On April 26, 2000, Dan Wickett posted a review of Alyson Hagy’s new novel, Keeneland, on Amazon.com. Earlier that spring, Hagy, who had been Wickett’s creative writing teacher at the University of Michigan more than a decade prior, had contacted some of her former students to tell them about her new book, and also to let them know that the first story collection of one of their classmates, What Salmon Know, by Elwood Reid, had recently been released.

In the eleven years since that undergraduate class, Wickett had fallen away from books, particularly after his children had been born. But reading Hagy’s novel reminded him what he had loved about reading. So much so, that he decided to try his hand at his first book review. “I tried to actually write something that was newspaper worthy,” Wickett said, laughing a bit at himself. “It wasn’t.”

But soon after posting his review on Amazon.com, he realized that the only people who would read it were individuals who’d already looked up Keeneland. “The problem with Amazon reviews is that unless someone is looking at that page, no one is going to see it,” he said. “So I e-mailed it to everyone who was currently on my e-mail address book at the time—a total of twenty-one individuals: nineteen family and friends, Alyson Hagy, and Elwood Reid. After, several friends and family members wrote back to say that they really enjoyed it, and they asked if I had any further suggestions. That was foolish on their part.”

Over the next few years Wickett would accumulate an e-mail list of more than 2,800 writers, editors, agents, publicists, and avid readers of literary fiction. Plus, those original family members. With each new review that he sent, he’d receive an e-mail or two in reply from someone who was a friend-of-a-friend wanting to be added to this list. His reviewing took an equally exponential leap. “In 2000 there were probably eleven or twelve book reviews, maybe thirteen,” Wickett said. “In 2001, I went crazy. There were 103 reviews. So people started getting e-mails every three days, or two in a day. And they were getting longer and longer.”

Wickett credits Reid as one of the individuals who really helped him get noticed. Steve Yarborough was another early advocate. “He forwarded the review that I’d done of his latest book to his publicist, Caitlin Hamilton,” he recounted, “and she e-mailed me with what seemed, at the time, like a ridiculous question: ‘Would you like some free books?’ It’s no longer a ridiculous question.” In fact, Wickett now receives more than a dozen review copies every week from publishers.

Reid was also one of the key writers who encouraged Wickett to start a Web site. He felt it would not only serve as a place for him to archive his work, which in 2002 had expanded to include author interviews, but also help him expand his readership. At the time, Wickett was working as a quality control manager at a steel distribution center. But eventually a friend offered to create him a Web site, and in 2003 the Emerging Writers Network was founded. Its mission, like the goal of those very first reviews, was—and still is—to help develop a larger audience for emerging writers and established writers deserving wider recognition. And for the last seven years it has done just that. In addition to those 2,800 members who receive a newsletter now rather than e-mails from Dan, the Web site averages six thousand visitors per month. It has also become an important resource for writers, with links to literally hundreds of reviews and journals, author sites, lit blogs, bookseller blogs, and online literary journals.

The same year that Dan Wickett was sending out that first book review, Steven Gillis was living in Ann Arbor, finally writing full-time after having recently left his job at a law firm, where he’d worked as an attorney specializing in anti-trust cases. Though it had taken him years to make this leap of faith, his desire to be a writer had been with him since he was a teenager. “I went to the University of Michigan as an undergrad,” Gillis explained, “but dropped out after my sophomore year to write. This would have been the late 1970s, early ’80s. During that time I worked at Follett’s bookstore, I drove a cab—I did all these odd jobs as I was trying to become a writer. And after three years, I realized, well, there’s a reason that they call it a ‘starving artist,’ because I was, literally, starving.”

All the while he had been writing. Slowly, steadily. “I came back to Michigan, practiced law as I wrote, then I finally just said, “Fuck law,” Gillis told me. “I’d gotten lucky in the stock market, and so I decided to roll the dice. I had enough not to starve, if I watched my pennies. So I moved from practicing law full-time at a firm in Birmingham to part-time law and writing the rest of the day. We were living in Ferndale at the time, and when I quit law entirely we moved here, to Ann Arbor, and I began writing full-time.”

In 2003 his first novel, Walter Falls, was published. The book was a finalist for the Independent Publishers Book of the Year Award and reviewed well. But in addition to writing, Gillis was also interested in community development. So that same year he contacted Ninive Calegari, who worked with Dave Eggers, about bringing a satellite of the writing center at 826 Valencia, in San Francisco, to Ann Arbor. “At the time, they were just thinking about having spokes on their wheel, having it in other places,” Steve explained.

Gillis not only went on to establish 826 Michigan, but he also funded the project entirely out of his own pocket. When I asked Gillis why creating a writing center mattered so much to him, he sat back in his chair. “You want me to get philosophical?” he asked.

