Indie Publishing

The Small Press: Indie Publishing

The “Small Press” has been around for hundreds of years and is actually older and closer to the original moveable type publishing concept than today’s larger, mass-market commercial magazines. Books and magazines are like living organisms; they need a certain environment to survive. They need an educated and literate populace with disposable income to buy them; they need printers and publishers with the technical means to produce them; and they need motivated authors willing to put in the time and energy to write them, often with little or no prospect of a monetary return.

In the eighteenth century authors such as Lord Byron often had fiction or poetry privately printed. The printer/ publisher could then sell one book at a time, for a meager profit. The author received little or no money, but could gain notoriety. If the writer became well-known and popular, as did Sir Walter Scott, it became possible to sell that writer’s books commercially. Scott and his printers/ publishers made enough money so that Scott could retire his family’s substantial debt. By the nineteenth century in America, conditions were right for the concept of regular magazines.

When Edgar Allan Poe was ready to begin his monumental work in creating and defining the short story, there were numerous magazines and gazettes and weeklies feeding the thirst of literate America. Although there were a lot of them, these magazines rose and fell and frequently failed to pay what they promised. In the twentieth century commercial publishing became healthy and stable, and magazines entered a golden age (for example, Colliers magazine during WWII, reached a circulation of over 2.5 million). Indie publishing mirrored this success on a smaller scale.

People with specialized interests — such as horror or science fiction or radical politics or literary experimentalism — could produce work through mimeograph machines, then copiers, and today through affordable and readily printing companies. As tastes changed and television took dollars and “eyeballs” away from the printed word, the circulation differences between the commercial press and small press began to disappear. Today, a great deal of publishing has migrated to the internet, so that a website edited and published by one person for the enjoyment of a dozen friends is not readily distinguishable from the largest commercial online magazine.