"I want to show you the chaos at the moment," says Balamohan Shingade, co-founder of Spoor Books. He tilts his screen to reveal books sprawled across his home office floor. The shelves behind him are empty and bare. He's in the middle of a recatalog, reorganising titles and clearing space for four boxes of books that are in transit from India.
Shingade is one of many independent publishers around the motu. There’s an ambitious wave of small publishers that have cropped up, such as Spoor Books, Āporo Press and Old King Press to name a few, that contrast and complement larger publications within Aotearoa.
Indie publications are book presses that are set up by a handful of people, usually one to five, and are typically self-funded. Many of these presses’ operations may look just like Shingade’s Spoor Books: manuscripts bursting out of homes and working outside office hours, all in the service of getting books into readers’ hands.
As the adage goes, the way to make a small fortune in publishing is to start with a big fortune, so why are these publishers doing what they do?
Many of these independent publishers are giving Aotearoa access to stories that might otherwise not reach our bookshelves. Like most independent publications, Spoor Books began as a way to fill a gap. Part publisher, part curated bookstore and importer, it publishes local writers and sources titles from India and the global south, with a focus on left-field inquiries and non-Western imaginaries.
According to Nielsen Book Data, around 80% of book sales in Aotearoa every year come from overseas publishers – the bulk of this coming from the UK, the US, and Australia. Spoor Books is a direct response to this Western-heavy literary diet, a way to connect readers to different parts of the world and to enable different conversations.
While Spoor looks outwards, many indie presses in Aotearoa look inwards. Published authors in Aotearoa are still overwhelmingly Pākehā, and in 2024 all books by Pasifika authors and around half of books by Māori and Asian authors were published by small or independent presses. One indie press that aims to diversify the country’s literary landscape is Āporo Press, a micro-press that stemmed from Bad Apple Gay (RIP), a former queer arts and literature journal dedicated to Aotearoa’s marginalised communities. Founders of Āporo, Damien Levi and Ruby Leonard planted the seed for the press out of "necessity" back in 2022.
A voice that Āporo has amplified is Laura Vincent's, who found that indie publishing offered a more direct relationship with her book as opposed to going through a larger publication. Vincent’s debut novel centres on the eclectic Gordon family – there’s a slight parallel between her fictional household and the real-life family affair she experienced while publishing her book with Āporo Press. “Publishing through an independent press meant every little, incremental achievement felt magnified, because we've done it together through hustle. Being part of a micro-press made me feel like I was part of something bigger.”
Another writer drawn to that closer connection is Glenn Colquhoun, a general practitioner and poet who has worked with indie presses for most of his career – including many years with Roger Steele, whom Colquhoun describes as a “one-man-band” publisher operating just outside of Wellington.
Now running his very own one-man-band, Colquhoun has self-published under Old King Press since 2020. Colquhoun has gained autonomy from self-publishing, and he also gets a kick out of the physicality of book-making. "I love the craft of making a book," he says. "It’s like a small piece of furniture, separate from the writing. You're making something for someone to hold in their hand, to be curious about, to open up and disappear inside of. It's been a different type of creativity."
With independent publishers focusing on local authors, Aotearoa’s reading demographic is an important consideration. Making a book is only half the equation – ideally people read it too. While Āporo Press believes there is an appetite for more Kiwi stories within the country, there is also the fight against “cultural cringe” to contend with.
"I think that New Zealand, in terms of a lot of our culture and art, has a real sense of cultural cringe," Leonard from Āporo explains. "I think a lot of readers just wouldn't ever think to pick up a New Zealand story in a bookshop because the expectation is that it's not going to be good – unless you see it doing well overseas, or it wins the Booker."
The cost of producing a book here presents pressure too. Print publishing is extremely expensive – and in Aotearoa, much more expensive than elsewhere. Independent publishers rarely run large enough print jobs to access offshore pricing, meaning they pay more per book for fewer copies made locally.
It's against this backdrop that Expensive Hobby was founded – a collaboration between three independent publications, Compound Press, Dead Bird Books and Gloria Books, working to make indie publishing in Aotearoa more sustainable and to ease the administrative burden of distribution. The name, as one of its founders explains, was never meant to stick. "Our name started as a joke working title," says Chris Holdaway, founder of Compound Press, "but like all things with more truth than you want to recognise, it stuck." The financial pressure is only intensifying: according to an industry print broker he speaks with regularly, from 1 May 2026 every printer in Aotearoa raised prices by 5% across the board.
Arts funding, or lack thereof, compounds the pressure. "A lot of the funding that does exist seems to have a bias in favour of physical art forms and events, against publications," Holdaway says. "Many people running independent publications are propping them up out of love."
"Sometimes you can trick yourself into thinking this is part of the dynamism of indie creation. But it's hard and ultimately fragile and overly reliant on the willingness of a small number of people to be workaholics."
On High Street in Tāmaki Makaurau's CBD sits Unity Books, a bustling sanctuary where books line every corner of its sage green walls. A quarter of the store is dedicated to writing from Aotearoa, and a significant portion of the books are indie titles. The section draws a diverse crowd; the person browsing a $90 hardback history stands alongside someone reaching for the $40 experimental nonfiction about New Lynn. “People come into Unity and often find something they didn’t know they were looking for,” says Chloe Blades, the manager. That can often be a local indie title they’ve not heard of before.
“When authors go to independent publishers, it produces an entirely different book in some ways – it's less commercial, less mainstream,” Blades says. “There's something special about those books because they are indie published – it stands out as something different on the shelf.”
