Most publishers at Book Expo America, the massive trade show that filled New York's Javits Center in June, displayed their wares in booths surrounded by oversize posters, banners, and pop-up displays. Joan Schweighardt of GreyCore Press attended the BEA with a backpack full of her authors' books. It's a perfect metaphor for Schweighardt's "shoestring" approach: The big houses may have the marketing money, but she has the stamina.

June was a great month for the Pine Bush based publisher. The Basket Maker, Kate Niles's 2004 novel, won ForeWord magazine's Editor's Choice Book of the Year Award. And GreyCore's newest release, Julie Mars's A Month of Sundays, was selected as a Barnes & Noble "Discover Great New Writers" title and a Quills Award nominee.

This is especially gratifying for Schweighardt, since Mars's 2000 novel, The Secret Keepers, was the first book she published. "It's such a Hudson Valley story." She grins, recalling how she met her second husband, Michael Dooley, and writer Mars at the same dinner party, hosted by Woodstock Film Festival founders Meira Blaustein and Laurent Rejto. "We were looking at their son's rock collection," she recalls, "and just got to talking."

Schweighardt and Mars traded books (Schweighardt's novels include the award-winning Gudrun's Tapestry), and The Secret Keepers blew her away. With the cash she'd earned from selling her former house, Schweighardt decided to start her own press. Never mind that she knew next to nothing about the publishing industry, or that her seed money wasn't nearly enough to hire anybody who did. By the time the "What have I done?" panic set in, she was fully committed to launching Mars's book.

"I was so afraid I'd do something wrong, I did everything twice," she recalls over breakfast at New Paltz's Main Street Bistro. "I read every book, called people and asked stupid questions, made countless checklists."

GreyCore is almost a one-woman show: Though she's quick to credit book designer Kathy Massaro, and her son Adam Mason is a valued manuscript reader, Schweighardt multitasks as owner, editor, and tireless publicist. There are distinct disadvantages to being a very small press. The workload is endless; distributors balk at working with start-ups; ad budgets are sparse. And no matter how good a book is, there's no guarantee of reviews, even from industry publications like Kirkus Reviews.

But Schweighardt is willing to do it the hard way. When Kate Niles landed a coveted NPR slot, she called Publishers Weekly repeatedly to request inclusion in their Authors on the Air listing. When PW didn't comply, Schweighardt and Mason spent an entire weekend calling 350 booksellers around the country, so they could have titles in stock when the interview aired.

Schweighardt is bold in her publishing choices. "If I can't stop reading it, I know it's for me," she says, noting that she "can't stop" publishing, either. "I love the challenge. It's kind of like being a gambler." The twin successes of Mars's and Niles's books seem to indicate she's on a roll.

GreyCore isn't the only Hudson Valley publisher with something to celebrate. Paul Cohen of Monkfish Books is delighted that Gerard Jones's irreverent Ginny Good just won an IPPY (the Independent Publishers Association's top award) for best autobiography/memoir of 2004. Cohen met Jones through the author's take-no-prisoners website, www.everyonewhosanyone.com, which outraged the industry by listing hundreds of insider names and reprinting actual rejection letters. "There's a nice affirmation in publishing a book that's famous for getting rejected," says Cohen.

Monkfish is housed in a two-story barn outside Rhinebeck, next to the home shared by Cohen and book designer Georgia Dent. Dent's catering business is downstairs, and delicious smells waft through the comfortable Monkfish office, whose fixtures include three large desks, a grand piano, and a cat named Pip. Monkfish's staff includes editor Charles Hirsch, publicist Linda Woznicki, and Marya Stanzione, an intern from Vassar.

Cohen "caught the publishing bug" while working for Whole Life Times in 1986. He sold advertising for magazines ranging from New Age Journal to the Robb Report, featuring "toys for the uber-rich...Rolls Royces, limos, yachts," then spent a few years of spiritual retreat in Vermont, studying Sufism and Tibetan Buddhism.

Envisioning "a company that blended spiritual values and literary values," Cohen published his first title in 2002: Sleeping in Caves: a Sixties Himalayan Memoir by Marilyn Stablein, then-owner of Kingston's Alternative Books. The press's name came to him as he free-associated words relating to spirit and searching: The bottom-dwelling monkfish sports a dangling antenna that emits light in the depths.

Cohen sees Monkfish as "pluralistically oriented, religiously speaking—we on the liberal left can be pretty snobbish," and says he'd publish evangelical literature alongside Eastern-themed books if the right manuscript came along. Monkfish also publishes fiction, and will soon print its first graphic novel, Krishna in New York.

When Bliss Plot Press founder Brent Robison launched his literary anthology Prima Materia in 2002, he deliberately chose to include only Hudson Valley writers. "We live in a special region that, along with its other great features, is amazingly abundant with talented writers. I wanted to give them a voice," he explains.

Shivastan Publishing also celebrates local writing, but with a distinctively global twist. Founder Shiv Mirabito has traveled to Nepal and India since 1988 to study Hinduism and Buddhism. Inspired by the legendary poetry press Starstream, which published books by Gregory Corso and Paul Bowles in Nepal in the '70s, Mirabito decided to print his own poetry there. Printing costs were low, the handmade rice papers were beautiful, and local residents were grateful for the work.

When Mirabito's poet friends admired his books, he offered to print theirs as well. "I didn't want to be a vanity press, and I had the connections in Kathmandu." He sees his Shivastan as a cooperative, with authors frequently contributing to printing costs and maintaining an unusual level of control over editing and book design.

Doing business in Kathmandu can be dicey—Mirabito's letterpress printers speak no English, so he relies on translators and his Nepalese "computer whiz." His last visit coincided with a coup d'etat: The Nepalese king declared a state of emergency, closing the country's borders, jailing political opponents, and abolishing democracy.  "It got pretty crazy over there," Mirabito says mildly.

To date, Shivastan has published 25 books by such local luminaries as Ed Sanders, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Janine Pommy Vega, in hand-numbered, limited editions. Mirabito coined the name Shivastan by joining the Hindu god's name to the same suffix as Pakistan or Afghanistan. "It means 'place of Shiva,'" he says, "which says what the press is about: handcrafted in the Himalayas."

The Himalayas may be higher, but the Catskills and Shawangunks boast a remarkable diversity of publishers. A partial listing includes literary presses McPherson & Co. of Kingston, Station Hill of Barrytown, and Woodstock/New York hybrid Overlook Press, which publishes such local legends as Alf Evers and Milton Glaser; outdoor and regional specialists Black Dome Press and Purple Mountain Press; poetry publishers Codhill Press and Hunger Books, and Ceres Press, founded by veggie gurus Nikki & David Goldbeck.

The newest kid on the block is the Hudson Valley Media Arts Center, founded by Susan Zimet and Beverly Spiri in 2000, whose fledgling Publishing Division will release its first title later this month. Pride and Politics: The Tale of a Big Story in a Small Town, by journalist Erin Quinn, which describes the media frenzy that followed when New Paltz's Green Party mayor, Jason West, performed weddings for dozens of same-sex couples. What could be more Hudson Valley than that?