Here’s a number that surprises most people: the five largest publishers in the English-speaking world account for roughly sixty percent of all trade book revenue. Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. Between them, they dominate shelf space, media attention, and the prize ecosystem. If you pick up a book in an airport bookstore, odds are good that one of these five published it.

The other forty percent is split among thousands of independent presses, university presses, and self-published authors. We’re one of those thousands. ScrollWorks Media puts out ten to twelve titles a year. In the context of the industry, we’re small. Very small.

So why do we exist? Why does any independent publisher exist, when the big houses have more money, more reach, more marketing muscle, and more name recognition? It’s a fair question, and we think the honest answer is more complicated than the usual indie-publisher talking points about “passion” and “literary commitment.” Those things are true, but they’re not the whole story.

The consolidation problem

To understand why independent publishers matter, you have to understand what consolidation has done to the industry.

In 1990, there were dozens of major publishers in New York alone. By 2024, after decades of mergers and acquisitions, the field had narrowed dramatically. The attempted merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, which the Department of Justice blocked in 2022, would have created a publisher so large that it controlled nearly half the market for anticipated bestsellers.

Consolidation has consequences. When fewer companies make more of the decisions about what gets published, the range of voices in the marketplace narrows. Not because anyone sets out to narrow it, but because large organizations are risk-averse by nature. They have shareholders. They have quarterly targets. They make decisions through committees. The gravitational pull is always toward the safe bet: the established author, the proven genre, the book that looks like a book that already sold well.

This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s an incentive structure. And it creates gaps.

The gaps we fill

Independent publishers exist in the gaps that consolidation creates. These gaps are real, and they’re bigger than most people realize.

There’s the gap of scale. A big publisher generally won’t acquire a book unless they think it can sell at least 10,000 to 20,000 copies. That’s a rough threshold, and it varies, but the principle holds: the larger the organization, the larger the minimum viable audience. This means books that might sell 3,000 to 8,000 copies, which is a lot of books, have no natural home at a major house.

Many of these are excellent books. They’re books with dedicated audiences who are hungry for them. But they don’t clear the commercial threshold that makes a big publisher’s accounting department comfortable. An independent press can publish these books profitably because our cost structure is different. We have less overhead. We don’t need a book to sell 20,000 copies to break even. We can make a book work at numbers that would be a rounding error for Penguin Random House.

There’s the gap of patience. Big publishers operate on tight timelines. A new hardcover has maybe three to six months to prove itself before it’s moved to the backlist and the marketing focus shifts to the next season’s titles. If a book is a slow starter, if it needs time to find its audience through word of mouth and hand-selling, it may never get that time at a large house.

We have the luxury of patience. Still Waters by Elena Marsh didn’t take off immediately. It sold modestly in its first few months. But we kept it in print, kept sending it to reviewers, kept talking about it. Eighteen months after publication, a bookseller in Portland started recommending it to every customer who walked through the door, and sales picked up. Two years in, it was one of the best-performing titles in our catalog. That kind of long arc is hard to sustain at a big house, where the attention has already moved on.

There’s the gap of risk tolerance. This is the one we think about most. Big publishers can afford to take big risks on individual titles; they have enough volume to absorb a failure. But they tend to take a certain kind of risk: big advances on books they believe will be big sellers. What they’re less likely to do is take a risk on something genuinely unusual, a book that doesn’t fit into an established category, a writer whose work is hard to describe in a pitch meeting.

David Okonkwo’s The Cartographer’s Dilemma is exactly this kind of book. It sits at the intersection of science writing, cultural criticism, and personal essay. It doesn’t have a clean comp title. When David’s agent (who is excellent) shopped it to big houses, the feedback was consistent: we love the writing, but we don’t know how to sell it. We said: we’ll figure it out. And we did, because we had the flexibility to position the book on its own terms rather than forcing it into an existing template.

The literary ecosystem argument

Think of publishing as an ecosystem. In any healthy ecosystem, you need diversity. You need large organisms and small ones. You need specialists and generalists. If the large organisms crowd out the small ones, the whole system becomes less resilient.

Independent publishers are the small organisms. We’re the ones experimenting at the margins, trying things that haven’t been tried, publishing voices that haven’t been heard. Many of these experiments fail. That’s fine. Some of them succeed, and when they do, they expand the range of what’s possible in publishing.

The history of American publishing is full of books that were first published by small presses and later became part of the cultural mainstream. Graywolf Press published the early work of several writers who went on to win major prizes. Milkweed Editions published environmental writing years before it became a mainstream category. Coffee House Press took risks on experimental fiction that larger publishers wouldn’t touch.

This pattern matters. Independent presses serve as the research and development wing of the publishing industry. We identify talent early. We take chances on forms and subjects that haven’t proven themselves commercially. We create a space where writers can develop without the pressure of immediate bestseller performance.

And yes, sometimes a big publisher comes along and offers one of our authors a deal we can’t match, and the author leaves. That stings. But it also means the system is working: the small press did its job of discovering and developing the talent, and the larger publisher can now bring that talent to a wider audience. We’d prefer to keep all our authors forever, obviously. But we’re realistic about how the ecosystem functions.

