Why It’s So Hard To Find Small Press Books
And what you can do about it.
In December, we wrote an essay about how small presses still fight the good fight for risky literary fiction, even as the conglomerated Big Five publishers abandon it. In a time when companies like Meta steal books to build generative AI, then claim that individual books “are no different from noise” in terms of their contribution to AI, defending wild fiction matters more than ever. Many readers reached out to us: after too-often plunking down $30 for a well-reviewed but ultimately disappointing new release, they were clamoring for better options. If small and independent presses offered fresher, more challenging books, how could they find and read them?
It’s a more difficult question to answer than you might expect.
Books navigate a long, complex journey before they appear on bookstore shelves, if they ever do. Most people still read books as physical objects, meaning they have to be warehoused and shipped. The Big Five have their own distribution centers, but most small presses are distributed by Ingram, a conglomerate superpower in its own right. (One small press editor we spoke to described it as “The Death Star.”) Ingram’s only other real competitor is Independent Publishers Group (IPG), a distributor for small and independent presses.
There’s a romantic vision that a book becomes a hit when readers stumble upon it, en masse, and fall in love. But in the real world, most readers hear about a book from a friend, social media, or a book review, then search for it at their local bookstore or Barnes & Noble or Amazon. If it’s not there, they’re not reading it.
We interviewed many different publishers, industry insiders, and distributors to understand how small press/indie books can more easily reach ordinary readers. Our big takeaway: it’s an environmental problem, not consumer taste, that makes this so difficult.
What Doesn’t Work and Why
Pressuring local, independent bookshops to carry the weight of the small press world on their shoulders.
Local bookshops make huge efforts to handsell local writers and indie reads, but their dedication doesn’t change the fact that most readers walk in with a specific book already in mind. We love these stores, and because we love them, it’s necessary to lay down home truths: they have employees to pay, stock to move, and a tax-cheating, price-slashing behemoth (Amazon) to battle. Without increased awareness and demand, small and independent press books cannot make up more than 5-7% of their inventory.
Expecting public libraries to stock small press books that readers have never heard of.
Like bookshops, libraries have to carry what people already want to read. These librarians are busy. They’re fighting local funding cuts and they have to keep that one guy from watching porn on the public computer. Despite it all, they represent the best of literary service. If small press titles are in demand, they’ll handle the supply.
What Kinda Works, or Works-For-Now, But Maybe Not For Long
Getting mainstream reviews.
The bookish press keeps shrinking. For the outlets that remain, they seem to function more as extensions of the Big Five’s PR teams than independent book reviewers. A couple of weeks ago, we counted the publishers for 52 titles highlighted on the NYT Books home page. Only three came from outside the conglomerated Big Five, and zero were from small or even midsize presses. Small press writers are simply out of luck here.
Going viral on BookTok.
“Word of mouth is still king,” said Cynthia Sherry of Chicago Review Press. That is exactly what BookTokers have done for certain small press books, like Betsy Lerner’s Shred Sisters. Long may BookTok reign, but now that TikTok has its own publishing arm (8th Note Press), we’re curious to see if the algorithm will play fair with the #smallpress competition.
What We’d Like to See
Mainstream review outlets, aggressively widen your coverage to include more diverse publishers.
To counteract the existing favoritism towards mega-publishers, half of all reviews, roundups, and bookish journalism should center on independent, mid-size, small, micropress, hybrid, and author-published books.
Celebrity bookworms, set the standard for literary taste.
Oprah, Reese, Jenna, Emma, and all other beautiful book-clubbing celebrities, you gave us really big sunglasses, and then you gave us really tiny sunglasses. That’s power. How about curating your lists to include 50% small and independent press books? Start reading from Hub City Press, Melville House, Stelliform Press, and Deep Vellum. You’ll love them. Or skip all that and get on the horn with the king and queen of indie book recommendations: Joe Matthews at IPG and Andrea Fleck-Nisbet at the Independent Book Publishers Association. We’re pretty sure they’ll take your call.
Tastemakers, be a hero for small presses in the same way you have been for thrifting, craft beer, off-the-beaten-track restaurants, and German board games.
Adopt a few small and independent presses as your own. Fall in love with a novel about what it means to be called to faith from Wiseblood Books. Get really, really into bookish terroir. Taste Malört liquor with Chicago Review Press and stand vigil by the mountain graves of West Virginia with Two Dollar Radio.
Ordinary bookworms, subscribe to newsletters.
Though it’s only a few weeks old, Zona Motel is bringing the smeared-lipstick, flash-camera, Charli XCX-insouciance to its small, but passionate base of small press aficionados. Bookmark the annual IPPY Awards and the Independent Book Award Finalists. Let them inspire your holiday shopping and future book club picks.
We would never expect Jane and Joe Reader to hunter-gather rare novels off the Internet. But in light of the new administration’s mid-term cuts to NEA grants, which have already affected 38 small presses, a more vibrant, more curious bookish ecosystem is crucial if literature is to survive outside of conglomerate publishing.
Our hope is that the small presses and their brave, funny, weird books are taken up as a cause célèbre by serious and casual readers alike, and especially that mainstream outlets take seriously their journalistic duty to report on book culture writ large.
We have complained enough about Big Five publishing, but the truth is that there is an alternative out there. It’s vital to go out and find it.
Melanie Jennings is a MacDowell fellow whose short stories, essays, and poems have appeared in Fiction Southeast, Hotel Amerika, and Crab Orchard Review. She lives in Oregon where she is working on a novel. Here is her Substack.
Elizabeth Kaye Cook is a writer in New York City. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in Carve, The Gettysburg Review, Three Crows Magazine, etc. Her newsletter is Notes from Elizabeth Kaye Cook.
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I'm the non-fiction buyer at a mid-sized public library, and I really appreciated the advice in this column. Thank you and keep this sort of thing coming! I'd like to add one thought about novels in particular: it would be great if we could get back to prioritizing stories that are just that--great stories--rather than thinly-veiled moral fables for whatever the author or publisher's agenda is or "arty" exercises in post-modern metafiction. Maybe I'm just another plain vanilla Midwestern type, but those things make me yawn, wince....and long for better.
I would add another powerful source that could influence what appears in bookstores and libraries: the major book prizes. For instance, this year's shortlist of six finalists for the International Booker Prize consists entirely of books from independent presses. (Good for them!) These books find their ways into major book reviews and onto bookstore shelves.
I'm sure there are also various Substackers who discuss small and independent press books. For instance--(ahem, utterly shameless plug)--I sometimes do this at my own Substack, https://frommybookshelf.substack.com/. It's by no means my only focus, because I cover whatever happens to interest me at the moment. But in the past few months I've written about Jon Fosse's "A Shining" (Fitzcarraldo/Transit Books), Hebe Uhart's "A Question of Belonging" (Archipelago), Zsuzsanna Gahse's "Mountainish" (prototype), and Teffi's "And Time Was No More" (Pushkin).
I'm sure there other Substackers who do much more of this than I do--and who have a bigger audience!--and I would love to hear other recommendations.