Two local authors launch Galiot Press, seeking books that ‘defy categorization’ - The Boston Globe (2024)

In 2014, Anjali Mitter Duva published her first book, “Faint Promise of Rain,” with a hybrid press called She Writes Press, after several traditional publishers rejected her manuscript.

Complicating Duva’s experience was what she calls her novel’s “doubly foreign setting” — “Faint Promise of Rain” takes place in 16th-century northern India, but “[isn’t] what a lot of people think of in [the] historical fiction [genre]. A lot of editors didn’t know what to do with it,” the Arlington author said. The combination of a historical period long ago and in another country and culture contributed, she believes, to the rejections.

She felt confident her book was good, however, and “really wanted it out there,” and She Writes Press, which follows a hybrid publishing model where the author and publisher share the cost of producing the book, helped her do that, she said. The traditional publishing model “requires categorization,” Duva said, and books that don’t fit into long-established genres are at a disadvantage.

As a solution, she and Cambridge author Henriette Lazaridis, created Galiot Press, an independent publishing model centered around telling stories that defy categorization. Both women will be business managers and editors, handling brand relations and reviewing submissions and working with authors.

“We want to help bring to market the books that exist in that confluence of genres,” said Lazaridis, a former Rhodes scholar who has published three novels and taught English literature at Harvard. “We want to find books that speak to that multiplicity.”

Editors and agents receive hundreds of queries each week, a hurdle for prospective authors who are trying to stand out from the competition, Lazaridis and Duva both believe. Being able to “turn the queries faucet on and off” is a critical component of Galiot’s success, Lazaridis explained. To do this, they’ve devised a reservation system that opens at the beginning of each week to allow a limited number of prospective authors to reserve a slot for guaranteed feedback.

“I’ve been saying for years that publishing is broken,” said Lazaridis, who published her two most recent novels, “Last Days in Plaka” (2024) and “Terra Nova” (2022), with the independent publisher Pegasus Books. Her first novel, “The Clover House” (2013), was published by Ballantine Books, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House.

Both Lazaridis and Duva had dreams of owning their own press and went all-in on Galiot in April of last year. Before that, they were instructors at GrubStreet, a nonprofit center for creative writing. “We were going to wait a few more years, and then we looked at each other and said, ‘Why are we waiting? It needs to happen now,’” Lazaridis said.

To jumpstart their press, the authors opened a crowdfunding campaign for an initial $60,000 on Kickstarter in April, to cover proof of concept costs. They incentivized donors with tiered rewards ranging from a $5 social media shoutout to a $1,000 full manuscript consult.

The fund-raising proved successful: By mid-May, they’d met their goal and turned their energy to hunting for the first three books Galiot will publish. Lazaridis and Duva say they’ll make their selections by fall 2024.

With print on demand technology, Galiot will be able to do short print runs in low quantities, allowing them to control the cost of production, so they can “take artistic risks,” Lazaridis said. When readers place an order, they’ll receive the first 50 pages as a PDF while the physical copy is being printed and shipped out.

“By committing to a print run, you’re taking a financial risk. You’re putting all your money into the print line up front,” Lazaridis said. Galiot authors will receive a $1,000 baseline advance once their manuscript is accepted. From there, Lazaridis estimates an author will “earn out,” or financially surpass, their advance once a few hundred copies of their book have sold, and will be eligible to receive royalties at a rate of 30 percent, as opposed to the industry standard of 10 percent.

“Traditional publishing has come to mean a certain thing,” Duva said. “It’s not like we’re the only ones doing something new — there’s a lot of people innovating in the publishing space — but a lot of the innovation is digital. We’re really trying to bring it back to the reader.”

Adri Pray can be reached at adri.pray@globe.com. Follow her @adriprayy.