Our Philosophy at
Toad Hall Editions

Toad Hall Editions is founded on the belief that women and gender-diverse voices should be heard equally, and also heard in a space that centers on equity. The relationship with the authors we represent is an intentionally collaborative one. We want our authors to feel as committed as we are, not only to seeing their work come to fruition, but in joining us in finding an audience and sharing their work more widely. In this spirit, we want our authors to feel supported, and to receive a fair share of the profits derived from their work.

In order to achieve this equanimity, we believe we must move away from the traditional publishing house system toward a more cooperative model.

In a typical publishing model, a contract between the author and a publishing house often excludes advances and rarely distributes the profits from a book equally because the publishing house “takes on all the risk,” particularly with newer authors. This puts them in a position to be exclusive and make privileged decisions that disproportionately benefit them and keeps the author from seeing much financial reward (much less sustainability) from their work. Established authors might see a healthy advance come their way precluding the completion of their work, but this is an uncommon occurrence.

In a self-publishing model, the author takes on all the risk, mostly working alone to write, produce, publicize, and distribute their work using a print-on-demand company. While it’s much easier for an author to self-publish (no waiting to get an agent or a publishing deal), it is much more challenging to get the book “out there” into the hands of people who don’t know the author personally. Though websites such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble will carry any book that has an ISBN number, the author is responsible for driving traffic to these sites by playing a numbers game with algorithms and upticks. What’s more, the percentages of sales that go to the author remain negligible. It is the retailers themselves who keep most of the proceeds.

The bottom line is, in both the traditional model and self-publishing model, the writers are left behind when it comes to equanimity, equity and profitability.

At Toad Hall Editions, we want to have a hand in designing a new model. We want to honor the work of our authors, to provide a sustainable way for their work to flourish, and to create a space unrestricted by many of the old rules. We’re less interested in playing it “safe” and more interested in taking a risk on courageous writing. We want to make meaningful contributions to the field of literature by publishing works that live in the liminal spaces, that defy categorization and that struggle for visibility. We want to carefully, thoughtfully, and intentionally support the work of women and gender-diverse writers to bring their work forward.

We are taking our cue from cooperative models to create a publishing ecosystem that lives and thrives on transparency, exchange, collaboration, mutual benefit, and equity, and we’re looking for people who can help us meet this vision.