Editor Interview: Red Hen Press

Outsiders

Copper Canyon, Graywolf, Coffee House, New Directions

Anne Carson, Italo Calvino, Ursula K. LeGuin, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Marguerite Duras, Percival Everett, C.D. Wright, Lydia Davis.

We do not publish writers who have made it by being New York insiders or insiders of any kind. We focus on a level of mastery with creative work as our primary criteria for publication.

Know what we publish and ask yourself if you belong in the Red Hen tribe and being willing to promote your book. Ask not what your publisher can do for your book, but what you can do for it. It's your baby, now our baby, but still first your baby.

Professional, articulate, and with a list of people who will support/blurb the book. Very good work that stands out and isn't simply well crafted but actually says something.

They send work we don't publish, they send too much at once, they send it in 14 point font or just a crazy font, but primarily, they don't do their homework. Clearly, they would walk into a bar and say, "Would anybody marry me?" forgetting that it's wise to know the person you're going to spend the next few years with even if it's a starter marriage.

We like a one page query letter with previous publication and what the author would do to promote the book. We like to publish books that there is a market for.

I can tell in the first few pages.

We have a meeting with the publisher, marketing associate and me, the managing editor and the publisher has to sign off. The marketing associate prepares a report about the marketability of the book. Sometimes it isn't very marketable and we go for it anyway, but we have a sense of the initial print run at that meeting.

I carry around an iPad and it has all the submissions on it for a first read. If I fall in love, we get a hard copy, so I have a couple hard copies also. As I write this, I am in Chicago to do a meeting with our sales reps. I have 20 manuscripts with me between the iPad and my laptop case which also has all the essentials for this trip. I just brought the laptop bag and my purse because I travel lightly and let manuscripts take precedence over stuff like clothing. I am constantly reading manuscripts and then other books so that I can think about what is being published. Reading is my life.