Once upon a time, Laura Stanfill lived in a New Jersey house filled with music boxes, street organs, and books. She grew up to become the publisher of Forest Avenue Press and the author of Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary. Her short-form work has appeared in Shondaland, The Rumpus, Catapult, The Vincent Brothers Review, Santa Fe Writers Project, and several print anthologies. She believes in indie bookstores and wishes on them like stars from her home in Portland, Oregon, where she resides with her family and Waffles the dog.
Author Experience
Ruth H. (RH): I kind of want to flip a little bit, and talk about your personal author experience. In 2022, you published a novel of historical fiction with Lanternfish Press. The novel follows Henri Blanchard as he journeys to find his half-brother and his own definition of happiness, and I absolutely loved it. I thought it was super whimsical, and it was so much fun. It won numerous awards, including being a Rumpus Book Club selection in March of 2022 and being nominated as Best Book by Independent Book Review that same year. What was it like to be on the author side of the editing process? How do you balance being a novelist and your editing work?
Laura Stanfill (LS): Being an author really was my dream come true after decades of trying and failing to break into the New York establishment, in part because I am neurodivergent and I write surprising, whimsical work that doesn’t fit into a box. I shifted my expectations and my dream to wanting a book to come out with a beautiful cover and find its readers. And Lanternfish signed me, and it was a delightful process all the way through, and I felt really taken care of, and I also realized how important communication is in the publishing process, because even though I knew all the steps, and I had been counseling writers. Part of my job as an editor is to put on my “Listening Therapist” hat, and help them through getting no reviews, or getting a bad review, or getting a weird email from a reader, or not being a finalist for an award, or being a finalist for an award, and then waiting to see if they’ve won or not. All of that stuff is so human, and so much about having a leader to help you through that, because it’s a big deal. When we write our books, our hearts are on the pages, and when we tear the words out of our hearts and hand them over to a publisher, we can’t control reactions. So, helping the person who put this vulnerable piece into the world is my primary job as an editor and publisher. And I really felt that I needed caretaking, too, to a degree higher than I anticipated with my own work. Because I was like, “Oh, but I know how publicity works, I’m fine,” and then it was, “Oh my gosh, maybe everyone hates me.” That fear of not being seen, or the fear of abandonment, was high, and I think I found myself needing more support than I would have expected.
RH: Following that authorial path, you recently published Imagine a Door: a writer’s guide to unlocking your story, choosing a publishing path, and honoring the creative journey, which I’ve enjoyed reading very much. Something I especially liked was your discussion of a literary ecosystem, which you define as “a group of writers, readers, and booksellers who support each other in a symbiotic relationship”. This made me think about the role that both literary journals and presses and individuals play in contributing to their local literary ecosystems. What would you say is the most important aspect of fostering a healthy literary ecosystem?
LS: Engaging with the work and also engaging with the people making the work. I’ve always been engaging with the work, I’ve always been a huge reader, but until I grew into myself and started feeling a little more confident, I never told a writer that I liked their work. That would have been unfathomable to me. Or I would get in line at the signature table and say, “I loved your last book,” but you’re saying this without really deeply engaging.
When literary journals and presses need readers, writers get really busy doing all the things, and reading becomes a lesser task on the to-do list, or it becomes a to-do list task and not enjoyment, I think that’s where the ecosystem can break down a little bit.
Literary journals and presses are doing it for love, we’re not doing it for money or fame, but we need to make our work better make sense. It needs to be accessible to other people, but then those other people also have to make the time to engage with the work. And that could be, sharing a photo on social media, or that could be showing up to a book event, that could be dropping a question in the chat of a Zoom event. That could be buying a copy of the latest literary journal at your local bookstore. That could be just browsing the shelves, or asking the booksellers, what have you read recently? Or can you show me where your local author shelf is?
One of the ways I like to break this down is because there are so many options of what to read. I like to break it down by community, and that can be, like, a community of small presses, but it can also be your home community. So, I am always reading Portland and Oregon writers, because they are my local writers, and even if it’s a genre I don’t read, I will get to it eventually. I want to honor the work that’s being done around me. My big feeling is if we all did that in our communities, we would elevate this ecosystem even more, and connect the dots on it even more, and make it more vibrant.
Social media is important to tell people that an event is happening, and that a book exists, but a lot of the time, we find ourselves scrolling at, like, the dentist’s office instead of carrying a book or popping open our Libby app. And so reading is the thing that powers the ecosystem. Reading is the activity that creates the opportunities for writers. Without reading the journals and the presses disappear.
