Any aspiring publisher knows that launching a small press is a gamble. But they don’t always know when they’ve played their last hand. In retrospect, said Jason Pinter, the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic was the beginning of the end for Polis Books, the New York–based indie press he founded in 2013. But it arrived in full this past March, when Pinter announced that Polis would close its doors after 11 years. The publisher’s website went dark a little more than a month later.
Pinter conceived the New York–based Polis in 2013, during a time when digital was roiling the publishing landscape. His aim was to focus on authors whose books seemed to no longer fit with the sales expectations of the big houses by delivering “the service and distribution of a major trade publishing house with the nimbleness, innovation, and forward thinking of an independent press.” Agora, an imprint publishing crime fiction from “unique and diverse social and cultural viewpoints,” followed in 2019. Over a decade-plus, Polis and Agora built a backlist of 171 books by such authors as Alex Segura, Cynthia Pelayo, Gabino Iglesias, Rob Hart, and Sena Desai Gopal, among others.
After scrambling to find those books new homes, Pinter said that about 50% of the list will be split between Bloodhound Books, the U.K.-based fiction publisher founded in 2014 and acquired by Open Road Integrated Media in 2021, and Datura Books, the crime imprint of U.K.-based science fiction/fantasy publisher Angry Robot. Another 10% of the books were rehomed through individual deals with “various publishers.” Rights for the remaining books, Pinter added, have either been returned to their authors or will be shortly.
In some ways, this outcome represents a best-case scenario inside a worst-case scenario for an entirely self-funded small press like Polis and the diverse list of titles it published. “We couldn’t just approach Random House and say, ‘Here are 171 books that are everything from crime to horror to fantasy to anthology to young adult to middle grade to upmarket women’s fiction! Take ’em all!’ ” Pinter explained—especially at a time, he noted, when most publishers are trimming their lists, not adding to them. Like the act of bringing those books into the world, the process of finding them homes had to be bespoke.
Bloodhound founder and director Betsy Reavley, noting that her press picked up 19 titles from five authors on Polis’s list, said the transition involved “a lot of hard work behind the scenes” and Pinter’s “unrelenting help and dedication.” Gemma Creffield, editorial director at Datura, estimated that the press would begin rolling out titles it acquired from Polis in 2025. “It’s always a sad day when any independent publisher closes its doors,” she said. But “the caliber of Polis authors is exceptional,” she added, “and we can’t wait to reintroduce them.”
Pinter was perhaps uniquely positioned to elegantly manage the press’s end-times. Before starting Polis, he worked as an editor at corporate publishing houses including Random House, St. Martin’s Press, and Warner Books. And he’s an author himself, mostly of crime and thriller titles, which he has both published under his own name—including the Henry Parker series, launched at the HarperCollins imprint Mira in 2007—and self-published under the nom de plume A.L. Brody. (He recently signed on with Entangled Publishing’s Amara imprint to publish new books under that name.) So when the end became imminent for Polis, Pinter knew how vital it was to approach it from both the publisher’s side and the authors’.
As for what went wrong, Pinter said that the challenges that began with the pandemic never stopped coming, and simply became unmanageable. “At various points, in 2020, we were working with three different printers,” he said. “Two of them closed down, and one of them ran out of paper. You plan for so many things to go wrong. You don’t plan for a printer to run out of paper, or to not have enough truck drivers to drive your books to the stores.”
By late 2023, amid high inflation, Pinter saw the writing on the wall. “Not having large print runs, your unit cost is always very high,” he said. “So when your high unit cost goes up 30%–40% on every book, it’s untenable. You’re making, at best, a 10% margin on your books. That’s not including returns. And when the returns came in, we were losing money on almost every single book that we printed.”
At first, Pinter considered looking for funding to keep the press going. Then came a realization: “If I’d spent six months trying to find an outside backer to save the company and that didn’t work out, most likely I would have had to declare bankruptcy,” he said. That would have left the legal system, and not Pinter, in charge of where Polis’s books would go, and the press’s authors twisting in the wind. Pinter had no intention of allowing that to happen.
On March 11, Pinter took to X (formerly Twitter) to announce that Polis would close, and he began working on rehoming its books, contacting authors and their agents and potential future publishers. Then came yet another challenge. Two days later, his parents were in a car crash that put both of them in the hospital. They have since fully recovered, but the accident hammered home a lesson many small press owners know all too well: anything can happen at any time, and when it does, the buck stops with you.
It says much of Pinter that his partners in the book business all seem to agree that if the buck had to stop with someone, he was the right person to end up with it.
“What Jason had, beyond everything else, was taste,” said Josh Getzler, partner and literary agent at HG Literary, who represented a large portion of Polis’s list. “He didn’t care if an author had been published before, or had a pedigree. If they could write, and had an edge,” and “if it appealed to his slice of the crime fiction world, he was game. The pity,” he continued, “was that his intense and admirable independence presented logistical and workload challenges that would have daunted anyone.” He added: “We’re grateful that Jason tried to remain a ‘writer’s publisher,’ and was constructive and helpful in reverting the rights for titles when authors requested them.”
Author Alex Segura, who published several books with Polis, also noted Pinter’s penchant for going out on a limb for his authors. “When Jason Pinter agreed to publish my debut, Silent City, it had already been rejected by almost everyone and only been out in the world via a small, local New York press,” he said. He also pointed to the loss of the Agora imprint in particular, noting that Pinter and former editor Chantelle Aimée Osman “provided a space for underrepresented and marginalized voices to share their stories, which is vitally important and desperately needed. Seeing that door close is never good.”
Maria Napolitano, foreign rights manager and agent at KT Literary, observed that the loss of Agora is indicative of a larger issue in the publishing world. “The closure of an indie press, particularly one with an imprint that specializes in diverse books, is a loss for authors and the industry in that it flattens the publisher landscape, and now there is one fewer house acquiring new works in this particular area,” she said. “Polis and Agora closing down is a reminder that relying on a few specialized imprints to publish diverse books means an outsized impact on already marginalized authors if those lists are shuttered.”
Author Cindy Fazzi, whom Napolitano represents, agreed. Her debut thriller with Agora, Multo, “subverts the bounty hunter trope by featuring a Filipino American protagonist, the first brown immigrant bounty hunter hero in a novel. I’ll forever be grateful to Agora Books for taking a chance on the very idea of reinventing the trope,” she said. “Many publishers say they want to publish diverse authors, but Agora Books did what other publishers have been saying they will do. That ‘doing’ as opposed to just talking is the greatest legacy of Polis Books.”
Another Agora author, Cynthia Pelayo, echoed both Segura and Fazzi. After “every major publisher rejected” her 2020 novel Children of Chicago, Osman picked it up for Agora. The book went on to receive a starred review in PW, reviews in major publications, and a nomination for a Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel, and the press subsequently published two more books by Pelayo. “I owe that thanks directly to Chantelle and Jason,” she said. “All of my novels with them were either nominated for awards or received other industry accolades. I’m grateful they were a part of my publishing journey.”
Looking toward the continuation of his own journey, Pinter said that he has had “informal discussions” with some publishers about potential roles. But for now, he added, “I think I need at least a week or two to let my blood pressure return to normal.”
This article has been updated with further information.
A version of this article appeared in the 06/03/2024 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: