An Interview with publisher, Ann Starr

For a course in publishing at Columbia College in Chicago, Margaret Smith chose Upper Hand Press for her final project, and interviewed publisher Ann Starr. This is a selection from her final paper. We thank her for sharing it with us!

"Ann Starr is the founder and editor of Upper Hand Press in Columbus, Ohio. She is also the author of Sounding Our Depths: The Music of Morgan Powell. She is an artist of many mediums, giving recognition to motherhood and her travels as major influences in her life and work.

Interviewer:

How did you get started in the publishing world?

Ann Starr:

I got started on a mission. A dear friend whose work I'd been reading in manuscript, who had and published in journals for years, had an "orphan"novel. The work had twice been taken up by Big Five publishers but then released because of negotiations over a second book. I'd known the novel since she'd begun work on it, and I'd always loved it and thought it wise and beautiful. I decide that I'd get the book into print myself, I felt so committed to it. I opened my press to publish One Hundred Years of Marriage. 

Not wishing to experiment on One Hundred Years of Marriage, now it its second edition, I published my own book of essays, Sounding Our Depths: The Music of Morgan Powell first. I'm glad I did that, because I learned the basics. There are errors of presentation that I learned not to make again, and I got to know my printer well. So, you see, I am a naif who plunged in and have been learning by making mistakes and taking big leaps ever since. I have little information beyond what I've needed to make the next book. I founded in late 2015, and I'm getting better with every book. I wish I could afford a staff, and I'm still some ways from profit. I fund the Press entirely from my own pocket—a part-time job, Social Security, and a small alimony. I live frugally.

Interviewer:

What is the biggest error a writer can make when it comes to submitting their work?

Starr:

I read manuscripts thinking not that it will be rejected, but that with the mindset that this is potential for my press. What I'm reading may be golden. It's like the teacher who tells the class that everyone starts with an 'A.' But I do see some big mistakes that are easily avoidable and tell me a lot. Ill-written cover letters can be a deal breaker. Errors of grammar, syntax, and spelling; unsuitable tone, especially pomposity. Evident lack of research into my press's character, or the assumption that the audience for the book will be "anyone who likes books and reading"—that is, writers who haven't thought specifically or realistically about the future of the book.

Interviewer:

Is there a book or collection, recent or from the past, that has come out that you wish Upper Hand could have gotten their hands on?

Starr:

No. Every press is defined by the editorial choices it makes. To wish I had another press's title would be to wish for something that's probably not really definitely of Upper Hand Press. There are lots of books I admire, but if I really had them, they might refocus my list. I think not only of my books, but of the family of my authors with whom I keep in touch and share news about one another's successes. They are all in relation to one another. When I choose books, I think about the ways the book and author will fit. 

Interviewer:

As a writer yourself, do you have a motto or words to live or write by?

Starr:
Don't try to be an author. Just write as well as you can.

Interviewer:

As an editor, do you have any wise words to writers?

Starr:

I can't overemphasize the importance of the first page. If it doesn't sparkle, it's heavy lifting to bring the reader along afterwards. 

Books are made of sentences. Sentences are composed of well-chosen words ordered grammatically, correctly spelled, and thoughtfully punctuated. When sentences depart from norms, the writer's reasons must be emphatically clear. Good sentences take time to write, and every one matters. Books are made of sentences and they are made of time. When any of these critical elements—good words, technical astuteness, strong sentences, or time—is missing, it's easily detected."

Announcing new titles for 2019; Thank you to our submitters

Submissions season is over for 2018. It was a boom year for submissions and I'm grateful for the number and quality of authors interested in publishing with Upper Hand Press. I tip my hat to the many who submitted their work for my consideration and my editorial board's. It is a pleasure and an honor to be entrusted with so many writers' works and ambitions in thirty-page blocks. I am never uninterested in the people who send their work. Everything we receive is full of life; work and commitment can't fail to show. So thank you to everyone who took a risk and sent their best to Upper Hand Press and my eye.

In the upcoming months, we'll be publishing three books, two by previously published authors, and one by a newcomer. On August first, we'll bring out Nick Fowler's, My Virtuous Sister. Nick wrote A Thing (or Two) About Curtis and Camilla in 2002 and it was a hit for Random House. It got reviews in places like the Times of New York and of Los Angeles and was a best seller in the United Kingdom. His new book, like his first, is set in New York City, but is a little more melancholy in tone as a younger brother seeks his beloved big sister, a rock star on hard times, in lower Manhattan. 


