There will be no new generation of "indie" publishers and "based" small presses. It's being tried. It will fail. Perhaps quickly, more likely slowly and with a few notable successes staving off the inevitable for a while. But it will fail. Authors will either learn to self-publish and prosper, or the book trade will die. Here's why. All the anti-white stuff (euphemistically called "wokeness") didn't kill publishing. It only crept in because tradpub was already dying. What happened was that when revenues had sunk low enough that entry-level positions at these publishing houses could no longer pay enough to live on in NYC, they were entirely taken over by Yankee socialist trust fund babies. Yankee socialist trust fund babies didn't need the money. They just wanted the prestige they could gain by publishing lefty agitprop. They would never have gained control if tradpub weren't already sick and dying. This is why the new "based" presses will fail. Their brand is "not woke", but "woke" isn't the real problem. The real problem is that the tradpub business model is obsolete, both economically and technologically. It no longer provides, in return for its lions' share, any service to authors that they cannot get better and cheaper elsewhere. I don't need them to fund my offset print runs, because Amazon and Ingram will give me print-on-demand until I'm famous enough to underwrite my own. I don't need them to give me an advance, because advances are a relic of the 20th century, and they only exist now as covert bribes to politicians, for ghostwritten books that will gather dust in warehouses. And therefore anyone who needs an advance to be able to write, is someone who can't afford to write. I don't need them to provide me an editor, because I can hire one. Who works for me, not the publishing house. I don't need them to provide me a cover designer, because I can hire one, and have a totality of creative control that A-list tradpub authors would envy. I don't need them to get my books in bookstores, because bookstores are not a significant fraction of the modern author's bread. We earn off ebooks and Amazon print-on-demand. Also, I am already in some bookstores. I don't need them to fund my special editions, or audiobooks, because I have Kickstarter. I don't need them for marketing, because they only spend marketing dollars on their A-listers, and I would still have to do what I am already doing... get the word out on social media. I'm running out of things to list. The killshot is that if I say this at a convention, tradpub editors don't have a ready answer. What they have instead is a tantrum. The small press guys are politer and less entitled, with more maturity and emotional control, but not with more answers. There are, still, a great many assistive services which authors would benefit from, and might be willing to pay for. But I know of no one, literally no one, who offers all of the things authors need, and nothing they don't, as part of a non-exploitively priced publishing package. No one, literally no one, has come up with a new business model for publishing that is actually good for authors in the era of social media and Amazon. Tradpub subsists merely on authors who are too naive to know this, too agreeable to reject this, or too rich and contractually committed to change. That's not a winning business model. It reminds me of a Douglas Adams line: The only export of NowWhat is the NowWhattian boghog skin, which no one in their right minds would want to buy because it's thin and very leaky, and the export trade only manages to survive because of the significant number of people in the Galaxy who are not in their right minds.