As a reader, I have grown over the years and one area of growth has been in consciously balancing whose books I am consuming. Due to the way big-box book stores are laid out and the way online shopping is structured, it is very easy to end up reading mostly Big Five (or Big Four now…) publications. After all, they dominate the publishing industry, so it makes sense. And they truly do publish some fabulous work and succeed commercially.

There are a wealth of small presses* that publish fabulous work, too. Just because an author is not published by Big Pub doesn’t make their work less fabulous. Small press excels at bringing lesser-known voices and debut voices to market, they can experiment with niche projects and push genre boundaries, they can focus on less commercial works to bring books to market that simply wouldn’t be published by a large publisher, and they can be stepping stone career builders for new authors. They publish different perspectives and challenge the status quo of the literary landscape.

Haruki Murakami’s quote “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking” resonates strongly with me and is the main reason why I limit reading bestsellers as a bookseller. Bestsellers don’t need my help to sell. Small press books do. And small press books offer levels of substance and content that bestsellers do not. So, when I select a book to read, I am consciously paying attention to who the publisher is and actively seek out books by small presses that can offer fresh perspectives and unique twists and a level of quirkiness not often found in large press commercial books.

For our inaugural year of Butterflies and Aliens, Saturday will be Small Press Saturday, and I look forward to introducing you to publishers and authors you may have never heard of before, and maybe you will start looking at who is publishing the books you read and step outside your reading comfort zone to try someone and something new. I hope you will check in with us next Saturday to meet our first small press in the spotlight.

Happy Reading!

– Stacey

* For simplicity in this post, I am using the phrase “small press” rather broadly to indicate any publisher that is not Big Four or a large independent.