In December, we bring out Alice Lichtenstein's The Crime of Being. Alice comes to us from Scribner's, where she published her novel Lost, enthused over by NPR and the Time Book Review. Her earlier novel was Genius of the World, published with the late, lamented literary press, Zoland Books. In The Crime of Being, Lichtenstein cooly visits the hot territory of a hate crime's effects on juvenile perpetrator and victim, their families, the judicial system and population of the small town where it happens.

William Cass's illustrated book Sam will open 2020 for us. This exquisite story sits in a comfortable chair that children and adults will share. The story is about a young girl who lives with her mom and plays by herself and the lonely, elderly man who can see her outside his window. Their friendship is told with warmth and penetrating insight into each generation. Young readers will love it; younger children will love to hear it; any adult will be happy to give it voice. Cass is a retired elementary principal, with many literary credits in fine journals.

Keep up with our home page to see the details about these books as they are posted. It's exciting to have designers deliver us the new covers and to begin preorders. My Virtuous Sister is already up, so take a look, and be sure to visit the music website of our only rock-and-roll author: Nick Fowler's music.

--Ann Starr, Publisher

Wil Haygood, Young Adults, and Young Writers

Last night I was among the many inspired by the towering historian and journalist Wil Haygood, who was back not only in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio but in his first alma mater, East High. The 1968-’69 championship basketball and baseball teams of East, composed all of black players in years of civil rights upheavals locally and nationally, are the subject of his book, Tigerland, which he launched on this joyous occasion.

 

Wil Haygood at the University of Vermont

Haygood brought many members of those extraordinary teams back for the occasion, and the stories of their teenaged struggles and triumphs were the meat of his generous, uplifting presentation. He stood as tall and square-shouldered as a basketball hero, but spoke as a preacher, with arm lifted and finger pointed heavenward as, time and again, he addressed Students. If Students need inspiration; if they need models; if they wonder how to proceed in life; if Students seek goals, then they can look to these men who in their youths filled with hardships and scant of resources, made their ways through discipline and courage to excellence and high achievement in adulthood.

I praise Haygood not even for his humble focus on others—so becoming in a man whose list of honors for his many books (including The Butler) and his long career at the Boston Globe and Washington Post recommend him to every reader and citizen. He persisted in pounding home the centrality of supporting high school students. He praised the youths who begat the excellent men assembled in the front row, calling for their coaches, families, and teachers to rise from the crowd and be recognized.

Best of all for me, a publisher, he made a point of asking students to come forward with their questions after his talk, even though none had dared enter the long line of adults waiting for the microphone. Two young women stepped up and asked intelligent questions focused on how Haygood broke into publishing.

Tigerland is a deeply researched book about how teenagers made it; the endings are necessarily multiple, complex, and in different keys.

Haygood didn’t write Tigerland for a YA market, but for a fully human one, that includes teens who will become adults. As the topic of Haygood’s book and very presence suggested, his book can inspire teens who want to write as adults about human experience—who write not as teens, but as aspiring adults, like the young women who took the mic to engage with him.

By reading widely in all literature and nonfiction, young writers can learn their craft; from their teachers and by taking the opportunities to hear writers like Haygood in their communities, they can find inspiration and practical knowledge to help them to their goals. We publishers too have a role in the advancement of young writers, by not assuming we publish content for limited ideas of supposed “teen level” or “teen taste,” but by aspiring for youth when we choose and market books that inspire next year's writers.

A New Service for Self-Publishers

Upper Hand Press is adding an imprint. You may have seen it already on Facebook or Twitter; its webpage will be coming soon.

Kensington Place Books will serve the needs of a kind of writer whose work we often see but can't accommodate. These are people who offer good books for publication, but whose ultimate goals are to publish a book rather than to build a career as a writer. 

For these authors, self-publishing is probably the best course. 

Are you writing an intimate memoir; writing a family history; organizing a volume of poetry for limited distribution? Are you in a writing group that wishes to publish a volume of work; an educational institution that would like to do an anthology of student writing? These are the clients we anticipate serving.

Our designer is John Hubbard, who designs catalogues for museums and art galleries around the world, and whose work has been awarded by the Art Libraries Society of North America. He is designing a standard layout and a standard cover into which an author's artwork can be placed. His design features excellent typography integrated with the client's art. This arrangement offers the writer a world-class design at greatly reduced cost.

