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.
Read the full article: https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-its-so-hard-to-find-small-press
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