Inkitt

“Inkitt is the world’s first reader-powered publisher, providing a platform to discover hidden talents and turn them into globally successful authors. Inkitt provides a platform for all authors to write, and submit and realize their aspirations as authors. Whether that means becoming professionally published, or a part of a bigger writing and reading community.” TechCrunch says “The startup’s eponymous app lets people self-publish stories, and then, using AI and data science, it selects what it believes are the most compelling of these to tweak and subsequently distribute and sell on a second app, Galatea.”

Inkitt was founded it seems in 2014 in Berlin yet is referred to as a startup now it is headquartered in San Francisco. The company has apparently raised more than $117 million, so someone (several someones) believes they are on the right track. They aim to become the Disney of the 21st century. (We don’t learn of Disney’s plans for the next 75 years. Surely we can’t assume they’re done just because they didn’t bother to get the term of copyright extended to match Mickey Mouses’s advancing age.) Inkitt claims already to have 33 million users and dozens of bestsellers. You apparently write your book at Inkitt, then AI decides which recent additions to the site are going to be bestsellers and “publishes” them on their companion site, Galatea. Galatea informs us that “1 in 2 debut authors published on Galatea go on to become bestsellers” — that AI sure knows what’s what! Just what these bestsellers are we don’t learn, and nor do we get a definition of bestseller — it could after all be the book that sells 200 copies when all your other ones sell 150. Not that I can swear that I know one when I see one, but I have to say that none of the books shown at the site shouts “Bestseller!” at me.

Being the world’s first “reader-powered” publisher sounds good; but what does that mean? Readers I guess do have the power to read and maybe to like a book, and to mention this fact to other readers who may also like it too, though no doubt their most relevant power is the power to buy the thing in the first place. But I’m not sure how this differs from what the relationship between readers and publishers or authors has always been — maybe it’s all because it’s moderated through an app. (Never mind Amazon, Kindle, Goodreads, Project Gutenberg, Bookshop.com etc etc. Hype has needs.) Can it be that the presence of the initials AI has alone been enough to coax money from investors wallets into Inkitt’s? Is one man’s diligence another man’s knee-jerk enthusiasm?

Now of course hype is ten a penny, and no doubt worth even less, and just because some investor or other is willing to plunk down a pile of money does not mean that their due diligence has been done diligently.

At the end of the day this is probably really nothing that special. It’s just another attempt to shake up the nature of the publishing company of which we have recently seen a few. Of course the biggest shake-up poured over the weir twenty (?) years ago when we woke up to the possibility of self publishing. It’s kind of impressive that there are investors out there who think that the book business is still worth disrupting!

Authors Equity

Sounds like a nice idea; a group of senior publishing people have put together a company whose mission is to share the profits with their authors. They describe it as “fully author-centric model”. 

But is it only a method of conning authors into sharing the risk?

Publishing Perspectives, and everyone else, is telling us that Don Weisberg, Madeline McIntosh, and Nina von Moltke, three senior ex-Big Five executives, are setting up a new publishing company called Authors Equity, “a collaborative publishing company reshaping the relationship between author and publisher”. This is a great name for a company — it just sounds so fair and above-board! “Our profit-share model rewards authors who want to bet on themselves. Profit participation is also an option for key members of the book team, so we’re in a position to win together.” In return for funding the publishing of their book authors get to share the profits.

As Shelf Awareness tells it “Madeleine McIntosh, former CEO of Penguin Random House US, an independent director of Simon & Schuster, and president of the board of Poets & Writers, will serve as Author Equity’s CEO and publisher. Serving as president is von Moltke, former president, strategic development, at PRH US, and a board member and treasurer of the Center for Fiction, while Weisberg, former CEO of Macmillan Publishers, will be senior adviser. Other core team members include Robin Desser, previously editor-in-chief of Random House and editorial director at Knopf; Carly Gorga, former head of partnerships and brand marketing at PRH US; and Andrea Bachofen, formerly of Random House and Amazon.”

