We wish.

Let's say you do get the fabled agent or even (gasp) make it out of the slush pile on your own. Suppose the unseen honcho does like you. You'll get an advance, but it's not going to be six figures. The print run will be about 5,000 books and they will sit in a warehouse until a bookstore orders them. If there's a multi-city book tour, it will be on your own dime, but you will get a great marketing package from the publisher. Borders will stock you if enough people ask about your book. The New York Times will get a press release. Big Books will list your book in the back of their catalog. If it doesn't sell well in the first few months, it'll quietly vanish. Aack.

Here's a true story for you. Mystery novelist M.R. Sellars' first book was titled "Harm None," and featured a Wiccan detective. His stated goal has always been to both entertain and inform, by making people aware of pagan religions in a positive light and debunking old myths about witches.

"Harm None" was accepted by a major publisher that shall remain nameless. Sellars was ecstatic and sent off his final draft of a 110,000-word novel. He celebrated until the first edited galleys arrived. The publisher had cut it down to 60,000 words, and suddenly the witch was riding a broomstick, his three cats were talking and he was casting spells to make people freeze.

"I called them up and said, 'Ha, this is a joke on the new writer, right?'" Sellars said. "They said I obviously hadn't researched witchcraft enough. I said, 'You do realize I'm a practicing witch?' They said I wasn't practicing the right type of witchcraft."

Sellars eventually withdrew from the publisher and found a small-press publisher with an open mind. "Harm None" was published with its message intact, and it birthed the Rowan Gant mystery series. 

Granted, most of us would give extraneous body parts just to say, "I'm an author." But in order to get an agent interested, you've got to have something published - hopefully short stories in something that qualifies as a blip of the publishing radar. In the course of getting a book out there, you have the stellar opportunity to be rejected by a) literary magazines that obviously have no idea that you're a soon-to-be-famous novelist, b) agents who will crush your soul for pleasure, c) slush-pile flunkies making less than a federal airport screener, d) the unseen honcho of Big Books Inc. who was having a bad day when he read your sample chapters, and e) the Big Books marketing department, which kills your book after six months of bated breath because something JUST LIKE your book made it there first. If you make past all those with your soul and your book intact, you then get to face reviewers, the reading public, denizens of Amazon.com and your grandmother.

So what's the alternative? According to the folks I met at a convention recently, the small press is going to save our souls.

Let's be clear here: small press is not the same as print-on-demand, subsidy or "vanity" press. Legitimate small press does not ask you to pay a dime for your book. It will not take your copyright or make you pay for registering your copyright. It will not be part of or associated with an editing or critique "service." It will edit your book (free), assign a cover artist and offer you copies of your own book at a discount without requiring ANY purchase on your part. 

So what's the difference between Yard Dog Press and Pocket Books? 

Yard Dog editor Selina Rosen says she won't order a print run of more than 200 books. Once they sell out, she orders another run. Yard Dog prints trade paperbacks and follows all of the above stipulations. Authors receive an advance of ten copies of the book, and a much more generous royalty than you'll get from a traditional publisher. Yard Dog also does profit-sharing with their authors, which even Rosen admits is more author-friendly than is standard even in the small press.

But here's the real difference between small press and corporate living. They may love you, but you can't quit your day job. You're not going to see fame and fortune, at least not right away. You also don't get the sweet distribution deals that Pocket Books and Tor and all those big fellas in New York can get. Legitimate small presses do contract with the major distributors, but your book is not going to be on the shelves of the local Barnes and Noble unless enough people ask for it.

There's also the question of marketing. It's very well and good to listen to the voice of the muse and see our work as the creation of art, but unless you're Stephen King and you've got a staff of twenty to handle your promotion and business affairs, you're going to have to market yourself shamelessly. The need for aggressive self-promotion is doubled with a small press, because you don't have the conglomerate behind you.

Rosen says sometimes that can work to your advantage. Since a small press only has about 30 titles in print at any given time, their people care very much about your book. They'll help you come up with press releases and personal appearances. They just don't have the money to get you on Letterman.

Most small presses have specialized niches. For example, Willow Tree Press, which publishes Sellars, specializes in fiction that provides a positive impression of pagan religions. That's a pretty narrow specialization. The key is to find the press that suits your book, especially if it's the kind of book that's hard to categorize.

To be honest, sometimes the work published by a small press is there because it couldn't make it in New York. (After all, if it can make it there, it can make it anywhere.) Sometimes it's there because it needed a specialized niche. But sometimes it's there because New York doesn't necessarily know good literature from a quill pen.

For example, look at "The Licking Valley Coon Hunters Club," by Brian A. Hopkins. Even the name seems odd. But it was picked up by Yard Dog Press, published in 2000 - and won the Bram Stoker Award for best first novel. Since the Stoker was announced, Rosen says the orders have poured in. Still, she never orders more than 200 at a single press run. "The books come in, the books go out," Rosen said. "I wait till we get down to about ten, then I order more... The printer has been really great about keeping up with us, and no one is ever left waiting for a book."

So what if your book really IS "Carrie"? Rosen says if that happens, most likely a mass-market publisher like Pocket Books is going to pick it up. The contracts include an escape clause: If Big Books offers you the multi-city book tour, you get out of your Yard Dog contract with their blessings. "Go on, make a living," Rosen says. Other small presses may have a few stipulations on that, so it's best to read your contract. What, don't you have a lawyer?

Small presses are under a lot of pressure right now. Rosen says a dozen small presses went under in the three months after 9/11. With a narrow profit margin, it doesn't take much to kill a small press. The more successful ones have been bought up by Big Books Inc. and its compatriots until almost every book in Borders has been published by one of seven conglomerates. 

How do you keep the small press alive? Buy their books. An average small-press book is going to cost a little more than Pocket Books - say $14-18 for a trade paperback, same as you'd pay in Borders. Yes, you can find them online - Amazon.com sells just about every book known to man, woman or alien being from the planet Krypton. But TW Miller, publisher of Crystal Dreams Publishing, says at first he lost money by putting the books on Amazon. See, Amazon takes about 55 percent of the cost of the book you just bought. The remaining 45 percent gets split between the publisher and the author according to their contract. At first, Miller priced his books the same on Amazon as he would on Crystal Dreams' own web site. "Then I'm getting $8 back for a book that cost us $10 to print," Miller said.

As a result, small presses have to overprice on Amazon to make up the cost of their books. So Rosen encourages patrons to buy directly from the small press' website. You'll pay less for the book, and the author and publisher will get more money from it. You've also got a good shot of getting your book signed by the author. "But if you like the book, go put a review on Amazon," Rosen said. "It's the only place I've ever seen where a review sells books." You can also go to Project Pulp (http://www.blindside.net/smallpress), which calls itself "the dot-com of the small press."

Is a small press right for you, the aspiring author? That's a question no one can answer for you. If you have an agent who already has the book on the desks of three editors, you might want to stop listening to me and listen to your agent. If you don't have an agent and don't want to end up in the warehouse-sized slush pile at Simon & Schuster, a small press may be a good place to jump-start your career. If your book is unusual or for a specific niche, a small press might be the answer. If your book has already been rejected by New York, you might look to the small press to see what New York's overlooking.

Of course, is it possible it was rejected because it's no good? Nah.