Could Small Be Publishing’s Next Big, Too?

By Ron Hogan on December 27, 2007 8:36 AM

It took me a while, but I finally caught up to Rob Walker‘s article for the NYT Magazine about the commercial boom in handcrafted merchandise, and though I haven’t got any concrete answers, it seems like it’s a phenomenon that book publishers should be watching carefully. Substituting “small, independent publishers, maybe even self-publishers” for “craft artisans,” of course. Heck, maybe iUniverse or Lulu.com or some company like that already gives us a handy reference point, albeit with less of the anti-corporate ethos that Walker describes pervading the Etsy world, although I suppose a more direct parallel would be an Amazon.com-like environment where only small press books were sold…

Ah, wait. Thanks to Gawker, I’ve found JustBookz.com, an “online independent bookstore” dedicated to “books published by Independent authors and small press trade book and children’s book publishers,” so there’s that. But is there a similar site getting Etsy-sized traffic/business I haven’t heard about yet? Probably not; if an independent online bookstore had sold $4.3 million of books to 300,000 customers last November, I imagine there’d be some press releases circulating.

Anyway, here’s a passage from Walker’s article worth mulling over:

“Buying something from an indie craft artist can result in a buyer-seller connection,” Walker writes, “but it can also make consumption itself feel like a creative act. This is the crucial element fueling the craft boom: People show up at the fairs, the shops and the Web sites. And they spend money.”

That reminds me a little bit of Japan’s semi-underground manga economy, but it also raises an interesting pair of questions: When you buy books, how often do you feel a “buyer-seller” connection, let alone a connection to a book’s creator? And when was the last time buying a book made you feel like you were being creative?