Flying Under the Radar
Why these data aren’t even close to representing what’s really going on in the publishing world is due to the fact in the past half decade we’ve seen an explosion of indie publishers thanks to the advent of affordable and easily accessible print on demand and digital printers.
How many indie publishers are there? No one really knows that either. There isn’t an umbrella organization, to my knowledge, in all of North America, let alone Europe and the rest of the world, that is representative of indie publishers. Given the number of independently published books available on Kindle and Smashwords, however, I’d hazard a guess the number of indie publishers ranks somewhere in the five to six figure range, each of them putting out, at a guess, an average of two to three titles a year.
At Smashwords alone it would appear there have been approximately 20,000 books published (based on 100,000 words/book, and Smashwords’ claim of 1,981,327,264 published words.) That figure could also represent about 6,700 publishers.
One site that lists independent publishers would lead one to believe there are approximately 850 indie publishers on their list, and that of course doesn’t include a great many across North America and the rest of the world. There are approximately 54 Canadian indie presses listed at Arsenalia, a list which is only inclusive of what realistically could be called small to medium indie presses in Canada, and certainly is not inclusive of the hundreds of micro-presses across the country. I can think of at least 20 other colleagues who operate micro-presses within Canada, and who publish about two to three titles a year. And that’s just within my own sphere of knowledge.
So, given just this microscopic tip of the new publishing iceberg, I suspect the real digital units sold represents an enormous and significant segment of the publishing economy, a grassroots, almost underground, publishing world that is like the mycelium, if you will, of the mushrooming world of publishing.
And in light of that possibility, the fact the Big Six and publishing analysts still haven’t grasped the impact or full extent of what HAS happened in publishing, means that indies like Five Rivers and a host of others, will continue to fly under the radar, remain absent from the census that would be vital to shaping economic and technological decisions in publishing.
Perhaps it’s time for indies to form a coalition, whether regional, national or global, to realize there is indeed power in numbers, and that together we may very well find ourselves with a place at the publishing bargaining table alongside the Big Six. Imagine that.
Long ago I dreamed of more writers being able to achieve their dreams through the internet revolution. I used to long to be published and tell myself it wasn't greedy because if I read more than I wrote, I was still a net audience for other writers. I could never forget other people's right to be heard whatever my own desires. I was and remain deeply grateful to have been published in print. And I don't know what my future holds as writer. It's oddly painful to see possibilities breaking out at a time when I am ill positioned, personally, to exploit them. But I hope and trust many young writers, like I was when I dreamed of possibilities, are going to find their audience and escape the "worlds of no" that can so discourage us when starting out. It's an exciting time to be a writer. I hope good things come of it.