“Ain’t all buttons and charts, little albatross. You know what the first rule of flyin’ is?”—Mal Reynolds, captain of Firefly-class starship Serenity

I recently saw a Facebook discussion about small presses that are too demanding about quality despite not being able to pay pro rates, whereas pro markets just specify sub/genre and word count. As the owner, lead editor, and solo operator of an indie micro-press, here are my views:

Leaving outré formatting demands aside (which are just people being precious), there are several reasons why pro markets appear—emphasis on appear—relaxed about requirements: 1) they receive avalanches of submissions and can afford to be as choosy as they like about quality; 2) they have slush readers to winnow the bottomless piles before any editor goes near them; 3) they expect submitters to be familiar with their content requirements, pithily expressed as “Your work has to be an X work” (X = Analog/Asimov’s, Tor, Amazing Stories, etc); 4) their reputations are secure and their finances underwritten, so if they publish even scads of mediocre works it won’t dent, let alone break them.

Small presses have none of these leeways, and the concept that they must accept mediocre work unless they can afford to pay top dollar is not only dispiriting but also regressive. It’s akin to the idea that poor people should only eat lousy cheap food and it’s inappropriate for someone of their status/class to dare covet (let alone consume) delicacies. This also elides the fact that indie presses are the engines currently driving most genres.

The major issue with small presses is that they go under far more frequently that big ones (see loss underwriting, above), which leads to potentially damaging pauses in writers’ careers. But then so does being mothballed or stonewalled by a big publisher or famous agent. If a small press edits well, has solid production values, pays royalties promptly and treats its artists as adult professionals, that’s as close to optimal as it can get. Not even the largest publishing conglomerate, with semi-infinite PR resources at hand, can guarantee fame or fortune. In the end, professional-level quality-focused indies are in this brutal contest for the love of writing in its totality, from sculpting a manuscript to text ornaments.

All that said, and switching to writer mode, I’ve seen submission calls so narrow that I can guess with near-certainty whose stories will be accepted. It’s an absolutely legitimate decision to submit one’s work exclusively to pro markets—and anyone who does so quickly discovers how relaxed or outside-the-box these markets truly are. Personally, I’ve ceased submitting altogether. My fiction has never fit the edginess-du-jour model, I cannot write to spec, and my non-joiner personality, with all the unsurprising consequences, is set in granite by now.

Finally, a small related postscript: it looks frankly pathetic to see large presses declare on Amazon that “At the publisher’s request this e-book is offered DRM-free” when this is a routine choice during digital book creation—and most small presses (who, incidentally, are disproportionately hurt by piracy) have been offering their titles DRM-free from Day One.

Okay, back to hand-polishing my inches of ivory and shaping the dark.

Images: Top, small home on Oia, Santorini; bottom, The Defiant (DS9)