The publishing house running on nights, weekends, and a machine cutter

Indie publishing is having a moment. The Los Angeles Art Book Fair has grown so popular it now charges a cover. Smaller fairs are popping up in towns that pull crowds from across the country. And internationally, art book fairs have taken hold in Mexico City, Dubai, Dakar, Seoul, Tokyo, and Taipei.

After online retail steamrolled traditional bookstores in the early 2000s, the next wave of digital infrastructure, from online storefronts to mobile point-of-sale to Substack itself, is doing the exact opposite for small publishers. It’s powering a generation of founder-led presses to reach readers, sell at fairs around the world, and survive without venture funding, retail chains, or institutional grants in sight.

It’s a convergence that could only happen now: Artificial intelligence fatigue is pushing readers back toward the tactile, funding for the arts is evaporating, public libraries are under unprecedented attack, and a community of readers is rushing in to fill the gap and stock their own bookshelves.

Courtesy of Vivian Sming

In the swirl of all this is Vivian Sming, who founded Sming Sming Books in 2017 in the Bay Area after spending years working at galleries, nonprofits, and artist spaces, including Giant Robot, the cult store and former magazine. Sming, who has been hand-binding books for more than a decade, has black hexagonal glasses, a soft, unhurried voice, and the kind of composure that makes you want to slow down, too.

Shopify sat down for a conversation with Sming, whose studio works one-on-one with artists, many of them women and artists of color, to design art books from scratch. The studio's catalog now sits in more than 150 libraries, museums, and universities, every one designed, printed, and bound by Sming herself. She's been in the trenches long before the scene exploded, and knows better than most why books are stubbornly resilient in 2026—and why the scene is determined to stay punk on purpose.

The founder: Vivian Sming

The business: Sming Sming Books, an independent publishing studio

Fun fact: Sming Sming's most intricate book designs are made with a Cricut, the same craft cutter sold in the scrapbooking aisle.

Anita: It's been about two years since we last talked. What's changed for Sming Sming in that time, and what's surprised you most about the indie scene?

Vivian: The most obvious surprise is just that we're still here. The conversation around AI has been huge, and I think there are questions around creativity and what it means for AI to be making things. And you can feel the difference. AI is being used to write and mass-produce books now. People generate them and turn them out instantly. The paper's bad, the print's off. If you pick up a book from an art book fair, it's a different object entirely. That distinction matters more now than it ever has.

But in the meantime, there’s this pocket community of publishers and writers and artists who are still making work. I’m still seeing a desire for people to engage with the tactility of books, specifically to be able to hold something in your hand. It seems to be super important, especially now when everything is veering in the other direction.

Anita: Book fairs in New York and LA are pulling in crowds that rival stadium concerts, and they're showing up in the most random places. What do you think is driving all of it? Why are people flocking to zines?

Vivian: It's a moment of a lot of different things colliding. Where I'm at in the Bay Area, there are a lot of art spaces and art schools closing. Federal funding for art spaces is being cut. There's a moment in which these institutions, these places we've relied on, are kind of collapsing.

And at the same time, there’s this real impulse to support our community, this sense of looking out for one another. People are looking at alternative models for things. And publishing is one of them. It’s seemingly niche, but most people in the world know what a book is and have engaged with one. So it becomes this very immediate format to share ideas and support an artist in a small way.

Anita: You once told me about this running joke that "there's no money in books." Is that still the punchline? And if so, how do you make a low-money business work?

Vivian: It's still true for me. I have my full-time job. But when you work small, there's less financial risk, and that's part of what makes it sustainable. A lot of people think the goal is to always be bigger and to sell thousands of copies. But during the pandemic, I realized that if I'm working small, it's a way of surviving. You can continue to do what you want, work with the artists you want to work with. The publishing isn't impacted by federal cuts or relying on external funding.

If I can keep the books at a price point where people can afford them while supporting the artists, it’s manageable. Day-to-day, some people are really good about waking up early and exercising. I’m more inclined to stay up late working on a book. I’m on my phone so much that I feel like if I took the two hours I was doomscrolling and put that into making something, I’d feel much better about it.

Anita: People see "small" and sometimes think "simple." But there's so many moving parts to getting these books done. What's a problem you've had to face that someone outside the scene never would have considered?

Vivian: There was one moment where the coils I use for binding, the one place that sells them was going out of business. This was right around when the tariffs hit. Everyone was freaking out, and that's the kind of thing most people don't think about. Thankfully the company was bought. But it's the kind of thing that reminds you how fragile the production side actually is. I mostly print locally now, within the state, so I'm not as exposed to international shipping and oil price shifts. But it's an ongoing roller coaster, and everyone is on it together.

Courtesy of Vivian Sming

Anita: Okay, brag a little. Tell me about a recent book you're proud of and how it got made.

Vivian: "Trickster at the End of a World" by Helen Shewolfe Tseng is the one. Helen is a Bay Area-based artist, writer, and naturalist who works in computational literature, and she's been obsessed with coyotes. We were trying to figure out how to do a die cut, and I ended up getting a Cricut cutter to make it happen. Usually I'm pretty involved in the design, but for this one Helen had a clear vision because it's her writing and drawings.

She’s interested in the coyote not just as the animal, but as a symbol of thriving on the margins, of existing in different spaces. She’s thinking about immigration, migration, surviving despite being one of the most hunted-out animals and being considered pests. The drawings are gorgeous. We wanted the book to feel like a field notebook, hence the spiral binding. You can take it out with you and lie in a piece of grass and read it.

Anita: If indie publishing keeps growing at this pace, what does the landscape look like in a few years? Mainstream? Still niche?

Vivian: A lot of these projects will stay small, just because people are working within the resources and means they have. Projects change all the time. Some people will do this for years and then stop and do something else. The level of production is just not at the scale of mainstream publishing. It's hard to imagine these books suddenly being everywhere in every bookstore.

But that’s part of the appeal, it refuses to be large. What I hope to see is some book thing happening every weekend because it’s about the person-to-person relationships. The scene is just a bunch of punks, this mashup of freaks and geeks. That’s where the community is.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

This story was produced by Shopify and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.