The Quiet Boom

The story people tell about independent publishing is usually a story about volume, and the volume is real. More than three and a half million self-published titles appeared last year, and the number climbs every year. In the United States, books brought out through indie channels now outnumber those from the traditional houses by a wide margin — not a rounding error, an order of magnitude.

Volume, though, is the least interesting thing about it. The interesting question is who is choosing this road, and why.

For decades "self-published" carried a quiet asterisk. It described a writer who couldn't get in the front door and slipped around the back, and the reputation was, frankly, earned — plenty of what got printed should have stayed in the drawer. What has shifted in the 2020s isn't mainly that the door swung open. It's that more writers who could get through the front door are deciding not to knock.