What we’re not saying

Let’s be clear about what we’re not arguing. We’re not saying independent publishers are morally superior to big publishers. We’re not saying small is always beautiful or that large is always corrupt. Big publishers put out plenty of wonderful books. They employ talented editors who care deeply about literature. Some of the best-edited books we’ve read in recent years came from major houses.

We’re also not saying that independent publishing is glamorous or easy. It isn’t. The pay is bad. The hours are long. The resources are thin. We’ve had years where the entire company’s profit margin was slimmer than the advance a single Big Five author received. There’s nothing romantic about worrying whether you can make payroll.

What we are saying is that a publishing landscape without independent presses would be impoverished. Not because big publishers are bad, but because they’re big, and bigness imposes constraints that limit what they can do. Small presses operate under different constraints, and those different constraints enable different things.

The author’s perspective

We hear from writers all the time who’ve been through the submission process at big houses and found it dispiriting. Not because anyone was unkind to them, but because the process is impersonal by nature. Your manuscript goes into a queue. It’s evaluated by an assistant. If it clears that hurdle, it goes to an editor. If the editor likes it, they take it to an editorial board. If the board approves, they make an offer. At every stage, the decision involves people who haven’t read the manuscript weighing in on commercial viability.

At a small press, the process is different. When you submit to us, your manuscript is read by the same people who will edit and publish it. If we say yes, you’ll work directly with a senior editor throughout the process. You’ll have a relationship with the people making decisions about your book’s cover, marketing, and positioning. You’ll be consulted, not just informed.

This matters to writers. Catherine Voss has said publicly that she chose to publish The Last Archive with us because she wanted to work closely with her editor, to have a real collaborative relationship rather than being one title among a hundred on a seasonal list. She could have gotten a larger advance elsewhere. She chose the relationship instead.

Not every writer makes that choice, and not every writer should. For some books and some careers, a big publisher is the right fit. But for writers who want close editorial collaboration, who want to be more than a line item on a P&L statement, an independent press offers something genuinely different.

The bookstore connection

Independent publishers and independent bookstores have a natural alliance, and it’s one of the most important relationships in the book world.

Big publishers have the muscle to get their books into chain stores and big-box retailers. Their sales teams negotiate for shelf placement and co-op advertising. An independent press can’t compete on those terms. Where we can compete is in the independent bookstore channel, where buying decisions are made by individual booksellers who actually read the books they stock.

These booksellers are our most valuable partners. They read advance copies. They write shelf talkers. They press books into the hands of customers who trust their judgment. A single enthusiastic bookseller can sell more copies of a small-press title in a year than a national advertising campaign, because the recommendation is personal and specific.

This relationship works in both directions. Independent bookstores need independent publishers because we provide the kind of books that differentiate them from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. If every bookstore stocked only the same big-publisher titles, there would be no reason to shop at a neighborhood store. The quirky, distinctive titles from small presses are part of what makes independent bookstores worth visiting.

The challenges, honestly

We should be honest about what’s hard.

Distribution is hard. Getting books into stores is expensive and logistically complex. We use a national distributor, which gives us access to major retail channels, but we pay for that access, and the terms are not favorable to small publishers. Returns, the system by which bookstores can send back unsold books for a full refund, are a particular burden. When a bookstore orders a hundred copies and returns sixty, we eat the cost of shipping, handling, and damaged inventory.

Marketing is hard. We don’t have the budget for national advertising campaigns. We rely on reviews, social media, author events, and word of mouth. These strategies work, but they work slowly. A big publisher can create buzz around a new title through sheer spending power. We have to earn attention one reader at a time.

Cash flow is hard. Publishing is a business with long lag times. You commit to a book today, spend money on editing, design, and production over the next year, and don’t start seeing revenue for eighteen months to two years. For a small company with limited capital reserves, those gaps are stressful.

Keeping talent is hard. We can’t match Big Five salaries. The people who work here do it because they love the work, but love doesn’t pay rent in a major city. We’ve lost good people to bigger companies that could offer more, and while we understand that choice, it hurts every time.

Why we keep going

Given all that, why do we keep doing this? The answer is honestly pretty simple.

We keep going because of the books. Because of the moment when a manuscript arrives that makes everyone in the room sit up straighter. Because of the email from a reader who says that a book we published changed how they think about something. Because of the review that articulates exactly what we hoped the book would do.

We keep going because the books we publish wouldn’t exist, or wouldn’t exist in the same form, without us. That’s not arrogance; it’s just a fact about how the industry works. Some books need a small publisher to exist. They need the attention, the patience, the willingness to take a chance on something unusual.

James Whitfield’s Echoes of Iron is a historical novel that took seven years to write. It required extensive fact-checking and a level of editorial care that a larger house, with tighter timelines and higher volume, might not have been able to provide. We gave that book the time and attention it needed, and the result is something we’re all proud of.

We keep going because we believe that a diverse publishing ecosystem is better than a consolidated one, not just for readers and writers, but for the culture as a whole. Books matter. Who publishes them, and how, and under what conditions, matters too. We’re doing our small part to keep the ecosystem healthy, and as long as we can sustain the business, we’ll keep doing it.

That’s the truth of it. No grand claims. No pretension. Just a small company doing work we believe in, one book at a time.

Written by Marcus Rivera, Publisher at ScrollWorks Media.