5 questions with LittlePuss Press

LittlePuss Publisher, Casey Plett. Photo credit: Joanna Eldridge Morrissey.

For this instalment of our 5 questions with series, we interviewed Casey Plett from LittlePuss Press, a feminist press run by two trans women — Casey and Cat Fitzpatrick. Casey is the Publisher of LittlePuss Press and the author of Little Fish, A Safe Girl to Love, and A Dream of a Woman — a short story collection longlisted for the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Cat is the Editrix at LittlePuss Press, the Director of the Women’s Studies program at Rutgers University, and the author of the book of poems Glamourpuss.

Now, without further ado, let’s get to Casey’s answers to our questionnaire.

1. Tell us about LittlePuss. Where are you located and what kinds of books do you publish?

We’re located in New York City. As to what kind of books we publish: The main thing we're thinking when we take on a manuscript is, could the best version of this book exist without us? We're a two-woman operation, so we have to be very judicious about what we select. Which (and maybe this is counterintuitive, ha!) is one of the reasons we’re willing to consider incomplete manuscripts. Now and then an author without a finished book meets an editor who's the right person to help them bring that book to completion, and we hope LittlePuss can act as the latter where that makes sense. We want to publish beautiful, weird, strange, compelling books.

2. What’s the single best thing you’ve done to promote your books to readers?

That's a hard one! I might say continuing to make free of charge the ebook of Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy From Transgender Writers. It was always free in earlier iterations, and we've now made it pay-what-you-can (and we've had a number of people choose to pay — thank you!). But we've had a lot of free downloads as well as direct sales of the hard copy, and I think there's been a symbiosis there, particularly for a book that was so communally made and with such a wide trans readership: A lot of trans people are pretty broke, and the book is large enough that we couldn't set the hard copy price any lower than $30 USD, which is not cheap! I don't know if we'll be able to offer pay-what-you-can ebooks for all our titles, but we'll never charge for the ebook of Meanwhile, Elsewhere, never.

Takeaway: I think in publishing, because we operate on such slim-to-non-existent margins, that the idea of giving anything away reflexively sends us into conniptions, and I get that. But there is perhaps also something to recognizing when what you've made isn't totally affordable, and it's worth asking harder questions as to how to get more material into the hands of people. When my business partner Cat Fitzpatrick was running the poetry imprint of Topside Press, a lot of the books she made were fairly small, even for poetry, so they made the books physically smaller and with a thinner binding. You give up something that way, yes, but it also meant the price point could come down to $10, half of a normal poetry book, and I saw a lot of those books move at events and conferences. One weekend they sold 100 copies of a poetry book at the Philly Trans Health Conference. I thought that was remarkable.

I'm not saying everybody has to do that, or even that LittlePuss will start putting out poetry! But I do think it's indicative that a bit of outside-the-box thinking can be helpful when you consider other models of putting your work into the hands of readers, in a manner that, not to be too neoliberal about it, can end up as a win-win.

3. Describe the culture you’d like to foster among your colleagues, and your readers?

I have one colleague and that is Cat and we have been good friends and literary partners for about seven years. Our culture mainly involves shouting, bars, and megalomaniacal conspiracy. I can't say in good moral conscience that I recommend that to others, but maybe a better way to answer your question is regarding the people we work with outside the press — authors, booksellers, distributors, media. There I can say we just want to be low-hassle, easily reachable, and pleasant and human-like to work with. 

As for readers, I'm not sure if there's any culture I wish to foster, and I say that here both as a publisher and an author. I think reading is so personal and so heterogeneous in the factors that bring people to it, that I'd never want to hazard hopes or wishes about what a collective readership might come to. 

Sometimes I feel wary about the easy platitudes we hear in the literary world like "We read to feel less alone" or "Reading helps break down barriers." Those things can be true, but I think a lot of people read for weirder, stranger, less definable and more mysterious reasons. So again, as both publisher and author, I'd aspire to make room for those unknowns. 

LittlePuss Editrix, Cat Fitzpatrick, and Publisher, Casey Plett.

4. What topics would you like to see more often in the books you publish?

I don’t know. I think we want to be surprised. I think I would love to publish books where beforehand I was like, "Shit, I've never thought about this before."

5. What’s next for LittlePuss?

We've got a few books in the hopper that we're working on with authors, and we've got a few submissions that we're excitedly combing through. Hopefully, we'll be able to make some announcements within the next few months, but we're not going to rush anything either. One of the nice things about just starting out is that we don't exactly have a timeline to disrupt yet, ha! So we can go at our own pace when it comes to bringing these books into the world. That said, our most optimistic timeline is to have new books pubbing in Fall '22. Watch this space!

BONUS: What do you wish you had known about publishing when you were starting out?

DEAR 2016 CASEY, IT IS YOU FROM THE FUTURE HERE TO HELP YOU AS YOU BEGIN WORKING IN PUBLISHING, PLEASE CONSIDER:

1) The pit of things-to-do won't get smaller. Quit the despair, throw on some headphones, order a pizza, and start shovelling away. Just do the work, Lord knows there's enough of it.

2) Freaking out and overworking has a short shelf life and it's not like you're in air traffic control, no one's gonna get hurt if something little gets screwed up! Please know when to quit, rest, and not look at your email for the rest of the day. Take care of yourself, because the problems will still be there the next morning and the morning after that, promise.

Holding these two truths in your head at once will probably save you a few headaches and heartaches, 2016 Casey. 

Thanks Casey for taking the time to answer all of our questions.

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