Welcome readers and writers and everyone in-between! I’m Amanda, the founder and editor-in-chief of Hollow Oak Press, and I’m addicted to what-ifs.
I’ve always liked stories, and being creative is as much a part of me as my left arm. The rush of a story idea, when that character or situation crosses into a new what-if scenario? There’s little that can match it.
I haven’t always known that about myself, though. I lived a big portion of my adult life creating nothing at all. I’d thrown myself headfirst into graduate school and then into my non-creative career, and I let that work consume me. I helped other people learn how to solve problems and to heal their relationships, and I pretended that work fed my energy, but really, it drained me. I used the sunk-cost fallacy as motivation to work harder and climb higher on a ladder where my feet never quite felt comfortable on the rungs. When I eventually paused to take in the view, I realized I didn’t want to go any higher. I didn’t particularly want to be on that ladder at all.
So I jumped. I threw myself into creative hobbies like community theater and this wonderful scavenger hunt called GISH (ask me about it, but only if you have an hour to listen to me sing its praises and show you photos). Being creative scratched an itch I didn’t realize I’d had. I wanted more and more and more.
And then, I bought a Chromebook and picked up something I hadn’t done in far too many years. I began writing again.
Flash-forward a couple of years to a chilly late fall evening, when my dog and I were out for a walk. I’d dedicated the previous year to the chase of traditional publishing and the heartache of querying agents with a novel. The online writing communities had called out “self-publish!” and I’d gotten DMs and emails from sleazy vanity presses trying to siphon money out of me. I’d also gotten back into writing short stories, my first love, and had a couple pieces accepted amongst easily a hundred rejections. I’d been watching online literary magazines and learning what markets existed for short fiction. The sheer number of plucky little publications that couldn’t afford to pay their authors dizzied me.
Mostly though, I was taken aback by the juxtaposition between the wealth-fueled Goliath of traditional publishing and the penny-scraping idealism of independent publishing, and it’s that very thing I ruminated on while on our daily constitutional.
My dog and I crunched through the leaves on the ground and the duskiness of the evening seeped into my very being. Dawn and dusk, two liminal times of day, straddling what is and what will be. I filled my lungs with the kind of autumn air that’s tinged with the promise of winter and steeled myself for a thought that had been trying to form itself for weeks.
What if I could provide a platform for authors like me?
What if I started a publishing company?
Now, three years later, I’ve taken that what-if and made it a reality. At Hollow Oak Press, we stand at a publishing crossroads. We’re a scrappy indie publishing company, and we believe that new and emerging voices in fiction have entertaining and impactful stories to tell. We want to help those authors find their readers. Details about our submission process can be found here.
We publish anthologies that immerse a reader beyond the story’s words. Our titles are available directly from us, from major online retailers, and select independent bookstores.