When we started Journey Press back in August 2019, we had one overriding goal: to publish excellent speculative fiction about and by women and queer people—and get them into your hands!
To that end, over the past five years, we’ve built a distribution network to make sure you can get our books in as many places and as many formats as possible. Whether it’s independent bookstores, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Apple Books, or even the Evil Amazon ™, you can always find a copy of Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women or Mirror of My Heart.
The latest frontier for our expansion has been libraries. We’ve always wanted to our books to be in your local library, freely available for people to enjoy, but for many reasons, a relationship with more than a handful proved elusive.
For physical copies, it’s because libraries are decentralized entities, and it is difficult for a small publisher to work on an individual basis with the tens of thousands of libraries in the United States alone! For electronic copies, the main problem is that Overdrive, the main provider of e-books to libraries, has become increasingly “enshittified“.
So, we were at an impasse as to how to go forward with libraries. Until…
Enter Lyrasis
A number of competitors have sprung up to challenge the bloated giant that is Overdrive, and the one we like the best is Lyrasis. Through platforms like BiblioBoard and The Palace Project, and on a non-profit basis, they “make it [their] mission to provide ebooks in a sustainable licensing model that benefits not only the library and the publisher, but also the author and the patron, to get high-quality ebooks into the hands of library patrons in as equitable and accessible a way as possible.”
We inked our relationship last week, and soon, Journey Press’ entire catalog will be available to Lyrasis’ hundreds of library clients. We are absolutely thrilled, not only at the prospect of being able to reach millions of people who use our public library systems, but also at the thought that our books will help Lyrasis erode Overdrive’s virtual monopoly, leveling the playing field for publishers and authors everywhere.
So, if you want to see our titles on the shelves (virtual or physical) of your local library, don’t be afraid to request them! Between Lyrasis and our other distribution methods, it’s a sure thing your library can stock our complete catalog.
