The New Normal: How We Gave Up the Small Press

In part three of this essay, I will try to round up some of the missing links in my argument about contemporary challenges to small press by looking at the commerce and politics of distribution, trends in government arts funding, and the institutional cooptation of small press practices, with particular focus on AWP's impact. Again, my views on all these matters, are mine alone (though I hope to find solidarity among my colleagues and readers), and any mistakes in the numbers presented are due to my oversight.

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Small Press on the Market

Writing for The Rumpus in January 2017 on the topic of Trump's threat of cutting the NEA budget, Brent Cunningham, Small Press Distribution's Operations Director (Executive Director as of 2020), emphasized the importance of NEA funding to the nonprofit distributor: "If we didn’t have contributed support, we would end up assessing everything through the short-term lens of sales."

Small Press Distribution (SPD), was founded in 1968 but didn’t really get going until the mid 1970s. We now act as an umbrella for more than 400 small literary publishers, greatly expanding the reach of those presses and their authors by providing subsidized warehousing, order fulfillment, marketing, and a great deal of professional advice about book publishing. [...] Starting in the 1970s, we received an unbroken stream of National Endowment for the Arts funding that took us from a tiny band of a few dozen scrappy publishers to an organization employing a staff of twelve and looking to sell over two million dollars worth of books this year.

NEA's 1981 grant of $30,000 to SPD (about $85,000 in today's money) accounted for 37% of SPD's annual budget, whereas, in recent years, NEA grants account for about 4% ($40,000 in 2016, $65,000 in 2019). Looking at these changes, Cunningham suggested that "even from a purely market-based perspective, it's been a pretty great investment." It's true that the NEA helped develop SPD into a crucial a lifeline to small presses; the government agency had taken a leap of faith by funding the tiny cooperative with annual grants as large as a third of its operating budget. It was a smart move and, like the block funding to CCLM from the late 1960s to the early '80s (see my previous post), is proof that the NEA had been consciously addressing the needs of small press, which it saw as culturally valuable. At the same time, Cunningham's positive spin of the fact that the NEA was supporting the distribution of small press at higher levels in the past re-conceptualizes a government grant as an investment—an influx that will yield increases in the commercial viability of the funded organization—and marks an important shift in the thinking around support of the literary arts.

In 2017, Jeffrey Lependorf was the Executive Director of both CLMP and SPD. Echoing Cunningham's assessment of SPD's situation, Lependorf told Publishers Weekly that "without crucial NEA support, we could still find a way to operate ... but we would be forced to take on fewer new presses without a proven track record of sales. We would be forced to make more of our decisions based on marketplace potential alone, and this would be critically damaging to literature in the long term." The implication is that, were the NEA to go bust or turn away, those market concerns would trickle down, affecting the 400+ publishers SPD represents. Cunningham suggests that a "market-driven SPD" is "worth thinking about," and imagines this scenario's effects on small presses distributed by SPD:

While we might indeed survive thinking more like a commercial distributor, it would also mean that many of the books we currently choose to distribute we would have to say no to. Just as the NEA 'seeded' SPD's existence, SPD currently makes long-term investment in books that might not make very much money right away but that we think are worth making available. Whether we think certain books have the potential to become classroom material, or we simply think they are important culturally and hope that others will catch up with that opinion, if we didn't have contributed support we would end up assessing everything through the short-term lens of sales. The truth is, SPD exists specifically because the staffers here feel that literary quality cannot be judged or derived just from sales figures. It is very unclear what we would become if this core value were removed from our organization, and this, finally, is what is at stake.

The question of the connection between literary quality and sales figures is of primary import to the current state of literary funding. The correlation is in part an effect of the conflation of literature and "books," seen as commodities by the tax system and by the culture at large, a connection that has made "nonprofit publishing" suspect to many potential donors as an oxymoronic term. To boot, market measures of success have become normalized by the proponents of "big data" analysis that hold sway over state bureaucracies as well as in the marketing departments of corporate concerns. The "short-term lens of sales," an inheritance for which we can thank the corporate conglomerate publishers, is just one of the roadblocks set up by granting agencies to cultural and intellectual diversity. For "big data," everything is quantifiable, and culture is numbers. The perspectival shift Cunningham alludes to is not just a hypothetical, it is the motor of a machine that continues to disenfranchise and control autonomous cultural producers.

The Slippery Slope of the Playing Field: Literary Funding Today

In 2019, in addition to 35 Creative Writing Fellowships for individuals totaling $875,000, the NEA awarded $2,455,000 in grants to literary organizations, about $500 less than its giving in the field of "Folk & Traditional Arts." Of the 104 grants to literary organizations, 60 went to a wide variety of literary presenters, reading venues, festivals and book fairs, literacy programs, identity-based advocacy organizations, radio programs, libraries, literary programs within museums, youth and children's programs, prison writing programs, and service-to-the-field organizations—including SPD, CLMP, and AWP. Twenty-four grants went to magazines, while 20 grants went to book publishers. (Since the NEA does not make these distinctions in posting reports on their website, for the purpose of these calculations I have done my best to distinguish between book publishers and publishers primarily focused on magazine publication who may also publish some books.)

The top five grantees in the publisher category were as follows: Archipelago, Copper Canyon, and Graywolf (at $70,000 each), Milkweed (at $60,000), and Coffee House Press ($55,000). A total of $325,000—13% of the NEA's budget for literary organizations, and nearly half (48%) of grants given to all literary presses—went to five publishers who have several commercially successful authors and titles, substantial corporate and foundation support, and a paid editorial staff; some of them publish fiction, which has more potential for profit than poetry. It is noteworthy that all five work through commercial distributors rather than the nonprofit SPD (more on that later). Considering these factors, these nonprofits have more in common with independent publishing than with the traditional definitions of small press. At the end of my previous post, I touched upon the consolidation of funding to more professionalized publishers with a higher potential for market-success. Given the more granular exploration of public funding charted here, it's easy to see how a comparison of literary awards for 2019 publications against the list of the highest-yielding 2019 NEA recipients would map fairly neatly.

Of the 44 book and magazine publishers awarded NEA grants in 2019, by my count only six of them (13%) are editor-run, i.e. those that rely heavily, if not exclusively, on volunteer editorial labor and are not affiliated with a college or university: Red Hen (awarded $20,000), Kaya ($15,000), Litmus ($10,000), UDP ($10,000), MAKE Magazine ($10,000), and Noemi ($10,000). Only one of these six (MAKE) is exclusively a periodical. Four of them received the minimum grant of $10,000. Together, these six publishers received a total of $75,000 which is roughly 1/32nd, or 3%, of the NEA's two-and-a-half-million-dollar literary pie (not including individual fellowships). In short, of the $365,000 awarded specifically to "literary" book publishers, $65,000 went to five identifiably editor-run small presses, a number that is difficult to see as anything but a downer when compared with government support of small presses in the 1970s, whether through CCLM or other agencies, as discussed in my previous post.

