Jennifer A Sutherland

SPD is winding down, or I should say, SPD sent out an email without warning to small presses across the country last week announcing that it has closed its doors. I have lawyer thoughts about all of this that I will keep to myself, the better part of valor being discretion, but poet-Jennifer is here to ask you to buy directly from small presses.

Academic, independent and small presses are where you will find brave, genre-evasive, smart, funny, really serious, really joyful, deeply truthful, deeply ironic work. It might be all those things at once. It might be agented. It might be stuff agents don’t know how to sell or wouldn’t want to try to sell. It will not be bland, it will not be stuff that’s engineered to satisfy a focus group. I don’t really want to read books that have been market-tested to death. If you are here, you probably don’t either. Survival of this segment of the literary market means the survival of small and indie presses.

Order from them directly. Presses make the most money that way; Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and distributors take a cut on profit margins that are already very small. Adam Smith-style economic principles don’t hold up very well in publishing for a variety of reasons, and the reluctance of the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice to involve itself in, oh, much of anything at all anymore hasn’t helped. If small presses die, we will read what the Big 5 decide we want to read, and I suspect that will mean cozies, self help, thrillers, and . . . you know what? I love a good cozy. I have no beef with cozies. But I also want work that challenges, and you should too.

Keep good books coming by supporting small presses. Buy books. Read them. Then buy more. Be an invisible hand in the publishing market but an invisible hand for good.

River River Books is a great place to start. Or start somewhere else. Just support small presses, and thanks.