We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kate Gale. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kate below.
Kate , appreciate you joining us today. In our experience, overnight success is usually the result of years of hard work laying the foundation for success, but unfortunately, it’s exactly this part of the story that most of the media ignores. So, we’d appreciate if you could open up about your growth story and the nitty, gritty details that went into scaling up.
There are a number of indie presses that have stayed small. We wanted to be able to publish more books. There are a lot of great stories out there, unicorns in the forest. To do that, we needed to have a larger organization with more staff. Two of us could not do all the work. We needed to build a board and trust them to work with us.
In the literary world, there is always a fear of founders being fired by their boards. We had to overcome that fear and trust our board to work with us to build a strong organization. We had to hire great staff.
What drives us is publishing books that reflect the world we live in.
We are different from other presses in that we are willing to keep changing and yet not become corporate. We keep improving our game, but we don’t become Apple. We keep finding ways to build a street brand without becoming a New York press. We stay true to being a unique West Coast press that looks for unicorn books.
The way we turn that into money is that every year, we have a few tent pole books that sell really well and we throw our energy into those books on social media and sell the long tail out of them.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
We discover authors. We found Chris Abani, Douglas Kearney, Camille Dungy. We are always looking for amazing talent, and we find it. Because we are in Los Angeles, we are looking for outsiders, dreamers, makers, stories that are outside the mainstream, that challenge the status quo..
We publish books that reflect the world we live in.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
My Plan A was to become a university professor. I got a divorce after I finished my graduate degree so I was stuck in Los Angeles which makes getting a job difficult even after I had a PhD.
I had all this executive energy leftover so I decided to start a press. I am now on Plan B. I am also remarried.
I am a big fan of Plan B. Oddly, I am still friends with my first husband and I still teach at Chapman, so I can still see what Plan A would have been like, and it’s not as good as Plan B.
So don’t get too hung up when Plan A folds. Wait for Plan B.
Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?
I wish I had created a business plan earlier.
I wish I had done some personal financial plan earlier.
I wish I had someone to advise me on editing anytime.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.redhen.org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drkategale/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drkategale/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kate-kategale-66a3b544
Image Credits
Alfred Haymond