(Note: I wrote this essay a couple mornings ago with the idea that someone would publish it and pay me, and then I realized the whole thing was probably too focused on Featherproof for any editor to care about it. But I liked it, so here it is.)

It was on the type of day that has Galleycat’s pager blowing up. Michael Wolff had written a gossipy piece about the end of Judith Regan’s reign of terror at HarperCollins. And USATODAY carried a story about James Patterson, Inc., the multi-million dollar fiction machine that pairs Patterson with young authors to collaborate on approximately 750 books a year. So when we had finished the rewrites on the mission statement for my little, two-year-old house, Featherproof Books, and posted it on our site, I was ready for the swell of public interest to lurch our way.

It never lurched.

It wasn’t simply that the other big publishing news of the day outshined us. We also never told anyone. We’d had a small ideological shift after being in business for two years, and “Dear Media, we’ve had a small ideological shift,” is not the way to start off a press release. At the time, our mission statement read: Featherproof Books is dedicated to the small press ideals of finding fresh, urban voices ignored by the conglomerates. The alteration came from removing that last “ignored by the conglomerates” bit. It’s not earth shattering, but it felt significant to us. We were sick of defining ourselves against something else.

When we started, we subscribed to the rhetoric of independent media. Big was bad. We’re fighting the good fight. Our books are better because we’re not as motivated to make money off of them (we’re at least half-right). In some ways, all of that still feels true to us, but the impetus came from the number of great books by our friends that had been published with the major houses, and the guilt we felt for lauding ourselves over them. Were we implying that they weren’t fresh and urban?

There’s a lot of sad news slithering its way through independent publishing at the moment. The bankruptcy of Publishers Group West, a distributor that handled many of what we consider to be our role-model presses, has changed the landscape faster than any technological advance that is supposed to kill books could. Soft Skull was purchased by a new publishing group. That group is still “independent” (i.e. not publicly owned), but Richard Eoin Nash, one of the guys we’ve tried to emulate, doesn’t own it anymore. It’s an imprint of something larger. Perseus, who has been cleaning up the PGW mess, has bought and shut down Carroll & Graf and Thunder’s Mouth Press, two idiosyncratic houses that suddenly cease to exist.

This past weekend at Chicago’s huge Printers Row Book Fair, we worked a small table under a tree that we cost-shared with a feminist poetry press. I gazed out from there at the big McSweeney’s tent, both jealous and admiring of the work they’ve done and the following they’ve built. And now comes news that they’re some $130,000 in the hole thanks to the PGW bankruptcy. They’re so hurting, they’re eBaying a Dave Eggers painting.

It’s made me think again about why we’re doing what we’re doing at Featherproof, trudging along to put out two books a year. Our seed money came when my partner, Zach, eBayed his car. We’ve had our distro troubles, too, and we’re constantly trying to figure out a way to pay our bills (We’ve run out of cars to sell). But that’s part of why we changed our motto. At this point, we have to admit that we’re doing something different. We’re not competing with the conglomerates, we’re trying to make books the way the independent music scene makes music: building mailing lists, throwing shows, putting together samplers, selling the books ourselves. We’re in bookstores across the country, and we’d like to be in more, but it’s time we admitted that we’re not an “alternative” to the conglomerated publishing houses. They’re doing their thing, we’re doing our thing. It’s a different business model, one that doesn’t necessarily sing the anthem of “Down with the Conglomerates,” because it doesn’t have to. We’re in a different ballgame, and I think there are a lot of presses out there like us, and we’re trying to figure out a new way to get readers’ attention.

Of course, Mr. Patterson, if you’re reading this, we wouldn’t say no to a little more money. We could certainly pair you with one of our writers, perhaps someone fresh and urban?

(Both McSweeney’s and Soft Skull are having sales. You can buy great books at huge discounts here and here.)