HP: The acclaimed writer Nell Zink’s first novel, The Wallcreeper, was published in 2014 by Dorothy, a publishing project, a small press with a feminist mission, cofounded and edited by the writer Danielle Dutton. Dorothy supported a promising unknown writer, put her book out well, and killed with it. The Wallcreeper was reviewed in the New York Times, which is almost impossible for small presses to achieve. Zink was profiled in the New Yorker. Dorothy’s savvy publication of this debut novel enabled its author’s continued success; Zink’s novels now come out steadily from Big Five presses.
In 2019, the New Yorker summarized Zink’s career thus: “She spent the first decades of her career writing for an audience of one at a time, seemingly unconcerned by whether her work reached a broader public…. The novels she wrote took the form of e-mails to friends. The recipient of one such email was Jonathan Franzen, who helped her publish her first novel, with a small feminist press, for a three-hundred-dollar advance. Since then, the novels have become sleeker, and the presses larger.”[1]
Here Zink’s first publisher sounds not like a site of excellence, vision, and achievement but like something quirky, darling, the opposite of sleek (frumpy?). Jonathan Franzen is credited but not the woman who published the book. Rather than celebrating an impressive underdog, the New Yorker (owned by global media corporation Condé Nast) emphasizes the pitiful size of the advance. A small press frequently runs on volunteer part-time labor and quite often on the money of its editors. I coedit a series at Rescue Press, and if I give an advance or hire a publicist for a book, I’m using my own money from my day job or whatever income is around. Zink’s later novels are published by Ecco Press, where no one who works on those books pays for them personally. In corporate media, it’s a fun backstory that a working woman writer who donates her time and money and expertise to support other women writers is kind of poor.
Insofar as the media pays attention to small presses, they’re seen as the JV team to the real presses, the Big Five. The natural goal for a writer is to leave them behind. To get discovered, go big. Most writers don’t feel this way, or not simply. They appreciate the editors and scenes who first recognized and supported them. Yet the small presses get left behind anyway, for purely structural reasons. The difference in sales potential is too vast. Why would someone publish at a press that has little access to larger book markets and will likely only move 500–1,000 copies if they could publish at a press that has the resources to move 5,000–10,000 or even 50,000–100,000 copies of that same book? They wouldn’t. I wouldn’t.
MY: But not everyone has that opportunity or wants it. If you’re writing against corporate and mainstream literature, and you belong to a community of like-minded writers, you might want to publish with your peers, within your community and for it. Furthermore, you might not have the “platform” to publish with the Big Five—a large enough social media following, for example, or some other insurance to guarantee sales. The more literary imprints of the Big Five don’t usually start with a print run of 50,000, and sometimes they sell no more than a small press. (I heard of a first book of literary fiction from FSG selling 500 copies.) Unlike a small press, if they aren’t selling through a big print run right out of the gate, they’re going to bet on a different horse and put the promotional money behind a book that’s doing better (and probably drop the low-selling author).
HP: And on the publisher’s side, when a small press sells reprint rights for a successful book to a big press—or sees an author’s next book go big—that’s a beautiful moment. Yet it doesn’t help us financially as much as one might think. Our lists are too weird and heterogeneous. Sales pathways that appear for one book don’t naturally serve the next book. Our next book probably won’t share subject matter or genre labels or algorithmic categories with that hit. We don’t have a brand, we’re more into restlessness and idiosyncrasy and community, as you might be if you were doing something for free. Because our choices are anticommercial, commercial success can’t simply elevate them. The success of a single title benefits us a bit, materially and for sure emotionally, but again, there’s a ceiling on how much we can capitalize.
MY: That’s because an unregulated book trade under capitalism severely punishes producers with high unit costs and low volume sales. It costs a hell of a lot less per unit to produce 50,000 copies of a book than it does 1,000. And even with a tiny profit margin, if you sell a ton of units, then you’re winning the game.
So the strategy is simple: a) secure distribution channels by outright ownership or access based on previous sales records; b) buy rights to books that have guaranteed sales; c) put a lot of advertising behind their reception. And there you have it—the next award winner or finalist, the next New York Times–reviewed book, the next book on a hundred college syllabi. It’s really quite formulaic, if you have the capital and a history of using it to make literature. If you have these things in place, of course you’ll print more copies off the bat, which means lower unit costs and higher profit margins.