It’s not like this is inherently a bad idea, and it’s not like this has never been done before — the catch is just that good books which people want will sell well, while less good books which nobody wants will have difficulty finding an audience. Twas ever thus, and thus ’twill ever be. The real beauty of a royalty agreement is that no matter how badly the book does, the author will still get their 10% or whatever on every sale. To promise an author a 70% share* of the profits sounds really generous, but wait, wait, wait — there have to be some profits before there’s anything to have a share in. A depressingly large number of books will never get there, or if they do will just stumble over the finish line.

From the point of view of the bestselling author, royalties can be seen as a bit of a sacrifice. You keep on getting your 10%, 15% on every copy sold while the publisher is hiring Brinks trucks to carry the money to the bank. For the average author it’s a totally different deal — you get paid your royalty even though the publisher is finding it harder and harder to persuade any bookstores to order your clunker. The harsh reality is that over a couple of hundred years we’ve worked out a business model under which the bestselling author (and reflect that many a bestselling author was once a non-bestselling author) effectively subsidizes their less successful colleagues. The bestselling author could get more, but that’d mean that someone else has to get less. And don’t go casually assuming that the more is going to come out of the pocket of the publisher — the publisher is already doing their bit by “subsidizing” all these non-sellers.

Authors who care about this sort of financial misalignment already have a shiny golden road to success beckoning to them. Now of course not every author wants to get into the business of publishing for themselves, but if they do they’ve certainly surged past the perception of their subsidizing anyone else. We certainly can’t have any objection to the urge to experiment with publishing models. Authors Equity sounds rather like Sutherland House’s recent initiative, and both sound a lot like the hybrid publishing model. No harm in duplication of experiments — maybe this’ll all work brilliantly. Hope so.

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* Not that I know anything about the percentage of profit participation the company plans to offer Publishers Lunch suggests 60-70% — it sounds like it’ll vary depending on the author’s bargaining power anyway. You can’t afford to be too generous to your authors or, in crude terms, you’ll find it harder to persuade investors to jump for profits which have already been promised elsewhere. Publishers Weekly points out that most of the investors thus far are authors themselves.

False © claims

Apparently copyright takeover is becoming a bit of a problem in the music industry. The New York Times tells us about Bad Dog, a Washington, DC folk duo who wanted to compile a give-away CD of their songs for a party. They’d been sharing their songs on-line via SoundCloud for ages without any desire to commercialize them, but when they came to create a CD they discovered a problem. By chance the producer of their album posted one of their songs, “Preston”, to his studio’s Instagram account, and was puzzled as to why Instagram labelled the song as “Drunk the Wine” by Vinay Jonge. Further investigation of Bad Dog’s songs revealed that “Pop song” had become “With me tonight” by Kyro Schellen, “The Misfit” had become “Outlier” by Arend Grootveld, “Verona” had become “I told you” by Ferdinand Eising and so on. None of these supposed artists had any other songs credited to them, nor any identity on the web. The company about to press Bad Dog’s CD ran a copyright check and found that Bad Dog didn’t even own copyright in these songs any longer — songs which they themselves had written over the previous years. This had been taken by whoever uploaded the songs.

One of the duo’s members is a practicing lawyer involved in intellectual property rights, while the other is a retired law professor who specialized in internet copyright, but even they found sorting the problem out almost impossible. In the end they sort of succeeded because they kept sending out “take down” notices. Apple Music responded to one with a form letter, and although that letter did little else at least by good fortune it included the name of the company which had been uploading Bad Dog’s music — it was Warner Music! It turns out that Warner owns a subsidiary, Level, a music distributor catering to independent artists. For a $20 annual subscription you too can be a musician — all you have to do is click a box agreeing to Level’s terms of service (which include a promise not to upload any audio owned by anyone else), and then fame awaits. Obviously nobody checks up on this ownership claim. Apparently Bad Dog’s songs were played about 60,000 times on Spotify, and this would have yielded income of about $250 at Spotify’s rates. Not a fortune, but “This is a scalable scam, said Mr Batey of Beatdapp [a company involved in tracking this sort of fraud]. SoundCloud boasts more than 320 million songs, many of them the work of weekend noodlers. These people may never realize that their work has been grabbed and renamed and is syphoning money from the royalty pool.” As one of the members of Bad Dog says “I couldn’t get a deal with Warner to save my life. But they made money from my music, and that money was from straight-up infringement”.

