Indie publishing

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Daisy Alioto and Chelsea Hodson discuss Hodson's new independent press, Rose Books.

I first met Chelsea Hodson at a reading organized for writers who had attended the Mors Tua Vita Mea workshop, which she co-founded with the late writer and publisher Giancarlo DiTrapano. After hearing her read, I devoured her 2014 chapbook Pity the Animal and her 2018 book of essays, Tonight I'm Someone Else before it had a brief moment of virality.

Hodson recently announced her own independent press, Rose Books. The first book, by my friend Geoff Rickly–who you might know best as the lead singer of the post-hardcore band Thursday–will debut in July 2023. You can preorder Someone Who Isn’t Me here.

I like the resurfacing of the word “someone” in relation to Hodson; it feels important to the ethos of Rose Books. “Being underestimated is a form of power,” she writes in Tonight I'm Someone Else. A few pages earlier she describes riding in the back of a friend’s mother’s car with a seat that faced through the rear windshield, waving at other drivers. “They could either wave back or pass us, but both actions were forms of confrontation…We made people choose. That was our one power.”

Independent publishing is a similar confrontation, and the literary world needs it now more than ever. The following is a condensed Q&A with Chelsea Hodson about the project. —Daisy Alioto

Daisy Alioto: How does having your own press address your frustrations as an author? As a reader?

Chelsea Hodson: My book came out on what you’d call a Big Five publisher, and I was super happy about that. And I loved my editor there. But I was frustrated by certain aspects of it, I felt that I was viewed as a kind of troublemaker by my own publicist in some ways for trying to do things myself. That shocked me, because I realized that certain organizations only operate within a traditional structure, and that’s how they’ve always done it. That’s how they’ll continue to do it, even when it runs them into the ground–even when it means they don’t make money.

I don’t think anyone was expecting me to be a number one best seller, including me, I just felt like my book was a little too weird for that. Honestly, I was kind of shocked it ended up where it did, because I was expecting to work with an indie press. So I certainly don't mean to complain about my experience, it was just kind of eye opening about, like, what resources are given to a certain level of author and what is only reserved for, say, celebrity memoirs.

I'm under no illusion that I'm going to save publishing or anything, but I am really confident that more people starting indie presses can potentially make a difference. It can provide other avenues for different kinds of books that maybe, like mine, weren't anticipated to be number one best sellers, but have kind of a cult following or a certain level of readership. I feel like people really are hungry for more things that are operating outside of traditional publishing structures.

DA: Going from the literary world to the startup world, I’ve realized there are so many industries that operate based on pattern-matching. Which I understand, because pattern-matching assists our intelligence—to be able to look at things, quickly categorize them, and process them. But it also really holds us back.

You have to frontrun people’s instinct to categorize you if you want to take ownership over the conversation. So I am trying to do more of that, and I really admire other people (like you) that have that instinct, because ultimately those people are very successful.

CH: People are going to think about you one way or another and they want to stamp you as one thing and put you in a category. And with those categories come demands. To call myself a publisher, there was the question of if I would sign with a distributor to get the books in as many stores as possible, as many hands as possible on Amazon. And of course, I really want the book in as many hands as possible.

But, you know, going that traditional route puts me in the same category as Penguin Random House, like using their same distributor. That doesn't make sense financially for me in a lot of ways. And it puts the press at risk, actually. And so I felt that I should at least try to operate without it. Because I can always change my mind, I can always go that route, but why not try a different route first?

I have to correspond with each individual bookstore, they have to agree to do more work and more paperwork to sell in a certain way outside of a distributor. But again, there are a lot of people that are excited by that.

DA: I’ve been thinking a lot about Tyrant Books. I never met Giancarlo, but I feel like I knew him a bit through Becca (Schuh) and through what he published. The last couple of years, there is a vacuum that was left by Tyrant Books—not just in the publishing ecosystem, but as a guiding force for young people that are at the edge of accepted thinking or accepted writing. It was like this vessel that kept people away from reactionism because it appealed to their sense of themselves as a renegade and channeled it into something productive.

Gian was like this older mentor who could say, you know, there is a system of values that are important to us. And it doesn’t require complete political correctness, but it requires some sort of fundamental empathy. Certain subcultures that have a sense of being on the fringes are really missing that sort of like guiding hand, there’s a ton of nihilism and cynicism. I don’t think Tyrant was ever cynical. Do you feel there is an inherent value system to being an independent publisher?

