A talk with Leland Cheuk of 7.13 Books.
Plus: A look at the surprising 150-year history of the idiom "ain't no such thing as a free lunch;" and the usual reviews and questions from ESL Redditors
Originally published at the Jason Pettus newsletter through Substack on October 7, 2022, and republished here at this website on January 20, 2024.
Leland Cheuk of 7.13 Books on Indie Lit, Query Submitting and More
I guess I don’t technically have to ethically disclose that I was actually the first publisher of Leland Cheuk’s debut novel, the uproariously hilarious dark comedy The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong, which I put out through the now shuttered Chicago Center for Literature and Photography; but I actually love disclosing that fact anyway, because I was very proud to have Leland’s book in my catalog, a clever and unexpected tale about The Most Dysfunctional Asian American Family In Human History. It brings a welcome sense of absurdity and outrageousness to this often overly earnest community in a way that wouldn’t be seen again until the recent Everything Everywhere All At Once, and it’s no wonder that it picked up a strong cult following that has led in subsequent years to Leland’s first mainstream national successes in places like VICE and NPR.
Leland was also one of the most socially active authors in the CCLaP catalog, perhaps only beaten by The Hardest Working Man In Show Business, Mister Ben Tanzer (but hopefully we’ll be talking with him more about this in another issue soon); so it’s also no wonder that when my press closed and my authors were required to find new fates for their books, Leland would decide to just start his own indie press called 7.13 Books in the style of mine and others, where the main focus is not on easily marketable titles but on finding truly great books, ones that don’t pander to the usual totebag crowd but offer legitimately challenging, legitimately thought-provoking stories and ideas. Now that it’s been up and running for a bit, I thought it’d be a great time to check in with Leland and see how things are going, and also have him share with all us some of the lessons he’s now learned about the business side of putting out books, as well as what it’s like to now be reading query letters instead of sending them. Our email conversation is below, so let me thank Leland very much for taking the time to participate.
You famously started an indie press after first writing and publishing a novel yourself. I imagine many of my subscribers have thought about doing this too. What's the most unexpected thing you've learned, now that you've been up and going for several years now?
I don’t know about “famously,” but I’ll take it. As strange as it is to say, I think the most unexpecting thing I’ve learned is that a lot of people care about writing and love literature, a word that means different things to different people. You’d think that, with how much we’re all on our screens with streaming services, more folks would be dying to write screenplays, but it seems that if someone wants to be creative and tell a story with words, people still want to write a book.
You have a pretty incredible list of media mentions already—NPR, the LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Buzzfeed, Kirkus, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and even more. How did an indie press like yours pull this off? More specifically, are there any basic lessons that anyone could learn and repeat for similar success?
It’s also been a surprise to see the trade reviewers review our books. You hear that they won’t review small, print-on-demand presses, but we haven’t had an issue with that. I just follow the same submission guidelines as the large presses. We get galleys ready 4-6 months ahead of the publication date and put it in the mail. I think if the book looks good and has a solid blurb or two on it and a professional looking press sheet, it has a shot.
As for the national outlets, I really rely on my authors to get there. I send them a simple 2-page book marketing guide on how to get reviews, interviews, and bookstore events. Usually, it starts with making a list of writers the author knows who can help, not just writers who can blurb the book, but freelancers who might be willing to pitch a review somewhere. I’m a book reviewer for these outlets so I know how the sausage gets made. For every full-time-employed critic like Ron Charles at the Washington Post, there are hundreds of freelancers like me.
A big thing we often talk about at the newsletter is the realistic amount of money an indie-lit person needs to pull off a commercial success, and how long you can go before you absolutely need that money back. Without needing to go into specific numbers if you don't want to, what's been your general experience with this subject at 7.13? How much does your marketing rely on traditional ads at Amazon and Audible, for example? Do you participate in the Kindle Unlimited program? Do sales to public libraries account for a significant amount of your revenue?
