Emily Books was launched in 2011 as a way for founders Emily Gould and Ruth Curry to share, as they write in their mission statement, “weird books by women.” Each month they choose a previously published work of prose or poetry that is hard to find or out of print, digitize it, and send it to their subscribers as an e-book—their list has included the work of Elena Ferrante, Eileen Myles, and Ellen Willis, among other pioneering women writers. Now the two are partnering with Coffee House Press to expand Emily Books into print, launching an imprint that will publish two new works of transgressive and genre-bending prose by women, trans, and queer writers each year (the editors are open to queries year-round). With the first Emily Books print title out this month—Jade Sharma’s debut novel, Problems—Gould and Curry discuss the evolution of their project.

How did you meet and decide to start Emily books?
Ruth Curry: We met about eleven years ago. We worked at the same big corporate publishing company. It’s funny, we actually applied to the same job—Emily and I both got to the last round of interviews. It was between her and me, but she got it. And I was so disappointed. But the publishing house kept my résumé on file, and six months later I got a call for a different opening. So then I got that job, and I wanted to know, “Who is this girl who got my job?” I was just so curious. We started becoming friends.
Emily Gould: Getting our start in big, corporate publishing and having experience working on cookbooks and celebrity memoirs, I think, perversely, has helped us a ton even though what we’re doing now is the polar opposite end of the spectrum. We still understand what it’s like to be in those meetings. We still understand what selling big books is like, and it made us believe that we would be able to crack the eternal problem of book marketing: uniting books with their audience.
Curry: So we became work friends and then we became real friends, and time passed, like that chapter of Mrs. Dalloway. Five years ago, we had both moved onto different jobs in publishing—Emily worked with Gawker, and had already written two books and was working on her third. I had left New York and come back, worked at a literary agency, and did one year of an MFA program before dropping out. We were both underemployed and confused and just about to turn thirty…
Gould: …but also really wanting to get back into publishing but not really seeing how, not really seeing the voices of authors who we cared about represented. We’re huge readers, and our friendship has always been based a lot on trading books back and forth, and we thought, “How do we replicate this? How do we recommend books to people?”
Curry: At this point, everyone was saying, “E-books are the future!” since there had just been a huge spike in sales. It has sort of recalibrated at this point, but at the time what we wanted to do was [digitally] replicate the experience of going into a favorite bookstore. My favorite [Brooklyn] bookstore is Greenlight—Emily’s is Word—and everyone at the store knows me and will recommend books, and I recognize people browsing there. We wanted to replicate that experience of having a local indie bookstore that you love, but online.
Gould: But we quickly realized that all the books we loved so much and felt were underrepresented or cult classics were books that had been published badly or had fallen out of print…
Curry: …or had just been published by a really small publisher that went out of business…
Gould: …or whose list got taken over by someone else. What we realized, eventually—after we’d already been in business for a couple of months and had started picking the books and sending them out to our subscribers—was that all the books we wanted to select were by women. And if there were underappreciated geniuses that were male…we still haven’t actually encountered any.
Curry: At one point, Emily said, “We might have to start using the f word.” And I thought, “What is she talking about?” And she said, “feminist.”

How do you grow your list?
Curry: After we’d been around for six months or so, people started recommending stuff to us. Or people whose books we had selected would recommend other books to feature.
Gould: That’s still a big source of recommendations for us, the authors. Even authors who aren’t Emily Books authors will recommend books that have been really important to them that we’ve never heard of.
Curry: And our readers too. Our readers are super savvy and really cool.
Gould: We’ve gotten a lot of suggestions from our subscribers.

What’s your read-to-recommend ratio?
Curry: In the last year or so we’ve gotten a lot better at figuring out exactly what works for us, so it used to be a lot higher. But I would say four to one.
Gould: I would say higher, like seven to one. We read a lot.
Curry: We read a lot of stuff, yeah. But now we’re pretty well established and have reached the point where we could plan out our next twelve months if we wanted to. We’re still waiting to be surprised by something that’s new and great, but I think we’ve really nailed what we want to do and are not casting about as much as we used to.
Gould: Another thing is that more books like our books are being published, which is a really new thing—it’s just been happening in the past few years.
Curry: Like Jenny Zhang, who just got that book deal with Lena Dunham’s imprint [at Random House]. She’s a great writer—she would have been published at some point anyway—but that it’s happening now, and in such a big way, is relatively new.
Gould: There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done to correct for years of the systematic erasure of women, queer people, and people of color…
Curry: …especially women of color.
Gould: We don’t think that work is anything close to being accomplished. There’s definitely still a place for us, but it does seem like the kind of books that we do are a little bit flavor-of-the-month now, and bigger publishers are sort of starting to listen to that. But we’ll still be here after it has stopped being trendy.

