Good Intentions Aren't Enough: The Uncomfortable Truth About Who Works at Indie Presses

Walk through the booth space at any indie literary festival, and you'll see it everywhere—small presses wearing their progressive values like a badge. Catalogs full of debuts from queer writers, translations from Global South authors, poetry collections by Indigenous voices that no corporate imprint would touch. The mission statements practically glow.

But ask who's answering the submissions inbox, who's designing the covers, who's running the social media account—and the picture gets a lot more complicated.

"There's this assumption that because we care about representation on the page, we've figured it out behind the scenes," says one acquisitions editor at a nonprofit literary press in the Midwest, who asked to remain anonymous. "We haven't. Not even close."

The Staff Room Looks Different Than the Catalog

Small press publishing has a staffing paradox that people in the industry talk about quietly, if at all. The books these presses champion are often explicitly about race, class, queerness, disability, and the margins of American life. The people producing those books are, in many cases, overwhelmingly white, college-educated, and working for wages that effectively screen out anyone without family financial support.

A 2022 survey by Lee & Low Books—one of the few recurring industry-wide diversity audits in publishing—found that the broader publishing workforce remained about 76% white. Independent presses weren't broken out separately, but people who work in that space say the numbers aren't meaningfully better, and in some cases may be worse, because small operations hire less frequently and rely heavily on unpaid internships to fill capacity gaps.

"If your pipeline is built on interns, and interns are built on people who can work for free in expensive cities, you've already decided who gets in the door," says Marisol Reyes, a freelance book designer based in Chicago who has worked with more than a dozen indie presses over the past eight years. "It doesn't matter what your mission statement says."

Pay Equity: The Number Nobody Wants to Talk About

For all the values-forward language on small press websites, salary transparency remains rare. When it does appear in job postings, the numbers are often striking—not in a good way. Entry-level editorial roles at indie presses frequently advertise in the $30,000–$38,000 range, even in cities like New York, Portland, and Chicago where cost of living makes those figures genuinely unworkable without outside income.

"I took a job at a press I really believed in," says one former marketing coordinator in the Pacific Northwest, now working in a different industry. "I believed in their authors. I believed in their politics. I also had $60,000 in student loan debt and couldn't make rent. Those two things don't coexist easily."

The counterargument from press directors usually involves math: small presses are operating on shoestring budgets, many with significant grant dependency, and they simply can't compete with corporate publishing salaries. That's real. But critics point out that the burden of those budget constraints falls disproportionately on the people with the least financial cushion—which maps, predictably, onto race and class.

"The budget constraints are real," acknowledges one press director in the Southeast who did agree to speak on the record. "But I also think we've used them as an excuse not to ask harder questions about who we're structuring our organizations for."

The Internship Pipeline Problem

Unpaid and low-stipend internships remain a structural cornerstone of small press operations across the country. Editing, publicity, social media, even some design work gets routed through interns—often MFA students or recent graduates who are, statistically, more likely to be white and more likely to have financial backing from family.

Some presses have started to reckon with this. A handful of independent publishers have moved to paid internship models in the last few years, often by writing internship costs into grant applications or restructuring budgets. Others have partnered with HBCUs or community colleges to actively recruit from student populations that have historically been locked out of publishing pipelines.

"We had to get honest about the fact that posting on the same MFA listservs we'd always used was going to get us the same applicants we'd always gotten," says one editorial director at a poetry press in the South. "That sounds obvious, but it took us years to actually change the behavior."

Workplace Culture: The Harder Conversation

Hiring is only the beginning. Several people interviewed for this piece described indie press workplaces where the progressive exterior didn't match the internal culture—where employees of color felt tokenized, where disability accommodations were treated as inconveniences, where the unspoken norms of the office reflected a very specific cultural background that not everyone shared.

"There's a version of 'indie press culture' that has its own gatekeeping," says one former editor who is Black and left her position at a small literary nonprofit after two years. "It's just gatekeeping around different things—taste, references, a certain kind of literary seriousness. And those things aren't neutral. They come from somewhere."

Small press directors who are actively working on these issues tend to describe it as slow, unglamorous work. Pay audits. Revised hiring language. Structured feedback processes that don't rely on people feeling comfortable enough to speak up informally. Some have brought in outside consultants. Others are doing it internally, with mixed results.

"We had a hard conversation last year about the fact that we'd published three books about immigration in two years and had never had an immigrant on staff," says one press co-director. "That's not nothing. That's a problem."

Moving From Rhetoric to Practice

None of this is unique to independent publishing—these are industry-wide failures that big five publishers have faced loudly and publicly, particularly since 2020. But indie presses occupy a specific position that makes the gap between stated values and internal practice feel more acute. These are organizations that have explicitly positioned themselves as alternatives to a broken system. The standard they're being held to is, in part, the one they set for themselves.

The presses making genuine headway tend to share a few things in common: they've stopped treating diversity work as a communications problem and started treating it as an operational one. They're asking structural questions—about pipelines, pay scales, and who gets to define "fit"—rather than just adding a land acknowledgment to their website.

"The books we publish matter," says Reyes, the Chicago designer. "I genuinely believe that. But the people making those books matter too. And right now, a lot of presses are asking readers to celebrate the work without looking too hard at the conditions it's made under."

That's a tension the indie publishing world is going to have to sit with—and, ideally, do something about. Good intentions built this community. Structural honesty is what's going to sustain it.