From Small Press to Big Five: Indie Press Authors Who Broke Through

Small press, big splash

There are five publishers who dominate bookstores and major media platforms. They have countless imprints, big budgets, major distribution networks, and hundreds of years of connections. Oftentimes, authors want to publish with these presses because they want to maximize exposure; they want to be read.

But not every author works with them. Not every author has a literary agent, a requirement for those publishers.

It’s not always because of quality either. Sure, agents sign authors they find talented, but they also do it with dollar signs for eyeballs. They do it based on gut feeling, on social media followers, on connections and celebrity, on what they believe those publishers want. 

They get things wrong sometimes too. Some publishers don’t want those books they thought would sell after all, perhaps because of a difficult sales pitch or because the publisher isn’t looking for that kind of book at the time of the pitch.

Other times, authors don’t pursue the big five publishers at all. They see their quiet book in their niche market that they love and they see indie presses taking chances on tiny books they would be proud to bring into the world, and they head straight for the submissions portal–agent or no agent. 

And sometimes, those small books make big splashes.

They catch the attention of major publishers and pave the way for a successful author career after them.

Here are five authors who went from indie presses to Big Five publishers.

Want to hear a fun fact?

Too bad, I’m going to tell you anyway.

Annie Hartnett was the first author I ever interviewed for Independent Book Review (outdated link here!). Her novel from Tin House Books, Rabbit Cake, was the second book we ever reviewed. I launched IBR with two books reviewed: Christopher D. DiCicco’s So My Mother, She Lives in the Clouds and Rabbit Cake.

I don’t know why she was so incredibly kind to talk to a lowly, just-starting-out book blogger like me, but she responded quickly and compassionately to my interview request, helping me launch the thing that would become my full time job five years later.

Rabbit Cake is an absolute blast of a debut novel. Narrated by a voicy 10-year-old, it tells the story of a family grieving the loss of their sleepwalking mother in a variety of different ways, from cooking hundreds of rabbit cakes to a husband wearing mom’s clothes and lipstick around the house. It did so well that it caught the attention of People Magazine, who named it a book of the week back in 2017.

From there, Hartnett was picked up by Ballantine Books (an imprint of Penguin Random House) for her second novel, Unlikely Animals, and then The Road to Tender Hearts, her most recent book that knocked it out of every single park. It’s hilarious, and it’s soft, and it’s got a sweet through-line narrative of a caring uncle who will spend every last dollar of his lottery money on helping his grieving nephew and niece. And if he finds his high school crush across the country while he’s doing it? It wouldn’t hurt.

Tin House, the indie publisher of Rabbit Cake and admittedly one of my all-time favorite presses, saw greatness in Hartnett, and all she’s done is thrive since she crossed their threshold.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a prolific, nationally acclaimed poet and essayist from Columbus, Ohio and one of the smartest people I’ve ever read. The MacArthur Foundation thought that too, naming him a fellow in 2021. It was never going to take long for this guy to get the recognition he deserved.

Publishing his first chapbook, Again I Wait for This to Pull Apart, with FreezeRay Press in 2015, he’s done nothing but excel each year since then. 

His second collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much (Button Poetry), is what sprung him onto the national scene with the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and his third, a book of essays on A Tribe Called Quest from University of Texas Press was a National Book Award Finalist. Can he kick it? Yes he can. 

Evocative, cultured, and concrete, his essays range from music to sports to pop culture; he’s got his finger on the pulse of that 90s feel I’ve been seeking out since growing up in that unforgettable age. 

My first book of his, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio), turned me into a lifelong fan who returns with each new book. Now he’s being published by Penguin Random House and can be found in almost every bookstore across the country. 

If you like basketball, his latest book, There’s Always This Year, fuses that ever-rotating feeling of hope and despair of being a sports fan in a world that doesn’t give you much hope anywhere else. He’s a hell of a live reader too, so whenever you get the chance to go audio with Abdurraqib, do it.

Split/Lip Press is one of my favorite small presses! And…they’re pretty darn small! They publish only a few books a year, around four, and they publish work that’s boundary- and genre-breaking. They saw what good Kristen Arnett would have in store for us with her short story collection Felt In the Jaw in 2017.

Since then, she’s hit homerun after homerun. 

Her debut novel, Mostly Dead Things (Tin House), is a hilarious, deeply Floridian novel about a queer girl dealing with her mother’s off-beat sexual-positioning taxidermy and who’s longing after the love of her life who’s disappeared. It’s  packed with humor, heart, and alligators. There’s a reason why it got a starred review from yours truly back in 2019. It was a New York Times Bestseller too.

Then in 2025, she released Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One with Riverhead Books, and it might be her best, funniest work to date. She’s a hilarious internet persona–one of my favorite Twitter follows back when that website didn’t give me conniptions–and she really hit her stride with this laugh-out-loud novel about a queer clown grieving her brother,  searching for love, celebrating friendships, and doing just about anything she can to make kids laugh. 

Ruben Degollado’s Throw (Slant Books) was a starred review before we even started doing starred reviews. The gorgeous cover might have been the reason I first jumped into this YA literary novel, but what’s inside is what’s kept me recommending him for years. 

Throw is just so heartfelt, so genuine, and so character-rich. The main character, Guero, is so deeply in love with his ex-girlfriend, nicknamed La Llorona after the Mexican ghost myth, and he’s equally loved by his friends. He continues to get in trouble and sticky situations because of them and  you can’t help but fall for the guy as a result. 

I’ve now gifted this book to four people, from my mom to my cousin who doesn’t read and my other younger cousin who does and feels unseen. It’s a heartbreaker of a novel that I called “as important as it is riveting” in my review back in 2019. He even reviewed for us, so obviously he’s near and dear to my IBR heart!

Then, in 2022, he released The Family Izquierdo with WW Norton & Co., a novel in stories about a family near the US-Mexico border with a family curse and a magical tortilla. It’s soulful and warm, a collection of snapshots and rich voices. 

When I saw Sequoia Nagamatsu at AWP in March, I fanboyed so hard that I probably made a fool of myself. I kept sneaking glances at him, like, “Woah, it’s really him,” until he wandered past the IBR booth and I finally mustered up the courage to tell him that Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone (Black Lawrence Press) is one of my all-time favorite books. 

It’s a sci-fi fantasy short story collection with a literary bent and images that will knock your socks off. If you don’t believe me, test out “Rokurokubi,” where a guy spies on his wife using an incredibly stretchy neck, or “Girl Zero,” where a grieving sister dives underwater to find a cave–and hopefully her sister. If you like literary fiction and haven’t read him yet, consider this your excuse.  

In 2022, he released a sci-fi novel, How High We Go In the Dark with William Morrow Books. It’s incredibly sad–don’t read it on a cruise like I did!–but it’s also extremely powerful. It’s got pandemic vibes and ice caves and brings that signature Nagamatsu style that makes you feel like you can picture him crying while he’s writing. 

Short story lovers will be ecstatic to discover Nagamatsu.

Who is an indie author you think should have gotten picked up by a Big Five publisher by now?

My choice? Lisa Boyle!

About the Author

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