Ellipsis Press

Nearly fifteen years ago, Dalkey Archive Press head John O'Brien took a shot at predicting the future of publishing and wrote the following in the Review of Contemporary Fiction:

you want to read on-screen. Welcome to it. What is the screen? A small, book-shaped screen...with contrast and definition that, well, resembles a book.... As the middlemen drop by the wayside, the cost of all of this also drops. Why must we now pay $25 for a book? Not because of the cost of producing the book; we pay $25 so that everyone along the way can get his cut, as inadequate as that cut may be. No one wants to consider what the actual costs are; no one, especially the publisher, wants to consider this because it raises the question of what need there is, or isn't, for all the middlemen, including—as presently constituted—the publisher.

This was in 1996 when "googol" was just a very large number. O'Brien goes on to persuasively make the case—using the end of commercial publishing's interest in drama and poetry as precedent—that the "end of literary fiction in commercial publishing is a historical inevitability."

And so it is coming to pass. Literary fiction sells poorly. It doesn't make financial sense for a commercial publisher to support literary fiction when these books often sell less than 5,000 copies, often less than 1,000 copies, in their first five years.

And yet, if you happen to believe in a literary culture, these books are critical. In 1980, according to the writer Thomas McGonigle, the combined total sales of Thomas Bernhard's three Knopf titles were around 1,000 books sold. Today, the Wikipedia entry for Bernhard breezily states he's "widely considered to be one of the most important German-speaking authors of the postwar era." As a casual study of writers' biographies might attest, Bernhard's initial poor reception is more rule than exception.

American literary culture, such as it is, has in large part been the result of otherwise capitalists' anti-commercial whims, of so-called gentlemen publishers, quixotic ski-resort trust-funders and department-store heirs. But now, as the antiquated publishing business is rudely awakened from its nineteenth-century dreams by the bleeping noises of the e-readers of the twenty-first, CEOs responsible only to their shareholders are much less incentivized to take a risk for the cause of literature.

But, if you've been playing along at home, this is all old news. "Micropresses" are not necessarily the panacea, nor are they without their limitations—most notably in their lack of access to a sales staff and quality distribution. Much of the heavy lifting will continue to be done by university houses and publishers like Coffee House Press, FC2, and Dalkey Archive, who are largely funded by foundations and grants. However, the small operations of micropresses—really just a few individuals working on laptops in apartments scattered around the country—are already making their outsized impact on the conversation. Calamari Press brought back in print an important work by the highly praised Gary Lutz. Black Square Editions has given us Lynn Crawford's Simply Separate People (2002). Counterpath Press gave us Oisín Curran's Mopus (2007). Starcherone gave us Zachary Mason's (recently republished by Farrar, Straus and Giroux) The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2008). These are serious works deserving of greater readership and attention.

These (non-commercial) successes are possible due to micropresses' relationship with capital. Save for the occasional and happy fluke, each outing for these presses is likely to be a financial loss. Making a profit or even winning a grant is not in their unwritten business plan. Relative to commercial publishers, micropresses are unconcerned with financial risk. This is not to say that micropresses are free of debt or that they don't need your contributions or purchases but to highlight the fact that their purpose and structure are found largely outside of the profit motive. Because of this and because of new, cheaper methods of production and distribution, these presses are uniquely positioned to publish—in...