Rachel Fershleiser, Nick Douglas and Molly McArdle. (Photo credit:Jesse Chan-Norris)

We have reached a stage in the life of New York or the life of literature (or both) where a glance at the bio of most contemporary authors inevitably ends with the words “lives in Brooklyn.” Not surprisingly, a literary festival exists to celebrate the borough’s bibliophiles. The Brooklyn Book Festival, which will take place this Sunday, means that many writers won’t even have to get on the subway in order to read aloud and sit on panels in front of enthusiastic readers.

To kick off the literary festivities prior to the literary Festival, Tumblr, Electric Literature, The New Inquiry and the Los Angeles Review of Books threw a party. (Book people love parties.) Shindigger, being notionally bookish ourselves, followed the parade of tote bags until we reached the Williamsburg event space Public Assembly. After getting a temporary tattoo stamped on our inner wrist, we entered the darkened hall.

The drinks were cheap, the music loud and the lights dim as publishing professionals, indie writers, indie booksellers and indie magazine editors shouted above the DJ to discuss Important Contemporary Fiction and trade industry gossip.

“Anything by Lorrie Moore speaks to a certain kind of person,” novelist Jami Attenberg said when we asked her what books she recommends. “Junot Díaz is a fucking genius—can I say that?” We were unsure if she meant the sentiment or the swear.

“The funny thing about book parties is that you take a bunch of introverts, put them in a room and get them drunk,” said Jason Oberholtzer. Mr. Olberholtzer is a Tumblr success story—his Tumblr, I Love Charts, was turned into a book of the same name.

Tumblr stickers and pins (the sort middle-schoolers affix to their jean jackets) were strewn around the tables. Greenpoint bookstore Word sold books by authors who are speaking at the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday, and the paperbacks went first and fast.

“This is my event—$3 gin and juice, what’s not to like?” Edith Zimmerman, editor of The Hairpin, told us when we asked her plans for the festival. Has she read anything exciting recently? “I just read the internet. It’s terrible.” She sipped on her gin and juice, and we suppose she looked laid back.

The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets author Kathleen Alcott looked more Madison Avenue than Bedford Avenue with her bright blond hair, pocketbook and well-cut pastel outfit. Although we thought she was too put-together to be at a party with $3 drink specials, as it turns out, Ms. Alcott does, in fact, live in Brooklyn.

“You must get this all the time, but what are you listening to  now?” we overheard someone ask New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones.

“I have a Google Doc,” replied Mr. Frere-Jones. We weren’t sure whether he was offering to share the document or not.

“I’m excited about my own book—am I allowed to say that?” asked Cole Stryker, author of Hacking the Future. We assured him he was.

“As far as lit parties, this one has the dimmest lighting. Usually, they have bright lighting,” Mr. Stryker explained. “There are a lot of nervous people here wondering if there’s going to be dancing.”

As we walked away from Mr. Stryker, we heard a cluster of young men in plaid debating the lack of a lifestyle magazine “for teenage guys.”

If, as Mr. Stryker suggested, people were wondering whether there was going to be dancing, they didn’t have to wonder for long.

“People are already dancing. Jesus,” someone said, near the vicinity of the dance floor. It was only 8:30.

Sean Howe, who has a book coming out on the history of Marvel Comics, told us that he was going to speak on a panel with legendary Nation editor Victor Navasky. Was he nervous?

“The last time I was on a panel, I got tunnel vision,” replied Mr. Howe. Why put himself through that again? He shrugged.

Matthew Specktor, the senior fiction editor of the LA Review of Books, a host of the event, represented the West Coast. The drink specials were $3 Brooklyn lager and $3 gin and juice, and the Facebook invitation suggested that the drinks were standing in for a proxy battle between coasts.

Well, who was winning?

“Everyone here is involved in literature, so we are all winning or losing together,” he said, adding, “There is more than enough literary seriousness in LA to power a small nation.”

Although Mr. Spector told us that the East Coast/West Coast divide is false, he did roll his eyes when mentioning Southern Californians’ penchant for yoga and juice cleanses. Since we walked by three yoga studios and one sterile-looking new juice cleanse bar just on the walk from Bedford to the party, we assured him that New York wasn’t that different.