CH: I think about Giancarlo every day that I am working, and I feel so lucky to have known him in the way that I knew him, to have taught alongside him and learned so much about his editorial approach, which is different from mine in a lot of ways. That’s why we got along, a yin and yang kind of vibe.

What I really loved about Tyrant is that everything was guided by his love of any book that he was publishing. There was that book Supremacist about the Supreme store, and then there would be a book of stories and essays, or Marie Calloway. I can understand why people would think every title was a little bit of a random event. But if you read them you understand, Tyrant was guided by his aesthetic and that had many forms. It wasn’t restricted to any certain genre or even style.

That’s something that I thought about when forming Rose Books. Ultimately, I want to publish whatever I’m drawn towards. I’m not sure I’ve set any real constraints beyond that. The first three titles that I announced are very different from each other. Two of them are novels. One is poetry and short prose. I want to take chances on people, and that's why I'm aware of the financial aspect of not just giving all my money away to a distributor just so that I don't have to mail a package myself.

Giancarlo had this ability to identify talent in people who weren’t published writers yet and know that they would write a good book. I think that unique talent died with him actually, like, that's not something that can be replicated. But I hope to identify that star power in writers that excite me.

DA: I liked what you said to Dan (Ozzi) about the balance of being yourself in the game of tech. Looking at what is happening to Twitter now, I wouldn’t want to be in the position to have my book sales or my sense of myself as a writer to be tied to my Twitter following. And of course there was a big discourse about BookTok.

As you know, social media is a really powerful mechanism for distribution, awareness and curation–which I'm most excited about. Obviously, I watched with huge interest to see how Kendall Jenner embracing your book changed the destiny of that book as a consumer good. But as you pointed out on Dan’s podcast, it didn’t change the destiny of the book as a work of literature–that was already set in place when you wrote it. And I respect that a lot, because someone else might have said, "I'm gonna go out and write another book and make sure Kendall Jenner recommends it again."

CH: I think the idea of writing to any audience is a mistake. For me, I don’t know if writing is a spiritual act, but it’s so much more subconscious than anything external. I always encourage other writers to listen to that thing that makes them feel like they might die if they don’t write it. Which is different than the book that you write in hopes that Kendall Jenner will like it.

Because for me, I felt I was going to die if I didn't write the book of essays that I wrote. And then Kendall Jenner ended up reading it. So you just never know what path your book is going to take. I didn’t know the person who got it into her hands, although I met her later–and her book is now my third title, that’s Ashleah Gonzales. That came about because I met her and I was like, you're obviously a writer, from the books that you read, it seems to me that you're probably writing your own book. And I was right.

I actually found it embarrassing for the whole TMZ thing to happen. Although, it was admittedly very funny to me. I thought it was really hilarious, but I actually found it embarrassing that it was the most popular thing I'd ever done. I'm very grateful that it happened. But ultimately, it doesn't really have anything to do with me. You know what I mean? It's like someone gave my book to a celebrity and she was photographed reading it, that doesn't ultimately affect my life that much.

DA: Where do you look for inspiration outside of the literary world? I know that you live in Sedona, which has a very specific environment. You obviously have a deep relationship with the music scene as well…

CH: I love it here. I didn’t know what it would be like to move out of New York to the middle of nowhere. It’s so quiet, and I really love that in a way I didn’t know that I would. It’s already filtered into my work—I just wrote a short story about the highway that I live off of.

But film is actually my number one inspiration for writing. I always have to read while I'm writing or editing, but I find that I am thinking more about film when I’m writing than other books, actually. Something about the translation of visual to written form is easier than written to written. If I love how someone wrote a book chapter, it’s hard for me to just do that. Whereas with film, I can say, oh I love the feeling of that part of the movie. How could I have that feeling in my book?

I love films that you can't really figure out. I don’t actually watch a lot of movies, but the ones that I love I watch over and over again. And then I watch all of the YouTube videos that are [the title of the movie: explained]—I dive really deep. Rewatching is almost meditative, because I already know what is going to happen. I know exactly what they are going to say.

And if I've been writing that morning, and I'm watching this movie in the background of whatever I'm doing, I can also have this experience where I'm thinking about the writing as I'm interacting with the film. So it becomes a creative process in some ways to obsess over certain films.

DA: My husband’s the same way. Most recently, with Mulholland Drive. What’s a film you’ve been thinking about recently?

CH: I love the film Under the Silver Lake, which is like a movie that a lot of people hate. And I am absolutely obsessed with it. Another film that I really like is called Always Shine. It’s a bit like Persona. It’s about relationships between women, and how women perform as objects as actresses. And it turns into a horror film. That’s a movie I think a lot about.

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