5ish Questions with Laura Paul of Asterism Books

Can a new distribution model be better for readers, writers, and publishers?

Laura Paul is a writer published in The Brooklyn Rail, Los Angeles Review of Books, minor literature[s], The Comics Journal, Tarpaulin Sky Magazine, Dream Pop Journal, Pangyrus, and other outlets. Her work has been exhibited at the Armory Center for the Arts, Open Space for Arts and Community, Other Places Art Fair, LA Zine Fair, and West Hollywood Book Fair. She's been selected for workshops at the 2019 Omnidawn Poetry Conference, the 2023 Community of Writers Summer Poetry Program, and to read her work at the 2024 New Orleans Poetry Festival. She lives in Seattle, where she works as a publisher and book distributor for Sublunary Editions and Asterism Books. To find out more, visit: laurapaulwriter.com

As I've detailed elsewhere, and I think you've seen, my contention is that SPD was bad for small press literary publishing. And your organization at Asterism really jumps out to me as one of the few, if only, viable alternatives that I've seen in my nearly 20 years in the literary world. So what is Asterism and why did you start it? 

Asterism started when Josh Rothes of Sublunary Editions joined together with five other presses—Andrew Wilt of 11:11 Press, Jesi Bender of Kernpunkt Press, Jacob Smullyan of Sagging Meniscus, John Trefry of Inside the Castle, and Rainer J. Hanshe of Contra Mundum Press. Originally, it was a website that could act as a central login for booksellers with the presses doing their own shipping. It came about because small presses who were either too small to be with SPD or never considered it because of the financial barrier to get into SPD needed other options. Sublunary Editions was briefly with SPD but the numbers didn’t make sense. SPD was taking in a significant amount of money by charging presses fees. Some presses we’ve talked to said they regularly lost money by distributing through them.

It seems like SPD’s financial model came about because independent publishers didn't really have a lot of distribution alternatives. Asterism was relaunched about a year ago with warehousing and fullfillment as a partnership with Phil Bevis, publisher of Chatwin Books and owner of the bookstore Arundel Books here in Seattle.

And so what is Asterism? It’s a distributor. We do wholesale to bookstores, libraries, and museums, and direct-to-consumer. Anyone with an internet connection, a mailing address, and a credit card can order our books.

We have a cool roster of publishers that has grown really organically. I focus on marketing and outreach and have recruited new presses. Our books have been bought by over 200 bookstores worldwide, like Powell's, McNally Jackson, Strand, Elliott Bay Books in Seattle, Alienated Majesty in Austin, TX, and Skylight Books in LA. Last year we shipped books to over 40 countries.

Besides the bookstores who order from Asterism, our direct sales to readers are part of our strong suit. Our website is a lot more user-friendly, with a better user interface, than SPD or other distributors.

Besides being a writer, I have a master's degree in media studies from UCLA. So I’ve always been really interested in how to pull books into the 21st century. I feel like so many of the conversations in decades prior have been like: Oh, technology is this enemy of books, rather than seeing how new technology or tools can be used for readers and writers. That’s where I've had a lot of fun experimenting with what I can do with my role at Asterism. It's basic I guess, but even just doing a lot of outreach on social media, whether it's about Asterism in general or about a title coming out from one of our presses, we have data that shows that’s how we get a lot of sales to our website.

Because we're using our own website, we're not funneling everything through Amazon or Bookshop.org. That means we have our own data. That's a hidden treasure we offer. There's a lot of value in that. And maybe going to what you experienced as an author prior, as a company we’re able to have more awareness of what our books are doing because of our data. We're also able to empower our presses and our authors to know what's going on with their books.

Basically, we're trying to make it as transparent as possible. If you're an author or a press making cool books and people are buying them, we feel like you should be able to access the information that shows what's going on with them.

That leads directly into my next question. You have this stated approach where you're rethinking many of the assumptions behind book distribution in general, but especially small press book distribution, and you've started talking about that. So what are those assumptions and how are you rethinking them? 

Oh my God. I will talk to you for years like an evangelical going out trying to shift ways of thinking and deeply held paradigms. If I have a conversation with people, they're like, poetry never sells, it'll never make money, there's no market for it. I'm like, I’m not a capitalist, I’m just trying to find a structure to distribute and enjoy people's books and build audiences for them, but it's weird.

I really like to press people on that: why do you think people don't read poetry? Do you think there's something inherent in it that it’s this flawed, rejected, faulty form?

I don't think that's it. I absolutely don't think that's it. I think it goes into huge issues with the history of publishing in the U.S. It's a cultural thing. U.S. poetry has largely been tied to publishing instead of something like oral traditions or performing poetry with music. I think it's really important to look at global literature and remember that.

I had an argument at AWP this year with another small press publisher, and she was just adamant: there's no money in this, it'll never work, all this stuff. I think that's where I really believe in building different structures. What I’m trying to do with my role in Asterism is: let's find ways to do a healthy exchange of people's work and not have them be economically exploited for it. Let’s get people the funds to sustain publishing their books. Let’s gather audiences for writers too. 