Mr. Spector nodded, we think a bit sadly (although that may have been reflected glow from the disco ball).

“Incandescent joy, unbridled happiness, metaphysical ecstasy,” gushed Rachel Rosenfelt, the editor-in-chief and founder of lit mag The New Inquiry, when asked about her night.

“There are a lot of blazers in play, and the dancing is hilarious,” said Amy Rose Spiegel, a Rookie Mag writer. She had very long false eyelashes, which we found impressive. “I’m having a bawl,” she added, requesting that we spell it to reflect her Jersey pronunciation.

People did seem to be having a good time. Nevertheless, when we heard one partygoer say, “She’s, like, doing something about smells and cultural associations,” we decided it was time to leave.

“It’s a pittance for them,” said Steve Wasserman, former editor of the shuttered Los Angeles Times Book Review, who nonetheless applauded Amazon’s recognition of LARB.

“Criticism is the oxygen of literature,” he said. “I’m happy to see the establishment of something of really grand ambition.”

Amazon’s generosity won’t impede LARB’s ambition to support the independent booksellers in its chokehold, however: it will keep up its affiliate program with anti-Amazons IndieBound and Powell’s, which pay the Review royalties on sales that come through the site.

“They’ve asked for nothing in return,” LARB founder and editor Tom Lutz told Off The Record. “Except the press release.” The Amazon gift will pay writers and editors and go toward the site’s redesign, scheduled to launch April 18.

“Like all corporate sponsorships, they are interested in associating their names with enterprises that reflect well on them and we’re glad Amazon thinks that of us,” Mr. Lutz said. (Other recipients include the 92nd St. Y, 826 Seattle and The Moth.) He added that he hopes it is the first of many corporate underwriters.

The redesigned site, done pro bono by  Ted Perez, will be easier to navigate by genre than its Tumblr-powered beta mode, part of the organization's overall mission to foster conversations among readers outside the literary community.

For example, Mr. Lutz said, “I’m hoping in our young adult pages young readers will interact with us in the way that young readers interact with each other.” In a new educational pilot program, LARB will encourage local public school kids to apply their native YouTube reaction and reply video making to book reviews, teaching them how to marshal evidence for why, say, Sarah, Plain and Tall sucks. The best videos will be featured on the site.

The new site is also designed to hold essays that respond and refer to previously published reviews, building a linked web of critical conversation. To that end, expect LARB to keep up its preference for essays over a “thumbs up/thumbs down” thing. Mr. Lutz sees the Review as a forum for discussion, rather than a place for reductive dismissals.

“In a world where 3 million books are published every year,” he added, “99% of books die a natural death without any help from us.”

“Readers seek to find other readers and share the experience they’ve had reading things,” said Mr. Wasserman, “especially in a region as vast and sprawling as L.A.”

For the same reason, Mr. Wasserman helped design the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which draws 130,000 readers to the University of Southern California’s sunny, indoor pursuits-unfriendly campus each year. At the 17th annual event later this month, LARB will carry the torch for literary criticism.

Mr. Lutz is scheduled for two panels, “California Literature,” and “Publishing: The New Shape of the Book,” and the Review will co-host the Young Literati after party. Although less than a quarter of LARB’s readers live in California—Mr. Lutz called its name a “steampunk” reference to the literary tribes of the past—a strong local presence helps attract financial support.

Off the Record asked Mr. Wasserman, now back on the East Coast, what distinguished the California literary scene from New York's.

“Frankly, what residents in neither city want to admit is that the two are coming more and more to resemble each other,” he noted. “Who could say that the values to be seen in Vanity Fair are that of Times Square and not Hollywood and Vine?”

“Susan Sontag once called California ‘America’s America’,” he went on. “By that I think she thought it was the place where people went to rid themselves of the weight of history and start afresh.”

The resurgence of New York media over the past two years has been led by companies whose primary business does not involve words. E-commerce colossus Gilt Groupe and technology and data giants Bloomberg and Reuters lured top legacy media talent to their doors with pre-recession salaries and the sense of relief offered by a company for whom making payroll is not a routine emergency.

