Indie Publishing: Decoding the World

When I first began working in publishing in Europe, the idea of ‘indie’ publishers wasn’t out there like it is today. More subject-specialist medium-sized publishers existed, but this changed as the publishing world had to adjust to altered reading habits. People began reading less for pleasure, more online and more digitally. Bookshops began closing and amalgamating. This wasn’t a trend it was a shifting landscape, as globalization and technology opened up other marketplaces.

Despite this; traditional publishing has suffered, and now only five major publishers exist who own through imprint, the majority of those former medium-sized or small-publishers. Even when your book is printed by a smaller press, if they are owned by a larger press, you are part of the machine of big publishers who control the vast majority of publishing. Many authors are never published by the big publishers, because they don’t have a writer’s agent or possess the writing acumen to be given a chance and can’t get looked at by bigger publishing houses, or they’re not deemed ‘marketable’ enough for main-stream publishing.

Only 30 years ago, most published books in the Western world and much of the rest of the world, were written by white men. Second to that, white women. Nearly all best-sellers and authors who actually made enough money being a writer and didn’t have to supplement by being a university professor or similar, were written by white men. If you wanted to read a book by an Indian author in the West, you’d have to trawl through specialistic stores or more obscure publishers, to find something that wasn’t white and male.

This began changing from the 70s with the introduction of women’s presses, who sought to ensure women writers had equal visibility to men. They didn’t succeed, but the niche markets for ‘women’s novels’ was robust and thriving, whilst not main-stream. Mirroring the trends seen in film, women’s novels gained popularity and began to hit best-seller lists, gradually becoming more main-stream, though to this day they rarely match the sales of white men, with a few notable exceptions like Patricia Cornwell and J. K. Rowlings (before she came out as anti-Trans).

Indie publishers as we understand them today, didn’t exist because publishers printed their own books and thus, required distribution, printing and design, all of which was impossible for a smaller organization with limited funds. The change came with technology. As the internet evolved, Amazon, who started out exclusively selling books, took over as the biggest book seller globally. Their meteoric rise was helped by free or inexpensive shipping, leaving little room for competition from home-grown publishers, who didn’t have access to the cheap shipping Amazon did. This monopolization of the publishing world, led to many smaller publishing houses closing OR doing something rarely done before, aside from in vanity publishing. They began printing on demand using Amazon and other online portals as their ‘distributor.’

Let’s do the math on this. If you are a publishing house and you publish an author, and sell 100 books, by printing on demand, you have to give Amazon and the other platforms you use, a hefty percentage of what you ‘earn’ from the sale of each book. Gone are the days you can give an advance to an author, or send them 1000 copies of their book. You are nickel-and-dimed over every book you sell. Consequently, these medium-and-small publishers were often bought up by the five large publishers who dominate distribution of actual printed books in all bookstores (minus the independents, who are still highly influenced by those publishers).

What was left was the indie scene. A scene that was less about profit and sustainability, as publishing books they felt passionately about; be it their own, or their friends or a community. As technology advanced, the ability for anyone to start a small publishing house, suddenly became very doable. You didn’t need to pay others to work with you because your friends who also wanted to do this, often showed up. This resulted in a proliferation of micro-small-cottage-industry publishing houses. Some were more hybrid, asking authors to pay for the ISBN and cover-design, whilst others recouped through the percentage(s) they paid authors.

When I began working for an indie publisher in 2017 there were many established micro-publishing houses out there, it was relatively easy to work off their blue-print and begin a publishing house, which is what they did, with me as one of their editors.

Truth-be-told, appearances can be deceptive. None of us would have been able to do this without technology and print-on-demand, moreover, most of the team did not need to work 9 hours a day, because if they had, the company could never have been viable. I began working with them because we shared a community, who loved poetry, and we felt there were many projects we were passionate about. What I had hoped when I began working with them was that we would build such a powerful iconic publishing house, that we’d be bought out by one of the bigger ones, and get more traction. I had seen it happen (rarely!) and really believed we could build this publishing house to that level and start earning real money, rather than having to work full time to pay for my side-hustle.

We did; for over 8 years. Riding the waves of change as they came, including everyone and their pet hamster starting a publishing company, which led to a bottle-neck pressure in a highly competitive marketplace. The irony being nobody was earning anything, in some ways it was a house of cards, but in other ways, like all passion-projects, it was how publishing had always been. When you do a deep dive into the history of publishing you will find that many of the ‘greats’ in the literary world, either self published or vanity published, remaining obscure and without income for most of their lives. The whole ‘starving artist’ myth, has more truism than myth.

Equally the kinds of people who worked in micro indie publishing were often of a similar ilk. They had to be relatively middle class, because what working class person has any funds or spare time to do something like this? They were predominantly white, because society is still very racist and that is evidenced in income disparity most acutely. They were often female, because women are still more likely to work part time or stay home (children, chronic illness) compared to men.

I wasn’t middle-class or white, and I struggled to work full time in another job whilst balancing an increasingly hectic side-hustle life in indie publishing. What kept me going was the sheer love for what I did. But what worked against me was the ever-increasing proliferation of ‘indie’ publishing houses (and magazines, and journals and zines) popping up overnight. A saturated market means everyone fails. If you have literally 100 calls for anthologies, poetry submissions and flash-fiction every week, everyone gets less, because submitters are fatigued and overwhelmed by the asks, and publishers are ever-more-hungry for submissions.