Moving to the book business, Plagiarism Today brings us an article entitled 5 Warning Signs a Copyright Notice May be False. I assumed that when they say copyright notice they are referring to the copyright notice printed in the book — but they are not. They are talking about fake take down notices! The article shows however that this sort of false-ownership copyright fraud is not restricted to music — books are getting to play in this muddy puddle too. If you just write without any thought of money this may not be such a problem — after all if your material turns out to be available under a different nom de plume, so what? It’s almost a compliment. If however there’s the slightest chance that at some remote date in the future you might wish to publish this material, or even just be recognized for having created it, (maybe even quote from it!) it might behoove you to exercise some vigilance. Just what that would mean is unfortunately not altogether obvious. Clearly if you are self-publishing you are a bit further down this lane of risk than someone who’s just writing on-line. You’ve already demonstrated that your writing is worth something.

I guess a musician might be advised to set up a Level account and get their music out there under their own name. A writer, though? Presumably you’ve not become a self-publisher because you didn’t want the hassle. Is hassle eventually necessary?

Write a novel?

Do we really need any more of these? Well, why not? It’s not like anyone’s forcing you to read (or to publish) every one of them. So Reedsy offers to guide you through the process of writing your own novel under the tutelage of Tom Bromley who will accompany you to the completion of your first draft in 101 days. 

NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) was officially last month, so maybe lots of people are off to a decent recent start in their 101-day quest. 

At the other end of the telescope, here’s advice on how to write your first philosophy paper. The Splintered Mind provides a roadmap for the young philosopher. An important part of it is to pick your topic carefully, and to keep it narrow. “You’ll want your first publication to be on something so narrow that you are among the five top experts in the world on that topic.” No doubt much the same may be said in connection with other academic disciplines. Publish or perish, they say, so this advice may be more important than Reedsy’s course.

Co-publishing

Too much thinking about this kind of stuff can lead to brain fog. At first blush one might see Canadian publisher Sutherland House’s setting up of a co-publishing imprint as a wonderfully appropriate response to demands like Mark Williams’ call for “a re-think of the royalties and commission model” of traditional publishing. Mr Whyte’s stated motivation for setting up Sutherland House Experts is after all that “Few authors are reasonably compensated for their efforts, and fewer still are able to make a living from writing”. (I feel I’ve beaten that one about the head far too many times, most recently in last Thursday’s post Agent agony!)

Isn’t this “new” imprint just what we have learnt to call hybrid publishing? Well yes it is, as Mr Whyte himself admits. A tidy definition of hybrid came in July via Jane Friedman’s blog in this piece by Barbara Lynn Probst:

“Hybrid publishing combines elements from two different sources.

• It resembles self-publishing because the author carries the cost and financial risk; thus, it involves an investment of your own capital.

• It resembles traditional publishing because professionals, not you, carry out the tasks required to transform a Word document on your laptop into an object called a book that people can buy and read.

[They also “carry out the tasks required” to inventory, sell, ship and account for your book.]

It’s like hiring a contractor. You pay the contractor to oversee the design, construction, plumbing, electricity, and so on, because he has the contacts and expertise that you lack or don’t have the bandwidth to acquire. When it’s done, you own the house; the contractor produced it (for a fee), but he doesn’t own it.”

Pretty straightforward. Parenthetically: we can’t argue with Ms Probst when she says “here’s the truth: if it’s a good book, professionally produced, readers don’t care what imprint is on the spine.” However the further away you get from trade publishing the less true this becomes. (See How to publish? for a discussion of this phenomenon.) If, say, you know Oxford University Press gets the best philosophy books, you will want to take into consideration the imprint on the books you are looking at when weighing alternatives.

