Articles by Steve Semken

Blog post by Katharine Hale I went through a lot of different phases of deciding what I wanted to be when I grew up. When I was in elementary school, I went through the usual rotation of ballerina, veterinarian, and teacher, with the slightly more unique zookeeper thrown in. As I reached my tween years, […]

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Our column in Publishers Weekly http://publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/soapbox/article/69567-ever-try-to-sell-a-book-it-s-not-easy.html   Ever Try to Sell a Book? It’s Not Easy An independent publisher faces retail customers By Steven Semken | Mar 04, 2016 As an independent book publisher for the past 24 years, I’m often asked to participate in Small Business Saturday, that counterpart to Black Friday and Cyber […]

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Introducing our latest intern Adam Jaschen. A few of his thoughts on publishing. I grew up surrounded by musicians, and it always felt like a beat was present, either in the air or in the way the people around me moved, worked, and spoke. To me, the beat was a unifying principle, an agreed-upon structure […]

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Meet out new publishing intern, Samantha Futhey. This past April, I attended the Association of Writers and Publishers conference in Minneapolis, representing Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment as their poetry editor. The book fair overwhelmed me in its impressive presentation of printed books and magazines piled high on tables of over 800 journals, university […]

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AUTHOR’S NOTE: For the uninitiated, a contributor copy is a free or reduced price volume provided to an author whose work appears in that volume. If you’ve just opened your Writer’s Market, those italicized cc‘s next to the various listings refer to contributor copies that a given publication provides to an author they published. My […]

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by Stefanie Brook Trout and Taylor Brorby The word anthology comes from the Greek anthologia, meaning a “flower collection,” and each essay, story, and poem in an anthology is like a flower in a carefully tended garden. Anthologists, like good gardeners, cultivate, weed, and select using a discerning eye. They know what they like, what […]

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I run my own blog now, and recently I wrote a little series about show, don’t tell. Most writers have heard that phrase before but struggle to understand what it means. Here is the introduction of my series. If you want to read my original post, click here. You can learn more about show, don’t tell […]

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A tiny year-in-review blog post for 2014. This year several changes to the press occurred, primarily, for the first time I had interns, who each in their own way did wonderful and remarkable tasks: editing, organizing an entire anthology, planning events, some marketing, read submissions, and much more. Each intern truly made me appear much […]

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