Can we talk about greater diversity in publishing if the resources available to writers for publication of their work are more limited than ever before? There may be more visible writers of color in this decade than in the 1990s, or 2000s (though that is arguable), but this does not mean that more writers will find publishers, nor that more writers will be free to take the aesthetic and political risks which small presses have traditionally supported. Without a reliably funded small press field of diverse publishers, those organizations chartered and funded to help writers from communities traditionally "under-represented" in commercial-publishing have been pressured to professionalize and, in turn, to aid in the professionalization of their constituents so that they can garner the attention of the high-end nonprofits, university, or the commercial (independent or conglomerate) publishers.

Most readers cannot imagine the amount of work it takes for a publisher to get a government grant, and when you hear about it, the minimum award hardly seems worth it. It's not a wonder that the majority of small presses fueled by donated labor don't pass the test of required tenacity, or simply give up on seeing the requirements and applications. One would be hard pressed to imagine some of those magazine editors that received NEA moneys through CCLM in the late 1960s and 1970s—like Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop of Burning Deck or Bernadette Mayer and Vito Acconci of 0 to 9—answering the ever-expanding list of questions asked by federal, state, and city arts funders in our times. "How will your project support US military veterans?" and other questions regarding the "public component" of their programs are a regular cause of eye-rolls among small publishers, not because they don't care about the variety of readers they might reach, but because the nature of their field and lack of staff deny them the ability to track and report data on specific communities of readers.

It's even "more impossible" to picture poet-publishers of the past filing organizational and financial reports for pre-qualification on the more recently launched web-based vetting sites like Grants Gateway or the Cultural Data Project. Lee Norton, who has been managing the grant application process for UDP for the last several years, explains that the CDP "asks us to replicate the work of a [IRS Form] 990—a full year's accounting, but with further distinctions, so it's not a straightforward cut-and-paste—in order to generate a 'Funder Report' that we submit with the DCA [New York City Department of Cultural Affairs] app every year." The CDP allows grantors and bureaucrats to quantify, visualize, and compare "cultural work." The preponderance of such number-gathering systems suggests that the ideas of "big data" and "Business Intelligence" is winning the hearts and minds of arts funders.  The fact that the additional work of providing the necessary data takes its toll on over-extended publishers whose good standing as a nonprofit has already been verified through IRS forms is of little concern to the granting agencies because the opportunity for government functionaries (and the arts nonprofits themselves) to compare organizations through number-based visualizations is seen as having unquestionable value. Furthermore, the new reporting systems are contracted out by federal and state governments to corner-cutting firms—their forms are difficult to navigate and their help-desks know close to nothing about the arts—creating even more arcane hurdles to small presses attempting to "pre-qualify" for government grants.

The growing focus of arts granting on specific community impact is in itself a questionably productive strategy, one that still needs to be addressed through sociological analysis. If the small press fulfills the expectation of finding and publishing "excellent" literature, its readership could be as diverse as any. One does not ask if a gardening book, a politician's autobiography, an international espionage thriller, or even a literary novel from Random House impacts veterans in particular, nor does anyone measure the success of such books in these terms. In pressuring nonprofit publishers to address their programming to specific communities, governments "contract out" the burden of responsibility to those that may be ill-equipped for a job they aren't being paid to do.

The red tape and meager rewards offered by the granting organizations that previously supported a wide range of literary publishers have—by their acquiescence to calls for "hard data" and accountability from the reactionary "public" and government offices who hold the purse strings—backed editor-run presses into the corners of their spare-room offices, forcing them to put up a professional front to be considered for funding. Grant applications that ask "How many individuals did your organization serve in the prior fiscal year?" are meant to satisfy clerks, conservative watchdogs, and "liberal" politicians convinced by quantification. But how can a small press editor/publisher possibly gauge the impact of their productions even if they have the sales figures, knowing the way that essays, fictions, and especially poems circulate (whether through library lending, xeroxed classroom handouts, social media, or house readings). A small press editor/publisher applying for government or foundation funding has now to know more about accounting, Quickbooks, taxes, and the practical realities of the book trade than most of the grant's administrators or panelists. Moreover, they have to learn to write what granting institutions expect—a narrative of "current capacity and assessment of future growth," to take a phrase from a 2019 Advancement Grant from NYSCA (New York Council on the Arts) and LitTAP (New York State Literary Technical Assistance Program). Under this particular grant, to apply for up to $2,500, let's say to purchase a computer, the small press must annually spend between $80,000 to $149,000. The application is 13 pages long and requires detailed budgets for two prior completed fiscal years.

In all the grant applications I have seen in almost 20 years, not one focusses more than 10% of its questions on the quality of the artwork or the aesthetic (not to mention political) concerns of the aspiring organization. In a 2017 NYSCA application for general operating support, apart from eligibility checklists and budgets to fill out, there were 13 required "questions," phrased as imperatives with no question marks, and only one of which suggested that the applicant "[a]rticulate the organization's artistic and/or cultural vision." The other "questions" came with headings such as "Program Overview," "Organizational Development," "Development & Outreach," "Facilities," "Online Resources," "Community Context," and so forth.

Additionally, the applying entity is often tasked to indicate its own self-evaluative procedures, in line with the institutional ideology of quantificational measurement ("articulate how the organization evaluates its programs, services, and/or other organizational initiatives") and even measure itself against other "organizations in the area that provide similar arts and cultural activities, and tell us how their activities support, enhance or differ from those of [your] organization." The applicant must also be thinking quite a bit ahead to "describe programs and/or services for the coming year and how they will help the organization to realize its artistic and cultural vision [and] discuss any new programs and/or initiatives that are planned for the next two years, the goals in undertaking these activities, and the expected outcomes." (The reader may have noticed that these questions are non-specific to book publishing, or whatever the artistic field of the applicant. In most such applications, publishers are repeatedly flummoxed by fill-in-the-blanks for "attendance" and other measures of success that are non-sequiturs in their industry.) Of course, the kind of small press editor I described in my first post, who is invested in expediting poetry's "news"—the speed that Charles Olson marveled at when his work was printed straightaway in The Floating Bear—may only have planned ahead as far as announcing submissions to seek new work for the following year.

Then there are the relatively harmless tasks of describing "the organization's marketing strategies" and "the facilities used for programming and administration," but one innocuously phrased proposal—to "describe the audiences and communities served"—might put a small press publisher in a tailspin of deflection or exaggeration. What is it that they want to know? How minor and insignificant and even perhaps "elite" is the reach of your poetry list in comparison to Norton or Penguin anthologies or single-author collections from FSG? Perhaps this is all well and good for a professional arts presenter, Lincoln Center for example, or MoMA (which, in a recent query for rights to reprint an excerpt of one of our books, took pains to remind us of their nonprofit status)—these orgs have paid staff time to devote to such analysis. But for the small press that is editor-run, there is usually no such thing as staff time, and if there is, there are books to pack and ship, and so on. Barely able to keep pace with the practical demands of publishing, how does a small press editor/publisher "outline the approach to institutional and succession planning, highlighting the roles of staff and board," especially when their boards are typically made up of mentors or friends that give their names as a favor but would rather not meet annually, much less quarterly?

