Death and Rebirth in the Land of Indies
some thoughts on SPD / Small Press Distribution closing
Dear Friends,
In the past couple of days it was announced that Small Press Distribution (SPD) would be closing down, effective immediately. As someone who has been a ham-and-egger in many different literary communities for over fifteen years, I’d like to offer some context for people not as familiar with what a distributor like SPD did.
There are many small presses (and micropresses) across the country—some that only put out one title per year. While I don’t necessarily want to suggest that books coming out of the “Big Five” publishers (Penguin/Random House, Hachette, Harper Collins, Macmillan, and Simon and Schuster) are not innovative, I think it’s fair to say that some of the most experimental, poetic, oddball, and formally adventurous books find their home at small presses. In the most general of terms, Big Five publishers exist to make profit. Small presses do not.
Yes, sometimes big publishers take huge risks, but I would assert that familiar patterns, tropes, and comps (comparable titles) are the books that get the best deals and most attention. I believe publishing has only become more conservative (as in taste, not politics) with each passing economic recession. This certainly is the case with genre fiction and the expectations that go inside of it. Many YA titles, for instance, have a first-person narrator, use the present tense, and have some sort of inciting incident occur within the first couple of chapters. This is not to say that a third-person past-tense young adult novel that’s more of a literary slow burn wouldn’t sell, but I reckon it would have a harder time finding an agent due to publisher expectations.
So where am I going with this? Well, it’s the small press that has been home to the outcasts and the underdogs—particularly the poets—who have received little attention from traditional publishers. These small presses may only have one or two people running them. The authors that publish with them rarely have agents, and seldom receive an advance (or royalties, TBH). Writers often submit directly to editors, either through literary prizes or open reading periods. While financial capitol is not always involved, I would be remiss not to acknowledge the cultural capitol of prizes and the prestige that comes with accolades. Just because someone starts out in indie publishing doesn’t mean they’re somehow morally superior to anyone else. There’s just as much clout chasing, fame seeking, and blood money in the small press as there is in other spaces. And, I want to just be clear that although a lot of my creative work has existed in these spaces, I would take that $750,000 advance from Random Penguin in an instant, thank you very much. I would like to pay off my medical debt, and visit doctors, and know that I can take my cats to the vet whenever I want.
That being said, when small presses are formed, the incentive to publish is almost always invested in the work itself, because forming a small press with the intention to turn profit would be the worst reason to launch one. Many small presses barely break even, if they break even at all. In connection to this, Big Five publishers have well-oiled distribution infrastructure built in. Without sounding too conspiratorial, the award-winners and future lit stars are often decided long before their books are printed. Books with marketing budgets (and marketing teams) get into more readers hands. They are distributed more seamlessly. Distribution is how books make it to independent bookshops, libraries, etc. For many small presses, they don’t inherently have connection to a distributor: so Small Press Distribution was that distributor for many. There are a few “big” small press outliers (think: Graywolf, Tin House, Coffee House…) that exist slightly closer to Macmillan than a zine published in a Bushwick basement, but for the other 99% of small publishers, there is no clearly defined path to getting their authors’ books into the world.
The small press world is small. Many of us who have published on small presses know each other. We don’t just experience cohesion because we’re many disparate writers having their books distributed under one umbrella, but we experience cohesion because we become part of a larger community. We’ve been on reading series rosters together. We’ve hung out face-to-face because many of us become friends outside of the internet. We meet up at AWP each year. Perhaps I’m being a little romantic, but I don’t think it’s entirely unfair to say that on a conceptual level, the loss of SPD feels like another loss of an independent community.
Before I go on though, I want to be clear that the if I am to mourn anything, it is mourning the idea of a space where innovative works can be purchased on one website. Let’s not underestimate convenience or the power of a collective. For reasons that should not be surprising, many small presses have a punk ethos and would not want to list their books on Amazon. SPD was the way to make sales. If I (a buyer of small press books) want to buy, say, five poetry books that come out of five different small presses… as a reader I don’t want to go to five different websites and fill out five different e-commerce forms and pay for shipping-and-handling five times. A website like SPD allowed me to fill up my cart with a bunch of independent books that were on my radar in one sitting.