Upper Hand Press's long-standing connections offer printing in any quantity, ebooks, warehousing and distribution with Baker & Taylor, Amazon, and Ingram if needed.

Best of all, there's no dashboard. After the initial inquiry, everything is handled personally with our publisher/editor, Ann Starr, who will answer all your questions and guide you through the process to just the book you want.

If you think this may be the way to publish for you or for someone you know, contact Ann Starr either through a message on the KENSINGTON PLACE BOOKS Facebook Page, or through the message box at Upper Hand Press.

Take a look at our model cover. The title is made-up, but the design is not. This lettering and layout will sit atop the author's photo or art; or, Hubbard can produce an entirely new design.

BEST SELLERS and READERSHIP

The book business is more complicated than my beginner’s enthusiasm permitted me to imagine in 2014. Enthusiasm, that bane of the 18^th century (“What can we reason, but from what we know?”) does indeed invite flights of reckless optimism. If there are boulders in the road and a learning curve that would dizzy a gymkhana contestant, well, “Love will find a way,” my inner Eubie Blake retorted to my entrenched Alexander Pope.

However arduous or silly the process of learning by doing continues to be for me, one big thing has been indisputable from the start: Everyone in publishing wants a best seller. Certainly the author does: Fame and fortune should reward the years of dedication and craft sparked by fire in the belly. The printer is eager to keep the presses rolling. The distributor’s bottom line is to move as much merchandise as possible to bookstores and retailers who are eager to sell, sell, sell!

And the publisher obviously wants to turn out best sellers, right? If an Upper Hand Press title sells millions, the income will secure an immediate future in which I can expand my press and its reputation. Even one best seller will boost sales of all the books on our list; it will attract the attention of authors who may not have previously considered publishing here.

A best seller for one of my authors could reassure all my authors that I’m working overtime to support their efforts. Best sellers reflect not only the literary skills, but the nigh-full-time commitment to promotion by the authors themselves. But it requires successful, well-focused and well-funded marketing on the publisher’s part. Reaching influential reviewers and publicity-generators; making best use of industry-only sources; keeping up with the industry through conferences, newsletters, new products; selling to libraries and book clubs—these are the unpaid tip of the marketing iceberg, the part I can presently afford, even if I am deficient in time to execute.

Upper Hand Press is self-funded by this publisher-staff-of-one. Marketing budget comes after production budget, which leaves little to spend. (For the authors, marketing costs to supplement what the Press provides are as great as they feel they can invest.)

For established large publishing house with well-funded, dedicated advertising budgets, the possibility for creating a best seller is substantial, sometimes from even modest literary material. Add full-page ads in prominent media, signs and promotional items, pop-up ads on Internet sites, access to appearances on major media, and long-standing relationships with taste-makers, and one is on the way.

So it is that best-selling books are unlikely to have the imprints of small, independent presses. The promotion budget comes after the costs of book production are met. For me, promotion is the pursuit of reviews from low-cost and free opportunities, entering relevant competitions, and creating connections for individual titles and for the Press. What’s left to budget for paid advertising is not much once the designers, typesetters, printers, and distributors are paid. Persuasive prose is our most useful marketing tool.

The question remains, though, whether making best sellers is the ultimate goal? About this I write for myself alone in answering that it is not. I would be overjoyed were an Upper Hand title to become a best-seller, but I don’t believe that by selling millions I’d feel that the mission of my press or that my personal mission was necessarily accomplished.

As an editor I look for material that invites the reader to engage deeply with the writer—I am a matchmaker between writers I believe in and the readers they long for and deserve. I choose the authors to publish, the ones I believe will endure by virtue of their literary skill and significant themes.  While I understand readers’ love of stories about romance, adventure, speculative pasts or futures, my love is in invitations to stretch the mind and explore our humanity, whatever form those come in. I just look for books that don’t end with the last page.

Read the reviews: Excellent, unique, convincing books are published all the time by publishers large and small. They win awards from learned bodies with acute judges, and they receive the highest praise from the most thoughtful reviewers. What their sales are, though, one can only guess. The reviews help, no doubt, but reviews alone don’t make best sellers. Big budgets are the bedrock. It’s likely that you’ll get sales commensurate to what you pay. But the world is ennobled, enlightened, and advanced by all the authors that small, independent presses bring to us in small editions, whatever their business models.

