Independence
Indie Authors, Publishers, and Booksellers
This is the first time Shelf Life has fallen on July 4. I hope it will not be the last, as the next instance of July 4 falling on a Tuesday or Thursday (in this case, Thursday) is next year. That gives me a whole 364 days to think up a topical topic for July 4, 2024. Perhaps 363 days, since I’m taking tomorrow off. After that, Shelf Life won’t fall on a July 4 till 2028 and surely by then society will have collapsed and all this will be moot.
But this topic, the topic of what independence means in the publishing/book industry, was low-hanging fruit. Not long ago over on the rapidly deteriorating birdspace someone asked #booktwitter for clarity about what an “indie author” and an “indie publisher” are. I thought about answering it but it would have taken too many characters and I got distracted really fast which is a normal function of that app. So I thought I would answer it here and I’ll throw in an explanation of “indie bookseller” as well, because I like you so much.
There are more of the Twenty Questions articles coming, by the way. This is just a little break for you (and for me.)
Many Shelf Lifes are written to answer questions I’ve encountered in online spaces where I couldn’t or wouldn’t, for whatever reason, answer the question right on the spot, in situ. Instead I add the topic to the long list and then, after I write it, the next time I encounter the question in the wild I just reply “Hey I wrote an essay on this” and drop the link. This hasn’t actually saved me any time yet but I’m sure it’ll start paying off in spades someday soon.
When an entity—for instance, a person or a company—is independent, that means they are not under the control of, nor under the authority of, any other entity outside themself. That’s the basic definition. Independent obviously takes on other shades of meaning depending on whether you are talking about a person or a business/company.
#BookTwitter is full of people who identify themselves as indie authors, indie published, indie booksellers—even indie editors and agents—and so on. There are also businesses identified as indie publishers and indie bookstores. I believe the person who asked the original question was confused because based on the commonly used definition of indie author—that is, an author who self publishes— that person is also an indie publisher—they’re an independent person and they published something. Right?
Indie author (as I mentioned above) typically refers to an author who has self-published one or more books. This is someone for whom the process of writing, editing, producing, and publishing the book has been fully under their own control. While they may have hired out contract workers to provide editorial, production, or design services, this person—the author—maintained complete creative and legal control over their product (the book). They are both the author and the publisher of the book.
This is true even if the author hires a contractor known as a packager in the industry. A packager is an editorial project manager who can be hired to produce a manuscript: If you pay them their asking price and hand them your manuscript, they will take care of everything from development editing, copyediting, proofreading, cover design, composition, printing, shipping, logistics, and so on. This is not, typically, one person who provides all those services personally but a project manager who subcontracts as needed. Many publishing companies use packagers when they don’t have in-house production staff or when their in-house production staff is overloaded and they need to get more books out than they have workers to handle.
The packager is a worker for hire, not a publisher. Even if an author uses the services of a packager to produce and publish their book, the author is still considered an indie author. There’s really no difference between hiring a copyeditor, a proofreader, and a cover designer versus hiring a packager to manage those hires. The author is simply using a contractor to provide some of the services the author does not, themself, have the skillset to do.
A person may also refer to themself as an indie author if they have written one or more manuscripts, and are unattached to any agency or publishing company, even if those manuscripts have not been published. This person may go on to self-publish and remain an indie author, or they may sign with a publisher and become a trad-published (or traditionally published) author. A person who has written a book is an author; the author of that book. The book need not be published for a person to be the author of it; every written work has an author whether it is published or not.
An indie publisher, on the other hand, is something very different. This term does not refer to individuals who have self-published their own book, though I can see how, logically, it could mean that. Indie publisher usually means the publishing company is not part of a larger publishing or media conglomerate; that it operates independently of a larger corporation. An independent publisher may be large or small; they may publish three books each year or thousands. The key is that they aren’t owned by another company.
Consider Basic Books: They are sometimes characterized as a small press based on the quantity of titles they put out or the revenue they bring in annually. However, Basic Books is part of Hachette Book Group, which in turn is part of Hachette Livre, which is part of Lagardère Publishing, which is the publishing arm of Lagardère S.A. Basic Books is small but it is not an indie publisher or an indie press.
