It’s a Small, Small, Small Press World: Adam Kirsch on Jewish Writers and Small Publishing Houses
A few years ago, it was impossible to talk to anyone in the book business without contracting a sense of doom. Publishers had seen how quickly new technologies destroyed the once mighty music industry and left newspapers and magazines teetering on the brink; so it was only natural to assume that books would be next. Once Amazon produced the first cheap and appealing e-reader, the Kindle, it seemed a safe bet that the next step would be online file-sharing, free streaming, and all the other legal and illegal innovations that destroyed the CD and the morning paper. Meanwhile, Amazon tried to take advantage of its market dominance to set a standard price of $9.99 for e-books, squeezing profit margins so tight that publishers feared they would go out of business. For a while, those that held out for a higher price point, like Hachette, saw their titles effectively banned by the online bookseller.
Along with this commercial and technological crisis came the crisis of confidence that affected every branch of the culture industry. Publishers, after all, are gatekeepers par excellence, deciding what writing should be put between hard covers and what should be relegated to the slush pile. And the very idea of gatekeeping, of discrimination between good and bad, worthy and unworthy, has taken a beating in the digital age. One of Amazon’s most potent weapons in its fight with Hachette was the idea that publishers themselves were elitist relics, standing between authors and their potential readers. Why bother submitting your manuscript to a publisher, and giving them 90 percent of sales revenue, when you could self-publish directly through Amazon’s Author Central program?