“The Small Press World is About to Fall Apart.” On the Collapse of Small Press Distribution
Last week, Diane Goettel was on vacation in Florida when she saw an alarming email on her phone. After 55 years, Small Press Distribution (SPD)—one of the last remaining independent book distributors in the US—was shutting down immediately, with no advance notice or transitional support. Its website went dark, its Twitter account was deleted, and no one was answering calls.
“The small press world is about to fall apart,” Goettel remembers thinking. She’s the executive editor of Black Lawrence Press, one of more than 400 publishers that relied on SPD to fulfill online orders and make copies available to bookstores and libraries. “A lot of people are really angry,” Goettel says. “I’m a little angry myself, but mostly I’m sad about the loss of this organization, and afraid of what it means.”
On the other side of the country, the executive editor of Noemi Press, Sarah Gzemski, was about to hop on a Zoom for her day job at the University of Arizona Poetry Center in Tucson when she received a text about SPD. “We were shocked, [though] some of the fulfillment issues we encountered over the past few months began to make more sense,” Gzemski says. “We’re already working on shoestring budgets, so for our distributor to close abruptly, without warning, while not paying us our earned income, is devastating.”