Have you found that authors are receptive to their books being turned into e-publications?
Curry: It’s really hit or miss. Some people are really into it. We made a list of all the books we were interested in pursuing back when we started in 2011, and there are probably at least three books from that original list that we still haven’t been able to convince an estate or a technophobe author to trust us, basically. So that’s difficult. But just as often people are so thrilled that the work is getting back out there, or that there’s a chance for a small university press’s book to get to a non-academic audience.
Gould: And we’re not as worried about it as we were. We figure we’ll win over everyone eventually. And in the meantime there are plenty of people who do want to work with us and are interested. We offer an extra boost, especially because we guarantee a number of sales. And there’s also a halo effect around the books that we pick—they sell more in their print editions too because we pick them.

How did the partnership with Coffee House Press start?
Curry: Emily had said, “We should do print.” And I said, “No, we shouldn’t. Everything about print is too hard. We can’t do it. I don’t want to. Let’s stop talking about this.” But a part of me was intrigued. We had kind of reached this plateau where it was like, okay, we have this core group of people…      
Gould: …and a brand that we’d built based on all of the many books that we’ve picked…
Curry: …but we felt like the people who liked to read e-books, and the people who were really into weird, transgressive books by women…maybe we had maxed it out. Maybe we needed to be able to reach more people…
Gould: …and have a bigger platform for our voice and our vision, and we could only get that by doing print originals.
Curry: So Chris Fischbach [the publisher of Coffee House] was in touch and mentioned that he was looking for freelance acquisitions editors because they were trying to expand their list, and get more voices, more diversity, and he asked if I knew anyone.
Gould: We had thought about trying to become an imprint of a more mainstream publisher, and had even had some meetings, but the timing wasn’t right for it. But Chris and Caroline [Casey] at Coffee House just immediately got our vision, and it fit really well with the other books on their list.

How do you find your titles for the imprint? How, for example, did you acquire your first title, Problems by Jade Sharma?
Curry: I went to grad school with Jade. We had a seminar class together where we sort of became friends, and I read the manuscript and thought, “This is really good.” And then I left school and we kind of fell out of touch. When Emily and I started putting this imprint together, I asked Jade if I could read it again because she had finished it. And I thought it was great. I just knew. I just knew it was right. So Problems came in through grad school connections. And then Emily and Chloe Caldwell, who wrote our second release—I’ll Tell You In Person, a collection of essays—have been Internet friends for a long time.
Gould: Chloe’s manuscript came to us in a much more traditional way. We didn’t ask whether she had something—her book was out on submission and we bought it. We’ve already signed up a third book and are looking for a fourth. We’re sort of cultivating some authors who we have picked in the past for Emily Books.
Curry: We’re always asking what people are working on as gently as possible.
Gould: We try to nag people in a way that we hope feels loving and not oppressive. And not like, “So…are you done with your novel yet?” Because that really is not a fun thing to hear. But there are definitely a few people who we are courting. And we already have a little network of agents who know what we like and are sending us stuff. But our whole thing is underrepresented voices and sometimes those people don’t have agents...
Curry: …so we do have open submissions.

Are you looking at mostly fiction and nonfiction? Are you going to publish poetry?
Curry: Coffee House has such a great poetry list, and we like poetry, but I’m not a poetry editor. I wouldn’t feel great trying to edit someone’s poetry collection.
Gould: Definitely not. Our first two acquisitions pretty much represent the range of what we do: Ruth is a good fiction editor, especially close autobiographical fiction, and I’m a good editor for personal essays. We’re both probably decent editors for other kinds of more experimental things, which our third book definitely is. We’ll find our way. Our editorial process is also very collaborative.
Curry: We are different people and have different strengths and weaknesses, and I think, like Power Rangers, we work together.
Gould: We’re greater than the sum of our parts.

What’s been the most challenging part of taking Emily Books from digital to print?
Gould: We’re still trying different things in terms of how we’re going to get to a sustainable future.
Curry: I think the hardest thing is making money.
Gould: We’re striving towards a model that is good for readers and authors and publishers and booksellers. Somebody is inevitably getting chopped in the equation. Our model is basically that we’ve found this audience and we market directly to it, and we try to grow that audience. And I think there’s a lot of potential for that model. I just worry about how we’re going to sustain it without ever partnering with the Amazons and Apples of the world, which is the one thing we haven’t done so far. We’re publishing books in a traditional way with Coffee House—obviously those books will be sold through all channels—so in a way we are not totally outside of the system anymore. Until now Emily Books was this very pure, untainted thing that was kind of punk rock: a book-publishing project equivalent of a zine. We were only selling things in a way that we felt was ethical. And everyone else whom we’ve talked to about how to make your indie project work was like, “Oh, we do it via Amazon affiliate links,” or “We do it via a grant from Amazon,” and we’re really bored of hearing that at this point. So we’re picking our battles. Our number-one priority will always be to get authors’ voices out there, and we’ll do whatever it takes to sustain that.

Cat Richardson is the managing editor of Bodega Magazine and a poetry editor at Phantom Books. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Narrative, Tin House, and elsewhere.