors who don’t get the support they need or the visibility they deserve. But the two things are often quite different, for authors and for readers.)

Part of the reason it takes more work is the matter of distribution, which is complex and virtually impossible to distill into a brief paragraph, and also entirely possible to be wrong about, because there are so many different ways it works. Distribution is how a publisher’s books get to you. Big publishers have their own distribution networks, but one way or the other, the book has to get from press to retailer to you (or directly to you, if a press sells straight to readers). Where things get complicated is in terms of discounts (which is how the retailer makes its money) and returnability (most books can be returned, but sometimes not) and more. When Small Press Distribution closed, it threw a wrench in the works for a lot of small presses. 

Other distributors, like Asterism, have stepped up to try to fill that space, and other options, like IPG and Consortium, already existed. But it is still, generally,  less likely that you will find a small press book on your local bookstore’s shelves—or at your library. Most indie stores will special order them for you, a service you should absolutely use if you feel so inclined. You can absolutely request your library carry a small press book. Both of these things are really good for the books, all told.

First you have to know they exist.

I have not always been great at finding small press books, for what I hope is a relatable reason: there are so many books to read. I am not lacking for reading material and I probably never will be. But I do care about this whole fraught complex system of smaller-scale publishing, and lesser-known authors, and making sure that I’m not just reading books published by massive multinational corporations. So I asked two people who are really up on small press work for their suggestions about how to go about finding and keeping tabs on it. 

Alex Brown said something that I hadn’t thought of at all: “I find most of the small press publishers I read through short speculative fiction. Many short spec fic authors pop up in anthologies and collections from small presses.”

Alex writes a monthly Short Fiction Spotlight, which is absolutely full of good places to start on this front. If you tend to read mostly novels and novellas (as I do), this is an excellent shortcut. A cheat sheet, in the best possible way. Alex also says, “Following authors and small presses on social media is another way I find them, because they often share announcements for each other.”

Watching authors cheerlead for each other is, I think, one of the great joys of social media, which is itself a powerful tool for small presses—and for finding their work. Conversations like the one I mentioned at the start of this column are invaluable. If an author you like mentions a book you haven’t heard of, published by a press you aren’t familiar with, why not go look them up? 

I also asked Tobias Carroll, who puts together regular posts about small press speculative fiction, where he finds the books he includes. He has a lot of tactics, including keeping a running list of interesting-sounding upcoming books that he sees mentioned online, keeping another list of presses with active “upcoming releases” pages, tracking distributors’ pages, and checking in on various publishers’ websites to see what’s new.

This is not to say that every reader ought to be doing every one of these things—though if you have favorite presses, by all means keep tabs on them!—but both Toby and Alex’s answers demonstrate that there is no single, simple answer to “How do I find great small press SFF?” There are a million more answers than these, and I’d love to hear yours! 

I think, overall, the first thing you’ll need is curiosity. The second thing you’ll need is a willingness to look around—to find small-press readers and writers on social media, to figure out who’s doing the work that you’re most interested in, and then to keep paying attention. It has always taken more legwork to find the artists working outside of the best-known systems. It has always been worth it.