In practice, though, SPD was beyond a perfect work environment; in fact, it was reported to be downright abusive at times. Someone under the moniker of Damaged Book Worker has written extensively about their experiences at SPD in articles such as “I was terrorized out of my job by Small Press Distribution” in December 2020. Another (different) writer named J. Worthen penned “Toxic: A Farewell to SPD & Hostile Workplaces” a couple of months later. As I wrote in a Facebook post in February 2021, there have been multiple accounts of SPD as a “toxic, abusive work environment that has been hostile to blue-collar workers, trans people, and people of color.” I questioned the complicity of the literary communities that use SPD. I question myself as someone whose poetry book was almost due out with a press that used SPD. I emailed the essays to my editor, despite knowing my press didn’t have long for this world (more on that in a minute). As someone who has been in an abusive non-profit work environment, I wanted to know what publishers were going to do. This is why I asked online. Perhaps it was just the algorithm that rendered my question invisible, but my post received no engagement beyond a few paltry likes. No one commented about how publishers should divest from SPD—or how the workers could receive justice. As far as I know, the workers never truly did receive the justice they deserved.
I know a lot of small presses have now moved from SPD to Asterism Books. I couldn’t tell you the timeline though and how many of these publishers did so after the accounts of the hostile work environment detailed by two different workers in 2020 and 2021. Or if they did so because they sensed SPD was on its way out. While this work environment certainly signaled a beginning of an end, I’m not entirely sure publishers, authors, and consumers divesting from SPD is what resulted in its closing down. If anything, I would wager it was impacted by what a lot of other independent literary projects have faced: loss in grants and funding. It all comes back to money in the end.
Now I want to say… despite anti-capitalist impulses existing in a lot of the small press communities I’ve been in, I don’t want to suggest the indie literary/small press space as holistically a type of commons. I would suggest many of the presses that were distributed by SPD were governed by art-making and built their own alt-institutions without prioritizing economic capitol. Through the lens of neoliberalism, the concentration of wealth behind a few major corporations (i.e.: Big Five publishers) and the continuous cutting of arts and cultural funding is leading to the loss of cultural and intellectual spaces. As we lose niche publishing spaces, we experience a loss of diversity and plurality in the cultural commons, as fewer voices and perspectives are able to find expression in the public sphere without having to learn the very specific rituals of courting agents, editors, and perhaps even shoving a circular-shaped book into the square hole of commercial expectations.
Beyond presses, literary magazines have also historically existed as labors-of-love, often tied with the same MFA programs and students who desire to publish on their favorite indie authors’ small presses. And, like small presses, lit mags have lost their homes to more commercial interests. In 2019, Tin House decided to close its titular literary magazine, instead focusing on (the presumably more profitable) small press books and workshops/seminars they put on. If some of you out there never read Tin House, I would argue it had its coolness factor because it was one of those rare, successful independent magazines that wasn’t tied to a University or MFA program. It was a beautiful, well-designed print magazine that both published some weirdos (notably, writers that blurred lines between lit fic and genre fic), but it was also read by agents looking for their next client. It seemed to simultaneously exist on some independent cutting edge, while also giving space to some of the darlings who eventually do find commercial success.
This closure was before the Pandemic began though, and things got more dire during the months of furloughs and budget cuts. The Believer, another perennially hip favorite, lost its home at the University of Las Vegas in 2021 (it had moved there just four years before in 2017). UNLV then re-sold the magazine to a digital dildo emporium. No, really. If it were not for the protests of readers online at UNLV’s bizarre and careless decision-making, the magazine would have probably not been sold yet again to its origin publisher: McSweeney’s.
