The Ebb of Harbor Mountain Press

IAM very proud of what we did. Twenty years ago I moved to Vermont with my librarian partner and our two young children, leaving California bliss with no clear vision of what I would do “for money.” Then I was given adjunct work—something I couldn’t find in the PhD-rich Bay Area—and I started a magazine, Across Borders: An International Literary Annual. We published Saadi Youssef, Mahdi Issa al-Saqr, Shakir Mustafa, Sinan Antoon, Ana Merino, Sohrab Sepehri, Haale Gafori, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Ilya Kaminsky, Philippe Tapon, David Updike, Andrea Cohen, José Emilio Pacheco, Patricia Glinton-Meicholas, Ronald Bayes, Tom Zoellner, and others. It wasn’t my first experience with a magazine: Fresh out of college and graduate school, I had helped create two others, Writers’ Bloc (Ohio) and

Lame Duck (Brooklyn, New York, and San Francisco). Taking turns as “publisher” seemed what a writer should do to help the community.

Richard Simonds, who published my first book of poems, These Are My Shoes (Boz Publications, 1991), liked the look and feel of Across Borders and offered to back me if I turned the concept into a nonprofit press. Leaving Provincetown Harbor one summer, I returned to Vermont and observed the field grass waving in the wind below Mount Ascutney. I was drawn to low tides as much as to mountain peak experiences. This high-low dynamic—its Sisyphean context— seemed appropriate for a name. Harbor Mountain Press was born with the help of an earnest three-person board and a lawyer. Initially we attempted to publish six titles a year on a $60,000 annual budget. Approaching our fourteenth year, however, we were publishing a single title with a budget way under $10,000. We had rent to pay, vendors to support, and what minor stipend I told Richard I needed was washing away. A decade and a half into it, I suppose I was feeling more defeated than such a good thing should make a person feel. We’d done amazing work.

In the arts we do more with less, and maybe this characteristic doesn’t help us to achieve the quantity of effect we wish to see. I always believed in that one reader. Maybe I wanted just one big review, or one prize, to let us know our books were being received.

Time magazine gave us a fantastic review of Sinan Antoon’s The Baghdad Blues (2007). We were the first to publish Antoon’s poems in a single volume in English. With Mario Suško we won a grant from Croatia to publish a unique anthology of contemporary

Croatian poetry. While we could afford to publish only small print runs, the singular surviving beauty of these volumes causes the heart to surge. I feel the pain, writing this. We feel again, when we’re in the presence of a book like no other. In the book’s absence we are left to make our own connections from a map of instinct and memory.

Like kids to camp, our books went to Ireland, Italy, India, Cambodia, Croatia, Sweden, Canada, the U.K., Spain, France, Denmark, New Zealand, the Bahamas, Cuba. Endorsements were written by Mark Doty—for David Oliveira’s gorgeous A Little Travel Story (2008)—and Robert Hass, for Alice B. Fogel’s Be That Empty: Apologia for Air (2007). Norman MacAfee, one of the translators of the trade edition of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, essentially quantified a century in an opera about class, race, justice in One Class: Selected Poems, 1965–2008 (2008). While in Havana I met Wendy Guerra—then little known in her country—and within a year Harbor Mountain produced one of the most alluring volumes I’ve ever beheld, A Cage Within (2013), with gifted translator Elizabeth Polli. Melville House later published some of these poems in Revolution Sunday, which was reviewed in the New York Times. Grace Paley, who lived up the road, wrote a foreword to a reissue of Robert Nichols’s Address to the Smaller Animals, and I was proud. Diana Whitney’s Wanting It went through seven printings. Ruth Dickey’s first full-length book, Mud Blooms, was the first winner of our contest, which we established in 2019, and those two words, mud and blooms, germinated hope. We read at New York City’s Ear Inn, celebrated in Chinatown, and saw some of our authors go on to larger publishers.

