Behind the Scenes at Terrapin Books

 

I was recently invited to do a Q&A with someone who planned to do an article about small press publishers who specialize in poetry books. I don't know why but the article never came to fruition. Rather than waste my work, I've decided to post it here. I hope it might prove informative and useful.

 

1. How do you determine who to publish?

I run two open readings per year. From the submissions, I select 2-4 manuscripts for publication. I select the ones I like best. I like to get a range of styles and voices and a diversity of poets. But my main guide is the quality of the work. I also consider if the work fits the press. I don’t take experimental poetry or single form collections (i.e., it’s unlikely that I’d take a collection of all sonnets or all haiku or all ekphrastic poems). I ask that a good number of the poems have been previously published and I limit the number of poems previously published in chapbooks to six.

2. How many manuscripts do you receive yearly?

This is a question I like to avoid answering. If it’s a high number, some poets will feel discouraged from submitting. If it’s a low number, some poets will feel that the press is not sufficiently competitive. So I’ll just say that we get a good number of submissions and that number increases each reading period and the quality of the submissions gets better and better. I do not run any contests at Terrapin. I like to think that each of my poets is a winner.

 

3. Can you share details of a normal agreement? 

Terrapin offers publication within a year of acceptance, an annual royalty,  6” x 9” books with printed spine. I provide each poet with 15 complimentary review copies. Authors also get a 50% discount off list price if they choose to order additional copies to sell on their own. I require that my authors have a dedicated website and belong to Facebook. I expect the poets to actively seek readings and other opportunities to promote their work. I also stipulate that they not publish a new book with a different press within a year of publication of the Terrapin book.

 

When I was starting Terrapin Books, I contacted several other publishers of small presses. Several of them were kind enough to share their contracts with me. I then created my own contract which I describe as “standard and fair.”

 

4. What sort of royalties do authors normally get? 

I pay an annual royalty of 15% of net sales. To qualify for a royalty payment, a poet must sell a minimum of 15 books in a given year.

 

5. Why might an author choose to work with a press like yours versus a similar press?

I typically respond within a month of submission. If accepted, the book gets published within a year. My poets don’t grow old waiting for publication. I carefully edit each accepted manuscript and work closely with each poet. I try to accommodate requests and to keep the poets happy. I respond quickly to emails. Poets are invited to participate in the design of the cover, though final decisions are left to me. I like to think of the entire process as a collaborative one.

 

6. Can you talk a bit about how you market the work for your authors?

I promote on Twitter and Facebook. I provide each poet with a list of suggested promotion tips. I also provide them with a list of after-publication contests they can submit to. If I know about readings in their part of the country, I pass on that information. I keep a list of reviewers and reach out to them to try to get some reviews for each book. I keep a Terrapin website where each poet gets a book page and an entry in the bookstore.

 

7. What do they normally have to do in terms of marketing?

I ask poets to send out an email announcement when their book is available for pre-orders and again when the book is published. I ask the poets to include purchase links in that note. And I ask them to send the announcement to an extensive list of friends, relatives, and neighbors—in short, everyone they know. You never know who might buy a book. I also ask my poets to post links on their website to reviews and to include excerpts from those reviews. I ask them to do the same on Facebook and Twitter. I ask them to send out review copies to journals they’ve published in. I ask them to line up readings. I suggest that they throw themselves a launch party. Every new book deserves a party.

 

8. Are you open to working with new authors, or are you mostly looking for established authors?

I love working with new poets and am happy to have several debut collections. Of the four poets I selected from the last open reading period, three of them have debut collections with Terrapin. But I’m also happy to work with older poets who sometimes feel that they are overlooked by other presses. In fact, I’m happy to work with new and established poets. Again, the quality of the work is the primary consideration.

 

9. How many copies do you usually expect to sell per book?


I aim for 500 but am happy with 300. Now that I can make the books available for pre-orders, I’m finding that the number of sales has gone up.

 

10. Is there anything else we should know about how you support your authors?

I give personalized service throughout the process. And I do not forget about my poets once their book has been published. Also I’ve recently started a new series, the Redux series. This series is limited to poets with a previous title with Terrapin, one that has done well. My original intention was to do one book only per poet, but a number of my poets asked for this new opportunity. I hope that means that they enjoyed working with me and are happy to be part of the Terrapin family of poets.

