In February, four small American literary presses agreed to share their 2025 accounts with this review. The presses were Coracle Editions of Northampton, the Watchhouse Press of Brattleboro, Two Window Books of Tucson, and Crinoline of Hudson, New York. The agreement was conditional: no individual title revenues would be named, and the figures would be reproduced only as ranges.
The exercise was suggested by Wren Brodie, the founder of Two Window Books, after a panel discussion at the Tucson Festival of Books in March 2025. Brodie said, into a microphone that may or may not have been on, that the trade press romanticised small publishing in roughly the same way that food magazines romanticised farming.
The numbers that follow are not a representative sample. Four presses out of the roughly six hundred independent literary publishers operating in the United States in 2025 cannot stand for an industry. They can, however, stand for themselves.
In aggregate, the four presses published thirty-one titles in 2025. Total gross revenue across the four was between $1.41 million and $1.58 million, depending on how distributor advances were attributed across fiscal years.
Total expenses, including printing, distribution, royalties, design, office rent, and salaries, were between $1.32 million and $1.49 million. The combined net margin across the four presses, before tax, was approximately six per cent.
That figure is not, in itself, unusual. What is unusual is how unevenly it was distributed. Crinoline, the smallest of the four, ran a small loss in 2025 of about $11,000. The Watchhouse Press, the largest, ran the highest net, at roughly $74,000.
Coracle Editions, founded in 2017 by the editor Sage Marchetti and her partner Dan Glasser, occupies the middle ground. The press published six titles in 2025, ran a small profit, and paid its two co-editors a combined $52,000 in salary.
Marchetti, asked whether the salary was sustainable, gave the answer most small publishers give. "It is sustainable because Dan also teaches," she said. "It would not be sustainable on its own."
This is the unwritten footnote of most small-press accounting. The income of the founders frequently comes from another source — teaching, freelance editing, a partner's job, an inheritance, a remote consulting contract. The press's books rarely show this subsidy because the subsidy does not pass through the press.
The Watchhouse Press is the exception, and an instructive one. Founded in 2009, the press has spent fifteen years building its backlist, which now contains a hundred and twelve titles. Backlist sales in 2025 accounted for sixty-three per cent of revenue.
Frontlist titles, by contrast, accounted for only thirty-one per cent of revenue, with the remaining six per cent coming from subsidiary rights, foreign licensing, and a small amount of bookshop direct sales.
This ratio is the secret of small-press sustainability. A press with a backlist of a hundred titles, each selling between fifty and three hundred copies a year at an average cover price of seventeen dollars, can generate enough recurring revenue to underwrite the riskier frontlist.
None of this is hidden knowledge. The trade press has discussed backlist economics for forty years. What is less often discussed is how long it takes to build a backlist of that kind, and how many small presses fail before they reach the inflection point.
Crinoline, founded in 2022, is in that earlier phase. The press has fourteen titles in print. Its backlist contributes about twenty-two per cent of revenue. Its founder, Lila Vance, was open about the press's position. "We are three years from sustainable," she said, "if we can keep publishing at the current pace and if no single title fails badly enough to wipe out the year."
Vance subsidises the press from her work as a freelance designer for two academic journals. She does not draw a salary. Her co-editor, Marcus Pell, does, at approximately $28,000 a year for four days a week.
Two Window Books, the most recently established of the four, is also the most experimentally financed. Brodie raised an initial $180,000 in 2023 from a combination of private investment and a small literary trust grant. The press has spent down approximately sixty per cent of that capital in two and a half years.
"We have eighteen months of runway," Brodie said. "After that, the press either covers its costs from sales or it does not." She did not elaborate on what would happen in the second case.
The four presses share certain assumptions. All four print in runs of between fifteen hundred and three thousand copies. All four use the same Michigan-based distributor, which charges a sixty-five per cent gross-to-net deduction. All four pay royalties of between seven and ten per cent of net receipts.
None of the four offer advances to authors above $5,000, and three of the four offer no advance at all for first books. The fourth offers between $500 and $2,000, depending on the title.
These figures will surprise no one who has worked in small publishing. They may surprise readers who have read the bound proofs of these presses' titles and assumed, reasonably, that a serious book must be backed by serious money.
The serious money, at this scale, is the founders' time. The four presses between them employ nine paid people, full and part-time. The volunteer labour, including the founders' unbilled hours, would, if costed at market rates, raise the combined expense base by approximately forty per cent.
What this means, practically, is that small-press accounting is not a description of an economy. It is a description of a subsidy that the founders provide, often without naming it, to a literary culture that benefits from their labour and does not pay for it.
None of the four founders said this with bitterness. All four said it with the patience of people who decided, some years ago, that the trade-off was worth it. Whether the trade-off remains worth it is a question that the next five years of independent publishing will answer for each of them separately.