Among my favorite tasks in making a book is matching textual emotion with a cover artist and its surrounding design. A sole publisher is lucky to find an efficient and flexible graphic designer. We hired at least three of these, each one improving on the last. We avoided big-city prices, but readers often noticed the look of our books, usually with a standout “ribbon” crossing the bottom of each spine. A couple of times artwork came from insistent poets, understandably, and I had to agree: Molly Brosnan, for example, covering her father Michael Brosnan’s The Sovereignty of the Accidental (2018). One artist who contributed several covers—Jan Clausen’s If You Like Difficulty (2007), Elena Georgiou’s Rhapsody of the Naked Immigrants (2009)—was Harley Francis, a painter and stamp artist from Indiana, Oberlin, and Guerneville, California. (If you’re looking for an American Matisse, Harley’s your artist.) Just as I had with Across Borders, by grace and asking, our covers also featured art from Félix de la Concha, Bennett Bean, Bob Henry, Sarah Lutz, Julia Jensen, Lauren McIntosh, Bob Stang, Louise Victor, Georgina Forbes, Gregory Albright, Peter Brooke, Mat Doyle, Susan Osgood, Ernest Montenegro, John

While we could afford to publish only small print runs,

the singular surviving beauty of these volumes causes the heart

to surge.

I feel the pain,

writing this.

PETER MONEY is the former publisher of Harbor Mountain Press and the author of the novel Oh When the Saints (Liberties Press, 2019), American Drone: New & Select

Poems (Harbor Mountain Press, 2013), and the spoken-word album Blue Square (Pax Recordings, 2008). He performs with the poetry band Los Lorcas. His website is petermoney.com.

Abrahamsen, and Lucia Vernarelli. Many of these artists agreed to lend their artwork to Harbor Mountain Press, with only small remuneration, because they felt what we were doing mattered. Bob Henry, partner of Selina Trieff, famously studied with Hans Hofmann. Sinan Antoon found the remarkable Mohammed Al Shammarey in Iraq. In a way, we were curating a gallery, too.

In most of these cases it was art that brought each reader to the text. It was line or shape and color that started to pull the shirt sleeve and opened the hands. It was the eyes that saw or the ears that needed listening, the mind that would want to harbor the words, the lengths of mountains that held the promise to propel us into new space— safe or on a precipice.

They weigh heavy in our hands, now, these books—most of which are paperback. I was lucky: After hiring a high-end printer and bindery in Michigan for the first two years, I found the best fit in Minneapolis. I worked with kind, talented, people— including intern Lenore DeCerce and book designer Andrew MillerBrown—and our press’s board included two constant supporters, the poet and singer Partridge Boswell and the intuitive Michelle Ollie.

If Harbor Mountain Press failed, I have to believe it was in poetry’s hands. We thought word of mouth would spawn readers and reviewers; we put the hope of awards and international recognition on a Publishers Weekly review; we chose a like-minded nonprofit distributor with a small staff to do the work of global dreaming. I could never keep up with unsolicited manuscripts.

In hindsight I would have gone to conferences and book fairs more; I would have hired a pod of representatives or influencers—would I?—and maybe I would have paid for reviews, I don’t know. It is something I ponder now.

We used to share a small office in a building called Dreamland with a man and a dog, cartoonists, and another writer—each one in rotation over the years. When the pandemic hit we had no office mates. Raising funds had already become increasingly difficult, and for whatever reason we didn’t qualify for large grants that might help independent publishers. Without a city, our soapbox seemed like a quiet patch of field. The birds loved our work, so did the deer.

I accepted a job as a librarian and backlist copies went to the authors who needed them. Many of our books are still available from Small Press Distribution, and now, as throughout the pandemic, the press has listed in quiet dissolution like the sleepy mind saying to itself, “So long, farewell,” not quite waiting for the chorus. Our remainders went to a literary project in Africa and a special lot to the Grolier Poetry Book Shop. A few remain in my office. Many more are scattered about, waiting for a bigger publisher perhaps. Or just the next reader.

a PowerPoint presentation,” says Alia Hanna Habib, an agent at the Gernert Company in New York. “Nobody who works in this industry doesn’t love books. We don’t fall in love with PowerPoint presentations. It should read engagingly. Even when you’re making the business case, it should sound like a writer on the page.”

