My New Project: IMAGINE A DOOR

On Publishing and Mental Health

Publishers Weekly announced my new project before I did!

(You can read the article here; it’s part of their disability representation series.)

IMAGINE A DOOR is my take on breaking into publishing without letting the industry break your heart, and it’s forthcoming from Forest Avenue Press in fall 2024 or spring 2025. I won a Regional Arts and Culture Council grant of $5,000 in June to support the project. Here’s the working description:

Capitalism doesn’t value story the way the heart does. As a small-press publisher and a published novelist, Laura Stanfill has been on both sides of the desk, giving and receiving thousands of rejections. IMAGINE A DOOR—with original reporting, advice from award-winning authors, and personal stories from the publishing trenches—is a rallying cry to focus your creative life on what really matters: the work itself.

I’m not sure if Publishers Weekly scooping me says something about the intrepid staff as much as it does about my priorities this summer: finishing the manuscript and recovering from a broken foot. It’s my right one—fifth metatarsal, snapped when I didn’t see a curb at the park—which means I can’t drive.

But those two variables worked in sync: spending weeks of summer on the couch means I now have a 70,000-word draft of IMAGINE A DOOR in the hands of my developmental editor, Liz Prato.

In 2016, I started interviewing agents, editors, and publishers for this project, because I kept meeting misinformed, frustrated authors. Much of their sadness came from the lack of transparency; when you don’t know how the system works, it’s easy to take every setback personally. Those trying to break in—myself included—dutifully followed the sacred steps of building up our bios, racking up publishing credits, growing our social media presence, reading contemporary work to understand the commercial landscape, making lists of like-minded agents and editors, workshopping our query letters, and… despite all this work, all this time and effort, we still racked up rejections or heard nothing at all. We bought into the do this and you’ll be a successful writer concept, only it didn’t pan out—at least not the way we had hoped. And now we collectively clutched our unpublished manuscripts, thinking, if all that didn’t get me published, then maybe I’m just not good enough.

Photo by Brian McDonnell.

Published authors didn’t seem to be faring any better, emotionally, when I started reporting for this project. They struggled with long lag times between acquisition and getting first-round edits. They didn’t get enough say on covers or jacket copy, forcing them to shill a book that didn’t look or sound like theirs. They felt ignored by their overworked in-house publicists—and often unable to able to afford a $20,000 multi-month retainer to hire a freelancer. And small press authors signed contracts with excitement only to realize their publisher’s business model meant it was nearly impossible to get their books onto bookstore shelves: more heartbreak.

When I started collecting all this information as an antidote to sore feelings, it came from the same place as Brave on the Page, the micro-essay collection that launched Forest Avenue Press in 2012 (and which was recently featured by The Masters Review). I wanted to make a statement about how doing the work of writing matters. I wanted writers—us—to feel better about ourselves. To hold our creativity sacred. To have tools to tune out rejection. To make choices about how we want to spend our time. To create better measurements for success—not just the capitalist ones.

Eventually, I let the new project simmer on the back burner because I had new Forest Avenue titles to publish and a debut novel to revise. I picked this idea back up last year, after my debut novel came out, feeling more confident about what I wanted to say.

The Guardian recently published this article about mental health in the publishing industry, focusing on how everyone is busy and burned out, how that impacts debut authors, and how UK publisher Canongate wants to create a resource to help. I’ve been working on this issue since 2016, I want to shout! But while The Guardian’s article focuses on the post-deal experience, IMAGINE A DOOR begins with the process of writing, weaving in personal goals and centering creativity as antidotes to the noise of capitalism.

I hope to position IMAGINE A DOOR as a resource for everyone who doesn’t want to become famous. If you love getting followers and want to create a brand around your product—and your product is writing classes or a skincare line or wines produced by your family vineyard—that’s awesome. But I’m hoping to create an alternative resource for writers who have stories to tell, who want to reach readers with their art—everyone who doesn’t want to be famous.

If performing “platform” according to the rules mattered to me, I’d publish this newsletter on a schedule like everyone says you’re supposed to. (Oops.) Instead, I send out a note when I have something to say. I’d rather readers think, Oh! It’s Laura in my inbox! Instead of thinking, Not again. There’s so much content out there and I don’t feel obligated to add to it. I know I’m doing it “wrong” by marketing standards, and that’s my decision. I wouldn’t have finished this new book if I had been churning out newsletter content every two weeks.

I think sometimes, when we listen to industry advice, we forget we can decide to ignore it. That we can listen to ourselves. That we can define success as getting great feedback from our critique group. Or reading a poem at an open mic. Or finding a better title for an essay. IMAGINE A DOOR is my way of reminding writers that every step of the process is important, not just the publication and its aftermath.

YOUR INVITATION: What’s a piece of industry advice you really struggle with? Do you still try to follow that advice—yes or no? Why have you made that choice? Another question: I’m struggling with a subtitle for IMAGINE A DOOR. It’s a resource for writers, and I could go with that: A RESOURCE FOR WRITERS. But that’s pretty blah and it doesn’t say a lot. Do you have an idea for me? Maybe something about publishing and heartbreak? An earlier iteration was A WRITER’S GUIDE TO SUBMISSIONS, REJECTIONS, AND THE CREATIVE LIFE, but that felt too focused on the process of submitting. I’d love your help.

Feel free to leave a comment! I started this newsletter to create an intimate but accessible conversation space about creativity, publishing, and the societal reset that the pandemic has offered creatives like us. You can reply to this email to have a conversation just with me, or you can comment on the post to connect with other readers too.