Trade publishing over the last 20 years has gone from being a kind of guild or cottage industry into something that largely functions within multinational corporations. Since the stakes, in terms of the amount of the money that is actually made, are lower in trade publishing’s fiction, non-fiction, and poetry offerings than they are in TV or film, it has taken a little longer for this paradigmatic cottage industry to be assimilated into its new, sprawling digs. However, the process, typical across the information-age capitalist veldt, now appears near complete.

A telling case, stylistically, of the manner in which formerly independent small publishers have been quietly falling, is the Ecco Press. Begun by poet Daniel Halpern as a seeming labor of love in 1971, Ecco published beautiful editions of high-quality, low-selling books. It attracted such poets as Louise Glück and Jorie Graham, and published them before they were huge (for poetry) names. It published lesser-known works by beloved Modernist writers, such as Marcel Proust’s Pleasures and Regrets. It consistently ran in the red and limped along on the donations of rich friends, who saw it as a noble charity in the best tradition of belles lettres.

But in 1998, Halpern completed a deal by which Ecco became an imprint of HarperCollins, with Halpern at its head and its major authors in tow. Not a single employee from Ecco’s Hopewell, NJ, offices was taken along. It raised a few eyebrows in publishing, but was not quite the kind of scandál that makes headlines.

Jorie Graham and Louise Glück continue to publish at Ecco, which, as the press information from a recent Czeslaw Milosz book galley announces, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year as if nothing has happened. And the Proust is out of print.

But once taken into the fold, no house is an island. A large part of this process involves the consolidation of once disparate publishers. Take, for example, the venerable publishing entity Random House. Random House is now the umbrella for a variety of "publishing groups," each with its own target market, which are then broken down into further niches covered by various imprints. One of these groups contains the vestige of a (more successful) Daniel Halpern-like figure who had an eponymous house: Alfred A. Knopf.

While some trade publishing imprints are linked to individual figures—Judith Regan’s ReganBooks at HarperCollins or Nan A. Talese’s imprint at Random House are other examples—many have begun to be linked to interest groups, or, analogously, to ethnic groups, that is, to particular demographics. Interest groups are obviously familiar: for nonfiction, interest groups include the health conscious of various kinds (correlated to weight, gender, genetic predisposition, and age, among other things), car buffs, or military history reenacters.

Random House itself is owned by the German corporation Bertelsmann. HarperCollins and its many imprints—including William Morrow, Ecco, and ReganBooks—is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and Entertainment global empire. Farrar, Straus & Giroux is owned by the German corporation Holtzbrinck. Viacom owns Simon & Schuster and its related imprints. Penguin, Putnam, Viking, Dorling Kindersley, Riverhead, Grosset & Dunlap, Berkley, and Jeremy P. Tarcher are owned by Pearson plc, the British multinational firm.

As Al Greco, associate professor at Fordham University’s Graduate School of Business Administration recently noted in Publishers Weekly, it’s no accident that so many American publishers are owned by non-U.S. entities, since U.S. law bars foreign companies from getting into broadcasting, and American content "has legs" overseas, with foreign rights to American properties often being extremely valuable. (The fact that it’s being partially underwritten by non-U.S. corporations gives U.S. cultural imperialism an interesting twist, no?)

There are still some bigger name independent publishers left: Norton remains master of its domain, as do Walker & Co., Grove/Atlantic, Inc., and André Schiffrin’s New Press, begun in the wake of his dismissal from Pantheon after he failed to produce corporate rates of return. These houses routinely compete with the corporate-based houses for literary fiction and nonfiction readers, while university presses, increasingly conscious of the bottom line, continue to move into trade publishing to subsidize their less profitable titles.

The biggest change that corporations have brought to publishing—which remains based in New York City—is to demand profit margins consistent with their other businesses. The old-school network of small houses, independent reps, functioning journalism, and smaller stores allowed everyone (except the journalists, of course) a small piece of a book’s profits. But with books going directly from warehouse to superstore (or even printer to superstore) with few stops in between, corporate publishers are expected to make corporate rates of return—sometimes as much as 25%—on their properties.

Many fledgling corporate publishing e-ventures had business models similar to those of the dot.coms who strove to get as many people as possible using the product (i.e., those little digital "readers" with which one downloads e-books) before any money was made. As a result, these e-ventures weren’t held to commercial publishing’s profitability standards, but that business model seems to be in the process of being abandoned along with the rest of the ’90s-style dot.economy. How, then, might a fledgling independent publisher start to get a lay of the land? Noting publishing’s drive toward high-margin profitability is the first way. For publishing ambitions that do not primarily involve making a profit or even a livelihood, but simply consist of breaking even or getting the work out, there is plenty of room to maneuver. (More on this in a minute.)

Another thing to notice is that as it has moved under the umbrella of corporations, trade publishing has tended to gravitate toward the two ways corporations seem to understand writing: as information or as entertainment. If the kind of writing you like doesn’t fit into one of these two categories—or their evil aggregate, "infotainment"—you’re probably already a consumer of independently produced books (see, for instance, Schiffrin’s The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read). So even though trade publishers seem to have a specific imprint for each niche, they are not particularly good at creating or developing niches that do not resolve into one of the above two categories, and they never really have been.

