07/06/2023, 21:01 Are small publishers doing all the hard work for the big ones?

rd work for the big ones? 1 Publishing I The Guardian

Publlshing
Are small publishers doing ali the hard
work for the big ones?
These days, it is minimally staffed and funded firms who invest
in new authors. The giants avoid such risk. only picking the
writers once their narnes are rnade

O Small firm, big win ... Oneworld author Paul Beatty, accepting the 2016 Man Booker Prize for The Sellout
Photograph: John PhilUps/PA

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Thu 8 Dec 201610.35 GMT
aul McVeigh and Kirsty Logan are authors you may have heard
of. Both of their debuts were published by Salt, an independent
publisher. Paul McVeigh's The Good San was shortlisted for a
bunch of awards, and won the Polari fust book prize this year.
Kirsty Logan's The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales won three awards -
including the Polari in 2015- and Logan had her next book published with
Harvill Secker, a division of Penguin Random House. The sarne trajectory
is likely for Paul McVeigh. It's a familiar story.

Independent publishers have existed since the 19th century; it wasn't

until the 20th and the 21st that we saw the industry dominated by a few
corporations. "The Big Four" publishers - Simon & Schuster, Penguin
Random House, Hachette and HarperCollins - have grown big by buying
up small publishers. Hogarth, for example, was founded by Leonard and
Virgínia Woolf in 1917; now it is an imprint at the Crown Publishing Group,
which is in tum a part of Penguin Random House - which itself used to be
Penguin and Random House before their merger in 2013. Phew.

Independent publishers, though, are the ones who made literature a

commodity in the fust place - or perhaps supplied the demand that
already existed - so we shouldn't be surprised at the success of small and
independent publishers, picking up prizes and acclaim at an enviable pace
in recent years. Yet the capitalist nature of big publishing and the doom­
and-gloom forecasts we've been hearing for the last decade or so have
created a clirnate in which we are, indeed, surprised.

There are many, many small presses out there today,

in a world where anyone can set up a website and declare themselves a
small press. Enough naive authors have been burned by scams to be wary.
For example, the class-action lawsuit that was filed against and later
settled with Author Solutions Inc. But a few independent publishers are
loorning ever larger in a crowded scene.

O Graeme Macrae Burnet. His book His Bloody Project, pubUshed by Contraband, outsold the
rest of the Man Booker shortlist until Beatty was announced as the winner. Photograph: Murdo
Macleod/The Guardian

Some success stories have already been written about, both on the
Guardian and elsewhere. His Bloody Project, published by Contraband - a
imprint of Saraband, which is run by two people - was nominated for the
Man Booker prize, for example, and Transoceanic Lights by S Li was
published on a shoestring budget by Harvard Square Editions and named
as one ofthe National Book Foundation's Five Under 35. Paul Beatty's The
Sellout, which won the Booker in October, was published in the UK by the
relatively large small press, Oneworld Publications, the 20-strong team
that also published the 2015 winner, Marlon James. Another two-person
operation, Galley Beggar Press, published Eimear McBride's debut A Girl Is
a Half-formed Thing in its fust year trading. McBride won numerous
prizes, including the Baileys women's prize for fiction. They've continued
to publish fiction in line with their mission: "We believe in the beauty of
books and the printed word, in the importance of nurturing authors and

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/dec/08/are-small-uk-publishers-doing-all-the-hard-work-for-the-big-ones 1/8
07/06/2023, 21:01 Are small publishers doing all the hard work for the big ones? 1 Publishing I The Guardian
paying serious attention to editing, and in the vital importance ofart as
well as commerce."

Since many small presses often Jack the resources that mid-sized
publishers like Graywolfand Oneworld have, so when an author becomes
successful, it is in the best interest ofboth author and small press to move
the rights over to a firm with more money and a wider distribution
network. McBride, as an example, went to Hogarth with her second. T
Geronimo Johnson's well-reviewed debut, Hold lt 'Til lt Hurts, was
published by Coffee House Press and his second, Welcome to Braggsville,
was published by William Morrow - an imprint ofHarperCollins. Similarly,
Neil Zink's debut The Wallcreeper was published by author Danielle
Dutton's press, Dorothy: A Publishing Project but Zink's next two books
were published by Ecco, a HarperCollins imprint.

Way back in the 1970s, when Rita Mae Brown first published Rubyfruit
Jungle, her now-iconic bildungsroman about an unapologetic lesbian, her
publisher (a two-woman press long defunct) couldn't keep up with
demand. Though they printed and sold some 70,000 copies, they
eventually had to sell the rights to Bantam, which has since itselfbeen
bought by Random House. The success ofRubyfruit Jungle was an
underground affair - people passed the book along, shared it with those
they could trust, told people about it in letters. There were no
advertisements for it, no publicity plan. Today, many independent
publishers work very hard to publicise their books, with varying success -
but word of mouth remains crucial.

õ Writ.er Nell Zink, pictured at the Edinburgh international book festival. Photograph: Murdo
Macleod/The Guardian

As more authors jump to prominence from small presses, and as

conversations around them become louder - publishers such as And Other
Stories and Civil Coping Mechanisms Press - a question that may be worth
asking is: are big publishers unwilling to take risks any more? Increasingly,
"risky" authors, those who've been rejected over and over again by
traditional publishers or dozens ofagents, are being picked up by small
presses whose modus operandi is to take risks on literature that is
exciting, innovative, or that they deem important either stylistically or
politically. Then the big publishers swoop in and profit from the hard work
and risk-taking ofthe small presses.

That is a good thing, in a way, because it means

everyone makes more money from the art and a wider audience is
reached. But it does seem like big publishers are hedging their bets more
and more often, operating as ifthey are not too big to fail. lt is a shame
that the heavy lifting is being left to those who are only big in ambition•

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