With a recent grant from the GIRLBOSS Foundation, Deena Drewis is ready to do for the publishing industry what Sophia Amoruso did for women’s clothing. 

by Kaylen Ralph

First things first, if you’ve yet to read #GIRLBOSS by NastyGal founder and CEO Sophia Amoruso, do so immediately. It’s part memoir, part life advice, and plenty of career advice for women entrepreneurs (really, anyone could benefit from reading this book.)

Following the book’s release in May 2014, Amoruso started the GIRLBOSS Foundation in August. The Foundation “wants to celebrate the next generation of young women who embody the GIRLBOSS philosophy of taking risks, rewriting the rules and defining success for yourself.” That led to creation of a series of grants, which are awarded quarterly and range from $5,000 to $15,000 dollars.

Now, meet Deena Drewis, editor of Nouvella, who received one of the first three grants that were awarded last month. Nouvella, an independent publishing house dedicated to novellas, features both established and emerging authors. Nouvella was already on the precipice of a big year when they received the grant money (they’ve increased print runs of their recent books by more than 1,000), and a boost from the Foundation will only ensure they continue to soar.

With three books coming out this year (two by women!), we wanted to know what was next for Nouvella and Drewis, a girlboss after our own hearts. Her thoughts on gender in publishing, and the potential for innovative e-book marketing had us very excited.

Kaylen Ralph: Congratulations on the #GIRLBOSS grant, that’s so exciting!

Deena Drewis: Thank you! Yeah, it’s really exciting.

KR: I’m familiar with Edan (Lepucki, author of California) and Emma Straub; we’ve covered her before, so I was so excited to see that you had caught them at their emerging phase, as well. I was thrilled to read about your company and find out you’d gotten the grant. What about the #GIRLBOSS Foundation did you think was a good fit for the company?

DD: I came across [the Foundation] on social media, and what they were looking for was women who had left or veered off the traditional path that career trajectories follow to kind of do their own thing. That was very much in line with why we started Nouvella in the first place, which is that there’s not a huge place for it in mass market publishing at this point, so, it’s not something a lot of people are doing. What they were looking for was really someone with a good idea of why what they were doing was special and different from what someone else is doing. It was important that the applicant was their own boss, rather than working for someone else. So that was very in line with the founding idea of Nouvella, and on top of that, the whole philosophy behind being a girlboss was pretty much exactly what I strive for.

KR: When you read her book were you just fist-pumping the entire time? I sure was.

DD: Yeah! I was like, “Oh my God, I don’t think there could be a more perfect grant out there.” Sophia Amoruso actually grew up in the same tiny little town that I did, Folsom, California, and she was a couple years ahead of me, but that was just kind of a coincidence. We had mutual friends and sisters of friends, so, that was another small coincidence, but it’s been crazy to watch her emerge from selling clothes on eBay to becoming a monster in the fashion world.

KR: You were saying how the grant was looking for women who had left jobs that might be considered traditional in an industry that they’ve chosen to go out on their own in. On that note, in the traditional publishing industry—in which it’s pretty widely agreed upon that it’s still a male-dominated field—from your unique perspective as someone who’s gone out on her own in that industry, what do you think still needs to happen for there to be an even playing field within the industry as a whole, and not just in this niche (novella) area?

DD: I’ve thought a lot about it. I think everyone has, especially over the last couple years as the VIDA statistics have come out, and it’s still really disheartening. But I will say, I noticed this last year and the year before with people posting their end of the year reading lists, and this year I looked at my list at the end of the year, and 14 of the 17 books I’d read were by women. That wasn’t really a conscious thing on my part, it’s just that the books I was excited to read and the books that the publicists I love were pushing and genuinely excited about, just happened to be by women. You see this happening across other mediums, too. With TV, there’s “Broad City” happening right now… Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, it seems so ridiculous that even five years ago someone would say that women aren’t as funny as men. It just seems preposterous to me now, but I think it may be wishful thinking, or maybe it’s my scope of experience, but I think there’s finally this time arising where it’s just ridiculous to think that women don’t deserve an equal platform. It’s because it’s become a joke when you come across people who think that way. That being said, there’s obviously a long way to go; mainstream publishing is always going to be the last to make an adjustment. I think it’s a fairly simple solution, because I think the editors who have the power to dictate what gets published and what doesn’t simply need to make that adjustment. It’s not for a lack of options or a lack of women writing, it’s not for a lack of people of different sexes and ethnic experiences writing, if you wanted to find that, there are so many promising writers putting all sorts of things out there… If you want to make the publishing house more diverse, then it’s only a matter of finding writers whose work you’re interested in that represents a diverse spectrum, and it’s as easy as choosing to do it.

