A Middle Ground of Small Press Publishing

I recently enjoyed an essay published online in Australian literary journal Overland, Sympathy for the devil?: Caroline Hamilton on small presses and free markets.

She illustrates well a middle ground between commerce and community where many of the newer small publishers work mostly as unpaid creative entrepreneurs who rely on an “economy of favours” supported by social networks to survive in the publishing industry.  Hamilton demonstrates how this emphasis on entrepreneurial individualism represents a major but subtle difference between book publishing then and now. What we find is that new small press publishers embrace free market attitudes and methods of large publishers to leverage their expertise and passion for books. What hasn’t changed is that small presses exist as formal mechanisms to publish primarily the publisher’s work, and that of his or her friends and colleagues, and rely on shoe-string budgets to operate.

Another highlight from the essay was the discussion on value, especially how value for each transaction is renegotiated, contingent on the type of client. A graphic designer might charge a small press one fee for a design and a much higher fee to an established publishing house. This falls under the basic principles of what the market will bear, and those with deeper pockets can bear more zeros before the decimal point. It’s also motivated by self-interest and membership in social networks, where the relationships are becoming more direct and specialized than in the past due to a lack of purely geographic restrictions.

The lack of geographic restriction in digital publishing (ebooks) represents the greatest change and opportunity for success. The world is filled with potential readers and this has the effect of eliminating the attitude of scarcity that drives competition. At the local level, small press publishers are increasingly pooling their limited resources to advance individual interests. Herein lies the greatest value of belonging to a social network in publishing.

Digital publishing poses less financial investment, and therefore less risk, undermining not just the notion that you must compete (versus collaborate) to survive, but also undermining the current logic of ebook pricing strategies, the most obvious indicator of a book’s value. I was interested to discover (somewhere else) that new publishing houses specializing in ebooks may price their books higher than traditional print publishing houses, who might devalue the electronic format, which suggests these types of publishers value format (packaging) and not content.

The tangled perceptions we weave; except, what that article didn’t touch upon (and Hamilton’s does) is the costly infrastructure and media conglomerate economics built into traditional publishing houses, not to mention the overemphasis on marketing and profits, and loss of “book culture”. That 60s Volvo 1800i is sexy but the upkeep on vintage is a rich person’s game. Luckily, a book is not a car, and we can read on real or pseudo-paper to foster the intimate exchange of book culture between writers and readers, especially at a fraction of the cost compared to only a decade ago. This is great news for digital small presses.

One final insight that points to who might be the future survivors in book publishing is a surprising rejection of the currently available funding models:

In this light, funding is perceived as promoting a dangerous dependence, a safety net that could encourage producers to forget the interests of their readers. Such an attitude suggests that, within the sphere of the moral economy, publishing success relates to a publication’s ability to hold its readership. Funding models, as they currently stand, are perceived by some small publishers as undermining these values.

I’m not convinced by this simplified attitude of “success equals loyal readership”, or that funding distracts the publisher from focusing on the reader, but then I’m not familiar with Australian funding models. I ascribe this rejection of social capital (funding in Canada comes from resident taxes) to a more American individualistic and commercial approach that has levelled the U.S. cultural field to the blockbuster hit and bestseller, where viewers and readers eventually lose interest because they aren’t challenged to ask for more. Sort of like the Google search algorithm, where I only get hits confirming what I asked for.

Rejecting any form of investment in culture, especially funding that doesn’t have to be paid back, speaks loudly of pride and prejudice.

See:

Sympathy for the devil?: Caroline Hamilton on small presses and free markets in Overland