THIS IS NOT A MANIFESTO
Richard Nash of Cursor
SEVERAL years ago the poet and publisher Matvei Yankelevich and I offered a conference panel audience the spectacle of an actual disagreement. Not a fierce one but a firm one. We hugged afterward, to make clear that it was partly for show, but it remains a useful dispute to reflect upon, even now.
It began with my asserting that independent publishing, as broadly understood at the time, began in 1985 with desktop publishing (the kind of sweeping generalization of which I am fond). Why? Because if the printing press represented the first time in human history we could produce, at significant scale, perfect copies of anything, desktop publishing represented the first time in human history that a single individual, using nothing more than PageMaker (released in 1985 by a company named after the great Venetian printer Aldus Manutius), running on a Mac that could be rented at a Kinko’s for six dollars per hour, could create a template or model for reproduction at scale that was utterly indistinguishable from one generated by a billion-dollar corporation. It would take another two decades for music production to reach that level of equivalency; another half decade for AutoCAD software to allow an individual to make a template for just about anything (carbon fiber 3-D printing, etc.).
Now Matvei rightly pointed out that I was blithely ignoring the rich history of the small-press movement of the 1950s and 1960s. He was, and is, right. The postwar small press movement was largely driven by serious full-time persons of letters with a lifelong mission to offset the growing scale of the largest publishers; it was a small but purposeful cultural movement, with a few wealthy dilettantes thrown in for good measure.
What happened after 1985, however, was something driven by social, economic, and technological change. After 1985 not just the amount of money, but also the degree of commitment shrank dramatically. To interface with a commercial printer in the analog days, one needed a degree of expertise and experience few had, or were interested in cultivating, at the time. Now all you needed was a couple thousand dollars. Not nothing, but if e-commerce now can be characterized as the elimination of friction on consumption, 1985 marked the beginning of the elimination of friction on production. Or, put another way, now petit bourgeois dilettantes could be publishers. A college student, like the founder of Soft Skull Press, could be a publisher.
Between 1985 and 2007—that is, prior to the launch of the Kindle—the number of new titles published each year in the United States increased significantly, to 350,000 titles each year. This was partly driven by increases in title count from corporate publishers, and from university presses, but it also came from the dramatic increase in the number of independent publishers. And instead of there being fifty vanguard small presses, there were hundreds. This is exponential growth in the most literal sense.
This was supported too by dramatic growth in the size of the bookstore. The low interest rates designed to lift the U.S. economy out of recession in the early 1990s enabled spectacular growth in big-box retail, so you had hundreds of bookstores that needed not the typical eight- to ten-thousand-title inventory of an independent bookstore, but ten times that. By maintaining that inventory level too, Borders and Barnes & Noble were effectively providing an interest-free working-capital loan—in the mid 2000s those two stores were sitting on $200,000 of slow-moving Soft Skull inventory. I complained furiously when much of it eventually returned (all of it, in the case of Borders); it hadn’t occurred to me at the time that my interest-free working-capital loan had been called in.
I’m already hinting, in the Borders bankruptcy, that there’s a next chapter in this story. As Matvei and I offered competing origin myths, all around the world there were people talking about an indie publishing that had nothing to do with the indie publishing we were debating. The advent of e-books (which started a new chapter for all kinds of publishers) and the improvement both in digital printing and the interfaces needed to exploit it, has meant that now anyone with access to a computer could be a publisher. “Indie publishing” now meant “self-publishing.” I complained furiously that our label had been coopted. But language changes without regard for the purists.
Now what did we mean when we said “independent”? While I’m wary
of speaking for every one of those hundreds of independent publishers, there was a strong anticorporate, antiestablishment thread running through most of us. As I was fond of saying, “We shove our books down the throat of the mainstream.” We thought of ourselves in opposition to a corporate world; even if some of us might have begun as dilettantes, those of us who persevered had fire in our bellies. We drew lines in the sand. We issued manifestos, proclamations, denunciations. We are this. We are not that.
I am no longer an independent publisher, even by our old definition. When I returned from a family vacation in Ireland last July, I said “coach” when the customs agent asked my profession, the first time in almost twenty years that I didn’t say “publisher.”
That said, Emily Cook, formerly of Milkweed and Granta, and I launched a business helping to run U.S. publishing operations for Coach House, Greystone, Icon, Oneworld, and Scribe—traditionally defined independent publishers that are headquartered in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. So I have skin in the game, still.
But one reason I became a coach is because it is a profession with a methodology that is fundamentally about asking questions, not offering answers. In the ever-evolving labor market, it occupies a space somewhere between psychotherapist and consultant. It reminds me most powerfully of my happiest moment as an editor, when the author needed—and I was able to offer—challenging, powerful queries.
The other reason is that we-versusthem just wasn’t animating me the way it used to. While the corporate label still has some valence, the visceral antipathy has vanished, and the indie label has stretched to encompass millions of people. It is by now commonplace to observe that many of the traditional forms of social organization—the nationstate, the bowling league, the watercooler topic—are fragmenting rapidly. We’re more granular, more atomic. When the number of producers begins to approach the number of consumers, organizing yourself as a particular type of producer against another particular type of producer becomes pointless. Instead you define yourself not by who you’re not—not dependent—but by who you are. Each of us is, in fact, dependent on others; we are connected, collaborative. As a coach I find I’m now able to support individual people—writers, editors, entrepreneurs, scholars, creative professionals—in a quest to find their inner compass amid fragmenting categories, labels, and taxonomies of identity.
Had I been asked to write some words on independent publishing a decade ago, I would have written a manifesto. Instead I’ve described a journey, a story—part social, part personal. As the duality that defined previous iterations of independent publishers dissolves, I believe we will all—as free but connected individuals—need to find new organizing frames. Those of us who have identified as independent publishers might look not to the production supply chain for that framework, the means of producing books, but inside the books themselves, for the stories we want to tell—our own and those of others.