There was a similar scenario when beloved genre-expansive magazine Conjunctions was to be sold away by Bard. Most likely, this decision was made by university admins who had no idea of its cultural impact, let alone ever picked up an issue. After some online outrage, Bard reversed its decision, saying that “[h]aving heard the immediate, widespread, and heartfelt reaction from readers, writers, and editors alike, the College is revisiting its decision with the intention of continuing its support for the journal.”
Unfortunately, there was barely a whisper when New Rivers Press lost its funding and home at the Minnesota State University Moorhead in the past couple of years. New Rivers Press was founded in 1968, and published hundreds of books—including my own debut poetry collection. Mask for Mask came out in April of 2021. It was a weird moment, because I had learned at relatively the same time frame that 1) my book would distributed on a distributor that had many anti-worker allegations against it and that 2) my publisher was losing its funding and would be effectively shutting down, including my editor losing their job. For the record, my editor also taught a publishing class at the university level where undergraduate students got to learn about publishing and work on books like mine. We also had one of these called Slash Pine Press at my alma mater (University of Alabama) that—surprise!—also lost funding and was shut down during the Pandemic.
And then there’s that whole thing about Elizabeth Koch, the daughter of one of the Koch brothers (yes, those Koch brothers) getting bored with funding Catapult’s literary magazines and online courses, and pulling out of rich-person hobby to focus on some bizarro vanity project.
I digress though. What I want to say is that while I was certain my publisher was losing its home and essentially closing, it was unclear entirely when New Rivers Press would close. After an unexpected academic-year renewal, my editor and the press stayed at MSUM until April 2023. At some point, the domain name for the press stopped working (although from a brief WHOIS search it seems MSUM still owns it). My editor was fired and their email address was deactivated. So, effectively, I have been pressless for a year, despite having been aware of the chopping block for awhile. I can’t fully tell you what this means. I was given an email address for a provost and a dean at MSUM if I had any lingering questions—and oddly—I didn’t. At least not until this week (as of this time, I have not heard back).
In the back of my head, I knew that copies of my book were still at SPD. I didn’t really understand what that meant, since there was no publisher to send the books back to if they didn’t sell, and no one looking over things like royalties (lol). I was mostly just comfortable with the thought that my books could still be purchased somewhere, even if it was SPD. When I learned that my book was now losing its home at SPD’s warehouse this past week, I became more proactive—probably out of a genuine curiosity of the print copies’ fates.
A couple of friends have checked in with me about how I’m feeling, now that I’m a member of the club of Writers with Unalive Books. I appreciate that. Despite not really having a publisher for nearly a year now, it didn’t feel that strange until this week, because in terms of my book already effectively being permanently out-of-print, it’s now no longer possible to purchase a copy (beyond the physical bookstores that still have a few on their shelves—gettem while they’re hot!).
I’m going to be completely honest here: I’m not as sorrowful as you think I might be. A book is always a crossing of the Rubicon. Once it’s out there, it’s out there. You can’t unpublish it. I went into publishing my debut book of poetry with low expectations for a multitude of reasons. For one, it was poetry, and poetry doesn’t sell. In addition, it was an “experimental” book of poetry, which further ghettoizes it. On top of that, I had just seen my first book (a story collection) into the world a month into the Pandemic. I was exhausted. At the time, I said I was happy with my book just being an archival object of what I was working on during the 2010s.
At the same time though, that’s a decade of my life, and so much energy went into that collection. You want your work to find the readers who ‘need it’ in the way that you needed to write it. I knew between the Pandemic and the type of writing I was doing that it wasn’t going to get much mileage, but you hope that someone will find value in the work you’re doing and not just think you’re a willfully illegible experimentalist. Before it found its home at New Rivers Press, Mask for Mask’s manuscript was rejected. A lot. At least over 50 times, if not 60. 70? I had already internalized failure and rejection as part of the book’s soul, so on some level the book losing its publisher and distributor feels about right. It’s about as close to uncrossing the Rubicon as you can get.
