The Soft Skull Press Basics:
Soft Skull Press, a press based in New York, NY, was founded in 1993 and bought by Counterpoint Press in 2007. It publishes approximately forty titles per year, one-fourth to one-third of which are fiction. The average print run for a fiction title is 4,000.
Former publisher Richard Nash completed this profile.
Model for Soft Skull Press:
We’re an independent press doing everything we can possibly do to emulate the greatest independent press of all time, Grove Press under Barney Rosset.
Two Titles Representative of Their Fiction List:
Lydia Millet’s Oh Pure and Radiant Heart and Michelle Embree’s Manstealing for Fat Girls. The former is a hugely ambitious and serious political novel by a writer with an MFA, with a touch of fantasy; the latter a suburban comedy by a zine writer.
What They're Looking For:
All the fiction we publish is very aware of the conditions in which the book is written. They could be slice-of-life or fabulist, set in the suburbs or the inner-city, in Africa or Turkey or St. Louis, but you will find that every one of them has, for want of a better word, a Brechtian quality -- they’re aware of their own means of production, though that could be Expressionist early Brecht, didactic mid-career Brecht, or emotional narrative late Brecht.
What They Offer Writers That Commercial Presses Don't:
We'll work our asses off, no matter what happens, for as long conceivably possible. We’ll find every angle on your book to build a promotional campaign around, and we’ll be working it years after your book has been published. The process of editing, and designing, and planning, and marketing and promoting will be transparent and we will basically give you an informal publishing education.
Number One Thing Most Likely to Put Them Off a Manuscript:
Contempt for the characters (most likely clichéd LA film industry types or snobby Manhattan types).
Number One Thing Most Likely to Put Them Off a Cover Letter:
When it is clear that they’ve never read a Soft Skull book and have no idea what we’re about.
Number One Thing Most Likely to Spark Their Interest:
A sense that you get where we’re coming from and where you’re coming from.
Address for Submissions:
Fiction Editor, Soft Skull Press, 19 West 21st, Suite 1101, New York NY 10010. Direct submissions to Editorial Director Denise Oswald.
Additional Advice for Writers Interested in Submitting Work:
That it is OK to go the agent route as well as directly to the publisher but, should you do so, make sure the prospective agent is the type that has a Plan B if the big money doesn’t come through. And, if you definitely don’t want an agent (there’s no chance, let’s say, that the manuscript would fly at a corporate house), gather as much info as you can about the publisher (be it Soft Skull or some other.) You need to situate yourself culturally, understand where the publisher is positioned, where its authors are positioned -- the more you can do to clarify how you see yourself, the easier it is for the publisher to picture you as one of his or her authors.
And please please don’t represent your work as A) unique/sui generis -- all the very greatest writers understood they were part of something larger than themselves; or B) like Pynchon or Joyce or Grisham or Beckett or Woolf -- a sales rep can’t show up in a bookstore persuading the buyer at the store that you’re the next Virginia Woolf, so you shouldn’t try that either.
