Trips, Tips, and Other Press Incidents

A Journey in Three Acts

[We’ve been slowing down here over the past few months, but we’re gearing back up for the fall and will be more active again in the coming weeks. Read on for a little insight into part of the impetus for easing through summer.]

The connection between the personal and the professional is a guiding force in our press. We are working alongside our writers to build something that speaks to a larger community around us as it has also deeply shaped who we are as people and a family. The places and cultures throughout the eclectic middle spaces of our region are embedded in our own personal histories, and we love finding new voices through our growing catalog to reflect a wide range of similarly rooted visions.

This becomes especially meaningful on press trips. When I travel to various events, I often pass through or land in destinations that have great significance in my own family background. They are also becoming larger satellites of our community, which only grows more exciting as those connections keep emerging.

With the personal-professional link, though, it’s also not simple. Being away means being away—both from regularly daily press work and from my own family (including our two still-quite-young children). Juggling those things while trying to be fully present to the goals of a particular trip is an ongoing challenge, and I’ve had a fair amount of practice the past year+ of travel to keep learning. I thought it might be worth sharing some of these experiences to both help folks get more perspective about the labor that goes into this work and offer some ideas about how to make the most of literary events wherever you go.

AWP: Kansas City, MO

Back in February, the AWP conference descended upon the Lower Midwest. Lucky us, KCMO is only about 4 hours from Fort Smith, so it was an easy drive straight north. This was not only my first AWP as a publisher, but my first one ever, so I made the most of the trip on every level, besides just being excited to hang out in Kansas City (which I personally think is a pretty cool town). In many ways, it was as meaningful and exhilarating as everyone talks about; it was also just as exhausting. Running our table while also participating in a panel, an offsite event (as a reader), and hosting two other offsites was a lot for one person to manage. Yet I was continually grateful for the support of authors and friends of the press who made it somewhat easier than past trips. I’ve learned never to underestimate the value of having more than one person who knows how to use the Point-of-Sale system, for example. (Special shout-out to Gatherer author Todd Osborne for being my “plus-one” registration and running the table so much all three days. Right now, his book is 40% off for the Sealey Poetry Challenge, by the way.)

From a publisher’s perspective, I have mixed feelings about making AWP a regular installment moving forward, particularly during the more far-flung years (looking at you, Los Angeles). While there are many benefits to the experience, and I appreciate the value it has for writers, I’m continuing to evaluate how we can be more strategic with our travel and where we want to focus on leveraging our resources.

Scissortail: Ada, Oklahoma

I went to college in central Oklahoma (and later, grad school in Tulsa), so I’ve long been familiar with the annual Scissortail Festival at East Central University each April. But somehow, I think this was only the second time I’ve ever attended. It was interesting to compare the experience—a much more intimate, familiar group—with something like AWP, especially among a group with whom I share more primal ties. We were lucky to have all four Belle Point authors on the roster scheduled for the same day, so it made for a pretty fast trip on my end—also welcome after the four-day trek of Kansas City. More than many festivals I’ve witnessed, Scissortail has a casually communal environment that felt so mutually supportive. Whereas at AWP, I was thrilled to encounter a fair number of people who were at least vaguely familiar with us, Scissortail felt more like coming home. In some respects, our reputation preceded us, and many writers were eager to buy books and have longer, more meaningful conversations beyond how to get published. (This isn’t a complaint, just a reality of events that my introverted self continues to learn how to navigate)

After this experience, I hope to make Scissortail a regular part of our rotation in the years to come, especially as we continue to grow our Okie community. As natives now settled along the border, we feel a particular kinship to the place that is in many ways inextricable to our vision of the press.

That proximity also became more valuable when both our kids got sick as I was still finishing up the festival and needed to get home. Within a couple weeks, we’d all been sick, and I was still recovering when it was time to get back on the road.

New Orleans Poetry Festival (NOPF)

Talking to one of many friends in New Orleans in April, I summed up my experience of the city this way: “Every time I come here, it’s both the best time of my life and something disastrous happens.” I’ve known New Orleans intimately like that for well over half my life (my brother lived there many years), and this trip was no exception: my car broke down and required an expensive, lengthy repair. 

I’ll be honest: this trip both healed me and nearly broke me. Learning that I was essentially stranded twelve hours away from my family—on the second weekend in a month apart from them—was hard to take.

