In 2002, I worked for a publisher that occupied the second floor of a converted warehouse in a part of town that nobody would call fashionable. The elevator was broken more often than it wasn’t. Our “conference room” was a folding table in the corner of the main office. Our catalog was printed on a photocopier because we couldn’t afford a commercial printer. We had nine employees, a list of about twenty titles per year, and a distribution arrangement with a regional wholesaler that paid us sixty days late, if we were lucky, and ninety days late, if we weren’t.

That was independent publishing twenty years ago. I want to describe it in some detail, because the independent publishing of today is so different that people who entered the industry in the last decade might not recognize what it used to be. And I think understanding where we came from helps explain both what we’ve gained and what we’ve lost.

The biggest difference was distribution. Today, an independent publisher can get their books into virtually any bookstore in the country through relationships with national distributors like Ingram or through direct-to-consumer sales via their own website. Twenty years ago, distribution was the wall that separated “real” publishers from everybody else. The major distributors, the companies that could place your books in Barnes and Noble, Borders (when it existed), and the independent bookstores that relied on their catalogs, were selective. They had limited capacity, and they prioritized publishers with track records. A new independent publisher could spend years trying to get a distribution deal, and in the meantime, their books were effectively invisible to most retail channels.

Without distribution, you were stuck with a handful of options, none of them great. You could sell directly to bookstores, which meant calling or visiting individual stores, one at a time, and convincing each one to carry your titles. This was exhausting, time-consuming, and geographically limited. You could sell through your own website, but e-commerce in 2002 was primitive compared to today, and nobody had figured out how to market online effectively. You could sell at events, readings, and book fairs, which was actually our most effective channel but which scaled about as well as you’d expect. Or you could try to get into Amazon, which in 2002 was still primarily a book retailer and was more open to working with small publishers than it would later become.

The practical result was that most independent publishers had tiny sales volumes. A successful title for us sold 2,000 to 3,000 copies in its first year. A hit, the kind of book we’d celebrate, might sell 5,000. These numbers made it essentially impossible to pay authors significant advances, invest in marketing, or build the kind of institutional infrastructure that larger publishers took for granted. We operated on margins so thin that a single underperforming title could threaten the company’s solvency. I remember calculating, more than once, whether we could make payroll the following month.

Print-on-demand technology barely existed. Short-run digital printing was available, but the quality was noticeably inferior to offset printing. The covers looked flat. The text was slightly fuzzy. The paper options were limited. If you wanted a professional-looking book, you needed to print at least 1,000 copies via offset, which meant a significant upfront investment and a warehouse full of inventory that might or might not sell. Every print run was a gamble. Print too many, and you’d be sitting on boxes of unsold books for years. Print too few, and you’d miss sales while waiting for a reprint. We got it wrong constantly. I can still picture the storage unit we rented that was, at one point, filled floor to ceiling with copies of a poetry collection that we’d optimistically printed 2,000 copies of and sold 400.

The editorial side was different too, though in some ways better than what many independent publishers manage today. Because we published so few titles, each one got intense attention. Our editorial process was slow and thorough, partly by design and partly because we didn’t have enough staff to rush. I edited three or four books per year, which gave me time to read each manuscript multiple times, to have long conversations with authors, to agonize over individual sentences. The editorial quality of our books was, I think, genuinely high. We couldn’t compete with the big publishers on distribution or marketing, but we could compete on how much care we put into each title.

Cover design was a constant struggle. Good book designers were expensive, and we couldn’t afford them consistently. Some of our early covers were designed by friends, relatives, or the authors themselves, with predictably uneven results. I remember one cover that the author designed using Microsoft Publisher. It looked like a church bulletin. We published it anyway because we’d run out of time and money. The book was actually quite good, and I’ve always felt guilty that its cover didn’t give it a fair chance. Today, independent publishers have access to a global market of freelance designers through platforms like Dribbble and Behance, and tools like Canva have raised the floor for basic design. Twenty years ago, if you couldn’t afford a professional designer, you got an amateur cover, and amateur covers killed books.

Marketing was the area where independent publishers were most disadvantaged, and where the gap with larger publishers was widest. The major publishers had publicity departments that could get books reviewed in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the major literary magazines. They had advertising budgets for print campaigns in those same publications. They had sales teams that could get books placed prominently in bookstores. They had relationships with radio and television producers who booked author interviews. Independent publishers had none of this. Our marketing consisted of sending review copies to publications that might or might not cover them (usually not), organizing readings at local bookstores, and hoping for word of mouth.

The review ecosystem was particularly hostile to independent publishers. Major review outlets had limited space and prioritized books from major publishers. The New York Times Book Review might review 2,000 books in a year, out of the 50,000 or more published annually. The odds of an independently published book getting a Times review were vanishingly small. Without reviews, it was almost impossible to generate the kind of critical attention that drove bookstore placement and consumer awareness. We were caught in a chicken-and-egg problem: we needed reviews to sell books, but we couldn’t get reviews because we didn’t sell enough books.