I think going back to SPD—and I don't want to sound like I'm pro-business or boo on non-profits. We need a thriving ecosystem of a lot of different structures. But I do think now in the fallout, if SPD was relying on philanthropy as a nonprofit to run a distribution company, it actually didn’t have as much incentive to get the books circulating. It relied on donations and charging the presses fees.

What Josh and I talk about all the time in regard to Asterism’s structure as a business is that we want to be motivated to get your books to people. And what’s funny is a little bit before the SPD fallout, but especially in the last week, is that people kept coming to me being like, how do I donate to Asterism? People were like, I want to give you guys money, and it's like…

Buy a book.

Yes. That's awesome. We want you to have books! We want our writers to have readers and be supported in their creative endeavors! I think that's also one of the missing keys at this moment. In the digital space, things have gotten really fragmented. People are really frustrated that you don't have the normal venues where there's a pre-existing audience or, you know, the metaphor of there's a stage. If you go on stage, you might want people in the chairs. I think the scramble people are trying to figure out in this moment is how do we find audiences? How do we gather community? How do we group readers and writers together? We want to be in conversation with each other, and I'm passionate about that. I want to figure that out.

Yeah, that's one of the many spiels that I have.

That resonates a lot with me. I mean, again, plus one to like the idea that there should be a range of different organization structures. But one of the things that I found working in and with 501c3 is that your product can become divorced from the revenue or money. And so it's surprisingly easy to get mission drift. At Les Figues, we talked about that a lot in part because we would go after these grants. And very few grants out there just give you money to publish and that’s it. And so you have to do something else. And it was always this tightrope to make those grants work so that we could get the money and work the publication within that project. But without having mission drift.

And this is an aside that we don't necessarily need to go down, but one of my thoughts that I've had is that SPD was created in a time where functionally its purpose was for aspiring professors to get their first and second books technically distributed so that they could qualify for tenure and the books could be available at campus bookstores for classes. And the point was less about whether any of the books actually got sold in the more open, traditional book market, at least in the way that it’s important now where a higher and higher percentage of these writers exist outside of the academy.

So now the community has grown, and the percent of writers in the community receiving or even going after tenure track jobs has changed. 

It has fascinating implications. I'm 36. I think some of it's generational. For a lot of my friends who are around my age and younger, it's like, well, the system has been so busted for so long. The structures didn’t really grow to accommodate the expansion of the MFA students and writers and just a larger population in general. All these digital possibilities are more exciting to me than a time when people were like, Oh, you just have to publish to get a job.

I think for some people my generation and younger, we're like, well, then why would you bother doing a print run if no one's going to read it? Why don't you publish it online? Or, if you don't care about making money, then why don't you make badass PDFs and distribute them for free?

I’m not saying oh, everything should go digital, but I think it makes sense with older generations that if it wasn't available as a book or in journal form, it wasn’t as real. At the time, it's not like you had this vast array of ways you could experiment with writing quite as much as we do with digital technology.

So one other question I want to get into that you touched on earlier. First, a little background. When I interacted with SPD in the past both as a publisher and bookseller, one of my frustrations was just how out of date all of their systems were. I don't know everything that happened behind the scenes on their end. So I don't want to make presumptions about what was going on, but how it felt on my end in both of those roles that I was working with an organization that hadn't updated its system in decades.

And that's how it felt. Whether or not it was true, that's functionally how it was on the receiving end. But at Asterism, you seem very proud of the advanced software systems, data, and general 21st century platform that you're building. Without giving up anything that you’d consider the “secret sauce”, what are some of those and how do they help you and your publishers build distribution, build an audience? 

A lot of it is economic and I don't know SPD’s choices, you know, they've been around for over 50 years. I don't know their history in and out. So I can't speak to that. 

For Asterism, Josh Rothes, who is the co-founder, is a computer programmer by trade. He was programming for the Seattle Times. And so this is economic. Trying to hire out programmers can be very expensive, but he had that skill already.

So I guess I'm already speculating with SPD. I don't know if they just didn't see that as something they had the money for, but it can be really expensive to get top-of-the-line tech support.

It was interesting how it happened, it almost feels like luck. Like I mentioned, I have a degree in media studies from UCLA. I used to work in film and television. I have years of experience in media, arts programming, and writing communities. Without being too boisterous, Josh and I both have pretty valuable skill sets that can be quite expensive to hire out. After Asterism was relaunched and I saw what they were trying to do, I was like, oh, I want to be part of this. I knew I could help.

I’m fascinated by digital technology. I've been watching these things. I've been thinking about them for a long time. I've been wanting to integrate books and writers and readers better into this space. But I think if a company had been trying to hire people out for that, they might not have been able to afford what Josh and I have been able to bring together.

So I guess that's the secret, but it also just feels like luck or fate or chance, besides all the hard work we put in. I guess it's also a testament to writers. We all have different skill sets, and we have other talents besides writing. I’m also very into empowering people, believing that each person has something to contribute. We need all these things. Writing and books need the full gamut of skills and jobs and experience that people have to offer, and it's very helpful.

