Good News for the Little People

Publisher's Weekly reported earlier this week that a new form of philanthropy has hit the small press market. Literary Ventures Fund, a non-profit organization committed to spreading literature to new readers, proposes to help small presses promote single titles. While they will not publish titles per se, they will provide funding for the marketing of books and the promotion of books at the bookstore level.

According to the fund's mission statement, the organization was inspired to take on this task due to the pressures in large publishing houses to promote and sell books that appeal to a larger market. Currently, they do not help single authors promote their works to publication, but they have plans to do so in the future.

Hallelujah! This is fantastic news for all types of writers, from literary memoirists and novelists to poets, of course. Poets often are published exclusively through the small press, so any support for a small press is support for a small poet somewhere.