The challenges of independent publishing (1)
In this month’s Trade Publishing Update, the Independent Publishers Guild’s Will Atkinson expressed his surprise about how many new publishers there are around, with many becoming established over the past five years. Two of these newcomers (Swift Press and Renard Press) even recently succeeded in winning in the Independent Publishers Awards. An impressive, and inspiring, achievement for all of us who are attempting to grow a new publishing enterprise in these challenging times.
It has become quite commonplace to hear talk of two seemingly contradictory tendencies in the book-publishing world (leaving to one side for now that bewildering proliferation of books brought by the ease of access to self-publishing platforms). on the one hand, the macro-domination by the ‘big five’ (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster), as they continue to swallow up the tastiest morsels found swimming around them. This appears to be producing something of a vacuum, which is giving an opportunity to small and even micro publishers to proliferate. Too tiny to be even perceived by the increasingly bloated leviathans that have claimed their dominion over the publishing seas, we can survive by filling the many gaps left by those giants, who long since lost a love of books and the creative process as their primary motivation, in favour of those corporate staples of profit margins and squeezing out value. Regardless of the consequences.
Amaurea is very definitely still at the tiniest extreme of the publishing ecosystem. Even most ‘small’ publishers look huge in comparison to our modest dimensions. And it is a challenge. Like the small fish venturing out from the hidden-away cave in which it hatched, into the confusing world of the coral reef, filled with its dazzling variety, we are having to learn as we go along, not just how to survive, but how to grow in the midst of such competition. For us, the deep ocean waters beyond the reef, where the five leviathans patrol, is still little more than a distant rumour.
What are the challenges that we have faced over the three and a half years that Amaurea has been in existence? Unlike many small publishing companies, we weren’t founded by people coming from within the existing publishing industry. We came from outside, our experience in academic research and editing, art curation, film studies, and above all a love of books. Thanks to the ease of access to self-publishing platforms (Ingramspark and AmazonKDP), it was possible for us to produce our first publications with really not much more up-front capital than the investment of our own time, skills and experience. They were small beginnings. Barely perceptible, for all that we continue to feel proud of those first forays into publishing.
But we quickly saw the limitation of this. It doesn’t matter how good a book is – how well written, how well edited, how well designed – if nobody knows about it. And our sales were showing this. Or rather, or almost total lack of them. We could see that much more needed to be done, for potential readers to find out about, and be persuaded to buy, our books. But lacking those necessary marketing skills (and with little time, and no money, to spare so that we could acquire them), we were caught in a dilemma. Our books weren’t selling, so we had no revenue. With no income, we were unable to obtain the promotion needed to obtain sales. Catch 22.
This was the first barrier we had to find a way past – and to do so without access to the financial investment that might have enabled us to simply buy the necessary infrastructure and capacity. Nevertheless, we kept working, trusting that so long as we continued putting together books that were worthwhile, remaining steadfast to our commitment to work in collaborative partnership with our authors, an opening would in the end present itself.
That opening did come last year. You might call it a lucky break, but I think that we make our own luck. And in this case, it was in great part thanks to the hard work we had already done, and the good example that we had established, that this opportunity, when it came knocking, was one we felt able to grasp.
It was a game changer for Amaurea. A chance to venture out amongst the other colourful denizens of independent publishing’s coral reef – daunting though that might be for a fish as small as we are. Like any advance, it has brought new challenges, and presented us with a steep learning curve. But that is something I will explore further in a future post.
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