Publishing at the scale of 7.13 Books, where we’re doing 2-5 books a year, is at best a breakeven business—you know this well, Jason, from your experience with CCLaP. I make my money back on about a quarter of my books. I don’t pay for advertising or Kindle Unlimited, and I don’t pay myself or anyone associated with the press. We seem to sell some to libraries but not much. Without a national distributor like the Ingram-owned companies, it’s tough to get into bookstores and libraries at any sort of scale no matter what trade reviews you get. And because we do so few books a year, it’s tough to get a national distributor interested in putting a sales rep behind you. A lot of small presses that are with national distributors complain about being in debt.
My experience with a distributor for a year was a money-losing one. We sold twice as many books, but once all the fees came in and you factored in the shipping costs of doing a print-run, we were spending three times as much, so we actually lost more money than ever by selling more books than ever. [JP: This was the biggest factor behind my own press going out of business too, my experiences with the traditional system of physical distributors and brick-and-mortar bookstores, run so wonkily that it leaves you owing money even after you’ve sold thousands of books. This will be the standalone subject of another newsletter soon!]
You yourself are a popular, widely read author, published in such hipster places as VICE, The Millions, The Rumpus, Salon, etc. You're also young(ish), very social, tech-savvy, and part of an already strong community based on race (in your case, Asian American). How much are these things absolutely needed for 7.13's success, do you think, and how much of it is just fun byproducts of being heavily involved in the literary community?
First of all, thanks for calling me young(ish) and popular because I don’t feel either. I think starting a press is about building your own little literary community, and as that grows, you get to know more creative people. My writing life is mostly separate from my publishing life. Where they intersect is that everyone in the literary community loves a publisher. Being a publisher is like being automatically elevated to literary sainthood. It’s not just because writers want to get published. It’s because I think we all know how frail and generally unprofitable this art form can be. And yet there’s this huge community that cares deeply about books. Literature resists the logic of capitalism.
What's something you never, ever want to see in a query letter or sample submission ever, ever again?
God, there are so many. I never want to see a book described as “completed.” It’d better be done before you submit it. The main issue I see with queries is that they’re generally about twice as long as they should be. Two-hundred-and-fifty to 350 words, tops—just the facts. I don’t need to know what inspired the book or how your agent ghosted you or how you’ve sent 10,000 queries prior.
Has being both an author and a publisher been worth it enough that you would recommend it to other ambitious authors? What are some of the biggest pitfalls to avoid, especially ones you didn't see coming?
I think more big-house authors should do it, particularly midlist ones who have some critical acclaim. The vast majority of them aren’t making a living off their advances. They’re probably teaching or doing some other day job. Publishing is one of the only endeavors where you can make someone’s lifelong dream come true by spending a few thousand bucks. That’s about as meaningful as it gets.
As for pitfalls, I’d say that distributor trap is a big one. If you’re lucky enough to have a distributor interested in your press, make sure it makes economic sense. Another pitfall is—and you probably know this as well, Jason—authors can be high-maintenance, particularly if it’s their first book and they haven’t thought about the way the publishing ecosystem works and how everything from publicity to distribution is tilted toward the big houses. [JP: I plead the Fifth.] Being a publisher requires high emotional intelligence: you’re setting expectations with authors, disappointing them almost daily, and finally, building them up when you can.
My thanks again to Leland for these insightful thoughts. 7.13’s newest book, Tessa Yang’s The Runaway Restaurant, comes out this Tuesday. Do you own a small press? Would you like to tell us how things have been going recently? I’d love to feature you in the next issue, so just drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com.