Mr Whyte also confesses that co-publishing is not new. Commission publishing provides some discussion of the history of author-financed book publishing. Co-publishing is not quite vanity publishing, but it comes close — actually it probably really is vanity publishing, but vanity publishing stripped of its pejorative associations that name carries! The author pays the cost of producing the books, and shares the proceeds with the publisher who moves the books into the marketplace, and hopefully out too. Such a deal will of course result in the author’s share of the pie being greater than it would be with a royalty agreement, but of course this generous reward will only come after the book sells. If the book fails to find a market, the hybrid publisher will be clean, they’ll have had their fees — it’s the person who financed the book who’s on the hook for any losses, in this case that’ll be the author. When advancing their arguments for hybrid publishing, publishers will emphasize the “royalty” or payment-per-copy-sold aspect of the deal. They will not dwell on the fact that with tiny sales only tiny income will be forthcoming, whereas the cost of publishing the book will already have been paid by the author.

Lots of academic presses have done lots of publishing of this kind for lots of years. Nowadays most of the funding of such projects tends to be institution or society based, but in the past there were many books published by many august presses at the cost of the author. Remuneration would be worked out in a variety of different ways.

But it’s all about risk sharing. If there’s a risk of your book’s not selling enough copies to cover your investment in its production, caveat emptor. Good ideas are not necessarily new ideas. Mr Whyte reports Sutherland House Experts is off to a good start. Long may they prosper!

See also International co-editions for an analogous cooperative publishing wheeze with a history. We’ve been at this for a long time — there are few dodges publishers have failed to think of.

Self reliance

Looking for a sci-fi mystery story anthology for class use, Kristine Kathyn Rusch tells us that she recently had “a shocking experience”. She couldn’t find a decent one.

“I went to various online booksellers to find the really good first anthology, only to discover that there were about 25 print copies available and affordable. (The hardcover was $92 at its cheapest.) There was no ebook edition. The editor had passed away before the pandemic, the publisher is long gone, and so . . . those 25 books are all that we could get our hands on.”

Twenty-five wasn’t enough. She found another possibility, but no copies were available:

“I held a copy of that anthology in my hands and thought: WMG could reprint it.* And then I thought about all the work—contacting the authors or their estates, figuring out how to pay everyone, dealing with an agent or two—and I let that idea slide away.”

After checking several possible anthologies, none of which is “in print”, she heaves a sigh and generously, draws an irrelevant nonsensical conclusion — “All of those things combined to create my shock. I had forgotten how awful traditional publishing was before ebooks. How books went out of print, never to be seen or found again. If the print run was 20,000 and people liked the book, they kept it. Finding a copy was nearly impossible.”

Now, if it had ever been the case that the raison d’être of traditional publishing had been to cater closely to the needs of Ms Rusch’s classwork, this would still be a false conclusion. Books come; books go. People wanted them then; people don’t want them now. You reprinted books people wanted. When there were not enough of them to cover your costs you’d declare the book out of print. Publishers did not declare books OP in order to annoy readers like Ms Rusch. They did it because they are not charities.

One of the glories of our current book publishing scene is the wide availability of so many books, from traditional publishers, indie publishers, web sites, institutions, and individuals acting as self-publishers — mass produced p-books, print-on-demand books, ebooks, audiobooks. A book published nowadays need never go out of print — but getting an old one into that condition costs more than anyone (even WMG apparently) can afford. Ms Rusch here discovers that wide availability is not however universal availability — her reaction is to blame the previous system for letting her down today.

It’s possibly true that in the olden days the traditional publishers active in the sci-fi genre (or the sci-fi mystery genre if such a beast existed back then) would no doubt by now have published a more recent anthology which Ms Rusch would probably have been delighted to use in her classes. However, it just so happens that the world of genre publishing has been co-opted by (or ceded to) the self-publishing industry — which takes us back to the second of her comments above — she just found it too much trouble to undertake “all the work—contacting the authors or their estates, figuring out how to pay everyone, dealing with an agent or two”. That’s what publishing’s all about. Have you considered that the reason certain books might no longer be available is that they no longer provide the funds needed to do “all the work”? For a self-publisher it can be a pastime. For a traditional publisher it’s a business.