For some of the organizations awarded NEA grants, the cumulative effect of federal funding is negligible—Graywolf's 2019 NEA grant made up less than 2% of their annual budget of 4 million dollars. If such publishers could perform their functions while foregoing this support, the chances for smaller publishers to stay afloat would more than double. In other words, we can turn the question of "impact"—to use the parlance of grant applications—toward the uses of available tax-payer money in the literary field. With the interests of small press in mind, the literary community could consider a petition to the NEA and other cultural funders for even allocation across a larger number of presses.  Of course, equal funding tactics would not work for literary organizations without products to sell (such as literacy programs, reading venues, advocacy groups, etc.), but in the sector of nonprofit publishing unequal distribution of funding does lead to the creation of advantages in the marketplace—the ability to hire publicists, pay advances, or buy ads directly affects the chances of their books to make money in a competitive marketplace.

For the sake of this thought experiment, let's say the $670,000 of 2019 NEA funding to publishers were distributed equally: each of the 20 publishers deemed supportable by the NEA's independent panel of application reviewers would receive $33,000. If that list were expanded to 50 presses, they would each get $13,400. Now, if the NEA considers a disbursement of $10,000 to be adequate support for 10 poetry books from UDP, why shouldn't $13,400 be adequate for all 50 of our theoretical publishers to put out 10 comparable titles. Were a more even-handed granting system put in place, the US market would theoretically see an influx of 500 books of poetry (or other non-commercial literature) funded ("in part," as it usually goes), by the NEA's tax-derived coffers, thus creating a more diverse, equal-opportunity field while at the same time showing the breadth and depth of arts-granting impact.

The fact that the above thought experiment will most certainly remain in the realm of the hypothetical only serves to underscore the "inevitable" compromises that have led to the disempowerment of small press communities. As any reasonable analysis of literary funding will show, those who prove successful on institutional terms are rewarded while those who are challenged by structural inequality are either underfunded or left out of the running. While a government grant might be a drop in the bucket for a successful nonprofit that regularly receives large donations from private foundations and wealthy individuals, it may be what makes or breaks a small press without access to millionaires. As Andy Horwitz, among others, has argued, government arts funding used to compensate precisely for such inequalities of access, counteracting "a kind of philanthropic redlining."

As the NEA’s budget has been slashed, private donors and foundations have jumped in to fill the gap, but the institutions they support, and that receive the bulk of arts funding in this country, aren’t reaching the people the NEA was founded to help serve. The arts aren’t dead, but the system by which they are funded is increasingly becoming as unequal as America itself.

Dreaming of utopian solutions aside, the question we might put to our literary institutions is whether they have any desire to lower the bar that excludes the majority of small presses from grants that would allow them time to do their much-needed work. Is it impertinent to ask, for example, whether a publisher with an annual budget of $40,000 or even $400,000 should be measured by the same frameworks as those with budgets of $4,000,000? Should these economically disparate organizations fill out the same application forms and meet the same requirements of reporting? If we do not take seriously these kinds of questions, we simply allow the system to quietly promulgate an ever-widening disparity that mirrors larger social inequalities in the name of "healthy" competition. With the uneven literary playing field tilting toward a slippery slope, do we simply shrug our shoulders? Normalizing the compromise that makes itself out to be the only option is a concession to "philanthropic redlining" that dovetails all too nicely with the neo-liberal economy of gentrification, itself fueled by disparities of wealth.

The Name Game: The New Face of Small Press

On the surface, based on its visibility in institutional settings (AWP, MFAs, the National Book Awards, etc.), the small press—a category which, for most readers of new literature in the US, is a messy tangle of independent presses, large nonprofits, and a few of the more visible editor-run publishers—is growing, and succeeding. Yet, it's only a few authors and their publishers—vaguely associated with small press but at the top-tier of nonprofits or independents—that succeed in terms of reach. The number of literary "mid-list" titles from the "big houses" has been dwindling in proportion to the speed of their mergers, particularly in the fields of literary fiction, translation, and poetry (due to an unprofitable unit cost to sale price relationship). Independent publishers may feel a self-congratulatory mirth in hearing the news of authors fleeing from outsized and overbearing marketing departments or uncaring, overworked editors to gain more artistic control over their books, and some long-awaited "breaks" might fall to them in the form of authors dropped by the bigger houses after well-advanced books sold "only" (or under) 1,000 copies. But, as smaller publishers take on more authors who used to publish with the big houses, will there be room for the non-professional voices, for new voices from outside the MFAs who are taught by those same well-connected authors and whose connections are passed along to the aspirants?

Of course, poetry, especially "avant garde" or "difficult" or "experimental" poetry, and especially that kind of poetry in translation—apart from the very few exceptions that can be monetized through celebrity-making and course-adoption—falls outside of finance-dependent structures, and remains the purview of the editor-run small presses and chapbook publishers, i.e., the amateurs and enthusiasts. No well-meaning boot-strap workshops offered by CLMP (see part two in this series) can have much of an effect on what they do and how they do it, simply because the resources are not available. The majority of grants are taken, the road to grant-funding is speed-bumped with red tape, the media is saturated with the few "small press" poets it can handle (especially since those presses don't purchase much advertising), and the graduate and undergraduate creative writing classrooms have reached their quota of "small press" books that must be taught to stay current in political affairs and edgy experimentalism. (I can no longer keep count of the times I've heard a graduate creative writing student at one or another prestigious institution tell me that they just recently found out about small press publishers "like Coffee House.")

In view of these bleak circumstances, one could say that nothing has changed for the small press, if one limits their definition to editor-run publishing spaces clinging to the vestiges of their "authenticity." Yet, one major thing has changed—they don't own their name. Their name has been watered-down through erroneous application to all kinds of publishing that has little to do with small press values of autonomy from institutions and markets. What's more, "small press" has been claimed by bigger organizations for what we might call its "authenticity-value" with no truck in the ethos of underground marginality and volunteerism that constitutes its legacy. Whether cynically or unknowingly, institutions may at times celebrate small press to bring attention to their own magnanimity. Similarly, its name is at times invoked by more traditional publishers seeking street cred, and nonprofits may pay homage to their small press roots to gain the sympathy of funders who would be wary of less professional beneficiaries.

The Authenticity Market: Small Press at AWP

Around the turn of the century, small presses and little magazines without institutional support began to attend the annual Associated Writing Programs (AWP) conference and book fair, seeing there an opportunity—perhaps the only one available at the time to such publishers—to reach professors and students of Creative Writing. Carting their publications in suitcases and backpacks, small press publishers set up shop amid the professional booths and tables of establishment magazines, student-run MFA journals, university presses, and venerable membership organizations like the Poetry Society of America and the Academy of American Poets, who shipped in their merchandise, swag, and promotional brochures through hotel and convention center channels. The newcomers, most of whom had no departmental funds to back them, got around the high price of registration and exhibition by sharing hotel rooms or sleeping on friends' couches and splitting the allotted eight-foot tables two or three or even four ways.