 

Anniversary for Terrapin Books

Turtle in Party Outfit

This month marks the 4th anniversary of Terrapin Books and we're celebrating! Back in 2015 I decided to open a small press for poetry books. Getting started involved a lot of work and new learning, but I approached it one day at a time and kept telling myself I could do it. I practiced my personal mantra: Patience and Persistence.

I first did all the business stuff that had to be done—formed an LLC, obtained an FEIN and a state ID, opened a business account at the bank, registered a domain name, built a website, researched printing options, and opened an Ingram account. Then came the biggest challenge—learning how to format a book.

I needed help along the way so when I needed it, I reached out and asked. Everyone I asked for help seemed happy to provide it. By January 2016 I was ready to put out my first call for submissions. That first book was the anthology, The Doll Collection. I took those first submissions by email, but have since joined Submittable.

In spite of the amount of work involved, I’ve never regretted opening the press. In fact, I love the work. It is a huge source of satisfaction to have built and launched the press, and it’s a joy to publish books for poets.

Since opening, Terrapin Books has published 19 poetry books with two more in progress:

Neil Carpathios, Confessions of a Captured Angel
Lynne Knight, The Persistence of Longing
Jessica de Koninck, Cutting Room
Christine Stewart-Nunez, Bluewords Greening
Patricia Clark, The Canopy
Carolyn Miller, Route 66 and Its Sorrows
Susanna Lang, Travel Notes from the River Styx
Hayden Saunier, How to Wear This Body
Michelle Menting, Leaves Surface Like Skin
Karen Paul Holmes, No Such Thing as Distance
Geraldine Connolly, Aileron
Michael T. Young, The Infinite Doctrine of Water
Lisa Bellamy, The Northway
Paige Riehl, Suspension
Gary J. Whitehead, Strange What Rises
Ann Fisher-Wirth, The Bones of Winter Birds
Sarah Wetzel, The Davids Inside David
David Graham, The Honey of Earth
Kory Wells, Sugar Fix
Dion O’Reilly, Ghost Dogs (forthcoming)
Ann Keniston, Somatic (forthcoming)


We’ve also published 3 anthologies:
The Doll Collection, ed. Diane Lockward
The Book of Donuts, eds. Jason Lee Brown and Shanie Latham
A Constellation of Kisses, ed, Diane Lockward

and 3 craft books:
The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop
The Crafty Poet II: A Portable Workshop
The Practicing Poet: Writing Beyond the Basics

Terrapin poets have received some wonderful recognition for their books and poems. This, too, is a great source of satisfaction. Our poets have been featured on Poetry Daily, The Writer's Almanac, Verse Daily, The Missouri Review, Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry, and Tracy K. Smith's podcast series The Slowdown.

Our books have been reviewed in a number of publications, including The Chattahoochee Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, American Poetry Journal, Broadkill Review, Rain Taxi Review of Books,  Mom Egg Review, Sabotage, Pedestal Magazine, New Letters, Pleiades, Compulsive Reader, The Collagist, Connotation Press, Rhino Poetry, Whale Road Review, The Adirondack Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Poet Lore, and The Literary Review.

Our books have also been adopted as course texts at such institutions as Bucks County Community College, Colorado State University, Washington & Lee University, Missouri State University, and Grand Valley State University.

Our books and our poets have also received some nice awards:

Lisa Bellamy won a 2018 Pushcart Prize for "Wild Pansy," from The Northway.
Michael T. Young’s book, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was named to the long list of finalists for the 2018 Julie Suk Prize.
Christine Stewart-Nunez’s book, Bluewords Greening, received the 2018 Whirling Prize from Etchings Press.
Patricia Clark’s book, The Canopy, received the 2018 Book Award from the Poetry Society of Virginia.
Michelle Menting’s book, Leaves Surface Like Skin, was named a 2017 finalist by Foreword Reviews in its annual book contest.
Lynne Knight’s book, The Persistence of Longing, was a finalist for the 2016 Northern California Book Award in Poetry.

We even have a state Poet Laureate among our poets! Christine Stewart-Nunez has recently been appointed Poet Laureate of South Dakota; her term began July 1, 2019.

