Richard Nash was kind enough to contact me recently when I started following his Twitter. He was one of about a million people I wanted to interview for the book, but for various reasons (mostly because both of us are quite busy), it didn’t work out. But he was generous enough to write a blog post about the end of indie and the unfurling of the whole post indie landscape, which references my book. And it brought to mind the issue of whether or not indie is really and truly over. To be honest, I have to agree with Richard: “indie” is totally over. A few reviewers have likened my book to a eulogy, which is fine with me. The indie community as we knew it even a few years ago has scattered and divided and moved on. What’s next? Who knows. But more than a few people have good ideas. Richard’s one of them.

I’m of two minds about this funereal climate. On the one hand, Richard is correct in his assessment that indie as we knew it in the 80s, 90s, and early 00s is no more. As he puts it, “All is changed, changed utterly. Indie doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s dead. Which is OK, because it won. Open source, Twitter. Indie won. Etsy. The irresistible decline of major labels and network TV and corporate publishing. Indie won.” The fact that the tools are in our hands now means it’s open season, game on. Plus the branding of indie makes it pretty distasteful to those who know where it came from originally. So the post-indie landscape is here, and it’s one in which we have more tools to work with than ever before. When we talk about book publishing in particular, it occurs to me that almost all the small press books I buy these days are POD.  It is easier, faster, cheaper than ever to get a book out there. But then the onus of where that book goes and who reads it is very much in the author’s hands at that point. Even is you get a corporate publishing deal, you are not going to be paid to travel, get ads in newspapers, or any of the traditional promotional things unless you’ve written what they perceive as a blockbuster. 90% of the promotion that’s happened for Slanted and Enchanted has been DIY — just me and my Macbook, baby. That’s no diss on Holt, who have treated me quite well. It’s just the way things work.

And that too can lead to the syndrome I also address in the final chapter: too much shit. Those small press books I buy? I have a pile of at least twenty poetry books I’ve bought at readings and have not found time to read. I was shopping for bags on Etsy yesterday and quickly found myself overwhelmed at the sheer volume of choices. I’m still newish to Twitter and cannot keep up with the 80 something people I follow (how do you manage when you follow thousands?). There are a billion bands circulating their music online, for free, which is great, but what’s good? What sucks? Do you just believe Pitchfork’s reviews? How do you find time to filter it all?

I’m not sure. I think Cursor sounds like a great venture, combining 21st century social networking tools with printed material, but strategically, rather than in the scatershot way most of us do it now. I’m no fan of the closed-source Kindle model, but I like the idea of readers playing a greater part in the publishing process. An open source electronic model is sorely needed. Several people have asked me recently how the book is selling, for example, and I have no idea. Yet I know a few people are reading it. I wish I had a better way to talk to them and get their feedback.

So it’s anyone’s game to try and figure out what’s next. I only hope that people keep in mind where indie came from in the first place (that’s the reason I wrote the book, after all), and hold true to its tenets of community, self sufficency, and constant reinvention as we move on. And the corporate part of me supposes that’s fodder for a sequel, isn’t it…

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