For a few years around 2002, Verse, Fence, McSweeney's, and Open City exhibited jointly at AWP as Big Small Press Mall. Publishers Weekly reported on this new cooperative of four magazines (one of which was "an outgrowth of the English Department at the University of Georgia") that had also recently started publishing books "which skew toward a hip, young readership." Due to the general lack of small press recognition in the mainstream media and a kind of amnesia as regards to small press history that such ventures at times bolstered and relied upon, one reporter went so far as to say that the publishers united in the Big Small Press Mall "opened up an entirely new world to hopeful writers and readers looking for new work outside the mainstream." (The "Mall" folded a few years later, presumably due in part to the Verse Press merger with the new Wave Books in 2005.)

These new publishers—dubbed independent, alternative, or small press—were interested in being seen at AWP because their readership was there, and growing. After all, presses like Verse, which had published its first book in 2000 yet was already selecting finalists for the National Poetry Series, had, according to Craig Morgan Teicher in Publishers Weekly, "developed something of a cult following among young poets and M.F.A. students," and published books which—in "both content and design—were aesthetically hip and often humorous."

The 2004 Chicago AWP was UDP's first time exhibiting at the conference. According to AWP's online archives, which go back only that far, there were round numbers of 4,000 attendees and 300 exhibitors, though no one but the sponsors are listed. (Within 10 years those numbers would more than double.) The intimidating booths of the gate keepers—McGraw-Hill, FSG, Norton, APR, etc.—loomed large alongside MFA journals and university presses. By the look of their stands, I couldn't tell nonprofits like Milkweed, Graywolf, and Coffee House apart from the commercial publishers. As far as poetry was concerned, the air was taken out of the room by what small press publishers have for years referred to as "stuffy" journals—AGNI, Poetry, The Kenyon (founded in 1939 by John Crowe Ransom) and the other "Reviews." "Official verse culture" was all but written on the walls. It goes without saying we felt quite peculiar with our makeshift sharpie signage and with just a handful of potential comrades—Futurepoem, Les Figues, perhaps one or two other newer small presses, and a few new "indies" like Tin House and the aforementioned "Mall," which, if memory serves, had grown to occupy two tables. There was no sign of avant-garde presses of either the old or the new generations—no Atelos, Roof, The Figures, Burning Deck, Faux Press, United Artists, Kenning, Krupskaya—nor any avant-garde journals with postmodernist aesthetics, Language-school affinities, or radical political allegiances like Chain or Hambone or How2. Nor was there a whiff of the still proliferating side-stapled and saddle-stitched "low end" journals and chapbook presses, some of whom I listed in the first post of this series.

Incidentally, though it's hardly an accident, most of the publishers missing from the 2004 AWP and many subsequent conferences are also omitted from the Poets & Writers list of 514 small presses (405 of which publish poetry), nor does the list include more recent avant-garde publishers like Compline, Troll Thread, Golias, and Wonder. If one were to regard P&W's list as representative of current small press activity in the US, a large swath of publishers would appear to be invisible, including many of those distributed by SPD and numerous members of CLMP. My friends wouldn't bat an eye on hearing that P&W's Literary Magazines database of 1200, of which 225 (1/5th) publish poetry, doesn't mention side-stapled magazines like Fell Swoop or Try, or email-circulated PDF mags like Elderly, but they might raise an eyebrow when they don't find Lana Turner and New American Writing on the roll call. Incomplete as it is, P&W's list points to a persistent division in our literary culture, one that is echoed by the list of publishers exhibiting at AWP. One might attribute the list's lacunae to its self-selecting criteria: those that want to be considered part of the marketplace sign up and give their information. Even so, while small presses and little magazines may not want the inevitable surge of submissions that result from the professional-looking listing, they shouldn't like to be forgotten. (A similar invisibility—one that is also suggested by the limitations of the Poetry Foundation's author profiles—can be traced in P&W's database of "Poets & Writers." Of UDP's more than 300 book and chapbook authors, 17 are listed on P&W's site, whereas Graywolf's entry connects to 80 authors, suggesting that the culture wars are far from over.)

You can imagine just how anomalous small presses must have appeared at AWP for poet Matthew Rohrer (who had published a book with Norton but moved to Verse in the early aughts) to later reminisce that "back at that time there weren’t that many small presses around." If by "around" he meant "at AWP," sure! If this were the only book fair you attended, as was presumably the case for many of the MFA students and Creative Writing professors present, you might have agreed with Rohrer's conclusion. The question begs itself—though it's seldom asked—what were we doing there in the first place?

The answer may now seem obvious. Previously, small presses and little magazines antagonistic to the institution and the MFA had no desire to attend AWP; furthermore their aesthetics were not welcome at the conference—their modernist-inflected ideas of autonomy (and the poetics these ideas spawned— think of Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer, or Lyn Hejinian) were anathema to AWP's market-oriented programs, and predominantly anti-academic panels (Creative Writing programs were for a long time embattled against their scholarly counterparts in departments of English). Furthermore, small presses had been, historically speaking, self-sufficient in that they sprouted from non-institutional communities of writers and could reach their readership without AWP's help.

One structural change played a role in this development: Publishing workshops at AWP organized by CLMP began to lead its constituency by the hand toward the conference, even subsidizing some small press participation through travel grants. (My first trip to AWP—New Orleans, 2002—was funded by such a grant. The money came from the New York State Council on the Arts and was administered through its technical assistance arm, Lit-TAP, and CLMP. These grants were meant exclusively for "professional growth"—like attending CLMP's workshops at AWP—and could not be used to help small press editors research in an archive or work with an author on a manuscript.) After all, if you were applying for federal, state, or city arts funding, it would behoove you to show a track record of AWP attendance.

In addition, many of the newer publishers were founded by writers who had come out of MFA contexts and some who were teaching Creative Writing. These publishers were comfortable with AWP's institutional space and some had previously attended as students. They were familiar with its terms and wanted to reach their peers and assert their publications' relevance to, and within, the (pseudo-)academic context. Increasingly, writers published by indie journals and small presses were also acculturated to the MFA context and the marketplace atmosphere of AWP—and they, too, needed to stake their claims to relevance with their peers for reasons of job security or professional advancement. By this, I don't mean to imply that there was not, or is not, a sense of community to be gained for writers and publishers attending AWP; I only wish to show how the formation of literary community was developing under this professional umbrella, dislodging literary community from its previous non-institutional spaces of congregation.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to AWP: The Rise and Fall of Table X

In fact, as more small presses flocked to AWP, a community spirit was on the upsurge, and growing. This new community at the fringe of the convention was united in its discomfort with its own presence behind enemy-lines, as it were; its comradery was bolstered by a mutual feeling of not-quite-belonging, and a vague sense of a unified mission around alternative modes of publication and distribution, around new writing, and what many of us perceived as the variety of new modes of expression in our generation. Within just a few years, ideas welled up to find ways of underscoring our presence in such a way that would cooperatively shed light on each other's work. There were already so many of us turning up—small presses, letterpress printers, chapbook and broadside publishers, and independent magazines—strewn about the book fair, often separated from each other by aisles and aisles of MFA magazines and more established publishers, feeling a bit lost and often overlooked.

