The Passion and Pragmatism of the Small Publisher

Abstract

In a literary marketplace increasingly dominated by large multinational conglomerate publisher companies, and both mediated and disrupted by technology companies, this chapter questions what the role of the small and/or independent publisher is—or might be—within a twenty-first-century publishing environment, as well as examining discourses which situate small publishers as sustaining quality publishing and bibliodiversity. Drawing on a sample set of semi-structured interviews with commissioning editors of small UK publishing companies, this chapter examines editorial choice-making. This chapter interrogates whether small publishers identify themselves as operating against, or beyond the limits of, mainstream publishing in their choices of books, or whether they perceive themselves to be working within a broader ecosystem of twenty-first-century publishing.