The sci-fi fantasy genre certainly appears to be a burgeoning one. The Bookseller informs us that sales in Britain are on track to hit £50 million, maybe £60 million, this year. The article includes a table showing the top publishers — traditional publishers — who are benefiting from the surge. Maybe our assumptions about genre publishing all going to the self-publishing model are wrong. (Or maybe they just apply differently across the Atlantic.) Of course even the reduced Penguin Random House genre sales numbers shown in my recent post represent a pretty healthy quantity.

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* WMG is not Warner Media Group, it’s Ms Rusch’s own indie publishing imprint.

How to publish?

At The Scholarly Kitchen Jill O’Neill introduces her piece on the various avenues of publication open to the author these days with a review of Fashionable Goodness: Christianity in Jane Austen’s England by Brenda S. Cox. She likes the book and hopes it will be widely available to the academic community.

“Once I’d finished reading Fashionable Goodness, I went back to Amazon and purchased the printed paperback. Why? Because I have no idea how long my access to the digital file of a self-published title might last. I am skeptical when it comes to guarantees of licensed access through Amazon. Before anyone asks, I did check library availability in WorldCat. The system tells me that the two closest libraries to me with this title are one in Durham, NC and the other in Fredericksburg, VA.”

I think we can all agree that the self-publishing industry has been incredibly successful. All sorts of books which would previously never have seen the light of day are now available. It’s not that these are all books which no traditional publisher would have touched (though of course some are). It’s more that traditional publishing has some finite limits. Nobody can publish every book ever written, though if thousands and thousands of self-publishers do their own, thus can the task be accomplished. Apart from family memoirs and the local-interest The Year’s Activities of the Podunk Cycling Club sort of thing, much self publishing is genre fiction. Traditional publishers did always, and still do, publish books of genre fiction, but obviously the market’s appetite was larger than that industry could supply. It’s all fairly straight-forward and simple: the books are available on line; the fans buy them.

That side of the business works beautifully. However, academic communication relies on channels other than just straight book buying. There are reviews in scholarly journals and in magazines directed at librarians, and of course the specialist book suppliers who cater to the audience for such material. Even more important is the library market. Here again we run into manpower constraints: there just aren’t enough librarians for them to be able to take a careful look at non-traditional publishing’s offerings. The current library environment has grown up in response to the size and nature of the traditional publishing industry — it can do just so many books; and the librarians can assess just so many books. Traditional publishers deal with librarians though catalogs, mailings, face-to-face encounters at meetings, standing order plans — all well-established routines which the individual self-publisher doesn’t have access to. It’s possible for a subject specialist librarian to review seventy catalogs from seventy publishers each containing seventy different titles. It’s impossible for them to review seventy thousand catalogs from seventy thousand self-publishers each containing one title. The solution: librarians rarely engage with self-published books. I had a friend who was determined to get his ebook for kids into his local library. He was friends with the librarian and was eventually able to persuade his friend to accept the book as a gift.

A book like Fashionable Goodness should really have been published by a university press. The author seems to have been thorough and careful on the bibliographical side of things, and Ms O’Neill certainly regards it as a valuable publication. We don’t know whether Ms Cox submitted her manuscript to a publisher or not. The self-reliant author may well find the self-publishing route irresistible. But the risk of a book’s having been self-published is that it may end up hard to find, and ultimately disappear one day, while a university press book might leave a more unmissable trace. Scholarship yearns towards eternity.

Publishing scams

Draft2Digital offers a round up of popular publishing scams: part 1 is here, and part 2 here. (Link via Nate Hoffelder’s Monday Morning Coffee email.) Most of their advice regards the need to exercise caution in dealing with operations offering services for a fee. This in a way should go without saying, but in the old days authors had publishers as an interface between them and all the incompetents out there, so now along with all the other tasks relating to publishing these need to be vetted by them, and nobody else.

