An “Accidental Profession”: Small Press Publishing in the Pacific Northwest

The Discourse and Value of Being an Independent Publisher

“…This situation was prompted initially by Random House's absorption of Alfred Knopf in the 1960s and then evidenced even in the last few years in mergers such as the 2014 HarperCollins acquisition of Harlequin and the Hachette acquisition of the largest independent publishing group: Perseus Books Group. 5 Evidence of the increased use of independent in book publishing can be found in the number of prominent publisher organizations that have incorporated independent into their titles in recent years. Although the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) has existed in earlier forms and names since 1983, it has only had the word independent in its official title since 2008.…”

‘A crowd at your back’: fantasy fandom and small press

“…There is no doubt that advances in digital-publishing technology have made increased small press activity possible (Hungerford, 2016: 11; Thompson, 2012: 155). The chief difference between small and large presses is characterised by Ramdarshan Bold (2016: 90) as a difference in ‘size, ambitions, and ethos’. Thompson (2012) acknowledges the diversity of small presses in this regard, showing that they range ‘from small operations run by one or two people working out of their own apartment or house and doing this in their spare time … to well-established businesses that have their own premises and employ several members of staff’ (p. 156).…”

“…Moreover, the Australian population is relatively low and concentrated in large urban centres with vast distances between them: there are nearly 4000 km between Sydney and Perth, for instance, with only a handful of small towns along the way. In terms of small press, the kind of geographically concentrated ‘creative hubs’ outside traditional publishing centres – described by Ramdarshan Bold’s (2016) examination of the Pacific Northwest (p. 85) and Childress’ (2015) study of the San Francisco Bay Area (p. 374) – do not exist in a meaningful way. What do exist, however, are creative hubs organised in connected communities across the country, and genre communities are a particularly active example.…”

“…Ramdarshan Bold (2016) writes that even though small presses ‘operate within the fringes of the industry’, they ensure through their operations that there is ‘constant regeneration and diversity’ in the publishing world (p. 85), because they provide a training and experimentation ground where writers can develop their craft, before ‘inevitably’ moving to large publishers (p. 92). We can see this movement exemplified in the case of Trudi Canavan, who started out writing for the small press fantasy journal Aurealis in the 1990s, before being published by HarperCollins’ Australian Voyager imprint and becoming a bestseller in multiple territories.…”

“…All of these forms allow different kinds of creative practice, even experimentation, bearing out Ramdarshan Bold’s (2016) assertion that small press is known for working in ‘distinct literary niches’ away from the mainstream (p. 92). Small presses have often been associated with the ‘avant-garde’ ‘for the alternative and nonconformist’ (Bold, 2016: 99). This notion of literature that experiments outside the mainstream does not map easily onto the usual view of genre fiction.…”