It’s 5:54 p.m. on Thursday, July 18, and I’m only two-thirds through my workday. I didn’t get a late start. In fact, I was up with the dawn so I could get a few hours of work in before waking my daughter for summer camp. Three and a half months ago, an event rocked my little corner of the publishing world, and ever since I’ve had two full-time jobs. The first: my day job as the executive editor of Black Lawrence Press, a job that regularly keeps me busy for fifty to sixty hours per week. The second: trying to recover from the utter disaster that started on March 28 when Small Press Distribution (SPD) closed without warning.
I’m a small press editor, meaning my colleagues and I operate outside of the sky-obscuring umbrella of Big Five publishing. It’s not easy running a small business in the arts, but we’ve been able to eke out an existence on the lush and vibrant heath that rims the margins of big publishing. And we’re not alone. There are well over four hundred small presses in the United States. Well, there were.
Distribution is the least visible and probably the least interesting part of the book business. But it is absolutely essential. Since its founding in 1969, Small Press Distribution offered that essential service to, as the name suggests, small presses. What made SPD unique was its willingness to work with tiny, niche, avant-garde, and fledgling presses with list sizes, sales numbers, and margins that many other distributors would sniff at.
When Black Lawrence Press started working with SPD in 2012, we had two dozen titles in print. We were new; we were young; we were finding our way. SPD offered us national distribution, making our titles available to mom-and-pop stores across the country as well as major chains. They also advocated for us in important moments. In 2018, for example, Amazon implemented a policy change requiring presses to individually shrink-wrap every copy of every book destined for their warehouses. This created not only a financial and logistical challenge but also a great deal of needless plastic waste. SPD went to bat for us and, in the end, we never had to shrink-wrap a single book. I doubt that Amazon’s policy reversal was entirely due to SPD’s efforts; I’m sure publishers and distributors of all sizes pushed back. But it was important, for a small press like us, to have SPD’s guidance and support.
Thanks to SPD, a raft of talented writers, and a dedicated staff, Black Lawrence Press has been able to grow and thrive. As of the writing of this article, we’ve published 340 books, expanded our staff, and founded scholarships and programs to offer support to the literary community. In the California Arts Council grantee database, SPD describes itself as a company that “forges a pathway to the book marketplace for independently published literary voices often excluded from and underrepresented in the culture at large. Reaching underserved readers with writing from a broad coalition of authors contributes to the vibrancy of our communities, and helps literature to prosper as an evolving and vital artform. Through book distribution, events, and public advocacy, SPD provides small presses and their authors with the reliable and professional network they need.”
We at Black Lawrence Press wholeheartedly believed in this mission and benefitted from SPD’s good work for many years. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that we would not be where we are today without SPD.
Black Lawrence Press is currently celebrating twenty years of publishing. We’re a small business in the arts, so keeping the lights on is sometimes a challenge. We’ve had lean times. We’ve had scary times. But not until March 28 did we ever have “Is this really the end?” times. And we weren’t alone. I imagine that hundreds of small press editors across the country were thinking the same thing. Whitney Koo, executive editor of Gasher Press, founded in 2018, told me, “When I first heard the news, it felt comical in a sad haha kind of reality of small press publishing: rubbing two nickels together and getting a penny. I remember thinking, ‘Is this going to end Gasher Press?’”