Are Indie Presses the Minor Leagues of Publishing?

June 13, 2013 9:30 the Book Beast

Are the big publishing houses using independent presses as a farm league to scout for talent, and giving up gambling on splashy debut novels? James McGirk reports.When Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station came out in 2011, it won major awards and seemed in every respect like one of those dazzling debut novels that preceded it: Everything Is Illuminated, The Art of Fielding, White Teeth. Except that it was published by little-known Minneapolis art-house company Coffee House Press. How could the big publishing houses have missed it?

There have been indications that the Big Six—Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin, HarperCollins, Random House, and Simon & Schuster—were steering away from splashy debuts. Sheila Heti, for example, released a book of short stories in Canada, sold a novel to McSweeney’s, and had trouble shopping her second novel before Macmillan, through its imprint Henry Holt and Company, swooped in to publish How Should A Person Be? to much fanfare. Then came word that perennial outsider Tao Lin had linked-up with famed literary agent Bill Clegg, and sold his third novel Taipei to Random House’s Vintage Books.

Could publishers be using independent presses as a sort farm league to scout for talent?

“The Big Six have become risk adverse [sic],” says Rob Spillman, editor of the literary magazine Tin House, which also has a small book-publishing division. “The stakes for them have gotten too high.” Large publishing conglomerates have large overheads, huge Manhattan offices and massive warehouses to maintain, and must employ large sales forces. “Indies have low overhead, are nimble, and rarely work by committees,” Spillman says. “We can do a two thousand print run on a first book and break even. No way any of the Big Six could do that.”

Spillman also notes that the small budgets of indie publishers make it hard for them to compete with the Big Six on book advances. “It is by necessity that the indies are really beating the bushes and looking for the new and interesting,” he says.

The Paris Review’s editor Lorin Stein, who is the former editor of Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, an imprint of Macmillan, says the big houses have always used the indies as a farm league, and it’s a tradition that’s worth reviving. “The blockbuster mentality is bad for readers, bad for publishers, and bad for the art itself,” he says. “It's especially bad when the big houses pour a lot of money into a first-time author whose book doesn't sell. Then everyone's screwed.”
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