Small presses don’t have capital of that kind, or the history of having exploited it. They’re taking chances on authors based on community dialogue, local importance, or an intuitive sense for discovery. Moreover, their access to those distribution channels—and bookstore shelves—is limited by a system that rewards the already visible, saleable, funded, or connected—what’s already in demand. In this respect, new poetry from small presses is at a great disadvantage: with few exceptions, it’s guaranteed not to sell and not to break even. In terms of economies of scale and profit margins, a small press book isn’t like other commodities—a hex screw or a plank of pine, a pencil or a microwave oven. It’s got a low ceiling, limited by the audience for more difficult texts and genres as much as by the publicity budgets and distribution channels available to small presses.
Let’s take a respectable print run of 1,000 copies for a well-produced poetry paperback at $3 per unit. Put an accessible price on it, say $20. A bookstore orders it from Small Press Distribution (SPD) at a standard 40% discount, taking $8 for the sale and sending $12 back to SPD, which keeps $6 and passes the other $6 to the publisher. Considering the outlay for printing, the publisher’s gross is $3. But what if they had also paid for foreign rights, paid out a royalty (let’s say a dollar per book) to the author and/or translator, sent out review copies in bubble mailers, paid a designer, or bought dinner for the proofreader. That $3 profit dwindles before our eyes. At best, there’s half a buck left over. If the run sells through at that rate, we’re looking at a $500 profit, one sixth of their next book’s printing costs. Those pennies would add up if they could keep selling steadily, but a small press frequently can’t afford the reprints, so it will likely sell that runaway hit to a publisher that doesn’t have to store copies under their bed.
HP: Even if you did print and sell 50,000 copies, the focus on sales as the primary measure of success can be devastating for writers and writing. Your phrase “writing against” is essential: writing against commercialization. The Big Five publish some incredibly important work. But they also don’t publish a lot of incredibly important work. It’s clear that the appetite at the Big Five for work that is formally and politically challenging—politically challenging in how it writes against dominant forms of rhetoric and thinking—is small, held to a handful of titles that often have to fight to be understood as the challenges they are.
I think mainstream literary culture relies on a comforting myth that good literature is liberal and will somehow do good politics, without ever articulating that politics or developing any coherent structure in which it might happen. There’s a vague, deliberately unexamined idea that the goodness of art and literature will transcend the complicity of the structures art “has to” use to reach people. And sometimes they can transcend; sometimes they can destabilize culture generatively, even using corporate-owned pathways.
But more often, of course, challenging work is not going to make it through those pathways. It’s going to be excluded, and readers are not going to encounter it and be changed by it. This is a political problem. Our allies in recognizing that problem as political are fewer than one might expect. Indie leftist media, for example, in the era of Patreon and Substack, pays extraordinarily little attention to leftist art and cultural work. It’s much more common to find takedowns of mainstream cultural products—think of how many lefty critiques of Hillbilly Elegy there were—than to find discussions of small, DIY, and indie art. Access to those platforms could be transformative for independent writers and publishers on the left, but we aren’t usually included there.
There’s a failure to understand small press and indie status as a political status and responsibility. For example, look at IndieBound, an organization that represents independent booksellers across the US. They promote a short list of new books every month, selected by indie bookstore staff—a coveted honor that can help launch a book nationally. Understandably, indie bookstores and sites like IndieBound emphasize the importance of independence: you should buy from the brick-and-mortar, rather than from Amazon, and support local community and economy. You should make a little sacrifice on price to protect something you’d miss if it were gone.
But the vast majority of the books IndieBound promotes and celebrates are published by the Big Five. The same is true at too many indie brick-and-mortars. Their uplift of independent, noncorporate business stops at the door—they ask you to buy indie and pay more, but that’s largely not what they do.
MY: So how is that store serving its readers? If you’re a reader and small press books aren’t on the shelf, you’re going to buy what’s on offer. But let’s say you’re into locally and responsibly farmed food and your co-op only carries Cal-Organic, wouldn’t you be concerned?
HP: If you don’t support local farmers, they disappear. People understand that and get why they should buy produce at the farmers market. What’s keeping readers from supporting small presses, and the diverse communities they serve, in similar terms?
MY: It seems to me they can’t see it that way because those presses are hidden from view by structural and economic barriers. On either side of the barriers, institutions, corporations, and small presses themselves often pretend these barriers don’t exist—they’re normalized by the market. Very few literary consumers know that their beloved local indie bookstore is (with very few exceptions) beholden to corporate distributors. Few can imagine what’s missing from those shelves and therefore from their potential reading lives. What’s missing is countless titles from 400 SPD presses, and who knows how many others that don’t have distribution at all.
HP: In recent years, “indie” pushback against corporate dominance in literary publishing has relied on tech solutions that I worry are precarious—like Bookshop.org, which replaces a real-world interaction with an online one, then tries to split the difference through donations—or on the capriciousness of wealthy donors. The recent shuttering of Astra Magazine and Catapult’s magazine and classes demonstrate the problems with the latter solution. The wealthy entities behind both those ventures seemed hilariously dismayed by the lack of profit generated by their lit mags and pulled their support.