That being said: the last time I checked SPD’s website there were around 60 copies of the book still in existence. It’s possible more exist somewhere at MSUM. I really should know more about this. Yesterday I jumped on an emergency Zoom call related to SPD’s closing with about 250 people. I knew, in the back of my mind, there were multiple people like myself out there who lost their publisher and now was on the verge of losing the last remaining physical copies of their books too. If they’re going to go into the dumpster, I would at least like the opportunity to interpose and claim them as my own. I fought for years to publish these poems. Even with my ambivalence, there is still a fight in me.
By the way, if you’re wondering where SPD’s stock is going, it’s either being shipped to Ingram Content Group or Publishers Storage and Shipping (PSSC). The former, as far as I know, is the largest and wealthiest book distributor in the US. Notice any patterns?
In any case, I have a few leads I will be pursing this upcoming week to try to get those print copies back to me. Overall, I’m more somber about another literary space that was familiar to me vanishing. The Google Reader blog-o-sphere I once knew (HTMLGIANT, Montevidayo, Weird Sister, Entropy…) is gone. Facebook is past its prime, and while I have no doubt that Twitter is still a home to many “important” literary discussions, I’m never going back. I almost missed out on the news about SPD completely until someone texted me letting me know it was donezo. Don’t get me wrong. Even though I’m not as ‘plugged in’ as I once was, I’m happy on my little academic island just trying to finish my PhD without keeping up with the discourse du jour. It’s better for my blood pressure this way. Still, I am sad that one new thing that existed in the literary world I once knew is now gone.
As a final talking point, I don’t want to presume that just because one familiar literary landscape is vanishing that no new ones have sprung up. As I said, I’m more unplugged than ever. I know there’s an entire world of ebooks and digital publishing and print-on-demeand and self-publishing and BookTok—and although I associate much of those spaces with Amazon and Big Five publishers, perhaps there are things that the small press world must learn from them to adapt. There’s certainly no shortage of new twenty-somethings in this world with the passion to create lit mags and start small presses.
At the end of the day, I know there will always be new writers and editors and publishers to reinvent this landscape, to create new spaces. Especially writers who have been historically locked out of various literary and publishing spaces, which is exciting indeed.
Still, I’m anxious about the ever-widening sea between corporate publishing and the type of books that are screenprinted and letter-pressed as print objects of love. I’m agitated by small ‘indie’ fish being swallowed by bigger corporate fish who love the brand, but not the ethos. I’m worried about online literary spaces disappearing—or the ones that still exist, like Lit Hub—being propped up as a not-so-secret publicity pipeline for Big Five authors. I’m exhausted that one of the main vehicles propping up indie publishing is money from “philanthropists.” I’m tired that so many of us who just want to teach or write and not live hand-to-mouth have to make these choices. And I’m skeptical that just because some other folks are now filling the space that SPD is leaving behind that the workers who find themselves in those spaces will be treated equitably.
I also want to add that just because I’m skeptical of Big Five publishers at times, doesn’t mean I don’t believe there’s not incredible people working their asses off who would love to publish the same types of books that I wish had more of a spotlight on them. Traditional publishing is full of underpaid, overworked employees who deserve their cut too (the gossip in xoxopublishinggg should make that quite clear).
At the end of the day, I want the misfits to have a space of their own. I want “indie” to be more than just a meaningless buzzword for corporate marketing. I want the working class to be protected from toxic and hostile work environments. I want literary magazines and chapbooks and poetry collections to exist not because of “benefactors” but because readers are buying the books and investing in the work in a way that sustains the press. I want communities to form without obsessing over capitol. I want the small press to be not only sustainable, but thriving.
As a final note, CLMP (the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses) has been working overtime to assist many of the small presses that belong under its own umbrella. They’ve made a list of small presses previously distributed by SPD, which you can find here. Perhaps it’s a good time as any to take a chance on a book by an author you might not find anywhere else.
Until next time,
JD
PS: If you’re an author like me who had a small press shut down in the last few years while copies of your books were distributed by and still existed on SPD before the shutdown, please feel free to reach out, and I can try to point you in the right direction.