Maybe it's my imagination, but it appears to me that electronic publications are pushing out the small press from the market. Since most small press pubs operate on practically a non-profit basis, it seems to me that contributing to electronic pubs is hastening the small press' death. For example, people are always talking about the loss of revenue for such organizations as The Small Press Association ,etc and the problem seems to be genuine.

For writers just starting out the small press has been the only place to break into the market and to try out one's talents before a genuine readership. But websites and the Internet seem to have given a crushing blow to these hard-copy markets. Therefore, I refuse to participate in electronic publishing which may, in the long run, result in the demise of the very markets which helped get me started.

Is all this just the product of my overactive imagination. Or is this paranoia warranted?

I can't speak for other publishers, but the impact of the Web on our business has been unmeasurably small. I run a small regional monthly magazine in a niche genre with a print run of 5,000, which may or may not qualify us as "small press" (depends on where you're coming from).

The web isn't killing the small press, just altering the playing field a bit. Think of presses like Coach House (and Ahadada, methinks) that utlize the web as a value-added channel to reach readers. Remember, the WWW is not essential. Whatever you create must be better than it would be in any other format—something that Coach House does well. Online, people want to read less, not more. The trick is in figuring out which exact piece of information they want and making it easy for them to find it.

Create for your reader: the user should drive the product. Always focus on what your audience will want, then give them the best possible quality and ease of use you can create. Us publishers are people who know when to cut. Whether it's on the Web or on paper, the old truism holds. Less is more.

Small press publications have a high failure rate without any "help" from new technology. They have the problems of small businessesAND of arts organizations. Technology giveth and technology taketh away. The small press as it is now is a product of new, cheaper printing processes. When the next breakthrough in cheap printing comes, there will be more printed small press pubs.

Small press publications have a high failure rate without any "help" from new technology. They have the problems of small businessesAND of arts organizations. Technology giveth and technology taketh away. The small press as it is now is a product of new, cheaper printing processes. When the next breakthrough in cheap printing comes, there will be more printed small press pubs.

These are interesting points. The small press these days is no less creative and adventurous than it was before the personal computer and desktop publishing, and it hasn't made it any more viable anyway—(but maybe less expensive?)

The small press is different these days than in the 60s and 70s. I feel the focus has shifted from the artistic to the business sensibility, in a sense.

Well, admittedly, I find that the quality of work online is generally crap. Online writers (the ones whom i have read) aren't concerned with how the industry works, how well something is written. Seems like they just want to see how many times they can google their byline.