Rita is off visiting tribe, and then to see her out-of-State family so I’m baching it for the week or so.

To stay out of trouble I have decided that the week is going to be Rising Tide Week!

I hope it is no secret that I’m a big cheerleader for small publishing houses. I do realize that small publishing houses have a reputation — deserved in many cases — for being dilettantes in the industry. For not taking it seriously, for treating like a hobby, and — most damning in my eyes — for not being professional.

There are many, many small publishers who do not deserve to be tarred with the same brush as the fly-by-nights, and the vanity presses. Let us call these professionals “NextGen Publishers”.

NextGen Publishers are, to my mind, the way of the future. Traditional Publishing is chained to techniques and procedures from the last century. They are hide-bound and moribund, and — absent a seismic shift in their corporate mind-set — headed to the same fate as the T-Rex. The change from Traditional Publishing to NextGen Publishing is inevitable. All things grow, mature, and die in their cycle, and Traditional Publishing is no more immune from the Great Wheel than anything else.

As inevitable as change is, I would not mind if the cycle sped up a little, and the biggest impediment to things hurrying along is the simple fact that NextGen Publishers simply don’t have the name recognition as the Traditional Publishers. People — readers — simply don’t know them outside of small fan groups.

Let’s change that a bit.

During the five days of Rising Tide Week, each day I will do a post about one NextGen Publisher. In these posts I will embed as many links to the social media, webpage, and anything else that I can dig up.

What I would like you, Gentle Reader, to do is:

1. Find five reading friends who haven’t heard of these Publishers and tell these friends about them;
2. Pop over to their social media sites and say, “Hi!” Bend that Social Media algorithm to our will!
3. Peruse the back catalog on their websites (Hello, “Search Engine Optimization”!), and if you see something that stirs your interest … buy it.
4. Take a note of any cons they’ll be at in the future, and if you’re near one of them, go by, shake hands, and say, “Hi!” in person. 

That’s it. Nothing to it, really.

Rising Tide Week starts Monday.

Thank you,

LawDog

(Cross-posted to the Raconteur Press Substack.)