Up until that point, this had been a standard interview—mapping out the separate paths that had brought two individuals (one a reader, the other a writer) together to create a nonprofit publishing entity: Dzanc Books. One that, in 2006, Publishers Weekly had called “The future of publishing,” despite the fact that they’d only published one title at the time. Yet Publishers Weekly had truly seen the future; in a mere four-year’s time, Dzanc has risen as one of the premier indie houses in this country. In addition to publishing such acclaimed authors as Roy Kesey, Yannick Murphy, Terese Svoboda, Allison Amend, Jeff Parker, and Peter Selgin, they also count Laura van den Berg in their stable of writers. Her 2009 collection What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, was the recipient of a Barnes & Noble Discovery Prize. It also was long-listed for the Story Prize, a finalist for Foreward Magazine’s Book of the Year, and, most recently, short-listed for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award. Additionally, four of their writers received NEA grants last year, and stories by their authors have received O. Henry and Best American accolades, among other prizes.

Yet while the publishing arm of Dzanc is what most people know them for, in fact, it is only one small aspect of their mission. At the heart of this organization is their charitable work, which is what I had stumbled upon in my casual question to Steve about his commitment to the community. When I answered that I did want to hear the philosophical answer, Gillis’s reply was simple and straightforward. Yet perhaps nothing captures why Dzanc exists, or what it hopes to accomplish as an organization and a publisher, than his response: “There’s really no purpose in life except helping other people. That’s the bottom line. I mean, there really isn’t. That’s how I look at it. I don’t understand when people don’t think that way. You know, I got lucky early on with investments. I live in a comfortable house. I could live in a mansion, but I don’t. I save my pennies and I do charitable work instead.”

How fitting—and natural—then that Gillis and Wickett would work so well together. Because during the five years prior to their initial meeting, the only compensation that Wickett had received from writing hundreds of reviews, interviewing dozens of writers, and creating a Web site to promote the work of these individuals, was the free copies of books he’d received from authors and publishers. What mattered to him was championing good writing. That, and the friendships that had naturally developed along the way.

It was the Emerging Writers Network Web site that eventually caught Gillis’s attention in late January of 2005. In particular, an interview that Wickett had conducted with John Haskell. And when Gillis realized that they both lived in southeast Michigan, he wrote to see when Wickett would be visiting Ann Arbor next. As it turned out, they were both planning to attend an upcoming reading at Shaman Drum the next month.

After the reading, they went across the street to a restaurant. The two joked as they recounted their initial encounter. “Dan had a burger and a Coke, and I had a drink. That’s basically how we are,” Gillis said. “We have the perfect relationship, because I’m the bad cop and he’s the good cop. He’s the face man; I’m the man behind the curtain. I’m the mad scientist with the ideas, and then Dan’s the one who has to say, “Ok, how the hell are we going to pull this off?”

“That is a very good description,” Dan agreed. “I sit back at times and question how other people haven’t been able to work well with Steve, but then I realize there are certain aspects of my personality that blend in very well with his. And that’s why this has gone so well.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty intense,” Gillis continued. “I might seem calm now, but I’m pretty much an A+ personality. And Dan knows how to handle it. I just want people to do what they say they’re going to do. If you want to annoy me the quickest, tell me you’re going to do something and then don’t do it.”

“And if you really want to make him mad,” Wickett added, laughing, “Follow that up by saying, ‘I didn’t say that.’ I can see the sparks flying in Ann Arbor all the way from Westland.”

Listening to Steve and Dan joke as we sat around Gillis’s kitchen table at his home in Ann Arbor—a modest bungalow in an equally modest neighborhood—I realized that the reason Dzanc worked, and the reason that it has been so successful, was exactly because of this: their relationship. In particular, their ability to be serious about their work without taking themselves too seriously.

When I spoke with Laura van den Berg about this several days later, via e-mail, her sentiments were nearly the same. “Dan and Steve strike me as being ideally suited business partners,” she wrote. “They’re both huge lovers of literature. They have great respect for what writers do and have a wonderful grasp of community. And they are utterly tireless workers.”

Even back in February of 2005, during their initial meeting, the two were already beginning to work together. And though a formal business partnership wouldn’t begin until the following year, when they founded Dzanc, they were already collaborating on ways to help writers get more attention, as well as how they could develop more charitable projects like putting writers into schools. “Though things don’t remain abstract with us too long,” Gillis explained. “I leap and Dan looks over the cliff and says, 'Oh, hell…'"

So by the end of 2005 they had decided to set up an umbrella nonprofit for literary journals, in order to help them with fund-raising, grant writing, and distribution. But some journals were hesitant to join because they feared they’d be told who to publish, and others affiliated with institutions were worried that they’d lose their university funding. “A lot of people were skeptical,” Wickett explained. “They wanted to know, ‘What’s in it for you guys?’”

“We still get that all the time, man,” Gillis added. “We do a lot of charitable work and they always ask: ‘What’s in it for you? What’s the catch?’ And I try to say, ‘There’s no catch.’ And they say, ‘Come on…’ Drives me nuts.”