Idiom Corner: No Such Thing as a Free Lunch
One of the truly surprising things I’ve learned by regularly answering questions for English as a Second Language (ESL) students at Reddit is just how rare it is for a language to rely as much on idioms for daily communication as English does, and specifically American English. “Idiom” is not a term many Americans know, but it’s a concept all of them inherently understand and intuitively use at least a dozen times every day; it’s when you create a witty or clever phrase that symbolically stands for a bigger or deeper action or subject (“I gave him the cold shoulder;” “He sent me on a wild goose chase”), but the words in that phrase have to be the exact same words every time, or else the meaning is instantly lost. So in other words, if I slangily say in a conversation, “Straighten up and get your act together, pal,” it cannot be directly substituted with the phrase, “Vertically align yourself and ensure that your theatrical performance is complete, comrade.” (Although now that I’ve written that down and looked at it, I do believe I’m going to try to work that second version into the next dinner party I attend.) We take them for granted here in the US, but I’m learning from ESL students around the globe that these kinds of universally known symbolic phrases in a culture (seemingly learned by osmosis—we never remember specifically learning them, but feel like they’ve just been with us our whole lives) are rare to non-existent in many other languages, and because of this can be one of the most difficult things for an ESL student to learn, grasp and really understand.
Not too long ago, we were discussing a fascinating one from American history over at Reddit, which is “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” This is a great example of how, since these kinds of phrases tend to be passed casually from one generation to the next via conversations with grandparents and old pieces of pop culture, they’re often some of the few cultural references we have left and still use from 50, 75, 100 years ago or more. This is of course yet another thing that makes them so difficult for ESL students to understand, because they’re often referencing a long-ago event from history or using now outdated language. Today’s phrase, for example, originates way back in the mid-1800s, when it was common practice for urban blue-collar saloons to offer a free lunch for day laborers who would come in for a beer; remember, these were the days before restaurants, certainly the days before diners or fast food, so it was kind of a win-win situation for everyone, keeping the city’s workforce fed and the bar owners making a tidy profit to boot. The fact that most such 1800s bar food was extra-salty (cheese, ham, crackers, peanuts), thus inspiring more drink orders, was merely a capitalist bonus. (For what it’s worth, free lunches in bars are not really a thing in America anymore [the elimination of daytime drinking, and the rise of fast food, put a permanent stop to it], although a very closely related ritual that happens at the end of the work day is still hugely popular to this day, called a “happy hour” when not only are drinks discounted but free food often served by the bar, often quite sophisticated.)
It's not until we get to the Great Depression of the 1930s, though, that this phenomenon from the American urban working world gains a new meaning and becomes a well-known phrase for the first time. For of course this tradition of free lunches at blue-collar bars was still in operation in many places across the country even 75 years after it had started, but in the Depression the nature of them often changed—either the drinks suddenly started costing a lot more, or you were required to buy more of them, or they were sponsored by a group and suddenly you were getting the hard sell from them, whether that was the communists, the fascists, the unions, the mafia or the Catholics. In fact, that’s a hallmark of any depression, how many groups try to manipulate the down and out during economically fraught times by promising big rewards for little to no work (something we would know nothing about in our current times at all); so no wonder it started being said more and more during the ‘30s that there “ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” by which such people were metaphorically expressing their frustration with the entire infiltration of these kinds of groups into society, not just bars. But no wonder such people expressed this frustration through this dwindling but still existing Victorian Age tradition of urban blue-collar bars offering lunches; because everyone understood what this was, and understood the actually quite sophisticated moral lesson that was being taught by evoking that image.
This phrase starts getting used over and over by people in conversation in the 1930s; it begins showing up in pop culture items like song names and movie titles; an entire generation later, ‘60s Libertarians like sci-fi author Robert Heinlein coopt it to further their agenda of radical self-empowerment; and that’s how something becomes an idiom, to the point where a huge majority of Americans will know this phrase and understand exactly what you’re trying to say by using it, even as none of them know when or where they exactly learned of the phrase for the very first time. And that’s why if someone shook their finger at you and admonished, “A meal without payment is not a truth that exists!” you would squint and frown and respond, “…What the hell you talking about, pal?”