The internet changed everything, but it changed everything slowly. By 2005 or 2006, book blogs were becoming a legitimate alternative to traditional review outlets. Bloggers were reviewing books that the mainstream media ignored, including books from small and independent publishers. They were building audiences of dedicated readers who trusted their recommendations. For the first time, an independently published book could get critical attention without going through the traditional gatekeepers. I remember the first time one of our books was reviewed on a popular book blog. The review was thoughtful and positive, and we saw a measurable spike in sales that week. It was a tiny spike by any objective standard, maybe twenty or thirty additional copies, but it felt like a revelation. There was a way to reach readers that didn’t depend on the New York Times.

Social media amplified this effect enormously. By 2010, Twitter had become a significant platform for book discovery. By 2015, Instagram (BookStagram) and YouTube (BookTube) were driving substantial sales for books that the traditional media hadn’t covered. Today, TikTok (BookTok) can make a book a bestseller overnight, regardless of who published it. The democratization of attention has been the single most transformative change in independent publishing over the past two decades. It hasn’t eliminated the advantages that major publishers have (they still dominate in terms of advance money, distribution infrastructure, and institutional relationships), but it has made it possible for a small publisher to reach a large audience if they produce a book that resonates with the right community of readers.

Print-on-demand has been equally transformative. Modern POD technology produces books that are virtually indistinguishable from offset-printed books. The paper quality is good. The cover printing is crisp. The binding is durable. And because POD allows you to print one copy at a time, the inventory risk that used to plague independent publishers has been largely eliminated. We no longer need to guess how many copies to print. We can start with a modest offset run for bookstore distribution and use POD to fulfill individual orders and handle demand spikes. The storage unit full of unsold poetry collections is a thing of the past.

E-commerce has solved the direct-to-consumer problem. Platforms like Shopify make it easy for a small publisher to run a professional online bookstore. Payment processing, fulfillment, customer service. All of it is accessible at a fraction of what it would have cost twenty years ago. Our website now accounts for about 15% of our total sales, and that percentage is growing. Direct sales are also our most profitable channel because we don’t share revenue with a distributor or retailer. Every dollar a customer spends on our website is a dollar that stays in the ecosystem of author, publisher, and reader.

What have we lost? Some things, I think. The independent publishing of twenty years ago was, by necessity, a local phenomenon. Your publisher was down the street. Your bookstore was around the corner. Your author readings were in your neighborhood. There was an intimacy to the relationship between publisher, bookseller, and reader that’s harder to maintain when your books are sold globally through Amazon and your authors live in different time zones. I miss the feeling of walking into a local bookstore and seeing our books on the shelf, knowing that the bookseller had ordered them because they believed in them, not because an algorithm suggested them.

I also think the barrier to entry being lower has created a noise problem. Twenty years ago, the difficulty of independent publishing meant that the publishers who survived were generally the ones with genuine editorial taste and business acumen. Today, anyone with a laptop and an account on IngramSpark can publish a book. That’s democratizing, and I support it in principle. But it also means that bookstores, reviewers, and readers are overwhelmed with choices. The signal-to-noise ratio has worsened. Good books from small publishers can still get lost in the flood, just as they could twenty years ago, but now they’re competing with a much larger number of titles for the same limited attention.

The economics have shifted in complicated ways. On one hand, it’s cheaper to start a publishing company today than it was twenty years ago. POD eliminates inventory risk. Digital distribution eliminates the need for a physical warehouse. E-commerce eliminates the dependence on traditional retail. On the other hand, the profitability ceiling for independent publishers hasn’t risen proportionally. Amazon’s dominance of book retail has compressed margins across the industry. The wholesale discount that publishers give to distributors and retailers, typically 55% of the retail price, hasn’t changed in decades, even as other costs have risen. An independent publisher today might have lower fixed costs than its 2002 equivalent, but the per-unit economics are just as tight.

At ScrollWorks, we benefit from every technological advance I’ve described. Our production process uses POD for backlist titles and short offset runs for new releases. Our marketing relies heavily on social media, email newsletters, and direct relationships with book influencers. Our distribution reaches every major retail channel. We’re incomparably better-equipped than the publisher I worked for in 2002. But the fundamental challenge is the same: finding great books, producing them with care, and getting them into the hands of readers who will value them. The tools have changed. The mission hasn’t.

I keep a photograph from that warehouse office on my desk. Nine people, a folding table, a stack of books. We didn’t know what we were doing, exactly, but we knew why we were doing it. I look at that photograph when the industry feels overwhelming, when the algorithms and the data and the market dynamics threaten to crowd out the simple, stubborn belief that good books matter and that someone needs to publish them. Twenty years ago, we did it with a photocopier and a broken elevator. Today, we have better tools. The work is the same.