On the other hand, consider Wiley. Wiley is a large company with several thousand employees and almost 2 billion in yearly revenue, but they’re not owned by another company. At the top is a board of directors, the chairman of which is Jesse Wiley, who succeeded his dad Peter Wiley in the position. Although the company is publicly traded and no longer solely owned by the Wiley family, it has not been sold to a larger company and the Wiley family is still very involved in operating it.
Another good example is Sage Publishing (where I used to work), which was founded and is still owned by Sara Miller McCune. They put out hundreds of titles each year and have offices on four continents, but everything ultimately answers to one person. McCune has arranged to roll ownership of Sage into an independent trust after her death so that the company remains independent.
An indie publisher, then, is any publisher that is not owned by another, larger company. Indie publishers may be traditional publishers, vanity publishers, or hybrid publishers—as long as the ownership structure is independent. An author who is published by an indie publisher using a trad model is a trad published author, not an indie author. Although the publishing company’s ownership structure is independent, the author did not publish independently in their own capacity as author and publisher. The author was published by a publishing company.
An indie bookstore is similar to an indie publisher in that it is not owned by or part of a larger corporation. Size of the bookstore—that is, the size of the physical bookstore or the quantity of units in the chain of stores—is irrelevant. The ownership structure is what makes a bookstore indie or not indie. Powell’s, for example, is a small chain of four bookstores owned by the Powell family, and the headquarters—Powell’s City of Books—is the largest indie bookstore in the world. Many indie bookstores are single-location shops.
Other than Powell’s some of the most famous indie bookstores are Los Angeles’s The Last Bookstore, New York’s The Strand, DC’s Kramerbooks, and Boston’s Harvard Bookstore.
Indie bookseller refers to two things: First, it may refer to an indie bookstore; second, it may refer to a person who works at an independent bookstore selling books, as opposed to a bookseller who works in a corporate-owned bookstore like Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, or Hudson News.
Independent bookstores are represented in the United States by the American Booksellers Association. Member booksellers report sales back to the ABA to create the Indie Bestseller list and may recommend books to the Indie Next list.
I also mentioned indie agent and indie editor above, although those are titles that don’t get bandied around as much and, as such, don’t have definitions as clear as indie author, indie publisher, and indie bookseller. If I encountered someone who represented themself as an indie agent or indie editor, I would assume that person meant to indicate they are an agent or an editor who does not work for a larger company, ie, an agency or a publishing company.
It’s not unusual for literary agents to work independently. A literary agent’s tools of the trade are their knowledge of the market, book development skills, and (perhaps most important) their connections with acquisitions editors in the industry to whom they can sell manuscripts. A literary agent who has all these things does not need to work at an agency to be legitimate or do an excellent job.
Conversely, being part of an agency does not, necessarily, indicate that an agent is legit or will do a good job. Plenty of people decide they want to be a literary agent, grab a like-minded friend, create an LLC, and book—they work for an agency. The best way to vet an agent, whether they’re an indie or part of an agency, is to evaluate what manuscripts they have sold, and to whom.
Indie editor might mean a lot of things because, as I’ve said in Shelf Life a lot of times, there are all kinds of editors. An acquisitions editor is unlikely to be indie—the acquisitions editor usually works for the publishing company and has the authority to sign books for that company. However, I’ve known a few freelance acquisitions editors—people who do contract work for a publishing company but are not employed by the publishing company.
Much more often development editors, line editors, and copyeditors (as well as proofreaders and individuals who have all of the above skills) work independently, providing editorial services on a freelance basis. There are freelance editors who work only with authors, those who work only with publishers, and those who work with both publishers and authors. Any of these editors may consider themselves indie editors as they do not work for a company. Many editorial roles have been converted from in-house to contract/freelance over the last twenty years, so there’s no need to be suspicious of “indie” editors just because they are independent. Inquire about a sample edit or request testimonials from previous clients to make sure you’re hiring the real deal.
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