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M: What do you look for in a potential Small Desk Press book besides a hairy author?
Our authors are not usually terribly hairy so it’s funny that you mention that. We like stuff that is taboo and raw and gutsy in terms of content and/or form. I’m a sucker for writing about sex and blood and poop and death and all that bodily stuff. We also tend to publish work that’s not perfectly polished: that has raw emotional content and maybe a few sloppy lines. Sometimes we work a lot on a manuscript with an author if we feel like it could be better, which is something that takes a lot of time but I think this goes along with our mission of publishing emerging writers. Sometimes we publish work as is. It’s also nice to publish people who you think you might like to work with. You end up communicating a lot with a person who you publish. Luckily the people we’ve published are all pretty cool, but I can’t imagine how much it would suck to publish someone who was a jerk. And we all know people who are great writers and total jerks.