Part of the problem is, I think, that the inexperienced publisher will tend to regard as more difficult things that are pretty much everyday in the traditional business, and once you know what various jargon terms mean are actually not very hard at all. Choice of literary agents, design services, copyright registration — all these things can look complicated when viewed from the outside, but are really dead easy. Lack of familiarity can easily beguile the new author into a belief that these tasks are not only difficult, but require urgent attention, and the application of money. And of course the scam artists are out there to encourage you in this belief. Draft2Digital provide links to a few posts at Reedsy, who, although as a supplier they have skin in the game, are well enough established to be able to tell the truth. It’s obviously worthwhile spending a bit of time getting an independent opinion and shopping around. One good test for the beginning author to run is to ask themselves — if I was buying a book, is this item something I’d expect, or if it wasn’t there, would I care about its absence?

One scam not mentioned by Draft2Digital, no doubt because it’s just too unlikely to happen to a beginner author, is finding nonsense work uploaded under your name as author. Plagiarism Today tells us of people uploading AI-generated texts under the name of some other author, passing off the work as if it were by someone with a fan-base. They refer to this as reverse plagiarism which may be quite accurate but I suspect is a bit too subtle to catch on. Jane Friedman, the victim of such an abuse, writes about it at her blog.

The New Publishing Standard seems to find in Jane Friedman’s objections to having junk books passed off as being written by her, yet more evidence of publishers’ technological innocence! He deeply meaningfully assures us we should not blame the technology because the problem is really the bad actors who are using it. Now it’s true I’ve no idea what sources Mr Williams has been looking at but I really doubt whether anyone can be found who thinks that the cause of this problem is AI. We can all believe that it’s too easy to buy a gun without thinking that guns commit murder. Isn’t it possible to think that maybe some regulation needs to be applied to the product of AI which would enable us to recognize which products might be worthless, without mistaking this as blaming AI for anything?

This may ultimately of course all be a trivial non-problem: after all nonsense will be obvious as soon as you look at it. As Richard Hershberger points out in a recent comment “. . . the stakes are low. Between dirt cheap books, easy ‘returns,’ and Kindle Unlimited, the risk to the reader is more time than money. This is why I wonder about the future of KU. The easy returns limits the potential to monetize the sale of crap books, but the KU model can be gamed. Eventually the time spent sorting through these might make it an unattractive option for readers.” I do think his last sentence is the likeliest to turn out to be the way things are in general. If you have to keep sending stuff back for credit, I’d think you’d quickly become convinced that fishing in these waters was a waste of time.

So in a way, the area is self-regulating, though I do suspect that a warning label will eventually be required. But what would such a warning say? Surely using AI to do some of the grunt work in writing a book has got to be acceptable practice, as long as the author intervenes to edit that output. It would in a way be not that much different from having a graduate student look up references for you. It’s what happens thereafter that makes the difference: just slamming out an AI-generated text with the name of some well-known author at the top isn’t quite the same as allowing a bot to compile a base text which you then edit carefully. Writing isn’t a procedure that can be regulated. Maybe your ideal is the poet in the garret adding soot to his inkwell, and sharpening his goose quill, but you can’t maintain that Aeropagitica is more of a book than the latest book on censorship because the newer book was written with the help of a laptop and its built-in spelling checker. Tools exist to be used: some craftsmen (or -women) will be able to use them better than others. I can’t imagine it’ll take us too long to figure out who the master craftspeople are.

Over-production?

Christoph Bläsi, a professor of book studies at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, addressed the recent Readmagine conference. His address is brought to us by Publishing Perspectives:

If you don’t see a video here, please click on the title of this post in order to view it in your browser.

Perhaps a mite contentiously, Mr Bläsi claims AI book-making “might lead to overproduction — in our international markets that already are annually saturated with books”. Are there really markets which are saturated with books? Have we published so many books that the world can consume no more?