Another downside was the very understandable backlash against not paying writers and artists for their submissions. It was completely impossible to do this with say, anthology projects, magazines, zines and websites. Unless you had a sponsor, you didn’t earn any money to pay your staff, let alone your submitters. But writers felt used and aggressively targeted to give up their hard written work without any compensation.

In some countries like Austria, publications were sponsored and funded by their governments or Districts, and they were able to flourish and grow a little more, thanks to grants. But in non-socialized countries like America, this didn’t happen very often and the average duration of an indie publisher was 4 years. Unpaid editors burned out and the whole system seemed hopelessly skewed toward those with money. You often only got the (unpaid) editorship if you had an MFA (which cost a small fortune) and again, like when publishing began, only the rich and influential seemed to be successful in the indie publishing scene.

Publishing houses like Two Sylvia’s being ahead of the curve, began running competitions which they advertised through portals like Submittable. Now this is routine, and publishing houses defray the cost of paying for Submittable and other online ‘submission portals’ by charging entrants a fee to submit a book or poem to a competition. Even 20 years ago, the numbers of people submitting was drastically lower, because it was typically confined to ‘in country’ with groups online meeting and finding out about relatively localized opportunities. As the internet gathered speed and access became easier, this exploded and became worldwide. For the many people speaking English as a second language, such like myself, there was a whole wealth of opportunity in other countries to submit to.

The downside to this was now the competition was multiplied. Many writers in English (as a second language) are incredibly talented and what was once, confined to say, a state in the US, became international. The numbers of submissions grew exponentially as did the coffers for those publishers who charged $20, 30, 40 for each submission. It became a new model for profit, and instead of having open calls for submissions of books, many indie publishers began competitions, where they could earn enough from submissions to cover basic operating costs.

When the publishers I worked with for eight years closed up shop, I moved on and did not take the offer of becoming the head of that publishing house. Being the head is a thankless task. You don’t do what you love (editing, creating books) so much as endless financials and chasing up administration. Working closely with a team, I did far more than just editing, I was project conceptualizer, publicist, author contact, author coach and marketing person. We all end up doing a lot more than what we signed on for, including the 100s of hours spent working without profit. As anyone who has worked in the non-profit volunteer sector will attest, it’s easy to burn out even with the best intentions; it’s not so different in the indie publishing scene.

During this time, I didn’t give up my day job because it was never viable to earn a living wage from publishing alone, despite what people think. I have seen some models that do achieve this, they are mostly hybrid and run the risk of being perilously close to vanity-publishing. My own experience as an author, I saw publishing houses that were bigger than those I worked with, using a pyramid-style-scheme whereby authors were encouraged to ‘pre-sell’ and in some cases, if they didn’t meet their target, then they earned nothing by way of income, even if their book went on to sell quite a few copies. I can understand publishers wanting to protect themselves and not take huge chances, but this seemed exploitative to me. I only ever worked with publishers who gave a big chunk of ‘profits’ to their authors. The exception to this were the social-cause anthologies I worked on, where the profits went to targeted causes, such as rape crisis centers. This remains to this day, the beating heart of why I went back into publishing, because I see the enduring value of these kinds of projects.

I worked with many authors, both as freelance editor, and through publishing houses. I still do. And when I meet someone new to the indie publishing scene, I smile at their optimism, because whilst I still love publishing, I know it’s got some serious drawbacks. I’m not sure what the solution is and I can’t foresee the next evolution in the indie publishing scene, as it is going to be dependent upon technological advances. What I will say is, this scene remains largely driven by the middle-and-upper classes. That’s not so different from when mass illiteracy meant only the ‘high’ born read. But it’s a real shame because we’re being elitist all over again. When we work on social-justice projects, are we even able to reach those we want to reach? Or are we still writing through the experiences of those with a degree of privilege? With the exorbitant costs for MFA’s and any higher education, as well as the reality that those who have ‘time’ to write are often privileged in some way, are we missing out on the true voices of any social-justice subject we may feel passionately about? Because they are too busy struggling to feed a family, work two jobs and pay their bills? Classism goes hand-in-hand with racism and sexism. Right now, on the surface, it ‘appears’ to be egalitarian, with nearly every indie publisher actively asking for BIPOC, LGBTQi+ writers, but this is still smoke-and-mirrors, when the real issue; inequity of access, still exists as much as it ever did. With all this said, there is nothing more satisfying than working closely with an author, especially a young bright mind, with little experience, and polishing a project to perfection to watch it shine out in the world. With distribution being the major impediment to getting indie titles widely known and read, supporting one another is more necessary than ever. Burn out among indie groups is high for those of us asked daily to write arcs, literature reviews, and publicize someone’s book. There is definitely a weariness after a while, and an apathy among people being repeatedly asked to buy a book. The very notion of ‘indie’ implies small. I’m not sure what will happen as we grow beyond our confines, but we’ll need to find ways to avoid saturating our small marketplace, especially with fewer people reading. Indie publishing has always been and continues to be, a project borne of love and devotion to the ‘art,’ because often, it is a thankless, exhausting job. The beauty of writing and the shining new talent is the reason