No two book proposals are exactly alike, but if you’re a debut author, your proposal will likely need to include a brief overview of the book that makes a case for why it needs to be written and published; a chapterby-chapter summary showing the book’s narrative arc; a discussion of published books that are similar to yours; a marketing and publicity plan that includes some discussion of your target readers; an author biography that makes it clear why you are the writer to tackle this material; and, finally, one or more sample chapters from the book-in-progress.

While most nonfiction titles, from self-help books to works of history or journalism, are sold on proposal, memoir remains a special category dependent on the author’s “platform,” an industry term for how well a writer is known among their target readership. Authors with long track records and writers who are already famous or who are involved in a highly publicized event or news story can often sell a memoir on proposal, agents say. A memoir by a debut author without a platform, on the other hand, will be treated more like a novel, and the writer will probably have to write most or all of the book before it’s sold.

Whether they’re writing memoir or narrative nonfiction, Habib advises clients to open their proposals “in the voice of the book,” so that it reads like an especially engaging introduction or prologue. From there she encourages her writers to guide readers through the book’s principal subject matter, characters, and themes in the style of marketing copy found on the inside jacket of a published book. “One of the best exercises you can do as a writer of nonfiction is go to a bookstore, look at the nonfiction books you love, and read the jacket copy to see how they’re able to very quickly convey what the book is about,” she says. “That’s the kind of language that a proposal has, except it’s longer.”

This opening section, along with the chapter summaries and writing sample, represents the core pitch to editors, because if a book isn’t compelling on its own terms, no amount of marketing wizardry is likely to save it. But writers are also wise to devote time and attention to making a case for where their book fits in the publishing marketplace and what they can do to help sell it.

Easy Beauty, for instance, could have easily been pigeonholed as a disability memoir, but that wasn’t the book Jones wanted to write, a point she made clear in her choice of comparable titles, or comps. She did mention Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy’s 1994 memoir about the author’s diagnosis of Ewing’s sarcoma when she was nine, which led to the removal of a significant portion of her jawbone, but Jones also referenced books by Eula Biss, Leslie Jamison, Helen Macdonald, and Maggie Nelson, authors she admired for their ability to interweave memoir with history and literary theory. Easy Beauty is also a travel memoir, which Jones made clear by including comps for literary travel narratives like Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (Knopf, 2012).

In most cases agents will help writers assemble their book proposals, especially the sections focusing on the marketing and positioning of the book, but that doesn’t mean a writer can simply knock out a few pages pitching their idea for a book and expect the agent to do the rest. “When you’ve done everything to get it in the best shape you can on your own, that’s when you should start seeking an agent,” says Habib. “You

should not be going to a potential agent half-dressed.”

Making serious headway on research and planning out how you want to structure and write your book before you reach out to an agent can also help prevent your work from succumbing to the pressures of the publishing market, which favors projects that are similar to books that have sold well in the past, leading to a certain level of conformity and pigeonholing.

To guard against this homogenizing pressure, Jones says, writers need to write “a clear, intentional statement about what their book is, what its goals are, and how it’s going to reach those goals” before they enter into a collaboration with an agent. “I’ve seen really good versions of this that are three paragraphs long, and I’ve seen really good versions of this that are closer to thirty or forty pages long, but they are your own true aims and goals and intentions for the book, and you go into the conversation with the agent saying, ‘Here’s what I want for this book, here’s what the book is really about, and here’s the structure I want to use to achieve these aims,’” she says.

Of course the best way to guarantee that the book you sell is the one you want to write is to work with an agent who shares your artistic vision. “If you feel the people you’re working with ultimately don’t understand and want to change the nature of your work and are not looking out for your best interest, they are not the right publishing fit for you,” says Jade Wong-Baxter, an agent at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency. “It can be really hard to turn that down and look for other alternatives, but it’s important for writers to have the backing and support of people who get it, people who will advocate for what they need.”

