Silver Current Press and the Independent Press Movement

I. A Press Named After Its Own Governing Image

Silver Current Press, the Philadelphia imprint under which Mulhern publishes his own novels, story collections, poetry, and craft guides,¹ takes its name from the same image that this essay series has already traced through the fiction and poetry as a controlling symbol: a current of water running continuously beneath separate, apparently unconnected surfaces. That the press bears this name is not incidental branding; it is the author’s own critical claim, made at the level of the company’s letterhead, that his body of work is a single continuous project rather than a shelf of unrelated titles — the same argument the essay “A Silver Current: Reading Mulhern’s Catalog as One Continuous Book” makes about the fiction, now visible in the imprint’s very name. This essay sets that argument aside to ask a different question: what does it mean, practically and culturally, for a working novelist and longtime teacher to found and operate his own press rather than pursue traditional publication, and how does that choice situate him within the broader resurgence of small, author-controlled literary presses now operating alongside — and sometimes against — the conventional publishing industry.

II. What Independence Actually Means Here

The phrase “independent press” is often used loosely, but Silver Current Press practices a specific and demanding version of it: full control of rights, metadata, formats, pricing, cover design, and production schedule, exercised across paperback, hardcover, and ebook editions of each title, published under the author’s own ISBNs rather than a distributor’s. This is a materially different arrangement from either self-publishing in the platform-only sense (uploading a manuscript to a single retailer’s system with minimal design or editorial infrastructure) or traditional publishing (surrendering most of these decisions to an acquiring house in exchange for its distribution and marketing apparatus). Silver Current Press occupies the harder middle position: it takes on the production discipline traditional publishing provides — professional design, considered formatting, multiple simultaneous editions — without surrendering any of the control that drives most writers toward self-publishing in the first place. The catalogue that has resulted, spanning literary fiction (the novels Molly Bonamici and Give Them Unquiet Dreams, the novella A Prayer for Home), short story collections (Assumptions and Other Stories, All We Ever Needed, The Weight of Small Mercies), poetry (Crossings), and craft resources (How to Analyze Literature), demonstrates that this model can sustain a genuinely varied literary list, not merely a single author’s backlist reissued in different formats.²

III. Editorial Philosophy as a Business Model

What distinguishes Silver Current Press from a merely administrative self-publishing operation is that its stated editorial values are inseparable from its business structure. The press positions itself explicitly around literary fiction, slow and careful editing, and books written in the lineage of Joyce and O’Connor — a commitment to “patient, demanding work” that most large commercial publishers, operating under quarterly sales pressure, have increasingly struggled to prioritize for literary fiction and poetry specifically. This is the same argument that has driven the broader small-press movement of the past two decades: that the mid-list literary title — ambitious, formally serious, not obviously commercial — survives more reliably under presses small enough to measure success in years and in the durability of a backlist rather than in a single opening quarter’s sales figures. Silver Current Press takes this logic to its furthest practical extreme by collapsing publisher and author into a single decision-maker, which removes the negotiation entirely: there is no acquisitions meeting to survive, no marketing department to convince that a story collection about Irish-Catholic Boston has commercial potential. The tradeoff, honestly stated, is that the press also has no external distribution apparatus, no advance, and no imprint recognition beyond what the author’s own name and years of magazine publication have built — a decade of placements in journals including The Galway Review, Fiction on the Web, Impspired, and The Writing Disorder before any of that work was gathered into the Silver Current Press catalogue.

IV. The Craft-Teacher’s Press

Silver Current Press’s catalogue is also unusual among small literary presses for including, alongside the fiction and poetry, direct pedagogical materials: How to Analyze Literature and related craft guides, published under the same imprint and evidently understood by its founder as continuous with the creative work rather than a separate commercial sideline. This reflects three decades of classroom teaching, from middle school through university level, including an ongoing seminar series offered directly through the press.³ Few small presses run by working novelists formalize their teaching output this way, publishing craft instruction under the same name and design standards as the literary list itself. The effect is to make Silver Current Press legible not just as a publishing operation but as an extension of a teaching practice — a press that treats “how to read a story closely” and “here is a story to read closely” as two expressions of the same underlying vocation, sold from the same catalogue to readers who may arrive as students and stay as readers of the fiction, or the reverse.

V. The Cost of the Model, Honestly Assessed

A responsible account of Silver Current Press cannot treat author-controlled publishing as a costless improvement on the traditional model; the arrangement has real structural disadvantages that the press’s own operating history makes visible. Distribution beyond direct sales and print-on-demand retail requires deliberate additional infrastructure — the kind that wide bookstore and library placement through services built for exactly this purpose can provide, but which a one-person imprint must actively pursue rather than receive automatically, as an author under a traditional contract would. Marketing budget is necessarily minimal, measured in the low hundreds of dollars annually rather than the five- or six-figure campaigns a lead literary title might receive from a major house. And the imprint has had to make real strategic decisions about where to sell — consolidating its retail presence onto a single platform after determining that spreading a catalogue across multiple storefronts (a general-education marketplace alongside a general e-commerce one) diluted rather than multiplied its reach.⁴ None of this is failure; it is the actual, unglamorous arithmetic of independence, and Silver Current Press’s willingness to simplify its own operation rather than chase every available sales channel is itself a case study in what sustainable small-press management looks like at the scale of a single working writer.

VI. Conclusion: A Press as a Continuation of the Work

Read alongside the fiction, poetry, and craft guides it publishes, Silver Current Press is best understood not as separate infrastructure built to support Mulhern’s writing but as itself an expression of the same conviction that runs through the writing: that mercy, attention, and care are transmitted in small, repeated, hand-to-hand units rather than delivered once from institutional heights. A traditional publisher offers scale and validation from a great height; Silver Current Press offers, instead, the slower, smaller, more accountable work of an author who has decided that the patient editing of a single sentence and the patient management of a single catalogue are, in the end, the same discipline practiced at two different scales. Whether this model can outlast a single founder’s active career is the open question every author-press faces, and one this essay does not resolve — but as a working case study in what independent literary publishing looks like when editorial philosophy and business structure are made to answer to the same values, Silver Current Press is a genuine, instructive instance of the wider movement it belongs to.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays A Working Philosophy