The “indie” label gets used as a marketing tool that diverts income and interest from actual indie presses and writers. “Indie cred” works for ventures like Bookshop.org, which, as we’ve discussed, provides income to indie bookstores (though less than what they’d get if you were to buy the book directly) and supports Ingram, a corporate rival to Amazon. It isn’t really helping small presses and indie writers build the long-term audiences and relationships we need—in fact, furthering Ingram’s dominance of the market hurts us. We see similar phenomena elsewhere: “indie” values and praise of the small press appear, but in a structure that doesn’t benefit us as much as you might think.
