The Quiet Rebellion of the Printed Page
Why Small Presses Matter Now More Than Ever
In an era of erasure, consolidation, and fear, small presses are keeping the soul of literature alive.
The world doesn’t end with a bang, it vanishes one bookstore at a time, one silenced writer, one book banned from a child’s hands. If you’re paying attention, you’ve seen the slow erasure of complexity, of dissent, of beauty that doesn’t fit the market. This is the world we’re living in and this is why small presses matter now more than ever.
We are watching the consolidation of the publishing industry into fewer and fewer hands—hands that answer to quarterly profit reports and market-tested narratives. Books are rejected not because they lack power, but because they lack "placement." Trans authors, disabled poets, immigrant visionaries, Indigenous truth-tellers—unless their stories can be neatly repackaged, they’re often left out of the room entirely. What’s dangerous is not just who gets published but who doesn’t.
Small presses have always existed at the margins. We were never meant to be mainstream. We publish books that don’t fit. Books that challenge, unsettle, or imagine new ways of being. We publish voices that won’t be heard unless someone chooses to listen, deeply and deliberately.
At Wayfarer, our origin was rooted in psyche and soil. We published works that uplifted but over time, as the world changed, so did we. After coming out as trans and watching state violence target the communities I belong to, I knew we couldn’t keep publishing as if nothing had changed. It wasn’t enough to be gentle, we had to be brave.
That’s why Wayfarer is evolving into a press that exists exclusively for marginalized voices. Not just open to them but built for them. In a time when fascism creeps closer, when trans writers are being erased and censored from public libraries, our mission is not just literary. It’s survival. Small presses are not sidelines—we are avant-garde, we are sanctuaries. We are not here to play it safe. We’re here to make sure someone still remembers how to tell the truth.
If you believe in this work, don’t wait for institutions to catch up. Support a small press. Share the books that move you. Buy direct from the publisher when you can. Make space for the messy, the complicated, the uncommodified voices. The soul of literature doesn’t live in the bestseller list; it lives in the work that nearly didn’t make it to print. We’re not going anywhere. We’ve got our hands in the soil, our spines intact, and a catalog of voices worth fighting for.
—The Wayfarers
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