Is this the start of an indie revolution?

Supporting small might be our best way out of a corporate conglomerate nightmare.

A special note! I’ve published a new zine, Browning Butter, all about my favorite ingredient of all time: brown butter! Whether you love brown butter, too, or have never made it and would like to know how, this zine is a great intro to whisking up and using the world’s yummiest culinary secret. I’ve included nine recipes total (not including the one that helps you make brown butter in the first place) from brown sugar-laced pecan bars to a delicately savory seafood entree.

Browning Butter is just $10 ($5, if you want the digital copy!) and can be purchased directly from my website, which now has a shiny new “Zines” section. Thank you in advance to anyone who orders a copy—and I hope your brown butter chocolate chunk cookies turn out delicious! 😉

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Is it just me, or does every single week seem to bring news of another rug pulled out from under another unfortunate group of creatives?

It can’t just be me, because the numbers are in: more than 8,500 people contributing to video game development were laid off in the first half of 2024. (That’s not including the dozens of people who worked for the 21-year-old studio Ready at Dawn, which Meta, Facebook’s owner, shuttered last month.) Because between 2008 and 2018, author earnings fell by 42%, even as major publishers raked in higher-than-normal profits. Because Because Disney has wrung so many movies and TV episodes out of Star Wars that film critics, moviegoers, and lifelong fans are starting to grow tired of the franchise. Because massive music streaming platforms refuse to pay small artists (and give well-known artists only $0.003 per stream). Because Inside Out 2, the highest-grossing animated movie of all time, was the product of 1.5 years of “unprecedented” crunch that ultimately left 175 employees unemployed and uncompensated. Because even producing a chart-topping, crowd-pleasing PC game isn’t enough to save your studio from big tech’s hammer.

I list these frustrating figures and phenomena not to fill anyone with dismay, but to drive home a point. As corporations undermine creatives and milk once-good ideas dry, it’s imperative that we support small artists, presses, and studios.

Here’s the thing: publishers and distributors were once, and are still occasionally, a way to improve one’s odds of creative success. Selling your novel to a publisher (sometimes) means an easier path toward bookstore placements and readers’ hands; working with a major video game studio (sometimes) means better access to development and publicity resources; signing with a record label (sometimes) means shows at bigger venues and additional exposure. The trade-off is a portion of your creative income. For a long time, this was a decent deal—it was difficult for individuals and small teams to access potential fans without the weight of a major participant who knew all the right routes to take. Receiving only a portion of one’s earnings was better than receiving no earnings at all.

But today, it’s easier than ever for creatives to reach people who might become fans of their work. We love to gripe about the internet—and it certainly has its pitfalls—but it’s given many artists an alternative path toward success. It’s no longer imperative that artists essentially hire a middleman in order to find and feed their audiences. In fact, we have a term for creatives who skip this step. We call them “indie.”

You know how when you go to the grocery store for a zucchini, there’s only one type of zucchini to choose from? Only one type of eggplant, only one type of green bean? There might be three types of tomatoes, but they’re all red and taste largely the same; there might be orange or purple carrots, but they’re no different from the ones you’d find at the next grocery store.

And then you go to a farmer’s market, or (eek!) a person’s front yard, where they’ve lovingly propped up a clapboard sign that says “zucchini: $1.” You think, Zucchini should be at least $2. What’s the catch here? but decide to try something new, if just for the story. Ten minutes later, you leave with an armful of striped Romanesco zucchini, or soft green Bianco di Trieste zucchini, and the whole thing cost you $10 even though the grocery store would have charged you twice as much. Your bundle of produce isn’t as polished as Whole Foods would have had it—there’s a bruise on one of your new zucchini, a cut on another—but it cost less because there was no middleman involved, and you feel warm about having supported the person who grew it. When you get home and sauté slices of your new zucchini in butter, you discover a world of flavor you never would have experienced otherwise.

Unlike a Marvel movie, I don’t feel the need to explain my subtext here. We access a wider and more colorful trove of experiences by branching out, by supporting the small creatives who don’t have Disney’s or Meta’s or major advertisers’ vehemently capitalistic—and often oppressive—principles to abide by.

I’m not the only one who thinks so. Self-published e-books reportedly make up more than half of all e-books sold these days, amounting to more than $874 million per year in earnings collected by indie authors. In 2023, indie games accounted for nearly a third of Steam revenue. (The report I’ve just linked poignantly remarks that the shift in interest toward indie games likely “reflects a broader dissatisfaction that some gamers feel towards the lack of innovation in the AAA [large studio] sector.”) Professionals across the film industry are starting to see indie films take their rightful place among movies from more established studios, resulting in attention from film giants like Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon.

While impressing Jeff Bezos and friends isn’t exactly indie art’s goal, this is proof that indie creatives are moving the needle. Readers, gamers, and moviegoers crave diverse, daring, and downright weird art. We want the bizarre eroticism that made Saltburn so popular. We want Maggie Nelson’s painstakingly slow and detailed cultural criticism, the thoughtfully crafted worlds of Stardew Valley and Unpacking. We want heart and flavor.

But we only get it by supporting it.

Whenever my partner and I talk about the rate at which AAA game studios have been exploiting their workers or ripping off gamers—a topic we broach, uh, a lot—we inevitably conclude with this refrain: Now is the time to support indie creatives. Now is the time to seek out a funky little $5 computer game. Now is the time to back a board game Kickstarter. Now is the time to find an indie film fest near you, to attend a grungy $12 concert in the basement of your local watering hole. Now is the time to subscribe to a YouTube channel with 30 subscribers, to attend a sleepy poetry open mic, to buy a writer’s zine or self-published novel.

As creatives, it’s our responsibility support each other because we’re small, not in spite of that fact.