Kayla Tanenbaum included me in her series of interviews at Columbia Journal, where she talks to writers and people working in publishing. Tt was one of the best conversations about the business of books that I’ve had in a long time.
KT: Why do you think we need indie presses?
AR: Traditional presses aren’t handling literature in the same way that they were historically. The catalog for one of the big five publishers, as they become more and more conglomerated, is focused on the bottom line. That means that they’re publishing more cookbooks, more children’s books, more books that they know are going to be successful. They’re marginalizing literary fiction and poetry. We’ve seeing poetry become completely marginalized in the last 30 to 40 years, and it’s to the point where no poets have an expectation of getting a book published by a traditional publisher. I’d hate to see that same thing happening to literary fiction or creative nonfiction