LEE: A galiot is a nimble, adaptable vessel that uses both sales and oars. Would you discuss this naming of your press and your vision of how Galiot Press is ground-breaking?
ANJALI: We spent quite some time brainstorming our name. We wanted to convey the idea that we lift up our authors, keep them afloat, and carry them forward. We also wanted to convey a sense of community and collaboration. A galiot, as you say, is nimble and can adapt to changing circumstances. A sailing vessel navigates currents and crosscurrents. The multiple sets of oars make for a team effort. Henriette is a rower, so this was also a little nod to her heritage. And “galiot” is a word of French origin. Since I grew up in France, there’s a connection to my background, too.
Ensuring respect, agency, and transparency in the publisher-author relationship is one of the ways in which we are trying to stand out. No ghosting, no keeping the author in the dark, no uneven treatment of authors. No assumptions about what book might sell more than another. We are redesigning the publishing model to reduce our financial risk so that we can take more artistic risk, and funnel more of the profits down to the authors. To be clear, we understand that the frustrations writers experience are not at all the fault of agents and editors, most of whom work very hard and care deeply about their authors, but rather the result of the traditional publishing model.
LEE: Your press is innovative in how it promotes its authors and uses print on demand. How does this printing method protect your writers and offer more flexibility?
ANJALI: Traditional publishing relies on print runs that are done ahead of any sales. This means that the publisher usually bears a heavy upfront cost. This in turn means that publishers will take on the books that they feel have the best chance at being a commercial success. And how can they know what books will be a success? By looking at the titles that have already sold many copies and acquiring manuscripts that are similar or will clearly appeal to the same audience. As a result, a lot of excellent, important writing is left out of traditional publishing: books by new voices, books considered too “niche,” books that don’t fit clearly into a single category (and therefore onto a specific shelf). But these books deserve a chance. Some of them are incredibly well-written and discussion-worthy. By using the print-on-demand model for our paperbacks, we don’t have to make assumptions about the success of any given title. We don’t have to decide how many to print, and risk overprinting and then having to pay for bookstores to return unsold copies, and possibly even destroy overstock. And our books will never be out of print.
LEE: What are your standards for acceptance and how did you choose your first three manuscripts?
HENRIETTE: First and foremost, we look for writing that pays serious attention to language. That doesn’t mean that we have a single, particular style in mind. On the contrary, we’re intrigued by any style—stark and simple, or elaborate and complicated, and everything in between—as long as it’s clear that the author is in command of their linguistic choices, and that those choices best serve the storytelling. Beyond that, we’re looking for manuscripts that offer deeply thought-out characters, along with storytelling that’s propelled by events. We want to be eager to keep turning the pages, moving forward even while we might want to linger for a minute and admire the prose. In a way, this is what a lot of people say: compelling stories well told. But we’re looking for one more piece that we feel makes a book a Galiot Press book. And that’s combination. In other words, a book that combines or mixes genres, that introduces elements from different categories or even prose forms to tell its own unique story. There’s a certain richness and newness to be found in combinations.
LEE: Please tell us more about your first books. Also, how do we order them?
HENRIETTE: Our first two books are Emily Ross’ SWALLOWTAIL and Robyn Ryle’s SEX OF THE MIDWEST. Emily’s book is, on the face of it, a crime novel. But it’s so much more as well. It’s crime, but it’s also a meditation on representations of women in mythology and art, and a tale of Surrealism turned into real, actual violence. It’s also a deep character study of a woman detective trying to bring order not only to her hometown of Quincy, Massachusetts, but also to her own psyche. Robyn’s novel is both collection of short stories and novel, centered around the arrival into a town’s inboxes of a survey about sexual habits in a midwestern town. The narrative does its own story-style survey—of the town’s residents, as they move into and out of each other’s lives, and of their collective lives in the aftermath of the pandemic. Robyn’s book offers both the individual and the collective, the social grouping that a novel presents and the particularity of a short story. Both of these are perfect Galiot Press books precisely because of their both/and approaches to storytelling.
As for how to order them, our preference is for readers to order directly from our website, as this ensures a greater portion of the proceeds go to the authors, and it also enables us to know who our customers are. But our books will also be available for purchase from any bookstore via the Ingram catalogue, on Amazon and Bookshop.org, and readers will be able to find them and order them from any of our partner venues where a simple tap of your phone to our branded old-fashioned typewriter will take you to our order page. There will be more about that on our website soon! GP books will be available for immediate download, or as paperbacks printed fresh for you the minute you order them, to be shipped to your home!
LEE: What other information would you care to give our readers?
ANJALI: We welcome submissions from agented as well as un-agented writers, and we run a unique query system that guarantees a response within a week. We open up query spots on the calendar at specific dates and times every week, posted weeks ahead of time on our site, and in this manner we accept only as many queries as we know we can handle that week. It’s a game changer in terms of balancing our workload and being able to be responsive. In exchange for our transparency and responsiveness, we expect writers to be ready to send us their partial or full manuscripts within three days of a request from us, so that we can plan out our workload. That means writers must have a manuscript ready to go when they query us. So far, this system has worked very well, both for us and for the writers who submit to us. I hope some of the Solstice contributors will come our way!
Lee Hope, is the author of the novel Horsefever, a finalist in the Midwest Book Awards. She is a recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship, and a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship for Fiction. She has published stories in numerous literary journals such as Witness and The North American Review. She founded and directed a low-residency MFA program and has taught at various universities. She also teaches for Changing Lives Through Literature, which serves people on probation and parole.
