There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from chasing the idea of “making it” as a writer—an exhaustion that publishers and scammers alike have learned to exploit. Late at night, when the world is quiet and you’re alone with your longing, the promises start to sound reasonable: Get your book in bookstores! Become a bestseller! We’ll handle everything for a small fee. It’s tempting, the way all mirages are tempting to the thirsty.
But there’s another story underneath, one I know intimately from the far edge of the literary map. I didn’t start Sunday Mornings at the River because I wanted to join the parade of publishers; I started it because I needed something real, something that didn’t ask poets to leave their hunger or their principles at the door. I built it with my own hands, after years of watching too many writers pay dearly just for the hope of being seen.
The world of publishing has its own shadows—mirrored halls where desperation is currency, where every promise is hedged in fine print. The most insidious offers always arrive disguised as opportunity. They speak of marketing, exposure, a fast track to respectability, and all you need to do is open your wallet, surrender your rights, trust that someone else knows best. It is, in its own way, a kind of magic trick: now you see your dream, now you don’t.
Over the years, I’ve watched these patterns repeat like bad weather. Vanity presses call themselves publishers, but what they publish best is invoices. They thrive not on book sales, but on the steady drip of hope from writers willing to pay for a seat at the table. A real publisher invests in your book because they believe it might matter; a scammer invests in your loneliness, your ache to belong. The difference is simple but devastating: one takes a chance on your words, the other simply takes.
Then there’s the new breed of self-publishing “services,” promising to make the process seamless. They offer to design, edit, and upload, and in exchange, they take a piece of everything—your royalties, your autonomy, sometimes even your copyright. But what is the point of self-publishing if you are not, in the end, the self who is publishing? So much of this industry is built on convincing you that you cannot do it alone, that you are too small, too lost, too in need of rescue.
And the bestseller fantasy—the numbers game, the empty guarantees. No one can sell you certainty. No one can manufacture an audience that will care the way you care. Any company that offers you a shortcut is, in truth, only detouring you away from what really matters: making work that is honest, urgent, and unrepeatable. I’ve seen poets disappear into these schemes, their books made hollow by the noise.
So what do you do? You listen to your own skepticism. You google names, you scan for warnings, you haunt the watchdog sites and read the fine print. You look at what’s already been published—if the catalogue is a graveyard of typos and careless design, trust that. You remember, above all, that anyone who stands to profit more from your payment than from your book’s success is not building your future—they’re building theirs on your longing.
There is, I think, a particular tenderness in saying no. No to shortcuts, no to easy promises, no to anyone who asks you to pay to be loved. The small presses, the real ones, are built out of stubbornness and hope. We take risks with our own time and money because we want your work to live in the world, not as a commodity, but as a force. That’s the only magic I believe in.
I started this press because I was tired of waiting for someone else to make a place for voices like mine. What I’ve learned, reading submission after submission, is that I’m not alone. The need is still here, beating just under the surface. We build these spaces not because it’s easy or profitable, but because someone must. Poetry is always an act of defiance. So is keeping your rights, protecting your work, refusing to buy your way into someone else’s idea of legitimacy.
If you’re here, you’re already doing it differently. Don’t let the noise drown you out. Hold on to your words, and trust that you’re not wrong for wanting more than a quick fix or a cheap promise. If it sounds too good to be true, it almost always is. Real publishing is messy, slow, sometimes lonely, always worth it. And sometimes—when the rain lifts, when the morning breaks over the river—it’s beautiful too.
—Rebecca
Sunday Mornings at the River