“Suns New, Long, and Short: An Interview With Gene § Small Presses”, 2007-08 ():
[background] Gene Wolfe: …The other confusing thing is I have both a story and a book called The Fifth Head of Cerberus, and my agent and I frequently get requests to reprint The Fifth Head of Cerberus that fail to make clear whether it is the book or the story they’re talking about. It makes a great deal of difference because the legal situation is different as to who controls the rights, and we have to find out what it is. It’s usually translation rights, someone in Norway or something. You have to find out which they want, to find out whether we can sell them to them, or whether we have to send them to Tor Books.
Lawrence Person: You’ve done some work with small presses, including Mark Ziesing [The Castle of the Otter, The Wolfe Archipelago, Free Live Free] and Cheap Street [“The Arimaspian Legacy”]. How does working with a small press differ from working with a major publisher, and how vital do you think the small press is to the genre?
G Wolfe: It differs in that it’s so much easier to pin down responsibility. With a major publisher, if they want to run you around in a circle, they can run you around forever. Jane says that Joe made her do it, but Joe says that Sam made him do it, and Sam says that it’s company policy established by Bart, and blah blah blah blah blah blah, and what it all boils down to is ‘We won’t do what you want us to do’.
With a small press publisher, there’s an easily identifiable individual who is in charge, and if this person is saying no, you know d—n well who it is who’s saying no. And at least there’s somebody who you can argue with and deal with and perhaps cut some kind of deal.
One of the nice things about Tor is that you don’t get this runaround to the extent you get from other publishers. When push comes to shove you can go to Tom Doherty and the buck stops here. He is the man. And if he tells them to do it, then by God they’ll do it or lose their jobs.
I think that small press publishing is the lifeblood of the genre. If we were to lose all of the small presses, which I don’t think we’re going to do, but if we were to do that, I don’t think the genre would survive indefinitely.