2022: What We Accomplished & Why It’s Important

2022 was a tremendous year for Stone Raven Press! Not just for our two successful book launches, but for the work we’ve done in defining our mission and plans for the future.

The first two volumes of Larissa N.N. Davila’s gorgeous fantasy series, The Sky Seekers, were released this year: Shorn in April and Cael’s Shadow in October. We promoted these books with live and virtual launch parties, giveaways, and a growing social media presence—our Facebook page now has 3,800 followers! We’ve not yet dipped our toes into the BookTok stream, but are having some internal conversations about that possibility for 2023.

The coming year will see the release of the next Sky Seekers novel, Avelune (cover art will be revealed very soon!), and an exciting announcement about a planned short fiction anthology tentatively titled Generations. We’ll continue to build our readership and support the efforts of other small presses—the kinds of publishers who value voices from outside the mainstream, and writing that defies tidy generic labels.

It’s both a scary and an exciting time to be a book publisher. Literary fans are aware that the “Big 5” publishers increasingly control the marketplace, with the result that many of the works that get published these days do so because they resemble past successes—or are written by established authors. Nothing wrong with these books, of course; we read and love them too! But it becomes harder and harder for first-time authors to find a press. Few large publishers will read unsolicited work anymore, and few agents will agree to represent writers who don’t already have a track record of publication—or at least a large social media following.

Increasingly, authors, even those writing for the Big 5, find themselves responsible for promoting their own work. Promotion budgets are ever-shrinking, while the public appetite for book news is ever-growing. Writers who don’t already have a large online community, or who struggle with the real-life challenges faced by marginalized groups, or who simply have day jobs that take most of their time, don’t get their stories in front of the public as reliably as those who have “Instagram-friendly” faces and resources.

Stone Raven Press is committed to finding and publishing those writers: people who have unique perspectives on the narratives that speculative fiction does especially well—stories about future possibilities; stories that re-imagine past histories; stories that question what defines humanity.

Research has shown that reading fiction enhances empathy, and as the ability to understand the perspectives of others becomes increasingly important in our own world, speculative fiction offers a way to open minds. Through speculative fiction we explore critical questions such as, how we define ourselves—as individuals and in relation to the larger living world—and how we define ourselves as a species. One thing that modern science is making very clear is the fact that we, as humans, aren’t the only intelligent beings on this planet, let alone in this universe. As we stretch our imaginations to embrace the largeness of our world, the richness of cultural differences, and the diversity of minds, bodies, and lives that we live among, we will look to our storytellers, poets, and dramatists—as well as to our scientists, teachers, and artisans—for maps to the future.

We at Stone Raven Press are proud of what we accomplished in our first year. In 2023, we look forward to sharing exciting new stories and perspectives with you!

Thank you for reading!

Kristen McDermott, Editor, and the whole team at Stone Raven Press