A group of us, the slightly older folks of the younger generation (Belladonna*, Futurepoem, Les Figues, Litmus, and UDP), proposed the communal purchase of a whole row of tables, facing each other to create a corridor, and invited a host of others to set up camp together. This would be called Table X—an encampment, a commons, a Commune, a Temporary Autonomous Zone of sorts, with a half a table set aside as a "commerce-free" space where communal chapbook binding, literary games, and performances were encouraged, and which sometimes serviced as an informal play-space/daycare for writers' children. We would endeavor to make sure that, as Anna Moschovakis wrote in one of the group emails, "at every moment of the conference, there is something happening at that half-table that does not involve selling or buying [and] instead promotes engagement, questioning, dialogue, protest, whatever is vital that might otherwise be squashed by three days of hawking one's wares." Posters and fliers were printed to alert conference attendees of our presence (and of related offsite events), listing the participating presses and the general place on the conference map—we were adamant that AWP list our group only as Table X in the conference catalog.

To have or have not a mission statement for Table X was a hot topic in the various email exchanges and our emerging Google group, as was our position vis-à-vis AWP itself. What stance were we taking? Looking back through my emails from 2009-2012, though many thoughts were exchanged about the meaning of our collective gesture as "a rejection of treatment of art as a structured commodity" or "a rejection of the lack of joy in the institutionalizing of arts," I recognize also some of the hesitation around a unified political statement that jives with the trends of the depoliticization of small press discussed in my first post.

Of course, grumblings were heard from some small publishers, still sandwiched between corporate and university publishers, miffed they weren't "invited" to be with the "cool kids," though representatives of Table X were diligently canvassing these lonely outposts to join us the following year. It was an open door policy, any small press could join. Because we weren't saying no to anyone, by the second year the organization of Table X became quite onerous, with one or another of the original members volunteering to nail down commitments from a growing number of somewhat disorganized colleagues (nearly 40 presses by the last year of its activity) and fronting money to secure the exhibition space. We encouraged others to start their own Table X (at some point a Table Y and Table Z emerged) so that the organizational work could be spread out.

With the co-op of Table X buying up 20 tables and refusing to list its participants, AWP was yielding control of a sizable part of the exhibition hall, with no way of knowing who would be showing up to dinner. They were nervous: they got on the phone and called me (and perhaps others who took turns organizing Table X), attempting to reason with us—wouldn't it be easier for readers to find us if the names of the publishers were listed in the program? Understandably, AWP wanted to lengthen the growing list of exhibitors for its own grant reporting and publicity, and—more importantly—it wanted control of the floor. Of course, they were careful enough not to nix the whole enterprise and risk a small scandal, though the media was unlikely to pay much attention to a bunch of disenfranchised presses and magazines. Meanwhile, I do not recall any vocal support of our communal effort from CLMP or other institutions, perhaps only a mildly flustered bemusement at this rowdy show.

The problem of the prohibitive cost of the conference for very small presses was perhaps a little bit alleviated by our cooperative buy-in; more importantly, though, our collaboration served to energize the small press ethos, brought attention to emerging publishers, and was productive in raising issues of small press participation in the conference in a way the institution would have to notice, if not address. For the fact that we were unable to establish a coherent and possibly sustaining political statement, I am as culpable as any of those involved, having deemed it impossible to come to a consensus around the ideological thrust of our effort with so many disparate publishers involved. Table X fizzled out due primarily to the exhaustion of those most committed to keeping it together and the lack of organizational backup, a result of the scarce funding that keeps most small press publishers overextended. AWP's antagonism to the loud and messy, barricade-like display didn't help either. Looking back, however, Table X's trajectory, as a group attempting to question the terms of the institution and push for change from within, was bound to failure precisely because it would not commit to any specific political position, cowed by the stigmatization of hardline commitments in a gentrified literary field, and hesitant to draw a line in the sand for fear of excluding anyone with a different view. Table X did succeed, however, in helping to normalize—for better and worse—the inclusion of small press within the institutional space.

Now, 20 years on, and more than 10 years since the first Table X manifestation, a small press exhibitor at AWP seems perfectly "natural." The desire to exhibit at the book fair can be feasibly imagined as originating from small presses themselves. However, that desire was molded by institutional efforts and significant structural shifts and cultural changes. We, the small presses who were drawn in, naively hoping to democratize this elite space and question its professional and commercial premises, believed in our own hype of a new small press movement. We attracted others like ourselves to participate, bolstering the cultural importance of the conference, which now boasts a gigantic book fair with nearly three times the number of exhibitors it had at the dawn of the century and attendance that rivals or surpasses the more academic MLA. AWP gave us legitimacy in return for our autonomy; it leased us a spotlight in return for our name. It cost the institution nothing, in fact it gained financially from this arrangement. Having lost its connection to the small press advocacy of its past and given up bargaining power through good-will collaboration, CLMP was never able to gain the sympathy of AWP to subsidize the participation of small presses and chapbook publishers with shrinking public funding and no university support. AWP's administration knew we would pay full price to get along. On the path to legitimization, seeking a professionalized readership, we donated our labor, our personal resources, our savvy, and gave away whatever power there may have been in remaining authentically outside, in the margins, not playing by the new rules. With our presence, to use Fredy Perlman's phrase, we "upheld the dominant bureaucracy." Perhaps, we've even come to enjoy our compromise.

Even so, it's taken some time for AWP to come around to the fact that it needs to keep small presses coming, not just for the proceeds, but to keep alive the illusory hope that its debt-anxious MFA constituency has plenty of publishing opportunities, that they too can "make it." In 2019, as lip-service to the "authenticity" of lowly but noble literary workers, who are expected to take up the slack of failing corporate publishers, AWP instituted a Small Press Publisher Award that recognizes "nonprofit presses and literary journals" and "the important role such organizations play in publishing creative works and introducing new authors to the reading public." As a prerequisite for nomination, a publisher must have consecutively attended and exhibited at the three most recent annual conferences to be considered, and must be a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization in operation for five years or more at the time of its nomination. The title of the award is misleading if only because a great number of small presses do not have their own nonprofit status with the IRS. (Tom Person's 1990 misgivings about making nonprofit status necessary for small press survival are even more pertinent now.) Furthermore, the AWP only recognizes presses who can afford to consistently attend and exhibit at the AWP book fair and find it valuable to do so. At a cost of $1950 for three years of attendance ($650/year), not including travel expenses, the award of $2000 (and a free table, tied to compulsory attendance) would scarcely cover the expenditures necessary for eligibility. Because the professionalized public attending AWP is unaware of (and deliberately blinded to) the facts of small publishers' indentured servitude to the organization and the criteria that make this award inaccessible to many editor-run presses, AWP can expect to earn kudos and cultural capital for their "support" and "recognition" of small press.

