Shoals: collaboration in publishing
I've always loved the image of the shoal: many small fish swimming together, emulating a bigger fish to deter prey. I imagine it's companionable, insofar as fish enjoy company, everyone making their own way in the water, but choosing to swim together to achieve something that would be impossible on their own.
"Shoal" also can mean an area of shallow water, a navigational hazard, a hidden challenge or difficulty. This sounds a lot like book publishing, a field where sometimes (often?) things are very hard, for reasons completely outside of our control.
In the 1950s and earlier, the book publishing field used to be myriad small fish, swimming around and doing their own thing. But after decades of mergers and acquisitions, which I imagine as one fish eating a smaller fish while itself being sized up by a larger one, the field looks like a few whales taking up most of the space in the water, harried by a couple of monopolistic mega-sharks like Amazon. The most astounding and illuminating image of what that looks like is this flow chart designed by Ali Almossawi, which shows so many once-independent presses that have been swallowed up by the major corporate publishers.
I believe that collaboration and community are some of the biggest opportunities for independent book publishers. Indie presses are wildly innovative and risk-taking, because we have to be, and because taking literary risks is why most of us do what we do. Resource- and knowledge-sharing can help give us an edge, as all of us are innovating, and sharing that knowledge and the results of our experiments can turn us from hundreds of tiny organizations all throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, to a shoal of interconnected community members, a hundred independent research laboratories all benefiting from the knowledge, experience, and innovation of the others.
When I was at Kickstarter as the Head of Publishing Outreach, I was given an impossibly large remit: bring publishing creators to the platform and help them succeed. With no other guidelines or guardrails from leadership, I realized I had to make my own so I could focus on creating the greatest impact with my work.
Back in 2015, I chose three areas of focus, to which I remained dedicated to for the rest of my time at Kickstarter. I focused on working with independent book publishers, since they're doing some of the most interesting and vital work in the book field, and a small amount of money goes a very very long way at an independent press, and because the Big 5 openly "borrow" successful strategies developed by indie presses. (Remember that whole "farm team" thing?) I also focused on supporting and celebrating marginalized voices, and literary organizations and community spaces.
An incredible element of my role at Kickstarter was that it was literally my full time job to research the whole literary field, develop a perspective, and reach out to people doing the most exciting things to see if I could help them raise money and build community on the internet. One of the most exciting things I found during that time was the Northern Fiction Alliance, a group founded by several independent publishers in the UK.
Founded in 2016 by four of the UK’s leading independents – Manchester’s Comma Press, Leeds’s Peepal Tree Press, Liverpool’s Dead Ink Books, and Sheffield’s And Other Stories – the Northern Fiction Alliance is a radical publishing collective devised to showcase the creativity, diversity and spirit of risk-taking that sets publishers in the North of England apart.
They published an open letter to challenge and inspire the field, and collaborated with each other in a variety of ways.
But this is only one of the many ways independent presses are connecting to and collaborating with each other.
Stateside, the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses serves and connects independent book and magazine publishers under the visionary and unflappable leadership of Mary Gannon.
Anne Trubek, founder and publisher of Belt Publishing, is a standout voice sharing information and the inner workings of an independent press.
The annual AWP Conference is a great opportunity for independent publishers to talk to each other and learn what other publishers in the field are thinking about and publishing.
And back in 2019, a dozen brilliant people from book, comics, and magazine publishing, literary organizations and spaces, and beyond, joined me to create The Next Page Conference, a hybrid virtual conference that invited people from around those fields to share information and ideas, and collaborate to improve the field for all of us. I spoke about my vision for publishing collaboration at about minute 6:45 in the introduction.
There are so many ways that independent presses and publishers are already collaborating and sharing information, formally and informally.
As small fish, we can be quick and nimble, and we can thrive in the waters that are too shallow for the whales to enter. And when we swim further out to the wild and wondrous deeper waters, we can join together to do things that would never be possible for one of us alone.
I'd love for you to tell me about publishers, organizations, and individuals doing great work to connect and collaborate with other indies in the field. I can share those in a future newsletter.
So come on in and join me in the shoal. With all of us swimming together, the water's fine.