KR: I agree. I was reading about Nouvella’s process for finding the authors that you’ll feature, and a lot of that is done by researching literary magazines, and I feel like even those are still male dominated. So I’m wondering if you feel that from your perspective as someone who is really aware of the gender disparity in publishing, do you find that it’s hard to just organically come across those (female) authors?

DD: It is and it isn’t. I think on the real, indie level, editors are so much more aware and committed to diversity than some of the more old guard publications. So, numbers still tend to skew male, but FiveChapters (is how we’ve found) two of the authors we’ve published so far, and Dave Daley, who’s the founding editor and basically runs it on his own, did a huge call for women writers as a response to the VIDA (statistics).. He has such incredible taste, and we really look to FiveChapters a lot when we’re scouting. Smaller publications is where we tend to look, because we are so vested in finding emerging writers; those writers are so much more in tune in a lot of ways. There’s not a board of directors breathing down their backs as is the case at bigger houses. In general, the people who tend to be involved (in the more niche market of publishing) tend to be a lot more aware and doing something actively to combat what’s been the case for hundreds of years at this point.

KR: That considered, do you consider Nouvella to be an alternative to mainstream publishing, or a stepping stone for a more diverse group of authors to have success in that arena?

DD: I like to think of it more as a stepping stone. I’ve never really considered my taste super avant-garde or experimental, and I’ve also loved fairly straightforward stuff. I hesitate to separate myself too much, or call myself alternative, or a renegade, or anything like that, just because I think there needs to be reform made with mainstream publishing. I really like what you said, and I do like to think of ourselves more as a stepping stone, hopefully feeding change into the bigger structure of publishing.

KR: Women should be mainstream, women shouldn’t be considered niche all the time.

DD: Right, that’s when problems tend to happen. In the fringe communities, you have a lot more like-minded people that you’re communicating with all the time, but the conversation needs to take place on a larger scale, I think.

KR: I love what it says on Nouvella’s website (“form follows function”) in terms of the actual sizes of your books. If You’re Not Yet Like Me fit in my smallest going-out purse.

DD:  What’s hard is that people on the Internet can’t see what the books look like, but I think that’s sort of the charm and novelty of Nouvella. It was something we really wanted to play to because you can read it on the plane really easily or on your commute really easily. It fits in your purse, it fits in your back pocket; it’s really something we like to play up.

KR: In what other ways do you think the philosophy of form following function applies to your business model?

DD: The first idea was to do 500 print copies, super limited edition and then from that point on, the book would only be kept in print as an e-book. In that sense we were trying to gauge where the market was going to go as far as people converting to e-books. In the very beginning I swore I was never going to get a Kindle, [but] I do have a Kindle and I do read e-books. My policy tends to be if I don’t like the cover art, I’ll buy it as an e-book. I made concessions and I think a lot of people have. On the flipside, we’ve started doing larger print runs, and we’re doing up to 1,500 or 2,000 for the first print, just because there are so many people who want to have a hard copy of the book. We weren’t really happy with only having 500 copies out there, just because they’re pretty, people like to hold them, and we didn’t want to limit that experience. So, in that sense, the original idea of form following function kind of just expanded from our original concept. I think there’s going to be some sort of delineation at some point—you can’t make an ugly paperback just because it’s cheap, because why would anyone pick an ugly paperback over an e-book at this point?

KR: I feel like even before you received the grant, Nouvella was on a really exciting trajectory. What are your big plans for the next year, now that you have this great opportunity from #GIRLBOSS?

DD: We have three books slated for this year – two sort of established authors and one brand new author. The grant money will go toward helping with production for those. We’ll also, for the first time, have a little bit of a marketing budget. We really want to do something playful and fun and not the traditional book publicist path, and maybe do something a little more engaging.  

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Kaylen is one of The Riveter’s co-founders and the EIC. She moved to Minneapolis, MN after graduating from the Missouri School of Journalism in August 2013. In addition to her editorial duties at The Riveter, Kaylen also works as a freelance researcher for The Sager Group. You can follow her on Instagram and Twitter at @kaylenralph.