Terrapin looks forward to continuing to publish beautiful poetry books. We hold two open reading periods each year. Our next open reading period will be January 24 - February 29, 2020. Guidelines are posted at the website. Perhaps you’ll join our list of poets?

From Manuscript to Book: Editing and Revising

All manuscripts accepted for publication by Terrapin Books are carefully edited. Several months before I plan to publish the book, I send instructions to the poet on how to prepare the manuscript for editing. I then go through the manuscript and mark it up with red comments. I send it back to the poet who then makes the fixes and returns the manuscript to me.

Typically, we go back and forth a few times, negotiating, discussing, agreeing, disagreeing, and eventually arriving at the final version of the manuscript. (Well, not quite final as there are invariably some additional errors that reveal themselves once the book is formatted and returned to the poet for proofreading.)

Following is a Q&A I conducted with Michael T. Young about the editing and revising process we engaged in with his forthcoming book, The Infinite Doctrine of Water. It should give you a good behind-the-scenes peek at what goes into book production at Terrapin Books.


Diane:  I recall that when I accepted your manuscript I right away suggested a structural change, that is, I suggested that your three sections become five. Do you recall why I made that suggestion? How did you implement it and to what effect? How difficult was it to make that change?

Michael:  Yes, I recall you felt the poems were dense and thought-provoking and, consequently, that some extra space could help them. This change made sense to me since I intend my poems to be thought-provoking. Grouping them into shorter sections would provide greater thematic focus and, at the same time, more intervals in which the reader could digest all they elicit.

I tackled the restructuring by rereading the whole collection and looking for additional thematic arcs within each section. Given that the original first two sections were rather long and the final section rather short, I focused on those first two sections. It was somewhat easy to break these into four sections with coherent thematic arcs. The first section was the easiest, requiring no shuffling of the poems. The other three new sections required a little tinkering with the order of poems both within and across sections to give them coherence. This was also influenced by the need to reorder poems from the final section which had an abundance of poems with water imagery. Moving those poems across the other three prior sections helped create connections across sections and filled in gaps within sections that were wanting. The process was somewhat slow since every reshuffling required I reread entire sections and try to hear both the individual pieces and how the whole related.


Diane:  Early on I was also concerned about your overuse of light images and the repetition of the word light. Were you aware of the excess when you assembled the collection? How did you go about fixing this? How did those edits change the manuscript?

Michael:  I’ve always had a penchant for light and related images. Even my previous two collections have an abundance of such images. When one is publishing individual poems in journals this is, of course, not an issue. It’s only an issue when assembling a collection.

I employed a number of approaches to handle the abundance of light references and light images in The Infinite Doctrine of Water. In some instances, I moved a poem to a different location to soften its resonance with other poems that had similar imagery. In some instances, I changed a word or simply deleted it. In still other instances I changed the word light or an image of light to darkness or some related image that was opposite. These changes resulted in a more dynamic relationship among all the poems in the book, even those that use light images. As Donald Justice wrote, “To shine is to be surrounded by the dark.”


Diane:  Point of view was another issue. I noticed an excessive reliance on first person I. Tell us how you addressed this point of view issue. How did the changes you made affect the collection?

Michael:  This abundance wasn’t as difficult to correct as the use of light. A few of the poems were in first person in only a minor way. That is, a few of them had a first person pronoun in only one sentence but the rest of the poem made no direct reference to the speaker. Removing the single first person pronoun from these poems was rather easy. This, combined with reshuffling some of the other second and third person poems from the final section throughout the rest of the collection, provided for a balance the collection didn’t have in its original form. I was very grateful to rework this aspect of the book through the editing process.


Diane:  I also made editorial suggestions for a number of individual poems. What kinds of changes did I suggest? Were you always agreeable? Give us a few examples of poems that were revised during this process of preparing your manuscript for book form.

Michael:  Suggested changes ranged from comma insertions and stanza breaks to changes of diction and a few line deletions. I wasn’t always amenable to changes. For instance, with the poem “Sage.” This poem contained the word light and you suggested it be removed and another word used. But I felt any alternatives I came up with didn’t say exactly what needed to be said or failed rhythmically to keep with the tone of the poem. It was one of the few that I didn’t change.