Independents have always taken it upon themselves, sometimes at a loss, to get out the work they believe in. But in the age of the superstore, more and more independents are having to act like corporations in order to get their books on shelves. It’s kind of a catch-22: big independents rely on large grants, which in turn depend on putting up numbers, which depends on sussing the promotional mindset of the corporates, which makes the independents not very independent. Publishers such as Norton and Grove produce nice trade books, but like corporate publishers, they don’t always reflect an intimacy with their subjects that people "on the ground"—meaning, you, for your particular passion—have.

Corporations know this, and they strive for an "authentic" look and feel. But while there is money to send Nike representatives to elementary school basketball courts throughout the country, the market for books is considerably smaller and more fragmented than that of sneaker wearers. Scouts are not sitting in on readings in Brooklyn, contracts in hand. The only reason corporate publishers publish poetry at all is for the symbolic capital—it gives the enterprise old-school credibility. Despite this, or probably because of this, they only take on "names." So, for the time being, those producing books on the fringes of publishing are relatively safe from the modes and methods of corporate publishing.

Since the days of papyrus, fringe publishing has been vital to the furtherance of art and literature. Even if a book that’s published reaches only 500 people, if these people happen to be other practitioners of a particular métier, then it will have had a profound affect on the art as practiced. And if journalism were to catch up with the book, or were forced to catch up, then other readers would be in on its significance.

I recently published a friend’s book of poems, because I believed in the work, and because he wanted to get it out fast, and wasn’t worried about having his work packaged and branded. He delivered "camera ready" copy—i.e., he picked a font he liked on his word processor, adjusted the margins to fit the page size we’d chosen, and used a laser printer to print it out. He had a friend help him with Photoshop and delivered a black and white cover. We sent it to the printer, who did the rest. We printed 500 copies of his 72-page manuscript. The cost, including shipping, was a little over $900. The books are sold through Small Press Distribution in Berkeley. After a year, we have about 100 left. We’ve had no returns, but we also haven’t recouped any of the original $900 "investment" and we don’t expect to. We gave away many of the copies.

There are presses based on a somewhat similar business plan who have tried to provide a living for the visionaries (as they’d have been called three years ago if their books had been digital) behind them. Sander Hicks, blessed with a terrific talent for promotion, put his activist Soft Skull press onto the map and into many stores, all the while supporting his staff along with the causes and the work he loves. Hicks was recently forced to sell his personal library to keep the press going.

Specialty presses can have better luck. PowerHouse Books, an illustrated book press, publishes photojournalistic and artistic work that takes on subjects like sex workers or lesser known artists that other houses won’t or can’t touch, and they seem to be doing fine.

Publishers like Soft Skull or PowerHouse spend their first few years madly pushing their books in order to convince a distributor, such as the St. Paul, MN-based Consortium, to take them on, but micropublishers with more modest goals need not spend so much time and money on the promotion end of things. However one feels about Amazon.com, its "Amazon Advantage" program, by which independent publishers can get their books handled by the site, reduces the need for more expensive and frequently less efficient distribution. Local stores will often stock titles by local writers, and sell them on consignment. St. Mark’s Bookshop in New York City’s East Village has an entire consignment shelf.

I’ve purposefully been a little vague about the kinds of issues and interests around which publishers often organize. In New York City, the real story recently has been the explosion of ethnic-based newspaper and radio activity. The New York Times recently ran a front-page Metro section story on the proliferation of lower-wattage, ethnic-based radio stations, and the terrific followings (and sometimes profits) they have garnered. Many Voices, One City: The IPA [Independent Press Association] Guide to the Ethnic Press of New York City, a recently released directory, reports 24 ethnic-based dailies (from the better-known El Diario and Novoye Russkoye Slovo to the Dominican El Nacional and black Daily Challenge) and 90 weeklies. These papers help organize and generate dialogue within their communities.

Similarly, publishing houses like Random House continue to produce materials specifically targeted at different demographic markets. One such example is its imprint Strivers’ Row, named for the majestic blocks of row houses in Harlem designed by McKim, Mead and White in 1891. The reason for the creation of such imprints, as recently reported by the New York Times, is the success of black writers within the newly-identified market of black readers. Random House’s controversial decision to make ads for Strivers’ Row books double as pitches for Pine-Sol cleaner and other products points to the serious contradictions involved in such an enterprise. Reactions among black writers interviewed by the Times were mixed (some thought anything that gave black writers more opportunities is a good thing), but many found it an appalling step backward.

As market research gets better and better, and demographics more and more narrowly defined, independent publishing has an opportunity to cheerfully ignore the data, and publish the work that both addresses and challenges demographic foundations. And if it undermines the larger, profit-based market logic at the same time, all the better.

Alfred Schein is the pseudonym of a writer working within corporate publishing.