MY: New York Times coverage of Astra’s closure claimed this lit mag was “unusual.”[2] In fact, though it was backed by a Chinese publishing conglomerate (Thinkingdom Media Group), its closure was completely predictable. From its sudden proliferation (what Publishers Weekly calls “good fortune”) to the industry-tested authors it published, and up to its dramatic failure, Astra bore all the markings of a successful PR stunt, even accomplished in record time.[3] The story of the unprofitability of literary magazines, which the Times piece plays like a doomsday trumpet, is no story at all. The wealthy have long funded literary magazines to sway opinion, to make taste, and to get attention. The not-so-wealthy have done the same, with staples, stencils, small print runs, and subscriptions; they just haven’t been written up in the Times.
The takeaway, for me, is that capital makes literature. By now, everyone knows that publishers pay the box stores to have a book displayed face out on the big table near the entrance or by the register. You can also pay to have your book reviewed in Kirkus Reviews. Magazines get a kickback from Amazon for clicks through their book reviews. But more importantly, it is capital that determines which poets appear on NPR, which of them tour dozens of bookstores and get paid for university speaking engagements, which are in the bookstores and get reviewed in major news outlets, library-oriented book reviews, and “indie” culture mags. Usually they’re the ones published by imprints of the Big Five, by Norton or other big indies, or by a handful of large nonprofits like Graywolf, and they have agents. Universities invite the same writers that you see reviewed, advertised, and on the shelves, and speakers’ agents make sure these writers are well paid, increasing the literary wealth gap.
It’s not merit, it’s money. Capitalism has a very simple algorithm. Step One: Try a few things and see what sells. Step Two: Put more money behind the one that sells, and it sells more. Step Two involves dropping the stuff that doesn’t sell, and whether it means to or not, it amounts to capturing attention away from any alternatives. Too often, this strategy serves the elite—the publishers, the nonprofit institutions that give awards and present literary programs and readings (and their figureheads), and the already established writers at the top of the academic and industry hierarchies—even when it raises up voices that have been overlooked or structurally marginalized.
HP: Unless writers and editors are independently making decisions about what writing is published and how it’s talked about, they are subject to profit/loss models and decisions driven by capital. They’re asked to rely on wealth generated by the Koch brothers’ decades of exploitation, for example (a Koch family member is cofounder and CEO of Catapult, and presumably provided its initial funding), or by the Big Five’s list of right-wing bestsellers. Without a press that can provide a home for your values and community in the long term, success for your politics and aesthetics today can vanish, or be drowned out, tomorrow.
MY: By the way, click on the purchase link at IndieBound and it takes you to Bookshop.org, which, according to the New Yorker, has “positioned itself as an alternative to Amazon” that supports indie booksellers.[4] The Guardian goes so far as to call it “revolutionary.”[5] A few years ago, some small presses wrote to Hyperallergic about switching the links on their indie book reviews away from Amazon. The magazine agreed it wasn’t a good look, gave up their Amazon kickback, and announced that they would link their book reviews to Bookshop.org, which—though they don’t advertise it—has an exclusive agreement to source its independent press books from Ingram Book Company. If you ask Google, “Who is the largest book distributor in the world?” the answer is Ingram. Several sites describe it as “offering immediate access to more than eleven million titles” and “the preferred wholesale provider for more than 71,000 retail and library customers globally.” In other words, your Bookshop.org order doesn’t come straight from the local store but from Ingram, which gets a good chunk of the sale. Yes, Ingram, the company that owns Lightning Source (print-on-demand services) and a host of formerly independent distributors including Consortium and PGW, and the distributor most “independent” bookstores use exclusively to order independent press titles.
In fact, Ingram’s market control is the foundation for the rather traumatic experience authors and translators of small press books have aplenty: You’ve got a book out with a press that’s distributed by SPD. You come to your local indie-and-proud bookstore and say, “I live nearby, I shop here, and I’ve just published a book. Can you order it? Maybe we could do an event?” The clerk looks through a complex database on their computer and says, “Sorry, we can’t order that title.” If you pursue the issue, you learn that the book’s unavailable. Push a little more and the clerk will say that it’s only available on “short discount.” These words mean nothing to you, and most writers, and the clerk won’t explain that they’re looking at Ingram’s system.