Yes, plus one. One of the things I'm going to write about is the challenge of small presses finding people who can do everything, because you have to wear so many hats. And how rare it is that someone can wear that many hats.

I mean, this may be obvious, but that has been our strength at Asterism because it grew organically. I mean, it's maybe not rare at all, but we take on a publisher, and they'd tell their friend who they had published, and that friend, you know, had published another friend. The OG crew of Asterism was pretty connected in with one another. When I came on, I brought people I knew into the catalog.

And I think because we were bringing people together, it's much easier to skill-share and knowledge-share. And some of what we did is basic. We started a Slack workspace, and every Asterism publisher is invited. So if they have a question about printing rates or they need graphic design help, we can share that stuff in-house without anyone being like, Oh shoot, how do I hire this out? I think it’s a really important thing to trade labor and make it more cost-effective for our publishers. Protecting each other and learning from each other’s mistakes.

Oh, that's really great. I would have killed for something like that when I was at Les Figues. We had email networks, but it's just not that same as being communally chat-based. There’s more community. You don't feel like you have to ask a specific person and impose on them directly. You can just post a question and whoever knows and has the capacity at the time to help can just pop in.

It’s likely to be a strength as we scale up because we are a small staff. Our publishers are awesome, and if other publishers have questions while they're onboarding a lot of folks have already said they’d be happy to take them under their wing.

You mentioned already that there is a robust and exciting market for small press literature, especially poetry, but it's also obviously a niche market, right? And one key aspect of these books, these writers, these publishers, and just the community in general is that the focus really is on the book's conversation, its quality, and its literary or political value rather than its economic value. 

There's a great interview in Chicago Review between Hilary Plum and Matvei Yankelevich where they set out the economic differences between the big five and midsize and small press publishing worlds. That’s the philosophical and economic backdrop of what I’m thinking about here. There’s totally different goals and systems within the larger world of writing and publishing.

And so how do you approach building a distribution model that obviously has the goal of selling as many books as possible, and thus provides the necessary economic support for these writers and presses, while also staying true to the literary and political goals of your presses?

Some of this is more specific to me and my role. One thing though, is that Asterism has been growing since the start. I don't see this as this uphill battle of how do we desperately get people to buy this? So I’m starting there as the temperature check.

I can talk a little bit more personally because a lot of my motivation is coming out of the pandemic, and just how terrible things are in general. Obviously, we care about selling books and getting them to the right readers, but from my standpoint, I'm like, what can I give a writer at any point in time?

And that doesn't always have to be money, right? People have been so discouraged and had so many hardships over the years. It's, like, well, even if I give someone my attention, that is actually really important to their career or to even their week, you know, if they haven't been acknowledged for their work or they haven't felt plugged in. I know that's the “softer” and more interpersonal stuff, but I think the way things have been run, especially with competition models and award models, people have been neglected for so long. It's really torn writers apart and it's just so toxic to creative endeavors. I guess that’s more the community side for me than just promoting books.

Part of it's also a philosophy of mine that was shaped by my time in film and television. Big corporate publishing so frequently thinks of pre-existing audiences. They have this imagined idea of YA–that it makes money. It's like: Oh, this is YA for girls 12-18 years old, or something. And they imagine this group and then they want to funnel books into that demographic. 

Conversely, my philosophy has always been creator first. If a person is moved to write something and they put all this effort into creating something, then I find an audience for that work. It's not the other way around.

Brenda Hillman's a hero of mine, and she has a line in her most recent book [In a Few Minutes Before Later] that's so beautiful, and it's like, “all a writer needs are four true readers & one of them can be a tree.” So I will acknowledge there are some books in our catalog where I'm like, this book might be for a tree and the author’s three closest friends.

When we started, we had a lot of smaller presses that not a lot of folks had heard of, so it was really fun because people love the discovery of something new. I put a ton of work into getting those books in front of more people. It had momentum because I could tell people why they were so exciting to me. Small presses are always going to catch a wider array of writers. You know, more working-class folks, more people of color, more queer, more non-binary, more women writers. More experimental work. I have this AOC/Bernie Sanders approach to books and book audiences.

I'm like, no, we don't just need wealthy white women. Corporate publishing seems to see them as the only demographic that buys books essentially, and what’s deemed literature in particular. No, that's not the only demographic. Every group of people has a literature and deserves one. I believe if a person can read, there is a book for them. We don't need money only from, you know, wealthy white women buying books. If we can bring books to the rest of the folks, we have something pretty cool going on.

So I think it's just disgusting to me that corporate publishing has neglected, and despised people in general, of classes that they didn't see as worth literature or creative writing. I guess that's my soapbox. I'm just like, there are books for every person. I’m trying to widen that. I want a literature for the rest of us.

I encourage you to support Asterism Books and all of their publishers, and become one of Laura Paul’s readers.

And if you’re a publisher or writer who has been impacted in any way by SPD’s closure or wants to talk about possible paths forward, please message me using the button below.