{"id":505369,"date":"2026-10-23T12:18:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-23T12:18:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/505369\/"},"modified":"2026-10-23T12:18:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-23T12:18:10","slug":"catapult-books-is-being-sold-and-its-l-a-authors-are-mourning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/505369\/","title":{"rendered":"Catapult Books is being sold and its L.A. authors are mourning"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Catapult Books<\/a>, an indie publisher that has supported authors across Southern California and beyond, has been sold.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Weekly<\/a>, which spoke with members of the publisher\u2019s union. The Catapult Workers Collective said the company\u2019s sale included the assets only and that the union was notified their employment would not be rolled over to the new buyer. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The union is now hashing out a severance package, according to Publisher\u2019s Weekly, and it\u2019s unclear what will happen to the 16 upcoming book titles scheduled through spring 2027.<\/p>\n

\u201cCatapult is intrinsic to L.A. culture and L.A. literature. So many of their writers are in this area,\u201d Gina Frangello<\/a> told The Times on Thursday. The author penned \u201cBlow Your House Down,\u201d published by Counterpoint Press, an imprint of Catapult. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a huge loss for L.A.,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s a huge loss for the West Coast.\u201d <\/p>\n

Frangello has been publishing books for more than 20 years, and she said she\u2019d never had the intimate publishing experience she had with Counterpoint, specifically with Dan Smetanka<\/a>. 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. <\/p>\n

\u201cAs someone who has been in indie publishing culture since the \u201990s, Catapult was a holdout of an old world,\u201d Frangello said. \u201cDan ran things the way they used to, in the storied, fabled days of publishing before everything went corporate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Susan Straight<\/a>, author of \u201cSacrament\u201d and winner of the L.A. Times Book Prizes\u2019 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\u2019s new location in Ontario, \u201cwhere more than a hundred readers were lined up outside, some having brought chairs to wait.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cWe keep hearing that Americans aren\u2019t reading \u2014 for two hours I saw people of all ages browsing, buying books, and talking to each other,\u201d she continued. \u201cAbout fifty people came and talked to me, and bought copies \u2018In the Country of Women,\u2019 my memoir published by Catapult, and \u2018Sacrament,\u2019 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. … <\/p>\n

\u201cI lit a veladora last night, the Virgen de Guadalupe, set it next to a bouquet of California sage from my yard, because I\u2019m a So Cal native, and whatever happens, I wanted to thank the universe for the editors like Dan Smetanka who\u2019ve brought our stories to the rest of the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cWednesday morning, I spent time talking about narrative with nurses, teachers, students, mothers, and nascent writers from all over So Cal. Americans are still reading \u2014 I see it every day in my community, which needs books by presses like Counterpoint and Catapult.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since Catapult\u2019s 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\u2019 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. <\/p>\n

Meredith Maran, the author of more than a dozen books including a novel published by Counterpoint in 2012, \u201cA Theory of Small Earthquakes,\u201d also mourned the publisher in a note to The Times, writing, \u201cCounterpoint, its imprints, and its beating heart, Dan Smetanka, have been (I cannot bring myself to say \u2018were\u2019) the stuff of legends. True legends. I\u2019ve 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.\u201d <\/p>\n

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 \u2014 the daughter of billionaire industrialist and businessman Charles Koch \u2014 launched another pet project in 2021, Unlikely Collaborators, a nonprofit storytelling and experiential organization. <\/p>\n

Bestselling author Tod Goldberg<\/a>, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction this year for his novel \u201cOnly Way Out,\u201d posted a tribute to the publisher on social media Wednesday night, crediting Smetanka and Counterpoint with taking a chance on \u201ca book others wouldn\u2019t touch\u201d and with that book\u2019s subsequent success, which changed Goldberg\u2019s life. <\/p>\n

\u201cSince their founding, Counterpoint has published books that matter, has taken chances on authors and topics that others wouldn\u2019t, and have been celebrated for this strident independence with wide critical acclaim and commercial success. From their roots in the Bay Area \u2014 where they published the likes of Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, Anne Lamott, Mary Robison early on \u2014 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cCounterpoint took big risks and found big rewards. I\u2019m confident that whomever the buyer is (and I\u2019ve not been told, so y\u2019all can stop texting me…) will keep these great writers in print while also continuing to publish new work from them, but what\u2019s lost here is not merely a publishing house, but a culture of excellence, of risk taking, plus a dash of punk rock.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Catapult Books, an indie publisher that has supported authors across Southern California and beyond, has been sold. Launched…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":505370,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[24264,195321,195322,195329,195326,195325,195327,195324,195323,48,52,51,195328,47,50,49,123875,1791,2328,18672,72],"class_list":["post-505369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-book","tag-catapult-books","tag-counterpoint","tag-counterpoint-press","tag-dan-smetanka","tag-gina-frangello","tag-imprint","tag-independent-publisher","tag-l-a-author","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-late-novel","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-publishing","tag-times","tag-union","tag-writer","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=505369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505369\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/505370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=505369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=505369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=505369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}