Your indie bookstore’s “shop local” plea ends up seeming toothless if local “producers” published by small presses aren’t represented on their shelves. Your book can quite easily be ordered at a standard bookstore discount from SPD, but the clerk isn’t going to tell you this. Ingram invested significant capital in creating an online system that makes it easy for these stores to order books and return what’s unsold. In a way, it’s just like Amazon: consolidate all your purchases to one portal and voilà—a life hack! But for an SPD-distributed book, the discount Ingram offers to your friendly neighborhood bookstore (or your corporate college bookstore) is 20%, about half of the discount it offers on other books—hence the “short discount” warning flashing on the bookstore clerk’s console. Ingram thus effectively blocks SPD-distributed publishers from the shelves, and from the “free” market. (Even though SPD’s plan to let go of their costly Berkeley warehouse space in the coming year will entail storing some of their publishers’ stock in Ingram’s warehouses, there are no foreseeable changes to Ingram’s sales terms for SPD books moving through their system.)
The only way the publisher can get around that—to play ball with the indies and get on those shelves—is to allow SPD to offer Ingram 15%, a hefty cut for a middleman. The total discount of 55% (the bookstore’s 40% and Ingram’s 15%) is equal to the discount Amazon demands for SPD-distributed titles. What’s left of the $20 retail price is $9, of which SPD takes half. The publisher’s take has dwindled to $4.50 gross. Subtract the printing costs, editorial and design work, publicity, royalties, or rights fees, and the small press has made close to nothing on the sale, or even lost a few cents.
HP: And it’s important to note that, in contrast, there are vital, inspiring local stores that love and stock indie books and are essential allies to smaller presses—the fantastic Mac’s Backs in my neighborhood in Ohio, for example. It’s clear from talking to the folks at Mac’s Backs, or other beautiful independently minded indie bookstores, that they support small presses because they consider this part of their mission, their values, their work in literature and community. They are making this choice despite the commercial obstacles to it—and then sometimes miraculously creating commercial successes out of small press books.
But many independently owned, noncorporate bookstores aren’t willing, for example, to work directly with SPD or individual publishers, which would require more labor but offer better terms than Ingram. They don’t value independently published, noncorporate books enough to push back on or find alternatives to the corporation dominating US book distribution (Ingram). So they can’t be relied on to help sustain the creation of independent books and literature as an alternative and resistance to corporate dominance. We can’t look for solidarity there.
MY: Why should a small press publisher support indie bookstores—even in their fight against Amazon—if those stores only stock few (if any) small press publications?
Sure, it’s great to have a local bookstore where you can talk to the clerk about literature and get their recommendations. It’s a much more pleasant experience than faceless internet shopping, and you feel good supporting “small business” (which isn’t quite the same as community). Yet if what they have in stock is basically the Big Five, their imprints, and a few prominent indies, then what they recommend is bound to be much like the “you might also like this” of an algorithm. They’re not going to turn you on to small press books you haven’t heard of, because they don’t have them in the store. In their minds, these books don’t really exist.
The lockout of small press literature is in fact much more problematic and violent than the “box out” of independent bookstores. It leads to a narrow, celebrity-oriented literary culture fueled by capital. It leads to market-based canonization.
HP: The word indie offers its own value—and a sort of alibi—and corporations have figured out how to use that for their moneymaking self-publishing wings. I’m thinking of the “Independent Press Listing” in the New York Review of Books, which features several dozen books, almost all self-published on commercial vanity presses—not independent presses. To a casual reader, it might look like the NYRB is giving ad opportunities to indie or small presses, but most of us can’t afford their fee ($320 per listing if you buy twenty at a time), and even if we could, if we advertised here, our books would look self-published.
MY: Similarly, Kirkus Reviews, a reputable librarian-oriented book review, has an “Indie” section where you’ll rarely see an SPD-distributed book but instead lots from an imprint that Kirkus lists as “Self,” as well as titles from FriesenPress (the self-publishing arm of a Canadian printer), Bowker (the official purveyor of ISBNs in the US, which also offers full-service self-publishing), and smaller print-on-demand and pay-to-play “publishing services.”
HP: Of course, the main way that venues like NYRB could support small presses would be to review our books, but that’s rare, since we’re largely excluded from the New York publishing publicity circuit. We don’t have a full-time publicity and marketing staff, we don’t have a team of sales reps to reach out to bookstores nationwide, and we can’t afford to fly ourselves and our authors to the trade shows where “buzz” happens around books months before their release.
MY: Right, because small press editors are often located outside high- cost-of-living cultural centers, in which case they can’t attend the parties or invite reviewers out for drinks. Small press authors rarely have agents who mingle in those scenes on their behalf.