Books are not like stoves or washing machines — of which one might say that once you have one you don’t need another. They are more like lettuce — once you’ve finished this one you need to go out and get another. I doubt whether it’s possible to saturate the market with books — lettuces will rot, but books stay fresh for ever. Of course there are many more books out there today than there were fifteen or twenty years ago, but no reader suffers if this one or that one doesn’t sell like hot cakes (which will also tend to go stale). You personally suffer nothing from the huge racks of shelving in Amazon warehouses around the world. You’ld suffer no more if they were to contain twice as many titles. Nobody is harmed by there being more books than any one person can read — it has been like that for centuries and will always be like that. If you’ve not read this book, well here’s something new for you.* Books which are only available as ebooks obviously fit this pattern seamlessly, and so do printed books which are only available by print-on-demand. The rest, the things publishers tend to focus on most of the time, are pretty well managed, and you can count on publishers reducing their print runs if there’s any sign of market resistance.

In common with the lettuce, a book feels no pain if nobody reads it for a century or two. Unlike the lettuce it remains ready for consumption during that quiet time.

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* Sorry to appear to be on the verge of falling into that common error of assuming “publishing” = trade fiction publishing. Of course people need books for many purposes much more serious that entertainment. In number of titles non-fiction publishing, more or less egg-head as the case may be, must outnumber by far the fiction offerings. This non-fiction publishing scene is also a case study in support of my publishing-wants-to-be-small-scale contention as of course is the entirety of the self-publishing business.

Indie bump: but which indie?

The Guardian carries an article headlined “The indie publishing mavericks shaking up the UK books world“. It points out that many of the big book prizes this year have been captured by small, independent publishers. Does this mean big trade publishing is dead? No doubt not yet a while, though I do believe that the nature of book publishing does in the long term favor the small-scale operation over the big conglomerate — even when it does seem to work, there just isn’t enough money in books to satisfy the demands of big capital.

The headline does however carry a confusion. Indie publishers are what the self-publishing world calls those self-publishers who also publish books by writers other than themselves. These are often groups providing editorial, design, and production services to authors, occasionally referred to as hybrid publishers. While these organizations are not entirely functionally different from the publishers The Guardian is here talking about — fairly small traditional publishing houses which are not owned by any larger corporate group, (also definable, as Reedsy puts it, as “small presses, an industry term for publishers making less than $50 million annually” — did not know this) the self-publishing world is by and large so antagonistic to traditional publishing that some nomenclatural distinction surely needs to be made. My own suggestion is that “indie” be reserved for these self-publishing, hybrid extenders, while the likes of Fitzcaraldo be referred to as independent publishers — though of course publishers tout court would actually be quite sufficient. Still given our feelings about big publishing, there’s some virtue in pointing to their independent ownership.

Is there actually any real “publishing” difference between an independent publisher and a member house of a conglomerate? Richard Charkin has a go at this question at Publishing Perspectives. In theory the bigger houses, having more revenue might have greater clout with the booksellers: but there’s scant evidence of this, and Charkin suggests it may even be a disadvantage. Essentially the publishing process, selection, editing and copyediting, design, production and manufacturing is carried out by similar teams of people at a big publisher or a smaller one. A bigger house might have more sales reps pushing their books into bookstores, but of course they also have more titles to push, so that that may well not be any advantage. The “ideal” publishing house consists of one person, possibly with a good friend in support, but of course such leanness in staffing does rather tend to restrict your output! Each of the major publishing conglomerates might be looked at as an amalgamation of a number of (fluctuating) teams of half-a-dozen or so people who are able to bring a few books to market every year, at which point a large marketing, sales, distribution and accounting system handles all these precious objects as if they were just “product”.

I don’t believe there are any fundamentals at work in our industry demanding amalgamation into ever larger units. Indeed quite the contrary — publishing is essentially a cottage industry, but one in which the cottages have often been piled on top of one another in an attempt to mimic a sky-scraper.

P.S. — I do not regard the winning of prizes by independent publishers as any kind of omen regarding the future, or lack of future, of trade publishing. All it means is that this time around these publishers had most of the books deemed “good”. Next time around it’ll probably be a different group of publishers in the winners circle.