Today’s Guardian Book Blog has a post by David Barnett complaining that “independent” writers don’t get the same respect that independents get in the music and movies business. He says:
The literary world only bestows acceptance, it seems, on those who are published through the traditional avenues. Independent and small presses get short shrift – national newspaper supplements seem loath to review indie books, the big high street sellers won’t stock them, unless the books are about the tough lives of mill girls or histories of public house names, which can be shoved on a shelf marked “local interest”.
This struck me as odd, because in the science fiction community small presses are thriving. They are winning awards all over the place, and you can find their books in major chains. I’m sure that if Michael Dirda or Mike Berry wanted to review a book from, say, Small Beer, Night Shade or Tachyon, then there would be no problem with their doing so. Then it hit me. Barnett is talking about mainstream literature in Britain. And like most mainstream literary people he assumes that his little part of the wider literary community is the entire literary world. Sad really.
Hi Cheryl.
Thanks for taking time to read and comment.
You might be interested that my “little part of the wider literary community” is actually the SF/F genre – I’ve had two novels out with Immanion Press.
I’m glad you’re seeing a greater acceptance of small press titles than I am – my local Waterstone’s, for example, isn’t hugely big on a wide range of indie titles, and although I got some good reviews for both my novels, I was told several times that there were quotas for small press books or, more often, completely ignored.
David:
Thanks for dropping by. I think if you check with most SF reviewers outside of the UK mainstream press you’ll find that they say the small presses is where much of the best quality work can be found. Magazines such as Locus and Strange Horizons regularly feature reviews of small press books, as I did when I was running Emerald City.
Equally in the sphere of awards, small presses do OK. Only last weekend Subterranean walked off with a Locus Award for Best Collection. Admittedly the major publishers don’t do many collections, but the award is there, and no one bats an eyelid at a small press winning it.
I’ve seen books by American small presses in my local Borders in California, and even in various branches of Waterstones in the UK. So it isn’t impossible to get them in. It will, however, be difficult for Storm to get her books into US stores because of the logistics.
In any case Waterstones is something of a special animal. As I understand it, their stocking policy has a huge amount of central control and they have some very sophisticated software for tracking stock and sales. It is a very hard set-up to crack. The good news is that Mike Rowley turns up at World Fantasy Con regularly (and hopefully he’ll be at Worldcon too) so Waterstones do know what is going on in the business.
Amazon, of course, stocks pretty much everything.
So what we come down to is UK newspapers. And actually it is a miracle that they give space to SF&F at all. Things have got a lot better over the past few years. Having people like you, Damien and Sam involved will hopefully mean that things will get even better soon.
The ones who really get short-changed are the online indies – writers who publish exclusively online. But I do understand how difficult it is to sort through the mass of net fiction.
I know there are SF/F writers who have made the leap to conventional publication. But I’m talking about those who aren’t interested in doing so; who don’t see it as goal/validation/whatever.