At the same time, from the moment I learned my plans had to change, I was taken care of. One poet offered a place to stay (+ temporary storage of our inventory) and became my chauffeur, while others gave advice on auto shops and paid for drinks and meals. All things considered, it was in many ways an ideal situation for also being a disaster. After determining the repair would take an entire week, I flew back home for a few days, then rented another car to drive back the following weekend to retrieve our vehicle. One plus: 35 hours alone in a car gives a lot of quiet space to think big-picture about dreams for the press (and listen to a lot of podcasts). But by the end of April, I was pretty tapped out for quite some time.

NOPF is a wonderful community and I’m grateful for how much love folks radiated to Belle Point this year. I’m also curious to find opportunities to experience other festivals and literary aspects of New Orleans/Louisiana culture as we keep growing our base around there in the coming years. Whatever that looks like from one year to the next, NOPF has a special place in my heart. Since some of the New Orleans and Oklahoma events often overlap or run close together, it’s another case of needing to work out priorities as they evolve.

Why to Prioritize Events as a Small Press

Having said all that, it’s perhaps now a little easier for me to appreciate why people frequently comment on how significant it seems for a press of our scale to be engaged with events, much less the ones that require travel. It is not for the faint of heart. Still, to a certain extent I have found some parts of these trips easier or less stressful than setting up an enormous tent + booth outside at our local farmer’s market before sunrise; to me it’s largely about focusing on the reasons for the event and managing your priorities as a small publisher. To that end, here are a few observations about why investing in events can be worthwhile if you can find the resources and energy to make them happen.

• Shake up the routine and help re-align priorities: Whatever happens, I always feel more clarity and a certain kind of energy after an event. Having space away from the daily tasks or endless administrative work can be refreshing and help reaffirm the overarching vision for why you do those things, what you’re hoping to accomplish with them.

• Get a stronger sense of relationships and the dynamics among different communities: It’s not to say that meeting people is a prerequisite to getting published, but it adds more depth to the larger picture of how individuals are part of the community you’re also contributing to. And of course, being in person lends itself to more substantial conversations than you can get from an email or a Zoom call.

• Enjoy a unique opportunity to make money (maybe): This is important. Even if it’s not the only goal, it’s a significant one. Those expenses add up fast, especially if the event attracts more browsers than buyers. (Case in point: buy books at these events!) Some larger presses see these endeavors more as marketing or networking events than profit centers, but smaller presses don’t necessarily have that kind of flexibility in their resources. For me at least, it’s a business trip, not a vacation.

How to Make the Most of Events + Other Tips for Writers and Publishers Alike

• Find creative ways to support writers: At NOPF for example, we hosted an informal party next door to the festival site one evening to celebrate Kirsten Reneau’s recent book of essays and hang out with our other authors. Even though Kirsten participated in our panel, since her book is a memoir in essays it was nice to add this more specific opportunity to share in her excitement firsthand as a new debut author.

• Plan for logistics—getting help, food & water, etc.: I am one of those people who tends to neglect these things. Figure out a plan beforehand with whoever can help you run the table or coordinate a reading, make the selling process seamless for people less familiar with your business, and buy easy snacks to have on hand while you travel (or sit at a table for 6+ hours).

• Make special/exclusive items available, offer early access: For AWP, when we learned that Todd would be helping me sell books, we made sure to finish his in time to sell at the conference even though it was two months before pub date. At Scissortail and elsewhere, we’ve also offered Rilla Askew’s Prose Series chap (a pre-order bonus with her forthcoming book, The Hungry and the Haunted) for individual sale as a limited-edition item alongside our other Prose Series installments.

• Offer a range of price points, discount incentives, etc.: This idea was actually one of the main reasons we started the Prose Series in the first place! Having small chaps available for a few dollars that also tend to catch people’s eye can be a nice way to encourage smaller purchases or add on to books they’re already buying. We also typically add discounts on purchases of a certain number of books or similar ideas to try and reduce the amount of inventory we’ll have to haul back to the car.

• Be intentional about who you’re going to see and try to talk to: Just being in the same place won’t make this automatic.

• Play to your strengths: I’m not an events person. I can do it; I enjoy parts of it. But it is simply not a skill that comes naturally to me compared to other parts of running the press. Be honest about your limitations and prioritize the things that will rejuvenate you and capitalize on what makes you most comfortable in potentially stressful settings.

• Remember the long game: Both in establishing relationships and building a larger presence in a particular community, it often takes time. If no one’s heard of you at an event one year, maybe they’ll have become a dedicated fan by the next time.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be back at it with two festivals: first Northwest Arkansas Book Fest up in Fayetteville (THIS coming Saturday, all day long!), then over to the Mississippi Book Festival in Jackson on 9/14. We can’t wait to see some of you folks there and meet new friends.

As always—especially during this quiet stretch—thanks for sticking around.