In a yet more cunning move, the nomination guidelines do not qualify what constitutes a "Small Press." There are no upper limits of the nominees' annual budgets, nothing to suggest the exclusion or disqualification of nonprofits on the order of NEA awardees Graywolf and Coffee House or Ploughshares and The Massachusetts Review. These companies hold the stated prerequisites and surely are to be honored for their "hard work, creativity, and innovation"; they have "contributed to the literary landscape through consistently excellent work" and are plausibly "committed to nurturing the talents of their published authors, supporting their literary communities, and actively engaging in consistent and effective public engagement and outreach." The vague language of the requirements for nomination, echoing the platitudes of grant applications, betrays a lack of knowledge of small press limitations, if not an outright cynical attitude toward the difficulties small presses face with regard to "public engagement and outreach," which the AWP in no way ameliorates and, in many ways, entrenches.

"Will my book be available on Amazon?": The Professionalization of the Small Press Author

As AWP grows in numbers and influence, more writers professionalize. Meanwhile, publishing opportunities are shrinking, and small presses see submissions increasingly supplemented with publicity plans and cover letters outlining potential audiences and media platforms. In addition to advice offered to MFA students on networking at the annual conference, AWP's convention catalog includes such panels as "Evolution of a Writer: On Ekeing, Emerging, and Becoming Established" (2007) which proposed to answer the question "How does one move from trying to eke out a place for themselves in the pages of literary journals to the New York Times Bestseller List?" and addresses "shameless self-promotion, the business of writing, job opportunities, maintaining momentum, and balancing your writing against other concerns."

Through a desire for institutional modes of access to their work, even small press authors have gotten on board with the implicit agenda of grantors and service orgs. In order to compete for professional advancement, authors want their books to be available on Amazon (however that may harm their own publisher's finances), sent for consideration to awards and prizes (with substantial submission fees), and represented at AWP's annual conference and book fair so that their book might be visible to the more than 13,000 attendees (a 2014 record that Publishers Weekly reports was matched in Portland in 2019), made up mostly of MFA writing students and their professors who might "adopt" their book for a class.

Self-consciousness about the market—a product of AWP's and MFA's new normal—is now unselfconsciously perceived as "naturally" desirable for the presses to which writers submit their manuscripts. The result is outsized expectations of an increasingly under-funded publishing field, unable to meet the labor demands expected by the publicity-minded professionalized writers. The entrenchment of pro-institutional professionalized values at AWP is of course not surprising—and it makes no effort to hide them. What's surprising is how writers and presses who previously saw themselves as excluded or unwelcome at AWP have been drawn in by its magnetic field.

The Institutionalization of Fugitive Forms: The Chapbook at AWP

The depoliticizing and redirecting small press values and its alternative forms of production and distribution is perhaps most exemplified by AWP's cooptation of the mode and form of the chapbook. Historically, the roots of the chapbook are bound up with the spread of literacy in Early Modern Europe and the equally politically-charged rise of decentralized production (through the spread of printing) and distribution (through traveling salesmen or "chapmen" [céapmann]). Made obsolete during the Industrial Revolution—by the advent of cheap paper from wood pulp and factory printing that brought us the newspaper—the chapbook had a resurgence in literary culture by the early 1900s as a privately printed, single-author collection that would serve modernist poets as a calling card spread through a gift economy. This is how it has been known through most of the twentieth century, with some augmentations to its production (the growth of "chapbook publishers" in the 1960s) and moments of increased popularity with the rise of movement literatures (as in the case of Broadside Press and other Black Arts movement publishers) and as an efficient conveyor for literary movements (see my previous notes on Tuumba).

Then, in April 2002, Frank Bidart's Music Like Dirt was published by nonprofit Sarabande Books as the first in their Quarternote Chapbook series. It won the Pulitzer in 2003, which no doubt prompted the AWP to include a panel on chapbooks a few years later, in 2006—the first such panel in its history—quite obviously titled, with a saccharine note of mock-incredulity, "A Pulitzer Prize for a Chapbook?" The panel description in the catalog triumphantly announced that chapbooks had, with this new precedent, "come in from the cold" and proposed to answer the questions "What is a chapbook, exactly? What is its history? What can we expect from the publishers and readers of these short collections?"

I was invited to participate and recall my desperate attempts as a young and idealistic small press publisher to make an argument that the Bidart chapbook was not really a chapbook at all. After all, it was perfect-bound, printed in an initial run of 1,000 copies (and surely reprinted since), and, what's more, it was authored by an already established poet, whereas, in my mind, the chapbook was a single-signature, sewn or stapled book form best suited for emerging writers to present their work and was inextricable from small press traditions of ephemerality, immediacy, and autonomy from institutional evaluation. I also recall my inability to see any reasonable similarity between Sarabande's coopting of the chapbook form—to "promote" the work of already established writers, thereby lifting their own prestige—to fellow panelist Curtis Bauer's (of Q Avenue Press) photocopied, hand-collated, and hand-bound chaps, in editions of no more than 100, made for the express ephemeral purpose of coinciding with a public reading by the author where they were primarily distributed. The watering down, and drowning out, of Curtis's modest efforts were, to be blunt, infuriating. I don't think many people heard my argument—I had mistaken, as I would for some time, the space of AWP as one of equal exchange. Though I would stand by my assessment today, the ship had already sailed.

AWP would go on to include 20 more panels on chapbooks in their annual conferences between 2007 and 2019. Not surprisingly, several of these chapbook panels were pitched toward the Creative Writing instructor, with titles such as "Hands-On: Chapbook-Making in the Writing Classroom" (2009) and "Get a Hold of Your Writing: Book Arts in the Classroom" (2013) which advertised "the possibilities that book arts can bring into the creative writing classroom" and peddled the pedagogical use-value of a form previously sustained by poet-publishers and poetry communities outside the academy. By 2015, as it turns out—according to AWP's revisionist history and guided by the institution's benevolent hand—the chapbook had "risen" above its modest beginnings: "Once cheaply produced ephemera, the chapbook today is a product of quality printing methods and editorial care." This naive yet insidious assessment that little "editorial care" had been given the chapbook previous to its institutionalization illustrates AWP's backhanded mode of "including" small press activity in its programming. One can only imagine the fury of Alan Kornblum of Toothpaste Press (now Coffee House) at hearing that his work had been "cheaply produced" and that "quality printing methods" for the chapbook were a new thing.

A number of other factors had prepared us for that 2006 panel at AWP and the chapbook's subsequent absorption into the institutional writing landscape. The Poetry Society of America's Chapbook Fellowship, established in 2003, prepared the ground for the locution "chapbook manuscript"—implying a manuscript of poems meant specifically for publication in a chapbook—to enter the literary discourse. (The PSA currently administers two awards—the regular Chapbook Fellowship and a "30 and Under" prize—with two prizes in each category, a total of four annually.) Another sign of the chapbook's mainstream acceptance has been the less prescriptive and rather joyful NYC/CUNY Chapbook Festival, initiated by poet Kimiko Hahn and hosted by the City University of New York's Center for Humanities, which ran annually, though with some off years, from 2009. (This year it will take place at Queens College). "Chapbook" is now, practically, a household word, at least in any worthwhile MFA program; even James Franco (yes, that James Franco) has one—it's available on Amazon.

