The end of the small-publishing moment?
Thinking about book publishing since the early-pandemic lockdown, I’m beginning to believe there have been two phases. The first was an insurgent moment that championed smallness and independence and may now be ending, having lost steam, paradoxically, sometime around the PRH decision that blocked another (especially big) merger of commercial houses last year.
My take on things is situated and particular, since the flyspeck publisher I was then directing had its biggest success during the early-pandemic small-press boom—with a title that did well on the awards circuit in 2020 and 2021 and became, in some circles, a kind of stand-in for independent success in an era of conglomeration. Most people didn’t, of course, have that same experience, and they may well interpret the very recent history of publishing differently.
But in 2022–23 I think you see a few things that indicate a retrenchment from the small-press moment—a moment distilled for me by Hub City Press’s popular “Decentralize Publishing” T-shirt. There’s the withdrawal of pandemic-era programs explicitly designed to help nonprofit publishers, right at a juncture (as noted by Meg Reid at Hub City) when increased paper costs and a return to pre-pandemic expectations (like mailing more ARCs and traveling and exhibiting more) make it that much harder for small players to get their finances to work. And there’s social media, which felt—to me, as a publishing professional navigating the weird landscape of 2020–21—like an equalizer, a way to drum up enthusiasm around authors and books that didn’t really cost much, and that a tiny house like mine could do just as well as, or better than, a big corporate house. Since social media has fared poorly in the past year or so, that’s another challenge for independent presses. Spending a couple of hours on a largely abandoned platform doesn’t feel equal to jetting to the reopened London Book Fair.
I want to avoid sounding nostalgic about the can-do camaraderie of the early pandemic, when booksellers were offering curbside pickup or hand delivery, and awards shows pivoted quickly to online ceremonies. (I thank god my year at the National Book Awards involved no formalwear.) But there was in 2020–21, I think, very visibly a community—scrappy, stressed, and in certain respects more equal.
That community’s support for the independent and small helped provide context for the big antitrust trial in 2022. And while the PRH decision blocking egregious corporate consolidation didn’t, of course, cause an end to support for small presses, maybe it seemed like a culmination—and maybe Book World’s collective guard has since been let down. Supporting smallness and independence requires an ongoing commitment that can be hard to sustain, especially when so many forces conspire to reassert an old normal that favored the commercial and big.
It goes without saying that small presses will continue to have successes. I hope everyone in the bookish ecosystem will continue to support them—which means, among other things, continuing to connect these successes to a narrative that celebrates independence.
I diisagree . The "small" press movement has been around since Margaret Fuller worked her ass off putting out "The Little Magazine" ( as I understand it) , and there numerous small presses throughout the twentieth century, often manned by a few doughty individuals that occasionally even broke iinto the rarified hierachica heights, like Paris Review, and others. Ive spent a good chunk of my adult life helping out at Small Press Bookfairs in New York Ciy and San Francico, helping to sell books from City Lights, Y'Bird Press. Thunder's Mouth Press. CoffeeHouse, Heresies,West End, Cineaste Film. Kearney Street Workshp, Hanging Loose, Beond Baroque,Curbstone, Kaya, TiaChuca, Shambalaa, MontwhlyReview and others. I have watched the incredible revolutioin in American poetry led by two organizations for writers-CaveCanem - an organizatiion suppoting AfricanAmerican writers, especially in and around MFA prorams, and, Kundiman, an Asian Amercan equivalent, and numerouss Latino Pressses,including Art De Publico, Tia Chaca, Noemi, and others. I think part of the problem, ffrom what Ihave seen for years at openmics, is thatmany professed poets and writers, includng thosewho do flash fction because someofthem are simply lazy and have no attention span and are so bereft ofimagination that. they constantly need prompts and cant tale tte slightest critique of their "work".
This past year I met a veteran poet, a prize winnng left-liberal poet. I asked him what hethought of the Amerian poet Sterlng A.Brown and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. He had never heard of either poet eventhough Darwish is known throughout the worlld.
Part of thisis due to the utterly racissst and ingoistic educational stances amng most people iin the Happy Valley. They get their mostly whitewriters dead or alive from the US, Great Britian and a small sliver of France or Italy or Denmaak if the oneblockbluster overripewriter is promoted and hyped . You know the writers. Writers to bianianring the US Populacee the long-sought for solace ofOBLVION.. So many possible curious readers then have no idea or clue aboout such spectacular authors such as Vi Khi Nao , Linh Dinh and Don Le from Vietnam, or Ben Okri, Chimimmanda Adiche, and Ngugi Wa Thiongo from,respectivey, Nigeria, and Kenya; or all the marvellous new wiriters from Japan; the delightful Ugrasek from Serbia, the brilliant Hassan Blasim from Iraq now lving in Finland ( author of the groundbreakng restructing of the short story collecion The ICorpse Exhibition, and the fabulous author of the finest long poem in fifty years- Tyehimba Jess author of the kaleidiscocpic epic OLIO