The rejection letter is a rite of passage every writer must endure: Rip open the envelope from a publisher only to read, “Thank you for your submission but it’s not what we’re looking for at this time.”
Columbia author Karen Petit knows the feeling.
“It’s hard to even get your story a fair read,” she says.
It was especially hard for Petit because she was pitching a series of books, not a single volume. She writes a children’s series about a crime-solving canine named Ivy and her “Shandon’s Ivy League” of animal sleuths.
Luckily for Petit, another local writer stepped in to save the day. Bob Lamb, who teaches creative writing at USC, offered to publish Petit’s series with Red Letter Press, a small publishing operation he started in 1998 to publish stories by his students.
The Mystery of the Screecher Creature was published last fall, and the second book in the series, The Mystery at Foggy Bottom Lake, was released on May 17. It’s a small victory for all good writers who face long odds when dealing with the big publishing houses.
“New talent can’t get in,” Lamb says. “The big publishers are only interested in big-name writers, celebrity biographies, scandal or whatever, and that’s it.”
In focusing on money-making formulas to the exclusion of new talent, the publishing industry parallels the worlds of movies and music where independent films and musicians have bypassed the major studios and record labels to get their work to the people via the Internet, guerilla marketing and independent distributors.
Lamb is using similar tactics with Red Letter Press, and so far it’s working. The Mystery of the Screecher Creature is in its fourth printing, and the third book in the series will be released in the fall. Petit is busy working on the fourth.
“I always wanted to write a story that would inspire young people to enjoy reading as much as I did,” she says. “Red Letter Press has made that possible, and now children across the country and Canada are reading the series.”
What began as a device to provide classroom material for Lamb’s students is now a full-fledged independent press. This month, Lamb will publish King’s Highway, the debut novel by James D. McCallister, a Columbia writer who also owns Loose Lucy’s in Five Points.
“Bob said he wanted to start this press because he loved writing, loved working with writers, and that was good enough for me,” McCallister says. “I’m much more interested in the art form, much more so than coming up with some high-concept, money machine of a story. So Bob and I make a good team in that sense.”
McCallister’s novel is about a 19-year-old college student who goes to Myrtle Beach to party away his troubles, only to have things go from bad to worse. A big music fan, McCallister named each chapter after a song from Warren Zevon’s Excitable Boy, an album that came out the year in which the novel is set, 1978.
In addition to his creative writing class, Lamb teaches an American literature class and a magazine writing course. He is a former reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and his first novel, Striking Out, was nominated for the PEN/Hemingway award in 1991. His second novel was published in 1998.
He sees Red Letter Press and others like it as a natural response to the stifling of talent by the big houses of corporate publishing.
“When art has such a hard time getting a fair shot, there’s something wrong,” he says. “That’s why you’re seeing the rise of the small press … I figure if I just break even, I’ve had fun and done something gratifying.”
And if more good writers get published, it’s better still.
“That’s why I named it Red Letter Press,” Lamb says. “It’s a red-letter day when you see your name in print.”
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