With publishers like Sarabande getting into the "chapbook market," small press publishers are understandably hungry for recognition of their "authentic" use of this short pamphlet form. A 2019 AWP panel (noteworthy for the ridiculous combination of the words "capital" and "chapbook" in its title), "Crafting the Capital of the Modern Chapbook," suggests that "experienced chapbook publishers" have come around to something like a self-consciousness about the new value of these "no longer liminal objects." Like the small press, the chapbook—with its "expanding forms, genres, and possibilities"—is no longer limited to any definition, nor any politics. Instead of making a corrective subversive gesture in the context of the institution, chapbook publishers have followed a path sprinkled with the well-meaning crumbs of "broad reach" and populist ideas of "liberal pluralism" that disappears their potential to disrupt the poetry market.

AWP's Economics of Servitude and the Alternative of No Alternative

A small chapbook press or a nonprofit publisher, no matter its annual budget, pays $650 for a table at the annual AWP conference's book exhibit. Let's imagine that in three days at the book fair, a very small press or chapbook publisher sells 13 copies each of its 5 new titles, a total of 65 books, regularly priced at $15, for a book fair discount of $10, sharpied on a makeshift sign. From one vantage point, the table has been paid for, and the publisher has found new readers for their books. If one shifts the perspectival prism, the students, creative writing faculty, and the few "unaffiliated" writers purchasing a book from this publisher may as well have given $10 directly to AWP, because, in effect, AWP sold them the book and made $10. The publisher may satisfy themselves with the thought that they recouped their "costs," but has no money to put toward future books. Considering economies of scale—higher per-unit printing and shipping costs for a smaller edition—the material costs (not including labor) for each copy sold are, let's imagine, $5 per copy, which in turn suggests a pure loss of $325 in the 65-book sale situation described above. Having spent $925 thus far on this "sale" of books, which in grant lingo might be termed "public engagement and outreach," the publisher also leaves with fewer items in their inventory, that is, they are no longer able to sell those 65 copies for any gain. They have, in effect, given away those copies to AWP, and in doing so also bolstered AWP's potential to market their inclusivity and magnanimity toward small presses.

The "sale" of these 65 books has allowed the publisher to be seen at the AWP, with an official badge and table sign and a listing in a 200+ page catalog—a mark of their "public engagement and outreach." For this honor, the publisher has spent $925 in cash, three eight-hour days selling books in a room with no natural light (24 hours free labor), and incurred additional expenses for overpriced convention center food and coffee, housing in a corporate hotel room or through Air B&B, and often travel from another city. In a conservative estimate, total costs for exhibition may range from $1500 to $2500. (I've encouraged other presses to share their figures with me, but "low-end" publishers rarely keep good accounts of such spending, and often use pocket money or personal credit cards that aren't tracked in their press's accounting ledgers, if those even exist.) Previous to the exhibit, the publisher had likely spent between 65 to 130 hours on each of the 5 titles they brought to the book fair—a combination of editing, designing, typesetting, proofing, publicizing (and in some cases printing and binding by hand), i.e. another 325 to 650 hours of free labor. As a small press publisher, unlike my artist friends who subscribe to the notions of fair pay upheld by W.A.G.E. and other advocacy groups, I do not see the labor in itself as a problem: The publisher is giving that labor freely and is either conditioned by or consciously adheres to the "negative" or "gift economy" of small press to expect no remuneration for their time, nor profit from it. (That's just how we do.) However, when a larger institution with a paid staff profits from that free labor, then we are dealing with a kind of exploitation—an exploitation of the good will that cultural laborers such as small publishers exhibit for the enrichment of cultural discourse.

After 13 years of consistent attendance, UDP has not taken a table at the AWP book fair since 2016. At the 2017 AWP conference in Washington DC, outside the guarded doors of the book exhibit, I distributed freely a pamphlet—printed on my own dime—along with 65 books commandeered from UDP's back stock. The pamphlet outlined the costs of exhibiting (along the lines of the above) and offered the following thought experiments:

If the publisher in our example wants to find new readers for the authors and books they have published, to benefit both readers and writers, they might as well give away, at no charge, the 65 books directly to the public without stepping foot in the exhibit hall. Perhaps, outside the exhibit halls, or even outside the convention center, the publisher will come upon someone who hasn’t paid to enter the conference, and they will have a conversation about poetry (and perhaps about the values and ideas that this type of small publishing puts forward) without the exchange of money and wearing no official badges of professional belonging or accreditation. The publisher would thus achieve their goal and find a meaningful exchange without financially unnecessarily benefiting a professional organization that gives nothing back to small publishers like them. The following year, the publisher may choose to give away 65 books closer to home, saving more of their resources, and will perhaps find that new reader near the public library or in a public park, on the stoop of their apartment building or their porch, far away from the AWP.

The following year, in 2018, an alternative book fair was held on the Friday of AWP's Tampa, Florida convention. It was called Whale Prom, and was held "off-site" at the Rialto Theatre and lasted just one day. It was free to attend and a table cost $25. More than 50 small and tiny publishers exhibited; 13 of them also exhibited at the AWP book fair. The following year, in Portland, Oregon, Zachary Schomburg of the local small press Octopus Books, organized the No Fair/Fair, a two-day event on the Friday and Saturday of the AWP conference, one mile away from the convention, with 29 exhibitors paying $80 per table. Nineteen of these publishers, including Octopus itself, also exhibited at AWP, which suggests that only one-third of the publishers at the alternative fair were "micro-presses" that couldn't afford a table at AWP or wouldn't want one, and that the alternative fair caused AWP no losses—the 2019 conference had a record 820 exhibitors.

No Fair/Fair, despite its seemingly activist title, made it very clear (in the large-type description on their site) that they were "not Anti-AWP." As Schomburg told the Portland Mercury "[i]t’s not that AWP is bad and we wanna fight it ... It’s just that the conference leaves a real gap for people that aren’t able to succeed there. We’re trying to fill that gap." At $80 per table, and most of the space occupied by people who can, by their own measure, "succeed there [at AWP]," it's hard to tell what was "alternative" about No Fair/Fair. Until a real alternative is offered, most publishers will concede with the local reporter who came to the very conclusion that AWP wants to hear: "if there’s a chance to get your books in front of 12,000 attendees, it’s a hard opportunity to pass up."

On Acquiescing: The Politics of Distribution

If you've ever wondered why even "good," "intellectual" bookstores have little in the way of small press poetry, or very conservative poetry selections, the reason is likely not the individual book buyer's "taste." The reason is structural: the distribution of independently published literature has been undergoing the same consolidation of power we have seen in arts granting and patronage, as well as in corporate publishing.