But despite the fact that Gillis and Wickett are idealists, they’re not naïve. With his background in law and his previous experience establishing 826 Michigan as a nonprofit, Gillis had a sense of the challenges they would face. He was unwilling to undertake the project unless they could come up with a clear business plan and an equally sound financial strategy. Though once they did, he believed in the mission enough that he donated a substantial amount of his own capital to guarantee the organization a strong financial start. The long-term plan was to begin grant writing and fund-raising in a few years, after they’d established themselves as a legitimate entity. Then the economy went in the toilet.

Because they are fiscally prudent and creative, though, Dzanc has managed to weather the storm. And despite some financial hardships, they haven’t cut back on their charitable programs. Quite the opposite, in fact. In addition to a host of workshops and scholarships that they sponsor, they also underwrite a writer-in-residence program in schools in Michigan. Additionally, they fund the Dzanc Prize each year. “This is a $5,000 award that goes to a writer who does both a social service and has a work in progress,” Gillis explained.

For example, Kodi Scheer was the winner of this prize in 2008. Her proposal, as she puts it, was “to lead a series of writing workshops for patients, caregivers, and staff at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.” When I asked her how she felt the program impacted her community, she said, “Most of my students felt a sense of agency they didn’t have before putting words on the page. When you’re in a healthcare setting, there’s a strong feeling of powerlessness, of everything happening to you, that you don’t have any choice. This tends to be true for many patients and family members. Writing can help us discover, explore, and reflect upon the choices we do have.”

Not every program has been a complete success the first time, of course. Last year Dzanc instituted “Dzanc Day,” which the founders admit was a learning experience. “It was a great idea—to have a writing workshop in every state, in as many cities as we could find volunteers to conduct them,” Gillis explained. And on March 20, 2010, they did manage to have thirty workshops in twenty-six different cities. Not a failure in anybody’s book. But because many of the workshops didn’t sell out, they fell short of their fundraising goal. Partly this had to do with not having enough time to publicize the event, so this year they’ve begun planning ten months in advance. And their goal is to double attendance.

Still, they learned from the process, just as they’ve learned how to be a better publisher in the last few years. “When we published our first book [Roy Kesey’s collection], we over printed,” Gillis told me. “So we’ve learned what the literary market is like. We learned we don’t need to print several thousand copies. Laura’s book is the exception, of course, because of the great things that have happened to it along the way. But in general, if you sell a thousand you’re doing really well. So we learned that.”

They also learned how integral a distributor was to their success. In the first year of business, Wickett had to call bookstores individually to solicit orders for their books. Then he’d invoice, package, and drive each one to the post office. Needless to say, this was time consuming. Especially considering the largest order they ever received that year was for twelve books. And, of course, their lack of distribution wasn’t by choice. They had hoped to work with Consortium, but the company’s policy was that they wouldn’t carry a publisher who had less than ten titles in print. And at that time they’d only published Kesey’s.

Then, as they say, the wind began to change. In March of 2006, Publishers Weekly ran that one-page story touting them as “the future of publishing,” and the next morning they woke up with e-mails offering distribution from both Consortium and PGW. They went with Consortium and by August they were in its first catalog.

The success of Kesey’s collection brought them further attention, both from the literary establishment and fellow writers. Soon after Kesey’s book was released, Yannick Murphy’s agent contacted them, Wickett explained. “Her agent wrote me and said, ‘I know from your blog that you really liked Yannick’s last novel, which was a McSweeney’s book, and we’ve got a story collection we’d like you to consider. Little Brown is publishing her next novel, but they don’t want the stories.’ So I said, ‘Sure.’”

“Coming out of the gate with those two writers helped cement our reputation,” Gillis added. “And since then—objectively speaking—I think our list is amazing.”

It would be hard to argue. In the last four years Dzanc (or its imprints) have published fifty-two books and five chapbooks, most of which are literary fiction, and many of which are award-winning titles. Those imprints themselves are a wonderful testament to Dzanc’s mission to promote literature. They now support four other presses—Black Lawrence Press, OV Books, Keyhole Press, and Starcherone—as well as literary journals—Absinthe and Monkeybicycle. Plus, they started their own online literary journal, The Collagist, edited by Matt Bell, the series editor for their Best of the Web anthology. Yet despite being under the Dzanc umbrella, these publications are completely autonomous in terms of staff and editorial work; Dzanc merely handles distributing and the up-front printing costs. “Our attitude when we heard that some presses were going to go under or needed help was to say, ‘We can help them.’ We didn’t say, ‘We can help them and we can make a lot of money.’ No. We can help them. And if we break even, that’s all we want to do. But we’re saving these places that people have put their hearts and souls into.”

Part of the reason that Dzanc has been able to invest so much of their money in expanding both their publishing and charitable work is due to the fact that they are incredibly fiscally prudent. “One of the first things we decided was that we weren’t going to waste money on an office,” Gillis told me. “We work out of the house. Authors don’t care. We’re not trying to impress anybody. So we save a lot of money that way. People still say to us, ‘How do you do it?’ But we communicate all the time. We communicate hourly—a hundred times an hour sometimes. You don’t need an office next door. You can do everything you need to do online. There’s no reason for the logistics to be physical.”