You're not coming in here on your own. Photograph: Andy Drysdale/Rex
Flying the flag of independence is a mark of respect in most areas of popular culture ... apart, it seems, from literature. Can you imagine any serious film reviewer refusing to watch anything other than the major Hollywood blockbusters?
Can you imagine New Musical Express (in its heyday, at least), only focusing on artists and records from the big corporate music labels, and ignoring the independent record company explosion of the late 70s, the ferment of hugely influential musical experimentation still audible in bands like Franz Ferdinand, the Arctic Monkeys and Bloc Party.
Doing it yourself is to be much admired in music and cinema. That mainstay of Hollywood, Robert Redford, was so enamoured by the growing movement of indie cinema in the United States that he set up the Sundance Festival to give the film-makers an outlet and an audience.
Without indie music, there would be no Smiths, no Happy Mondays, no Kylie, even (she was on Stock, Aitken and Waterman's own indie label, PWL). Without indie cinema, there would be no Reservoir Dogs, no Ghost World, no Night of the Living Dead. Without indie publishing there would be no ... who? Who are the big indie writers, those who refuse to compromise by not allowing The Man to dictate what and how they should write, and earn massive respect because of it?
The literary world only bestows acceptance, it seems, on those who are published through the traditional avenues. Independent and small presses get short shrift - national newspaper supplements seem loath to review indie books, the big high street sellers won't stock them, unless the books are about the tough lives of mill girls or histories of public house names, which can be shoved on a shelf marked "local interest".
Perhaps the problem is that independence in books is too closely associated with vanity publishing. Few diamonds are found in the welter of self-published books, and booksellers or reviewers probably don't have the time to distinguish between the output of a small but genuine publisher and something knocked up on a frustrated author's PC in an afternoon.
The iconic punk fanzine Sniffin' Glue is infamous for its front page depicting three guitar chord positions and the exhortation: "Now go and form a band" (although Sniffin' Glue editor Mark Perry later claimed it had never actually appeared in the 'zine). Which, presumably, is all right for those pink-haired oiks whose noses bristled with spots and safety pins, and the musical tribes they begat over the next three decades, but popular music and low-budget movies aren't books, are they?
That books are a much higher art than pop or film, is presumably the reason. Books are lovingly written by intelligent, creative people, edited by intelligent, creative people, packaged and designed by intelligent, creative people. If just anyone starts punting books on to the street without the careful control of intelligent, creative people, then goodness knows what kind of situation we might have. One of unfettered invention and originality, such as is sometimes seen in the music and film industries, perhaps?
Granted, the problem for the reader - and the reviewer, and the book buyer at your local shop - is plucking the gems from a market which is bloated, largely a mystery to them, and dragged down by poor books which have had little or no editorial input from anyone other than the author.
But there's a sea of dross in the worlds of pop music and movies, too. Quality rises to the surface there, so if the literary industry can relax its perceived inherently snobbish attitude to the output of anything other than the established, traditional publishers, perhaps the same will happen with independent, small press and even self-published books.
