Publish and be Blessed
There is a good article in the Guardian online about the rise of independent publishers who are capturing more and more of the top literary prizes (and thank you Tosh Berman for drawing my attention to it).
Tosh, of course, has been responsible for publishing a number of books on my shelf – a series of translations of Boris Vian – so he speaks with some authority on the subject.
When I first started broadening out my reading in my teens there were few or no independent publishers as the technology wasn’t there to do it easily. There were some smaller houses that tackled non mainstream books – John Calder and New Directions spring to mind. As typesetting got easier with computer technology small houses started to grow but still faced a challenge getting their books out to bookshops. Most of my favourites – including titles like Atlas Press were found in independent bookshops or university ones which didn’t rely on large volumes of sales. This was also before the start of social media (and before Amazon) so the means of getting your output in front of people was also limited.
The Guardian article correctly spots two trends – there are fewer large publishers and they have become more risk averse. Part of this reluctance to take risks may be because their model relies on getting their titles in every store available so print runs have to be big. Niche market books are therefore shunned. Unfortunately this also means concentration on celebrity books and clones of whatever breakthrough success has just happened.
Many of the books I love are never going to have mass market appeal. They are obscure, experimental, and challenging. You are not going to see them round the pool in Benidorm. This means they are never going to sell in large numbers, but the people who want to read them really want to read them, so will work harder to find them and are willing to pay a bit more.
Amazon has helped (despite its sometimes questionable business practices and impact on independent bookshops) because if there are only 1000 people who want to read a book, they can find it online.
This is not (just) me being a literary snob – I read a lot of mass market books as well. It is me celebrating the publishers who have a particular love and are willing to invest in it.