Advice for Future Publishers
RH: And then I just had one final question for you. I joined the editorial team for my campus’s literary magazine, The Broken Plate. We’ll be launching our issue in spring of 2026 and I’m really excited about it, it’ll be a ton of fun. What advice do you have for those of us that are working in publishing or want to work in publishing? Is there, like, a good starting spot, and is there something that helped you along the way that you wouldn’t have expected?
LS: There are definitely educational programs you can take, and some of them are short programs, like the Denver Publishing Institute, where you can get a crash course on how publishing works, and build your resume, but that is not accessible or affordable to everybody. I went to the Yale Publishing Course, and that helped me understand that my DIY press was actually a legitimate, real press. It gave me just the courage to interact with other presses and say, “Oh, this is how I do things,” instead of feeling like I was missing the education piece. But there are so many other ways to get into publishing. One of them is volunteering with a local press or literary journal. I highly recommend any writer just trying to break into a journal or a press to try to volunteer to read submissions. Because if you see 20 manuscripts that begin with two characters talking about their day as they’re waking up in their bedroom, and you know, like, oh, well, everyone does that. I don’t need to do that. My story starts somewhere else, I need to go back and revise.
I feel conflicted about volunteering and interning, because everyone should get paid, but there’s just not enough money to go around, and so I kind of avoid taking interns and encouraging internships as a result, although some presses do have full-fledged intern programs that will allow an aspiring publisher or publicist or editor to find their way.
I think if you want to work in publishing, and you try to reach out to some presses, I would start with local presses in your hometown community, or where your college is, and see what opportunities are there. And I would also say, “I’m specifically interested in learning about publicity, or learning how a developmental edit works, or, or reading manuscripts.” For me, what makes a resume stand out is that interest in a particular type of publishing. When someone wants to learn all the things about publishing, I feel like they could talk to anybody. But if you want to learn specifically how to grow a readership of local writers, or work with bookstores, or send out press releases. That’s something where I could pick a project off and say, okay, let’s work on this together.
The big piece of the publishing learning curve I didn’t know was distribution. When we talk about product, and creating products in 2025, people who make dresses might go to Etsy or, you know, a pre-existing platform, or they might send out their own website and do online sales, or they might go to a local dress shop and say, “Would you carry some of my dresses? Yes or no?” Maybe it’s on consignment. Books work the same way, but because they’re first and foremost a piece of literature of a brain trying to communicate things to other brains. We don’t always think of them in terms of an object moving through the economic marketplace.
Distribution is how the book goes from the computer screen to becoming an actual physical object, or an e-book, or an audiobook. And particularly with physical books, small presses have a range of distribution options. And I’ve changed my model over time, but in 2014, I signed with a national distributor called Publishers Group West. They are owned by Ingram. Ingram is the big book catalog wholesaler.
So, in the olden days, I had to print books, ship them to my house, or go drive to the printer to pick them up in my minivan, drive the books back to Portland, then I would put a box in the back of the minivan and drive to the local bookstores, and they would say, “Yes, I will buy 3 copies,” or “Yes, I will take 5 copies on consignment,” then I would fill out all the forms and leave them there. And that’s a legitimate business model, and it was a great way to connect with local bookstores and to get authors onto the shelves. But now I have PGW, and 9 months before a book comes out, I am sharing a cover description and the book description. I’m sharing blurbs as they come in. I’m getting feedback from a sales team that is actually going to go sell the books into Barnes & Noble nationally, but we really focus on the independent bookstores, and libraries, too. The library wholesaler will buy some copies, and colleges might buy some copies. Having distribution is the thing that separates small presses, and it’s the most misunderstood thing, because people generally are not transparent about how it works. And also because of the rise of technology with print-on-demand.
Print-on-demand is a fabulous, low-cost option, for hanging out a shingle as a book publisher. But print-on-demand authors get less attention because their book is a piece of data out in the ecosystem of lots of data, and to get a reader, you have to find someone or find a bookseller who’s willing to look up your book and commit to buying a few copies. Whereas I have, like, a built-in sales team that’s going out and saying, here’s the latest from Forest Avenue so the stakes are higher, and one model isn’t better than the others. A distribution model is a lot more expensive. I’m probably too small to have this kind of distribution, because I don’t have 20 titles a year. I have 2 or 3 titles a year.
I think the number one thing that writers feel sad about when they debut with small presses is the disconnect between what they want, where they want their book. They want their book to be in their hometown bookstore, and it’s not, not because their book isn’t good, but because of how the press is set up, distribution wise. And so, that’s why it’s become kind of a mission for me to talk about the mechanism of books going into the world as being an important facet of the story. And if you’re looking for a job in publishing and you walk in with a working knowledge of distribution, you’re a lot further ahead.
RH: That is all of my official questions, thank you for being willing to connect with me.
LS: Oh, of course!