Catapult Books, an indie publisher that has supported authors across Southern California and beyond, has been sold.
Launched by Elizabeth Koch and Andy Hunter more than a decade ago, the independent publisher will shutter operations in just over a week, per Publisher’s Weekly, which spoke with members of the publisher’s union. The Catapult Workers Collective said the company’s sale included the assets only and that the union was notified their employment would not be rolled over to the new buyer.
According to union reps, the publisher announced plans to sell the business while staff were in the midst of a union vote. The union, which includes roughly 20 staff members across various publishing departments, told the outlet that they had filed for an election earlier in the year seeking better pay, job stability, and clearer communication from executives.
The union is now hashing out a severance package, according to Publisher’s Weekly, and it’s unclear what will happen to the 16 upcoming book titles scheduled through spring 2027.
“Catapult is intrinsic to L.A. culture and L.A. literature. So many of their writers are in this area,” Gina Frangello told The Times on Thursday. The author penned “Blow Your House Down,” published by Counterpoint Press, an imprint of Catapult.
“It’s a huge loss for L.A.,” she said. “It’s a huge loss for the West Coast.”
Frangello has been publishing books for more than 20 years, and she said she’d never had the intimate publishing experience she had with Counterpoint, specifically with Dan Smetanka. The editorial director and senior vice president of Catapult is widely known in literary circles for his meticulous and thoughtful approach to editing and for his support of the authors he works with.
“As someone who has been in indie publishing culture since the ’90s, Catapult was a holdout of an old world,” Frangello said. “Dan ran things the way they used to, in the storied, fabled days of publishing before everything went corporate.”
Susan Straight, author of “Sacrament” and winner of the L.A. Times Book Prizes’ Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement, emailed The Times a missive on the Catapult news. She wrote that on Wednesday she attended the grand opening of Barnes & Noble’s new location in Ontario, “where more than a hundred readers were lined up outside, some having brought chairs to wait.”
“We keep hearing that Americans aren’t reading — for two hours I saw people of all ages browsing, buying books, and talking to each other,” she continued. “About fifty people came and talked to me, and bought copies ‘In the Country of Women,’ my memoir published by Catapult, and ‘Sacrament,’ my latest novel, published by Counterpoint. Both are indelibly So Cal Books, filled with Fontana, East Hollywood, Santa Ana, Los Feliz, and San Bernardino, and the readers were from all these places. …
“I lit a veladora last night, the Virgen de Guadalupe, set it next to a bouquet of California sage from my yard, because I’m a So Cal native, and whatever happens, I wanted to thank the universe for the editors like Dan Smetanka who’ve brought our stories to the rest of the world.
“Wednesday morning, I spent time talking about narrative with nurses, teachers, students, mothers, and nascent writers from all over So Cal. Americans are still reading — I see it every day in my community, which needs books by presses like Counterpoint and Catapult.”
Since Catapult’s debut in 2015, the indie outfit and its authors have been a force on the awards circuit, landing the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ E. M. Forster Award in Literature, a PEN/Faulkner Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, the Maine Literary Award, the Costa Novel Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Meredith Maran, the author of more than a dozen books including a novel published by Counterpoint in 2012, “A Theory of Small Earthquakes,” also mourned the publisher in a note to The Times, writing, “Counterpoint, its imprints, and its beating heart, Dan Smetanka, have been (I cannot bring myself to say ‘were’) the stuff of legends. True legends. I’ve published books with all of the big 5 houses and comparing those experiences to the Counterpoint experience, the Dan experience, is like comparing an AI-generated metaphor, to, well, this one. Counterpoint humanized publishing, revered its authors, honored and will live on in its books.”
Over the last decade, Catapult included a publishing imprint, digital magazine, and courses for budding and established writers. (The latter two were nixed in 2023.) In 2016, it merged with Counterpoint Press, which brought into the fold its own imprint, Soft Skull Press. Last fall, Catapult also acquired Hawthorne Books. In 2023, Catapult Chief Executive Koch — the daughter of billionaire industrialist and businessman Charles Koch — launched another pet project in 2021, Unlikely Collaborators, a nonprofit storytelling and experiential organization.
Bestselling author Tod Goldberg, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction this year for his novel “Only Way Out,” posted a tribute to the publisher on social media Wednesday night, crediting Smetanka and Counterpoint with taking a chance on “a book others wouldn’t touch” and with that book’s subsequent success, which changed Goldberg’s life.
“Since their founding, Counterpoint has published books that matter, has taken chances on authors and topics that others wouldn’t, and have been celebrated for this strident independence with wide critical acclaim and commercial success. From their roots in the Bay Area — where they published the likes of Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, Anne Lamott, Mary Robison early on — to their move south into Los Angeles, where they took on writers like myself, Natashia Deon, Karen Bender, Gina Frangello, Elizabeth Crane, Ben Ehrenreich, Dana Johnson, Vanessa Hua, Joan Silber, to name just a few, plus the late Eve Babitz.”
“Counterpoint took big risks and found big rewards. I’m confident that whomever the buyer is (and I’ve not been told, so y’all can stop texting me…) will keep these great writers in print while also continuing to publish new work from them, but what’s lost here is not merely a publishing house, but a culture of excellence, of risk taking, plus a dash of punk rock.”
The post Catapult Books is being sold; authors mourn a major loss to L.A.’s literary scene appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
