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To the couple of people who have decided that the problem is that Seal Press is tiny and hence unprofessional:
Welcome to today's independent publishing scene. I too run a small independent press, and mine's even smaller than Seal: I run it singlehandedly. And we're small for much the same reasons -- an independent distributor, which is the channel that enables small publishers to compete with the giants for shelf space at Barnes & Noble, declared bankruptcy and burned them for a lot of money. Seal used to be a lot bigger, and I hope it will be again someday.
I don't know Seal's sales figures, but our bestselling book, _The Ethical Slut_, is currently at about 75,000-80,000 copies sold -- not exactly New York Times bestseller list material, but a resounding success by the standards of even the largest publishing house.
Desktop publishing has made page layout a lot easier, but it hasn't made paper or printing any cheaper. There have always been small presses, because someone needs to disseminate the stuff that's too niche or too edgy to interest the big guys. Remember, Virginia and Leonard Woolf ran a small press too, and without it you might not have seen the work of one of the century's most important feminist voices.
However, it is absolutely true that micro-publishers don't generally go out looking for a particular kind of author. By the time I finish going through the slush pile, negotiating the contracts, editing the manuscripts, doing the layouts, supervising the production, spearheading the marketing, doing the bookkeeping (ugh), answering the phones and sweeping the floors, aggressive action toward a diverse author list -- desirable though I know it may be -- simply tends to drop off the bottom of the list.
