I’m thrilled to announce that 2025 is the year I launch Astraea Books, my small press focused on showcasing new writers from non-traditional backgrounds, and it’s also the year I shut it down because it’s way too expensive and too much work. For too long, publishing has amplified the same voices telling the same stories, and we’re long overdo for someone with the vision and courage to start a press designed to disrupt boring, conservative trad-pubs with something bold, shocking, and temporary. 

Look at the New York Times Bestseller List. What do you see? Celebrity cookbooks and memoirs, and debut novels from nepo babies and Brooklyn trust-fund neo-hipsters. Yawn. But that’s not what you’ll find in the Astraea Books catalog. From searing social commentary, otherworldly speculative fiction, memoirs that grapple with abuse and addiction, and experimental poetry, Astraea’s authors are producing some of the most innovative work which, unfortunately, won’t sell nearly enough to justify all the expenses of printing and shipping, not to mention all the time spent editing and proofreading and on design, when I could be hanging with Craig and Len at the microbrewery they just opened in the Warehouse District; and so I really hope another press can pick up the slack and get some of them published once I back out of the contracts with a short message on X. I mean Twitter – I’m never calling it X.

The bean-counting suits in New York City publishing might have an infrastructure in place for producing, distributing, marketing, and selling books, but I have something they don’t: a true passion for literature. I also have a student loan payment of $767.45 every month, so I have every incentive to make Astraea a success, and also a very reasonable excuse for bailing on a book contract three weeks before publication date. Have you seen what it costs to get a review in Kirkus?

From the start, I vowed to do everything at Astraea myself, from acquisitions, to editing, proofreading, cover and interior design, marketing, social media, bankruptcy, and finally liquidation. I don’t have interns fetching me lattes all day, or taking pictures of me hunched over edits to put on Twitter. Instead, I spend my time scouring litmags for the brightest emerging talent so I can reach out with the life-changing offer of book publication, followed by the life-changing cancellation of book publication. Do I worry that I should do more? Should I have had a modicum of business acumen and start-up capital before I began? Is it too late to get my deposit back for my table at AWP? Are those credit score-repair companies really scams?

Good questions. All good questions. We might never know the answers.

So hold on to your hats, because 2025 is only the start but also the end of Astraea Books, “Where Literature Comes to Life for a Little While.” Follow us on Twitter, InstaGram, and BlueSky, and look for our books wherever books are sold, because you never know.

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Justin Bryant is the author of the novel ‘Thunder From a Clear Blue Sky,’ published in 2023 by Malarkey Books. He lives in Raleigh with his wife Sarah and their dog Roxy, and with the memories of his dogs Blake and Bryce. Two very good boys.