At publishing collectives and cooperatives, indies stand together to reshape traditional publishing models, whether through juicing their purchasing power, streamlining their operations, or pursuing nonhierarchical ideals.
Strategic partnerships can give indies a competitive edge. “We’re hell-bent on making this industry as efficient and profitable as possible,” says Ulysses Press CEO Keith Riegert, president of the Stable Book Group, a co-op formed earlier this year by Ulysses, She Writes Press, Trafalgar Square Books, and VeloPress, with Galpón Press as a client and Mountain Gazette Books as a partner.
Stable, Riegert says, is building a “lean team for the largest publishing portfolio,” sharing resources and centralizing operations. It consolidates such operations as managing production and paying royalties, and members’ combined catalogs increase everyone’s marketing reach. “We have intentionally looked for companies that have category killers in their niches,” Riegert adds. “We can treat it like an investment portfolio and be as diversified as possible.”
Ulysses is also among nine members of the growing Publishers Cooperative, established in February to fuel indies’ purchasing power. Other members include AdventureKeen, C&T Publishing, Gibbs-Smith, Mango Publishing, Mixed Media Resources, Mountaineers Books, Schiffer Publishing, and the latest addition, Red Wheel/Weiser. Belonging to Publishers Cooperative provides “a clear economic benefit in that you act as and look like a larger entity,” says Brad Farmer, CEO of Gibbs-Smith, enabling members to streamline best practices, compare costs, and negotiate better deals on print runs, shipping, and software licensing.
Other cooperative enterprises operate on a much smaller scale. Thinking Ink Press of Campbell, Calif., is a coequal partnership among Anthony Francis, Betsy Miller, Liza Olmsted, and Keiko O’Leary, who “share decision-making, creative direction, and profits equally,” according to Olmsted.
Thinking Ink is for-profit, but its socially inclusive program permitted it to seek fiscal sponsorship from a tax-exempt Bay Area nonprofit, Independent Arts Media. Thanks to this alliance, “we can apply for grants, the grant money goes to them, and they disperse the money to us,” Olmsted says, enabling the publisher to fund its mission to publish books for queer, neurodivergent, and disabled readers.
Taking the Long View
Collective publishers are distinct from cooperatives, often more motivated by ideological ideals than by increasing the bottom line. One of the longest-running collectives, FC2, marked 50 years of literary endeavor last year.
Founded in 1974 as the Fiction Collective and reorganized in 1989 under its present name, the author-run nonprofit is an imprint of the University of Alabama Press publishing six books per year. FC2 operates with support from foundations, arts councils, and the institutions where its authors write and teach. Once FC2 decides to acquire a title, UAP handles contracts, copy editing, production, and distribution.
FC2 board chair Joanna Ruocco views UAP as a bulwark in uncertain times for funding. “We have not been as impacted as presses that rely on National Endowment for the Arts grants,” she says. Though “university presses are on the line” when priorities change and budget decisions are made, FC2 feels confident in its home institution.
The collective is a stubborn labor of love, too. “We don’t have any paid staff,” Ruocco says. “We have the skill and devotional, donated energy of our members,” who collaborate on acquisition and developmental editing. Authors who publish with FC2 become members of the collective, and their books remain in print in perpetuity. She notes that FC2 wants to “remove barriers to access” by investing in such projects as 2023’s Infinite Constellations, a speculative fiction anthology with work from 30 writers of color edited by Khadijah Queen and K. Ibura.
Ruocco appreciates FC2’s “uncompromising” aesthetic vision. While a commercial title “has to have buzz and hit a certain number of sales on publication day,” she says, FC2 acquires manuscripts that “push boundaries of who it’s for and what narratives can do.” No stranger to the trade, Ruocco writes queer historical romance as Joanna Lowell. But at FC2, “we like things that push to the edge of every genre envelope. We want to bring those writers in.”
For board member Brian Conn, the collective exists to promote emergent writing. “We have to follow our instincts” rather than known formulas for success, he says. “We’d rather have a book that sells 100 copies a year for 20 years” than a flash in the pan. The collective welcomes such unpredictable texts as Candace R. Nunag’s debut, A Solar Flare (out now), inspired by an 1859 geomagnetic event, and its backlist includes work by Lucy Corin (Everyday Psychokillers), Samuel R. Delany (Hogg), and Stephen Graham Jones (The Fast Red Road).
FC2 offers two annual cash prizes that include publication, both of which opened for submissions on August 15. The $15,000 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize, funded by the Jarvis and Constance Doctorow Foundation at the Community Foundation of Utah, most recently went to John Haskell’s Trying to Be (Oct.) and Karen An-hwei Lee’s Marimo, Mon Amour (fall 2026). Winnings for the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest, whose winners include Jesse Efron’s Low-Risk Activities (Sept.) and Radhika Singh’s Weirdly Tuned Antennae (fall 2026), were doubled this year, to $3,000.
“Maybe it feels a little strange that we’re suddenly doubling a prize amount” when other publishers must hold steady, Ruocco says of the Sukenick. Yet “his widow, Julia Nolet, reached out about creating a larger gift, to make the prize feel more materially significant” at a time when “the larger climate for the arts is incredibly disturbing and indie publishing is more important than ever.”
Aesthetic Appeals
Ugly Duckling Presse, which like FC2 is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, publishes poetry, books in translation, and experimental works. Forthcoming titles include Jonathan González’s Ways to Move: Black Insurgent Grammars (Nov.) and Terrence Arjoon’s The Disinherited (Nov.). UDP keeps historically significant work alive with publications including Exercises 1950–1960 (out now), a collection of poems by Greek revolutionary poet Yannis Ritsos, translated by Spring Ulmer, and the first translation of Ronald M. Schernikau’s 1980 queer coming-of-age story, Smalltownnovella (Nov.), translated from the German by Lucy Jones.
