As Executive Director, O’Brien says his work spans both advocacy and practical support.

“I’m always seeking ways to get our publishers’ names, titles and authors in front of a wider audience,” he explains, pointing particularly to IPC’s investment in programming for booksellers and librarians. Alongside that, the organisation has increasingly focused on broader marketing and publicity campaigns, including the Independent Press Top 40 Bestseller List and Indie Press Month.

But much of the work is less visible. O’Brien also facilitates education for publishers on everything from printing and manufacturing to direct-to-consumer sales strategies.

“Whatever publishers need to know to stay nimble in a changing marketplace,” he says, “it’s my job to pay attention to it, and make sure I’m providing support to them in navigating those changes.”

Some pressures are longstanding. Others are newer.

“Independent publishers are small businesses,” O’Brien says. “In a lot of ways, the answer to this question never changes: rising costs.”

Printing, shipping, distribution and marketing expenses continue to tighten margins across the sector. But layered onto that, he says, are technological shifts that are making visibility and labour increasingly unstable.

“The marketplace is more crowded,” he notes, “and we’re seeing the proliferation of AI slop across the marketplace making all of our jobs harder.”

He is careful not to reduce the issue to technology alone. AI-generated material is one problem; the wider drive toward efficiency and workforce reduction is another.

“Supposed improvements in technology shrinking workforces,” he says. “We’re worried about that.”

For O’Brien, the phrase is less rhetorical than historical.

He points to presses whose catalogues effectively document alternative literary histories: Grove and City Lights preserving Beat writers; Beacon Press publishing James Baldwin and Octavia Butler; Milkweed Editions bringing Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass into the mainstream; Copper Canyon sustaining poetry publishing at scale.

Independent publishing, he argues, has often acted as a site of cultural risk-taking long before the wider market catches up.

“We have politically-conscious presses like Haymarket Books,” he says, “or Other Press, who just published UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s latest book.”

At the same time, many independent presses function as translators and importers of international literary culture into the United States. O’Brien references Transit Books publishing Nobel laureate Jon Fosse and Seven Stories publishing Annie Ernaux, alongside children’s presses such as Tapioca Stories introducing translated work from South America.

“These are but a handful of examples,” he says, “of our member presses publishing exemplary work that demonstrates the best of the independents.”

What connects them, in his view, is editorial independence itself.

“IPC publishers are risk-takers, with their fingers on the pulse — and risk-taking is at the heart of American literary culture.”

O’Brien frames the problem directly: discoverability itself is shrinking.

Review sections continue to disappear. Media attention fragments faster. Attention spans shorten. In response, IPC created the Independent Press Top 40 Bestseller List as a collective intervention.

“We thought, what if there was one place to highlight the bestselling titles from our presses,” he says. “We believe this raises all boats.”

The intention is not simply to elevate individual bestsellers, but to draw attention back toward publishers themselves.

“Now that you’re paying attention to our bestsellers,” he says, “maybe you’ll take a look at our other titles.”

O’Brien is also realistic about bestseller culture.

“Sometimes the bestseller race feels like a race to the bottom,” he admits. “It doesn’t always reflect the best books on our lists.”

Still, visibility matters.

More importantly, he argues, independent publishing continues to depend less on platforms than on human literary networks: booksellers, librarians, local advocacy and independent media.

“At the end of the day,” he says, “these folks are the champions of our titles, and the primary reason for their success.”

Amazon, in his telling, functions more as endpoint than engine.

“Amazon isn’t promoting our titles,” he says. “If we see exemplary sales there, it’s because some other media or publicity drove them there.”

O’Brien sees two parallel developments unfolding simultaneously.

The first is the influx of low-quality AI-generated material into bookselling and library systems, creating additional labour for booksellers and librarians already operating under pressure.

“These books are getting streamed into ordering systems,” he says, “and the onus is on booksellers and librarians to report back that they’re being inundated with slop.”

The second is the growing possibility that recommendation itself becomes increasingly automated.

“Presumably, people will start relying on AI for recommendations,” he says, “and new apps will be developed for such purposes.”

His concern is not technological novelty so much as homogenisation.

“That will lead to the Amazonification of book recommendations,” he says, “which has never been a good thing.”

Yet O’Brien stops short of apocalyptic thinking. Independent publishing, he argues, has already survived multiple predicted extinctions: ebooks, chain-store collapse, consolidation and distributor failures.

“Print media has outlasted every existential risk that has ever arrived at our door,” he says.

He points out that several major book distributors have shuttered within the last two years alone.

“And we’re all still here,” he says. “We’re going to find a way to stay.”

O’Brien’s answer moves beyond publishing economics toward civic responsibility.

“Defending: freedom of speech. Freedom of the press. All basic freedoms under attack.”

He describes independent publishers not only as cultural institutions but as participants in a broader political and technological struggle over autonomy, labour, ownership and public discourse.

“The more our books and the people behind the books stand in solidarity against fascism,” he says, “the safer we all are from the technocracy.”

At the same time, he argues for building more collaborative and cooperative publishing structures — “robust networks of mutual aid and support” — capable of surviving increasing instability.

And preservation itself, he suggests, remains central.

“Everything we need to know has already happened,” he says, “whether imagined in our fiction or in actuality in our nonfiction.”

For O’Brien, archives are not passive repositories but active infrastructure.

“Independent publishers are the holders of such a vast amount of invaluable information,” he says. “We need to resurface and reshare and ensure accessible archives.”