Randy White - Small Literary Press Workshop - January 8th

How to get your writing from notebook to a bookstore’s shelf.

We will briefly examine the background of small literary presses and how they differ from self-publishing including some currently significant small independent literary presses, such as Copper Canyon and Blue Oak Press, and the small press relationship to the mainstream publishing industry. An overview of how small presses are founded, funded, and staffed including the value of a website and a social media presence will also be discussed.

We will also inform participants on how manuscripts are chosen, as well as what a publisher expects from and offers to an author including author rights, royalties, and renumerations. The editorial process of revising and sequencing a manuscript, and cover design will be touched upon as well as interior design, typography, the printing process, and proofing. Finally we will discuss doing literary readings and media interviews, and aquiring blurbs (testimonials about your book) and the marketing and distribution of a book including working with Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and other mass distribution outlets for books.

Randy White is the managing editor and publisher of Blue Oak Press which published two notable books in 2019: Karst Mountain Will Bloom by Pos Moua, and Coyote Logic by Lisa Dominguez Abraham. They Rise Like A Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets is forthcoming in 2020. Formerly an Acquisitions Editor at Dustbooks and a book design manager at ISI Press. He has also been sponsored to lecture on writing by Poets & Writers Inc. and gives literary readings at universities and venues across the nation. He currently serves on the board of directors of the Sierra College Press.

Besides being the author of Blood Transparencies (which was nominated for a 2016 Pulitzer Prize ) and Motherlode/La Veta Madre, he was awarded the Bazzanella Literary Award for both poetry and short fiction. His work has appeared in the Range of Light Anthology, From These Hills: Stories and Poems of The American West, Sulfur, News From Native California and other magazines.

Currently, he is preparing American Mahabharata, a compilation of the last forty-five years of his writing, for publication.

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