HP: The “indie” label gets used as a marketing tool that diverts income and interest from actual indie presses and writers. “Indie cred” works for ventures like Bookshop.org, which, as we’ve discussed, provides income to indie bookstores (though less than what they’d get if you were to buy the book directly) and supports Ingram, a corporate rival to Amazon. It isn’t really helping small presses and indie writers build the long-term audiences and relationships we need—in fact, furthering Ingram’s dominance of the market hurts us. We see similar phenomena elsewhere: “indie” values and praise of the small press appear, but in a structure that doesn’t benefit us as much as you might think.
For example, take the recent 2022 holiday “Small Press Gift Guide” that appeared in BOMB: a nice feature that included a lot of really good books. But with a couple important exceptions, most of the “small presses” featured in this indie magazine weren’t small presses. They’re independent but larger companies with multiple paid full-time staff members (that’s not a small press thing). One (Catapult) was founded with Koch money. There’s an ethos to lists like these—an idea that you’re supporting organizations in need. These books and presses are certainly worth supporting, but if you work at a truly small press, you read lists like these and think: Am I too small to be recognized as a small press?
This is the sort of situation that gets perpetuated by literary culture’s genial (lack of) politics. The vague idea that “we’re all in this together” comes at the expense of the smaller organizations and most marginalized writers, editors, and endeavors. But there’s a hesitation to point out these structural suppressions because everyone wants to stay in everyone’s good graces, lest you bite the hand that could, in the future, decide to feed you (and in corporate culture, the hand that feeds you is often the hand that kept you from growing your own food).
MY: The blurring that’s happening in such “small press” lists, in the “indie” review section of major book reviews—as well as in the rhetoric of indie bookstores fighting Amazon—tells of the disappearance of political and aesthetic commitment. It’s not only small presses that become invisible—such that readers don’t even notice that there’s so much missing from the bookstore shelves, curricula, libraries, and radio—but also the very notion that there is in fact something else, something oppositional, an imaginative space for literature and its production beyond the one produced by capital, reinforced by corporate interests and government subsidies. In the Dorothy/Nell Zink example, the media patronizes (and diminishes the potential of) a small press even when it decides it should support it with a mention.
Small press publishing has surely introduced and buoyed new writers to the surface. It has made possible a lot of the diversity we now see (as much of it as there is) in above-ground publishing. But I don’t think that is its primary purpose, in the sense that small presses don’t exist to make the larger publishers better, to help them “discover” writers that rise to the top with the help of their capital. (After all, they choose the ones that fit their needs and serve their purposes.) We’re not planting a crop of carrots so that someone can come with their expertise, their optics, and their measuring stick to pick out just the perfectly straight and perfectly orange one (or perfectly quirky heirloom) and then plow the field over for another go.
What do you think we’re doing? And who created our invisibility? Or rather, whose interests does our invisibility serve?
HP: I think we’re providing both models and real instances of grassroots culture-making and collective imagination. Small presses are run by writers, and anyone can start one—as long as they can steal a little time from their working lives and get a first publication out to their local readers, which isn’t as hard as it sounds. That’s not to say small presses are free of racism, classism, sexism—we know they haven’t been; they aren’t. But their political potential is in their smallness and how they empower people: tomorrow, anyone could found a new press to publish the work that needs publishing, and they could run it collaboratively in relation to community and readers and political values. They could never make a single decision that was about sales (sounds impossible, but I’ve seen it). They could create a small, real thing that is intimate and imaginative and dynamic and open ended and full of different visions and agents and working against capital, choice by choice. This is the political potential of the small press.
Notes:
[1] Madeleine Schwartz, “Be the Change: Activism and Cynicism in Nell Zink’s ‘Doxology,’” The New Yorker, September 2, 2019, 63.
[2] Kate Dwyer, “Astra Magazine Had Creative Freedom and a Budget. It Wasn’t Enough,” The New York Times, December 3, 2022, https://www. nytimes.com/2022/12/03/books/astra-magazine.html.
[3] Ed Nawotka, “Astra Publishing House Reaches for the Stars,” Publishers Weekly, October 29, 2021, https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/ industry-news/publisher-news/article/87770-astra-publishing-house- reaches-for-the-stars.html.
[4] Casey Cep, “A Kansas Bookshop’s Fight with Amazon Is about More than the Price of Books,” The New Yorker, March 12, 2021, https://www. newyorker.com/news/us-journal/a-kansas-bookshops-fight-with-amazon- is-about-more-than-the-price-of-books.
[5] Alison Flood, “‘This Is Revolutionary’: New Online Bookshop Unites Indies to Rival Amazon,” The Guardian, November 1, 2020, https://www. theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/02/this-is-revolutionary-new-online- bookshop-unites-indies-to-rival-amazon.