News

Items of interest concerning Hawthorne Books and its authors

“Tom Spanbauer: Truth Through Fiction,” by Cathy Camper For Lambda Literary Review

09 Apr 2014|

Back in 2006, I interviewed Tom Spanbauer for The Lambda Literary Review when his book Now is the Hour was published. He is well known nationally as the author of that book and others, including Faraway Places, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon and The City of Shy Hunters. And in Portland, OR where he lives, as a teacher for his Dangerous Writers classes. His publisher, Hawthorne Books, notified me that his latest novel I Loved You More would be published this month, and I was very happy to be able to interview him about his new book, his writing process, and the current state of publishing.


Cathy Camper: Hawthorne Books reprinted your book Faraway Places, and they are publishing your latest book, I Loved You More. Could you talk a little about your choice to work with them and the differences of working with a small (and local) press compared to a larger publisher?


Tom Spanbauer: I took I Loved You More to the larger publishers in New York. At first my agent and I tried to sell it to my publisher of The Man who Fell in Love with the Moon, and Now is the Hour, he finally told me that he doesn’t take books that have writers [as characters] in them. So then, I sent it to Houghton Mifflin, they thought there was a lot of wonderful stuff in it, and “Spanbauer fans are going to love this,” but they thought it was outdated. “He’s sixty-eight years old, he’s still writing about the eighties and writing about AIDS. This is old stuff; we want the new happenin’ hip stuff.” I kind of felt as far as the market was concerned, I was out to pasture.

I thought, since Rhonda [Tom’s editor at Hawthorne] published Faraway Places, let’s talk to her about I Loved You More and she wanted it immediately. Those large publishers did very little promotion. I went on a book tour for The Man who Fell in Love with the Moon, but that was it. Hawthorne Books, on the other hand, has three people just on my book, every day. The way that this is going out into the world is incredible; they’ve already connected the book to Huffington Post.

What’s happened is these larger New York publishers are looking for the bottom line, and really the future in publishing is in small presses, because it’s an assemblage of people who love to read and love to write. It’s their passion.

To read the entire interview, go the Lambda Literary.