UDP originated as a zine in the 1990s before incorporating as a not-for-profit in 2002. Today, it’s a distribution client of Asterism but distributes its own bulk orders. Annual output varies, press manager Marine Cornuet says, “because we want to have energy to devote to each book.”
Presently, UDP has four paid part-time staff members, and three serve on the official 11-member editorial collective; it also offers two nine-month paid apprenticeships. After UDP’s editorial collective decides what to publish, staff and apprentices “do the nitty-gritty of making and distributing the physical objects,” Cornuet says. Having a large editorial group means “we can cover a lot of ground, because they know who to contact” when UDP posts a call for submissions.
“The biggest change over the last 15 years” was the decision to pay UDP’s part-time staff, Cornuet adds. Early on, “editors were designing and typesetting and running the studio for free. Especially in a city that’s so incredibly expensive, volunteer labor alone cannot sustain the press.”
Since 2006, UDP has been housed in a former factory in Gowanus, Brooklyn, and production decisions are made by the team on a project-by-project basis. The press specializes in small print runs of around 700 copies per book, 500 per chapbook, and “we print most of our covers in-house” on a Heidelberg, says UDP editor Milo Wippermann.
Economy remains a strong consideration for UDP, which depends on book sales and grants; New York State is its biggest funder. “Our NEA funding was cut, and state funding is going to become more competitive,” Wippermann says. “We’re working on shoring up other possibilities.” Readers can support the press through subscriptions, and UDP partner bookstores receive special discounts and free returns.
A Community Effort
Each collective publisher has its own capacities and constraints. At City Works Press, a project of the San Diego Writers Collective, codirector Jim Miller says sustainability requires “three things: labor, money, and community. All of our books are paid for as we go.”
City Works began as a literary journal in 1994, and over the past year it’s published five books including Stories of San Diego: A Collection About People of Color and Covid, edited by Lindsay M. Hood. It’s distributed by Sunbelt Publications of Chula Vista, Calif., and directed by Miller and Kelly Mayhew, faculty members at San Diego Community College. Next year, the press will publish a memoir by former Black Panther and emeritus SDCC faculty member Roberta Alexander.
Miller describes City Works as “an alternative to the postcard view of San Diego, with emerging student writers alongside people who are well-known.” The catalog includes the Reclaiming Our Stories series, with contributions from writing workshop students; poet Jimmy Santiago Baca’s collection Rita and Julia; and the Sunshine/Noir series of writing from San Diego and Tijuana, edited by Mayhew and Miller.
City Works sells or donates books at community readings and at SoCal universities that teach about regional culture. By design, the books are in limited supply. “We try to maintain a policy of no reprints,” Mayhew says. Once the press sells through a print run, the book is retired, and the author retains copyright.
Frugality and readings that double as fund-raisers have kept City Works afloat. “In the 20 years since this press has come out, there’s a graveyard of other projects locally that aimed to be bigger, flashier, and didn’t survive more than a year,” Miller says. The press is “DIY, like a band that shows up at the gig with the CDs in their trunk. That’s us.”
“You have to be a multitool”
AK Press in Chico, Calif., is a worker-run collective. Founded in 1990, it celebrates 35 years of radical publishing in 2025; its seven members identify as anarchists and describe the press as a political project. “Worker self-management and control over our labor” are written into AK’s bylaws, says press member Suzanne Shaffer. “It’s important to us to embody our politics.”
At AK, “we’re collective, which is different than ‘worker-owned’ or ‘cooperative,’ ” says AK worker Angelica Sgouros. “You can have a workers’ co-op that has a power structure, a boss, stratified pay. We’re nonhierarchical. We decide on our raises and all the financial questions, and a lot of the day-to-day operating is through collective decision-making.”
AK publishes and distributes around 16–20 books per year, including a Working Classics series (The Famous Speeches of the Eight Chicago Anarchists, Nov.) and the Legacy Left series, small books featuring contemporary activists interviewing movement elders (A Southern Panther, out now). Speculative fiction novellas in its Black Dawn series include Ancestors (out now) by adrienne maree brown.
“We’ve always been a scrappy operation, but in the beginning, it was a bunch of activists” learning to publish quality books on a timely schedule, Shaffer says. Now, everyone still participates in the acquisition process, but a publishing team focuses on editorial and marketing, while a distribution team manages order fulfillment. “You have to be a multitool at AK,” Sgouros says.
Over the decades, AK has built a network of fellow travelers. “We do exclusive distribution for a number of very small presses,” Shaffer says, including Girl Dad Press and fellow collectives Between the Lines and Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. Like UDP, AK offers monthly and annual subscriptions to new releases, and it finds creative ways to get titles into readers’ hands: the press currently is running a preorder campaign in collaboration with worker-owned Pilsen Community Books in Chicago for Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis (Nov.), edited by Menominee Native author Kelly Hayes. It’s also produced a paperback prison edition of Garrett Felber’s biography of jailhouse lawyer and Black bookseller Martin Sostre, A Continuous Struggle (out now), as part of its commitment to providing books for incarcerated readers.
Belonging to a collective means participating in debate, realizing shared visions, and taking on projects of long-term artistic and political importance. Or, as Shaffer puts it, “We’re all committed to figuring out, together, how we put our ideals into practice.”