But there were a number of good changes made. For instance, in “Close Reading,” we changed the word skirred to skirted. Although skirred was the more precise word, it is unfamiliar and likely to have been read as a typo by readers. This was something you pointed out and I thought it was a reasonable assumption. So the change seemed a good one.

A few concluding lines were removed altogether, as in the poems “Setting Fires” and “Paperclip.” Both these poems were afflicted by my old habit of providing the reader with a kind of summation which dampened what was otherwise a strong poem. Removing such summations allowed the poems to resolve in a strong image.


Diane:  Your original title was Turpentine. I recall saying that while I very much liked the poem from which that title was taken, I didn’t think it fit or did enough work for the collection. I suggested several other possibilities. What made you choose The Infinite Doctrine of Water?

Michael:  The Infinite Doctrine of Water was another title I had been considering. In fact, when I prepare manuscripts for submission, I often prepare both a full-length collection and a chapbook to send to publishers. In preparing the chapbook which corresponded to this full-length collection, I was using the title The Infinite Doctrine of Water for that chapbook.

Like light, water also is a very important image to me and moves throughout all my poetry. So the change was really an easy one. In fact, as soon as we changed it and were, at the same time, in the midst of revising and reordering, it became immediately obvious that “The Voice of Water” was the ideal final poem for the collection, when originally it was earlier in the final section. Additionally, would it be too much to say that as soon as we changed the title, ideas for the book cover flooded my mind? For all these reasons, the title change seemed immediately right.



Michael T. Young is the author of two previous poetry collections, The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost (Poets Wear Prada, 2014) and Transcriptions of Daylight (Rattapallax Press, 2000). He is also the author of the chapbooks, Living in the Counterpoint (Finishing Line Press, 2013), winner of the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award, and Because the Wind Has Questions (Somers Rocks Press, 1997). His work has been published in such journals as Cimarron Review, The Cortland Review, Little Patuxent Review, Potomac Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. He is a past recipient of a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and has been featured on Verse Daily.


Michael’s book, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, will be released on April 1. It is now available for
Pre-orders.

Terrapin Books Is Open for Submissions

I am happy to announce that my poetry press, Terrapin Books, is currently open for submissions of full-length poetry manuscripts. Please note that our submission period closes on February 28, 2018.

Be sure to read our Guidelines before submitting. Please note that we request both a bio and a descriptive statement with your submission. Be sure to include both. Most questions are answered in our FAQs, so be sure to read that page also.

Our Guidelines ask for a manuscript of approximately 40-55 poems for a book of approximately 90-110 pages (count includes poems, front and back matter, and section pages). Please note that your book will be longer than your manuscript. If you have 40-55 poems, go ahead and submit. Let us worry about book length.

Here's some general information about the press:

We publish only poetry books, primarily single-author collections but also an occasional craft book or anthology.

Terrapin Books is committed to publishing outstanding books of poetry by outstanding poets. We intend to fully support our poets. We will edit your manuscript and work with you on revisions. We expect our poets to actively engage in promoting their books. We require our poets to maintain a dedicated website and to be a member of Facebook.

Our books are 6 x 9, paperback, perfect bound, color cover, with printed spine (poet's name, title, press).

We are committed to publishing accepted titles within six months of acceptance. We do not maintain a long list of books-in-waiting.

We offer a standard contract, a generous number of author copies, a substantial discount on additional copies purchased by the author, and an annual royalty payment.

We are the proud publisher of collections by Neil Carpathios, Lynne Knight, Christine Stewart-Nunez, Jessica de Koninck, Carolyn Miller, Patricia Clark, Susanna Lang, Hayden Saunier, Michelle Menting, and Karen Paul Holmes. We look forward to books by Geraldine Connolly (March) and Michael T. Young (April).

We welcome submissions from poets at any stage in their career. Some of our poets have a long publication history with multiple books. A few of our poets have two books out. And we are very proud to be the publisher of two debut collections.

We look forward to reading your work.

April Feature for Poetry Month

Beginning on Tuesday, April 2, I will be posting features for new poetry books. One every other day. Each feature will include the publication information, a book description, a blurb, a cover image linked to Amazon, a sample poem from the book, and additional links to poems from the book.

I hope you'll check out these new books and support the poets and their small press publishers. Treat yourself to a handful of new poetry collections. Is there any better way to celebrate National Poetry Month? Is there any better way to stimulate your own writing?