Developing readership is an uphill task for a small, independent press in a world of readers and writers that loves best sellers. Upper Hand books are currently finding readers our authors are writing for, but there are many more we want to reach. I know we will find them with constant and steady--and someday expensive--promotion. But the dream of the best seller is a dream of winning the lottery; a dream of winning something for no more effort than a wish, and we all know that things don’t work that way without laboring masses and pots of money behind the curtain we'd like to pretend isn't there.

Diversity is a Knotted, Uncomfortable Thing

Educators, parents, librarians, and young readers are asking us publishers for more diversity titles for the "young adult" and "YA/crossover" markets. The United States is no longer (if it ever was) a nation of Dicks and Janes, blue-eyed kids in single-family houses with picket-fenced yards. Contemporary readers want books to reflect America's polyglot demographics and dreams. Young readers (and their adults especially) expect books to reflect diverse life in a complex society, with characters linked to their own neighborhoods and to global issues alike.

I'm unaware if there are any unfavorable reviews of diversity titles now on the market. The eagerness for this content tends to make diversity itself the topic, illustrated by the story. But as with any revolution, we won't know its effects until a few years hence: Which books will have become classics? Which will have been forgotten? Will books focused on current expressions of diversity feel as helpful to readers in ten years? Will the stories hold up as natural and true? These are the questions that arise with the energetic impulses of any new movement, literary or social. To Kill a Mockingbird is now "diversity literature." It hardly needs to be. It was a great literary novel and humane document before, and it will survive as both however it is used in a moment.

By next September, Upper Hand Press will have two "young adult/crossover" titles, both of which could be entries into the diversity market. If anyone chooses them for that reason, I'd be honored and I think the authors, Rhonda G. Williams and Nicholas H. Bradley, would be too. 

In both, the protagonists are children: in The Naming of Girl (2016), it's a nine-year-old girl; in Rickie Trujillo (2017), a high school boy. The moving narratives transcend the limits of any reader's prejudices about appeal of stories about kids. In both books, the language is natural, sophisticated, and undiluted; the protagonists' challenges are with the natures of their fully-described, lived-in worlds. 

Each book seems quite to fit into the diversity environment. Each has a vivid "minority" protagonist fighting adverse circumstances; each needs allies where there seems to be none; each has to use limited knowledge of the world and a brutalized sense of justice to fight for self-definition and survival.

But neither Girl Brown nor Rickie Trujillo really has a good chance despite all their efforts. The odds are against them in their impoverished, bleak worlds that don't nurture children. Children have weak advocates and are left to fight with all they have against opponents they can't beat.

The Naming of Girl is a gothic novel, Rhonda Williams reminds us: It's the nature of that genre that all the characters are damaged people who have to live with their flaws and the effects of those flaws upon one another. But within that context, Girl Brown lives in a real world. The setting is a South Arkansas backwater in which we see rural poverty as it is almost never represented in contemporary literature. 

Ignorance, poverty, and the greed that attends them are as much characters as the people. And the people in Girl's world are her guardians who are a Viet Nam amputee and mean drunk, and his drug-addict girlfriend. They also house a mentally disabled adult man, nine-year-old Girl's best friend. Girl is bullied by three vicious little boys egged on by her guardian. Her guardian puts a black teenager in the hospital after beating him up; the black boy's mother is the only civilized person in Girl's life. You want diversity? That's just the beginning.

The Naming of Girl is not about diversity, though. Diversity is the nature of Girl's world. Poverty, racism, retardation, drug addiction, and mean ignorance make "diversity" a very complex concept. All are intertwined, all reinforce and magnify one another. Girl is not fighting a single person or prejudice; the world is indeed against her and her strength is manifested in her fight on all fronts with only nine-year-old will to live.

Rickie Trujillo, a YA/crossover novel, is grittily realistic——based on a real character, in fact. But, as in The Naming of Girl, diversity is neither a single issue nor the point. The characters are all teenage boys living in the East San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles, many the children of undocumented Mexicans. As in The Naming of Girl, though, poverty, racism, juvenile crime, the failure of adult care and mentoring, and the impotence of dreams are as active enemies as rival crews of taggers and neighborhood gangs. But diversity? This is a novel for our moment of concern with Hispanic youth, urban poverty, and juvenile crime. Again, all of these issues aggregate and won't be teased into easy morals or examples.

