"Lauren Woods launched the project in May after growing frustrated with what she saw as some publishers' focus on sensationalism and the lack of bookstores focused on local authors in the area. "I had friends who wrote award-winning books and couldn't get their books into D.C. bookstores because they were smaller presses, or they didn't have a mass appeal, or the book buyer didn't think they would be profitable," Woods said. "And that always seemed wrong to me.""
""Although those bigger books are going to be marketed differently, when they are marketed equally, they sell pretty equally," Woods said. Her experiment seems to have worked out so far. People are buying from the vending machine almost as many smaller press books as those from the "Big Five" publishers Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster."
LitBox opened in Washington, D.C., in May as a vending machine stocked with books by local and small-press authors near the White House, World Bank and IMF. The project responds to publishers' focus on sensationalism and a shortage of bookstores carrying smaller-press works, aiming to market books more equitably. The vending machine draws inspiration from European book machines and tests sales of smaller-press titles against Big Five publishers. Early results show nearly equal purchases of small-press and Big Five books. Reduced federal arts funding has further motivated the project and highlighted challenges facing writers.
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