Small press thrives in tiny niche

SANDPOINT - Few business sagas are as rough and tumble as the one surrounding the book selling trade. Once the domain of cozy little mom and pop bookstores, the landscape was altered dramatically when "category killers" such as Borders and Barnes & Noble cropped up in malls and shopping centers all over America.

But in this new chapter of Darwinian competition, even the biggest fish couldn't manage to gobble fast enough to avoid being gobbled themselves. Witness the case of Borders, which declared bankruptcy two weeks ago because of its inability to compete with the online muscle of Amazon or the combined retail and Internet presence of Barnes & Noble.

Swimming blithely and very happily below the feeding frenzy of the big box bookstores and the online giants, one Sandpoint-based publisher has found success in keeping a tight focus on doing one thing very well. From an overstuffed chair in a log home near Oden Bay, Lost Horse Press founder and publisher Christine Holbert spends her time reading manuscripts from poets who normally couldn't get the time of day from major publishers, much less shelf space in the big chain stores.

Under Holbert's wing, however, these same writers have found a way to get their work in front of an appreciative and increasingly larger pool of readers.

"It's a big advantage to remain small enough to fit into a specific niche, so you're out of that rat race," the small press founder said.

The niche that Holbert has found is about as specific as it gets - she sells her poetry collections to college and university creative writing classes. The academic relationship has developed over time, with the University of Washington Press now handling the distribution of the independent publisher's books and the addition this fall of Lost Horse Press as the teaching press at University of Montana Western, where Holbert will be teaching courses in publishing, covering acquisitions, editing, design, production, marketing and promotions.

"It'll be the first money I've made from publishing," she said, adding quickly that creating an income was never the driving force behind creating her nonprofit publishing company. "I must work 90 hours a week, but I don't even think of this as a job.

When I started out, I thought, 'I want to publish all literary books,' Holbert went on. Well, that's a hard row to hoe. I was nave. Then I refined both the vision of the press and the work I like to do.

That meant turning her attention to little-known poets whom she felt deserved a chance to get their work in the hands of readers. Along the way, Holbert and Lost Horse Press built a reputation for spotting strong talent and getting it into print before it hit the national stage.

In 2009, Lost Horse Press published a collection of poetry by Sheryl Noethe, who this year was named Poet Laureate of Montana. Her immediate predecessor as poet laureate for the Big Sky State was Henry Real Bird, a rancher, writer and educator who speaks Crow as his primary language and favors an unorthodox approach to compiling manuscripts for books such as his 2010 Lost Horse Press title, "Horse Tracks."

"Henry writes on napkins and whatever else he can find," Holbert said. "He hands you a sack full of this stuff and says, 'Here's my book.'"

Holbert got her start in publishing as a returning adult student at Eastern Washington University, where she did an internship at the EWU Press and worked with its director, Irish poet James McAuley. Together, they developed the university's MFA in Publishing program, with Holbert as its first graduate. Living in Spokane at the time, she went on to organize that city's popular Get Lit! literary festival.

An avid reader who loves the process of getting the written word onto the printed page, Holbert pointed out that she has a distinction that keeps her in good stead with those whose work she shepherds into book form.

"One of the things my poets love about me is that I'm not a writer," she said. "Most poetry presses are owned by poets, but it's a big conflict, because they become jealous of the people's manuscripts they have in their hands. I don't have that problem."

Another problem she has avoided is getting caught up in what she calls the "archaic program" that publishers adopted to sell books during the Great Depression, where all titles are accepted on consignmentand those who produce them are paid only after they are sold - often months after the fact. By working directly with colleges and universities, Lost Horse Press sells its books to a guaranteed clientele of students and educators.

Holbert has taken an equally creative approach to working with her writers to promote their collections - she puts books into their hands and puts them to work.

"Poetry books don't go flying out of bookstores; you sell them at readings," she explained. "So I 'front' a box of books to the poet, they do readings, sell their books and send 50 percent of the revenue back to Lost Horse Press.

"All of a sudden, poets are actually making money because they're getting their 10 percent royalty, plus another 40 percent for the hard work they put in," she added. "And the press is making more money than it would have if it went with a distributor."

More troubling to some than the erosion of independent bookstores is the prospect that books themselves might someday be replaced by the ubiquitous "e-readers" such as the Kindle and the iPad. Holbert, though, believes there is no substitute for sliding under the covers or settling into a reading chair with a good book.

"The heft of a book, the smell and the feel of good paper and leather binding - there's nothing like it," she said.

Here again, her well-defined niche in the poetry world provides a built-in safeguard against the advance of technology, since e-readers are unable to format text on the screen.

"Poetry is meant to be read from the page," Holbert said. "The formatting has 'road signs' in the line breaks, the punctuation and the capitalization. Without those, the poetry can't breathe and flow."

Throughout the year, Lost Horse Press sponsors several literary events, including the Lost Horse Writer's Conference and Young Writers of the Lost Horse - a cooperative program with the East Bonner County Library to help students from elementary grades through high school develop their interest in writing.

The small press also established The Idaho Prize in 2004 as a national poetry competition that awards prize money and the publication of a book-length manuscript to each year's winning poet.

On Friday, Aug. 19, Lost Horse Press will travel to the Custer Battlefield Trading Post in Crow Agency, Mont., for a poetry reading at Crow Fair, featuring Henry Real Bird, as well as Assiniboine poet Alison Colgan, Cheyenne poet Dr. Franklin Rowland, and Montana poet Tami Haaland.

While she is understandably pleased with the widening recognition of her non-profit press - Lost Horse titles now are available in libraries from Washington state to Maine and in Grolier's Bookshop in Cambridge, Mass., which is one of only two poetry only bookstores in the country - Holbert continues to get the most satisfaction from the work she does in the solitude of her editor's seat, reviewing the work of emerging writers and connecting them with readers who love good poetry.

"Small publishers really are the ones who are saving great literature," she said. "And when I publish these writers, I'm as proud as a new mama."

For more information, visit: www.losthorsepress.org