A few weeks ago, the translator of a book I edited for UDP went into the venerable indy bookstore Politics and Prose in Washington D.C. to ask after a possible reading. He was told that they wouldn't do an event for the forthcoming book because they can't order copies. The reason given: the books are only available on "a non-returnable basis." The bookseller didn't own up to the fact that they don't like to order directly from SPD, which distributes this translator's UDP book, and that Ingram was the channel that was creating this problem. The truth is that, like many bookstores, both chains and indies, they prefer to consolidate orders of independently published books through Ingram, which has had a difficult relationship with SPD. The two distributors only recently worked out an agreement. Prior to 2016, Ingram did not represent SPD titles to "the trade" (i.e. booksellers) because Ingram was adamant about aggressive discounts (55% off cover price) and terms that would allow them to return a book to SPD in any condition for full credit while accepting returns from stores in any condition at any time. Knowing that for a small press with print runs of around, or under, 1,000, every copy counts, SPD wouldn't play their game. The current agreement gives Ingram a 40% discount, equal to the usual discount for bookstores, and Ingram can return for full credit only items that haven't gone out on the shelves and come back. That is why Politics and Prose says that a UDP book is non-returnable. If they ordered the book through SPD directly, this wouldn't be the case, and their margin on the sale would be the usual 40%, instead of the 20% that Ingram likely offers. In a sense, both Ingram and the bookstore are complicit in blocking the availability of small press literature to potential readers.

As the primary distributors of literary publishers are now owned by Ingram, it's worth saying a little about how that came to pass because it fits the larger narrative that this series of posts attempts to trace. Consortium, which began its life as a Twin-Cities-based book wholesaling cooperative in 1985, now represents 90 independent publishers, including poetry publishers like Wave, City Lights, Nightboat, Coffee House, Copper Canyon, Sarabande, Alice James, and Fence. In 2006, it was acquired by Perseus Books Group (founded by an investor in 1996). A year later, Perseus bought PGW, which, in the '90s, was the largest US distributor of independent publishers, representing the likes of McSweeney's, Milkweed, Tin House, and Grove. In 2016, having grown to distribute 600 publishers through similar buyouts, Perseus's distribution business was bought by Ingram, a publishing services business that also owns the POD business Lightning Source. (Perseus's publishing arm was taken over by Hachette.) Within the span of a decade, the publishers represented by Consortium and PGW had their stock moved twice to new warehouse locations, and suffered financial losses and much organization headache on account of these mergers. However, the publishers these corporations represent have seen no other choice for reaching readers and taking their slim percentage. They are all now under the umbrella of Ingram.

Some literary publishers are still distributed by both SPD and Consortium, listing their books in both places, due to an old friendship between the two organizations and a clause in their contracts. I've heard more than once the argument that SPD takes too big of a cut, though they do not charge for returns, whereas smart commercial distributors—though they may have a knowledgeable sales force—make most of their money by charging their publishers for warehousing and returns. Finally, publishers concerned about the economics of distribution, are afraid to lose reach and visibility by sticking solely with SPD, a loss that would be likely precisely because of indy bookstores like Politics and Prose. Yet, if several of these presses moved exclusively to SPD, there's no question that either Ingram's policies would change or those bookstores would begin to order through SPD directly to satisfy customer demand.

Are we not curious about what would happen if, instead of moving two million dollars of stock annually, a nonprofit distributor was moving 50 million dollars-worth of sales? Wouldn't the percentage of the publishers' take go up? Wouldn't the nonprofit distributor hire a sales force? Would not all the arguments that the larger literary publishers routinely make against working with SPD simply evaporate? Such a shift would of course be a sea change for a small organization like SPD with its 15 employees; it would not be what it is now, but because it is a nonprofit with a mission to uphold, it would not have to skim from the top and would still be able to distribute the smaller presses. In fact, as with Table X, the more established presses would likely bring more attention to the emerging ones.

Yet, as our culture acquiesces to acquiescing, instead of pressuring bookstores to get their stock from a nonprofit distributor, literary publishers prefer a commercial model of distribution. Instead of deciding to build up the market power of an organization with a mission to support literary publishing, they are eager to play the game, may the best man win. The result is the dissolution of the potential bargaining power of small press publishing and the hope of solidarity between the bigger nonprofit and independent publishers with their scrappier colleagues, something once imagined and to some extent realized in the era of COSMEP and CCLM (see post #2 of this series).

We know as well as we know the alphabet that corporations have just one purpose, to make money, and that, understandably, they aren't so interested in literature. We have learned not to question the moral prerogative to make money guaranteed by our constitution, even though it is the driving force behind practices that disempower socially and economically marginal communities, undermine a democratic literature, and are generally bad for culture, just as they are bad for the ecology. We say it can't be any different, it's "normal." Our acquiescence leads to a bleak politics of denial and control.

Even our academic institutions with their Barnes & Noble campus bookstores and their dependence on Ingram distribution have no interest in finding a way around corporate structures. Just as the larger nonprofit publishers refuse to question their own distribution systems, the academy balks at the question of their allegiance to corporate booksellers, by which it squanders every opportunity to engage with and support alternative, autonomous intellectual culture created by small press. Are the faculty in the humanities and Creative Writing up in arms about this state of affairs? I think the number of Amazon packages one sees at the English Department office is a sufficient answer.

Recently, when a group of small press publishers voiced concerns that their books were not represented at a translation conference, I heard someone who I considered a member of my literary community, the editor of a well-respected imprint affiliated with a university, retort that "if you're not interested in making money, why don't you donate your books." Why so? He proceeded to explain that the corporate bookstore hired to bring books to the conference deserves our care and they can't make money stocking small press (i.e. SPD-distributed) titles. Be reasonable—says the institution to the small press—think about the loss that your books would cause this corporation. If you think people should read what you've published, you'll have to give away the books. (I have trouble imagining someone asking the corporate and professional nonprofit publishers with commercial distribution to donate their books to secure equal participation.) Indeed, why not give away the books? These publishers have donated their labor to make an alternative to corporate book culture, and now they should donate the books as well—because corporate book culture "can't" make their books available and the professoriate and literary professionals with their degrees and pedigrees "can't" figure out why that is. Does anyone here smell baloney?

Earlier I made the case that giving away the books may be a prudent tactic in certain situations—but where this donation occurs is paramount to its meaning, and to its real public impact. Surely, the donation of small press books proposed by the university-affiliated editor would set a poor precedent as a concession to the institution, and would serve only to reaffirm its deep-seated belief, barely hidden behind gritted teeth, that small press publications have no actual value.

In the next and final post in this series, I'll turn to UDP's own history and its current internal struggles with the pressures of institutionalization, and to some (perhaps, more hopeful) thoughts on collective and collaborative work in the small press tradition, the value of volunteering, and the political potential of autonomy.

***

Continue with this series for Part 1 "'Power to the people's mimeo machines!' or the Politicization of Small Press Aesthetics," Part 2 "Autonomy's Compromise and the Professionalization of the Small Press," and Part 4 "'Fervent and Utopian': Small Press at a Crossroads."

 

 

[Editor’s Note: The editors of Harriet endeavor to provide space for individual poets to explore and experiment with writing which informs, influences, and furthers the art of poetry and its institutions. Writing on Harriet does not go through the same fact-checking process in which our weekly articles are submitted. The views stated here do not reflect those of the Poetry Foundation but are the sole perspective of the author.]