This can be doubly true for writers of color and others from underrepresented backgrounds, Wong-Baxter says. Over the past year and a half, in response to the national reckoning over race and diversity that followed the police killing of George Floyd, publishing has become more welcoming to the work of writers of color, she says. But publishing remains overwhelmingly white, and writers of color still have to be on the lookout for cultural misunderstandings and market pressures that can distort their work. “If you say yes in that moment, if you say, ‘Yes, okay, I’ll rewrite this so the main character is white or so the book is no longer a comedy and it’s this sad, trauma story,’ then there are going to be all these compromises down the road,” she says.

FINDING the right agent was especially crucial for Daniel Barban Levin, whose memoir, Slonim Woods 9, details the years he spent as a student at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, enmeshed in an allegedly abusive cult led by Larry Ray, the father of one of Levin’s roomates. Ever since he’d extricated himself from Ray’s orbit, Levin, a recent graduate of the UC Irvine poetry MFA program, had been trying to write about his experiences in the medium of poetry, with little success.

Then, in April 2019, two reporters from New York magazine broke the story of the alleged cult, and suddenly some of the worst moments of Levin’s life were national news. He was approached by executives at Blumhouse Productions, best known for producing horror films, who wanted to buy his “life rights,” which would have prevented Levin from ever writing a version of the story himself.

All this left Levin uniquely vulnerable. At the time, he was working as a valet parking attendant at a hotel in Los Angeles, and the Hollywood money, about $50,000, would have been lifealtering. He was also still recovering from his time with Ray, which, Levin says, had made him distrustful but also, paradoxically, ingrained in him a need to please powerful people.

So he e-mailed PJ Mark, an agent at Janklow & Nesbit Associates, who represents one of Levin’s favorite

authors, Maggie Nelson. Mark introduced Levin to Chris Clemans, another agent at Janklow & Nesbit, who advised him about the “life rights” offer and whether he should try to write a memoir of his own. “I sat by the lake here in Echo Park, and he said, ‘Tell me the story and we’ll see if it’s a book,’” Levin recalls. “He was very gracious and sat on the phone for something like two hours while I told a very fragmented version of the story, trying to recapture these memories. He said he thought it could be a book and he thought I could write it, and he wanted me to try to put together twenty-five pages and maybe an outline.”

Ultimately, Levin declined to sell his life rights and wrote his own version of the story in Slonim Woods 9, published by Crown in September. But it all started with that e-mail to PJ Mark, whom Levin felt he could trust thanks to his association with Maggie Nelson.

This is a point worth emphasizing:

So much of the success of a nonfiction book proposal depends on finding the right agent to help you write and sell it. Because they’re created before the book exists and because they focus so much on marketing and positioning, proposals can be something of an agent’s medium. Pick the wrong agent and your project can stall out before it even leaves the gate, or, worse, you could find yourself contracted to write a book you barely recognize.

One secret to finding the right agent is having the agent find you, as happened to Jones when her essay appeared in the Believer. Habib, the Gernert agent, estimates that about half of the clients she takes on are writers she contacted first, usually after she read something they published, and she encourages writers looking to sell a nonfiction book to first pitch shorter pieces on their topic to reputable publications in print or online, where their work can be discovered by an agent looking for salable book projects.

“If there’s a subject you’re interested in or something you want to write about, start by publishing pieces in smaller publications,” says Habib. “It establishes you as an expert, it gets your name out there, and often an agent will come calling.”

However you connect with an agent, you’ll want to have much of the research spadework completed and a strong sense of how you want to structure the book before you try to sell it. The proposal itself, especially the sections dealing with marketing and positioning of the book, can be a collaboration between writer and agent, Wong-Baxter says, but writers should work to retain control over their book’s subject matter, along with its structure and voice.

“You really want to make sure that the agent is on the same page as you,” she says. “They’ll hopefully bring in some good ideas for how to shape it, but they’re not fundamentally changing the nature of what you’re writing.”