We use these idioms all the time in American English to express complex thoughts quickly in fast, casual conversations; and it’s a subject we’re often talking about over at ESL Reddit, because this is just so difficult for someone new to our culture to learn in any kind of traditional or rational way. The idioms under question often turn out to have fascinating histories; so I thought maybe I’d start regularly sharing some of their stories here at the newsletter, in between the industry news, grammar features, indie marketing discussions, and advice to prospective book editors. If you have one in particular you’d like me to examine here in a future issue, please drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com and let me know!
The Latest Reviews: Alphabet Challenge Edition
It’s the end of summer and the start of fall, so time to pack away all my beach and airport reads from Elin Hilderbrand and Lee Child and Jim Butcher, and get out the weighty tomes that will each take a month apiece to read (currently Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel; then my second read of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem; then Mary Shelley’s forgotten 18th-century post-apocalyptic novel, The Last Man; then at long last my first-ever read of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind; and finally around the holidays, a reread of Don DeLillo’s White Noise in preparation for the coming Noah Baumbach adaptation on Netflix at Christmas).
That’s going to keep the book reviews few and far between this autumn; but that gives me time to delve more into my new Alphabet Challenge over at my movie review account at Letterboxd! Namely, I’m sick to death of paying all this money to all these streaming services and then never getting around to actually watching anything (or worse, just binging the same ol’ episodes of Seinfeld every night); so as often as I can pull it off, I’m going through the alphabet and every week watching five movies that start with that week’s letter, respectively each night at Netflix, HBOmax, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and free service Tubi.
The A and B weeks are far off in the past now, but the C week just recently got posted, so here’s some writeups to keep you occupied for the moment, with another letter or two I’ll have ready to share with each new issue (hopefully):
First was 1978’s Coma, written and directed by technothriller pioneer Michael Crichton, one of the first movies I have a conscious memory of because the commercials featuring naked people hanging from wires freaked me out. It was quite good!
Then David Cronenberg’s latest, this year’s Crimes of the Future, marketed as his grand return to disgusting technofreak body horror. That’s true, and the results aren’t bad!
Next, the recent Concrete Cowboy, starring Idris Elba in a tale so surreal it has to be true; namely, it’s a fictional tale but set within the real world of Philadelphia urban-class Black “urban cowboys” who have been stabling and riding horses within the city all the way back since the 1800s and horse-drawn wagons, now a dying breed whose unsafe stable shacks are being demolished by the city and bringing an end to a centuries-long way of urban life. As most of you know, earnest afterschool specials aren’t really my thing, but this one is thoughtful, tough, and uses its bizarre true origins for all it’s worth.
After that was Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 The Conversation, one of those post-Kennedy moody conspiracy thrillers I love so much, quickly forgotten because it came out the same exact year as his Godfather Part II, which won all the awards and pushed this one out of contention. It’s for sure worth your time to track down and watch on streaming.
And finally, 1984’s low-budget cult horror “classic” C.H.U.D., inspiration for a movie review website that became more famous than the film itself. Every bad thing you’ve heard about it is true, which of course is what makes it so delightful to watch.
And of course, let’s not forget about those questions I’m always answering for English as a Second Language (ESL) students at Reddit! Here’s some of the more fascinating ones since the last issue:
What’s the name of those little stick figures on bathroom signs?
If someone jumps rope in the past, is it that they “jumped rope” or “jump-roped?”
Why is it considered good if something is “humming like a machine?”
Why do Americans say “more perfect,” when “perfect” already means “as good as it possibly gets?”
What’s the difference between “finishing” a plan and “fulfilling” a plan?
Got a book or movie you want me to review? How about a question concerning the English language? Or are you maybe ready to start editing your own book, and want to see if I’m available? Drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com and let me know about it! Remember, if you’re subscribed to the newsletter when booking a job directly with me, you get 25 percent off your bill—all jobs, all bills—so don’t forget to make a mention of it when you write.