Neither Rhonda Williams nor Nicholas Bradley rewards the reader with a simple conclusion for their protagonist. For each child, life is crushing. Do these books meet the diversity goal of reflecting diverse realities? Of course they do; alas they do. Are they uplifting? Yes. 

I chose these books to publish because each is complex and loving with its hard truths. Each is on the side of the angels, and each teaches the reader about the difficulty of remaining there, especially with a child's insufficient resources. Both of these novels should make us humble as adults; both remind young adults about the legitimacy of anger and the importance of strategy.

Race, lovelessness, vicious role models, poverty, ignorance, abandonment, experiencing or witnessing abuse: It is a diverse world, rarely packaged neatly. 

The Naming of Girl and Rickie Trujillo are two brilliant novels for adults and teens alike to learn from and grow with.

Julianne Buchsbaum has died

                           Goodbye fine rain falling,

Goodbye idea of the good. Outside,

                          daylight is blue against spruce trees

and a dead girl lives again in your memory

--Julianne Buchsbaum, "Phantoms of Utopia," A Little Night Comes, 2005

2017

Julie Buchsbaum agreed in 2014 to be a member of the editorial board of my brand new press. She was, in her always modest way, proud to be asked, and we hoped that it would give her a center and focus to help her weary mind. She agreed because of our fast friendship, though she had her doubts. Lyme disease, from which she'd already been suffering acutely and painfully for several years had undermined her ability to concentrate or write, to think, to muster the energy to walk her tiny companion, the beloved dog Gilbert, whom she carefully tucked into his seatbelt whenever they drove out to buy groceries. She was living in a little house in Lawrence, Kansas, where she had been a librarian at the University, receiving medical care from doctors untutored in the treatment of Lyme, and living on disability.

When I met Julie in 2002, we were both underemployed artists and thinkers at Kenyon College in Ohio. The poet (a Paul Engle Fellow from the Michener Foundation at the Iowa Writer's Workshop) had become a computer-competent librarian to feed herself, and we'd laugh (what else to do?) about her days spent "crawling under the desks of rude English professors to fix their computer problems." I was then a visual artist who had lectured at to the British Society of the History of Medicine, at that point having my fingers slapped by my former-elementary-school-teacher supervisor at the library circulation desk when I made mistakes. 

Julie and I were displaced persons, mutual admirers, and instant soul-mates. We often met at the little bar next to the laundromat to drink (beer for the Milwaukee native, liquor for me) and spend long evenings laughing over the absurdity of our lives there. We'd imagine our liberations. She pursued hers. She bought a Honda Rebel motorcycle and rode her intellectual and spiritual restlessness to the University of Missouri, where she became a G. Ellsworth Huggins Fellow and earned her PhD in English. 

Julianne Buchsbaum published three volumes of poetry in her 47 years. Slowly, Slowly, Horses was her first, from Ausable Press in 2001. I read it when we met and it was part of our love. Her powers of observation were so acute as to be almost a burden, and her bravery in seeing whatever there was acquainted her reader with the junk and bruises of the world in ways that raised them to the spiritual. 

During the years we were separated she published A Little Night Comes, Del Sol Press, 2005. Her last poetry was The Apothecary's Daughter, Penguin, 2011. The Apothecary's Heir was a National Poetry Series winner, chosen by Lucie Brock-Broido. I was delighted to review this mesmerizing book in my blog, Starr Review, in 2012.

Brock-Brodio's citation said, "The Apothecary's Heir, is riddled with 'venom and wonder,' heavy with the freight of mystery and magical thinking. This is a world where a branch 'is deranging the air,' where flies 'burgeon' in a 'broth of gold light.'...The poems are elixirs."

In April, 2017, Upper Hand Press will publish its first poetry, Ann Cefola's remarkable dual-narrative work, Free Ferry, a book fine poetry connected both to ancient myth and to the science of the atom bomb. I am very proud that Cefola's book is the inaugural volume of my press's Booktree Poetry Series, named in Julianne Buchsbaum's honor. Free Ferry is particularly suitable: Julie, having studied classics, philosophy, and the history of science—all in depth—would have delighted in breadth of interest and in the fine language.

I depended on her living to receive a copy and to rejoice with her and Ann together. I am heartbroken. 

If you read Buchbaum's poetry, think of what I strive for at Upper Hand Press; for what is fine and penetrating in thought, perception, language, and insight.

Ann Starr