But on the other end of the media spectrum, a handful of entrepreneurial online editors have been striving to turn publishing quality content into a business model. Websites like The Classical, Rookie, Thought Catalog, and Los Angeles Review of Books talk the talk of Silicon Alley start-ups, but are founded on an editorial ethos rather than a technological idea. They seem to be led by the example of (and no doubt encouraged by the success of) former Gawker editors Choire Sicha and Alex Balk’s The Awl.

Launched in late 2008, The Awl carried on the hallmarks of the “good,” “old” Gawker even as Mr. Denton shed them. When Gawker corrected its New York media myopia, The Awl offered media commentary like Edith Zimmerman’s parodic “Letters to the Editors of Women’s Magazines” and David Parker’s “The Most Emailed New York Times Article Ever” (not to mention Mr. Sicha’s attentive coverage of masthead changes at this publication). After Nick Denton told The Observer that social media killed the ironic headline—so unclickable—The Awl’s headlines became deadpan to the point of obfuscation. “Man Gets Job,” The Awl recently tweeted.

In the fall of 2010, David Carr reported that the The Awl was bringing in $200,000 in revenue.

“I’m surprised that there aren’t a lot of independent, owner-operated editorial Web sites out there,” Mr. Sicha told him then.

A year later, they’ve begun to spring up, and several cite The Awl as inspiration.

Teen blog phenom Tavi Gevinson’s new web magazine, Rookie, had originally been slated to operate in partnership with Jane Pratt’s website, xoJane.com, but Ms. Gevinson pulled out at the eleventh hour. xoJane.com is published by SAY Media, and Ms. Gevinson wanted to own her own work. When the project went indie, Ms. Gevinson’s friends and collaborators turned to The Awl for advice, according to managing editor Emily Condon.

“We’re super thrilled that Tavi is being her own boss too,” Mr. Sicha wrote The Observer. “So punk.”

Like The Awl, Rookie’s overhead costs have come out the pockets of its friends and founders, but unlike The Awl, it has a key ad partner from the outset: the advertising sales team at New York Media, parent company of New York magazine.

Perhaps more important, Rookie needed to be independent in order to adhere to its editorial ethos, which, like The Awl, bucks conventional new media strategy and bets long on original content. “A lot of websites run on a system of having to get a post up every half-hour, and a lot of those end up being filler posts because they don’t actually have that much to say,” Ms. Gevinson told New York. “After being in all these meetings with publishing companies and advertisers and stuff, it’s like everyone just wants to trick people into reading their website. If the content is good, people will read it.”

Last month, a group of similar-minded if somewhat older sportswriters teamed up to launch an independently owned and operated website called The Classical, a home for ponderous long-form writing about sports and popular culture. It sounded a lot like the Bill Simmons’ blog Grantland, launched earlier this summer, but the entrepreneurs insisted otherwise.

“We’re way smaller, way more seat-of-pants, with no giant corporate funding (yet),” managing editor Peter Beatty wrote The Observer, noting that their plans hinge on attracting a dedicated commenting community that will also contribute.

“The Classical will be a running, wide-ranging conversation between us and our readers,” The Classical founders wrote in their manifesto. “Our model in this regard is The Awl, a site for which many of us have written and which all of us love.”

But the comparison ends there. Although the founders of The Classical (Bethlehem Shoals, Tom Breihan, David Roth, and Tim Marchman, among others) have many years of writing and editing experience, they lack the large online followings that Mr. Sicha and Ms. Gevinson have built up, which are immediately attractive to advertisers. Instead, The Classical asked its would-be readers, commenters and contributors to fund its first year, through the micro-philanthropy site Kickstarter.

They cleared the $50,000 hurdle—including a contribution from Mr. Balk—with more than a week left of fundraising.

Dissolving the line between producers and consumers of media has supported the growth of another of The Awl’s spawn: Thought Catalog. Launched in 2009 with a confident mission statement (“Thought Catalog is illuminating and informative… TC contributors are at the vanguard of their respective fields… We’re avant-now”), the site initially commissioned relatively well-known contributors and critics like Douglas Wolk, Molly Young, and Killian Fox, but soon opened its arms to unpaid submissions. A young editor, Ryan O’Connell, was hired to vet and edit them, in addition to publishing his own writing.

Mr. O’Connell developed a large following which did not just read him—it emulated him. Thought Catalog now has more than 500 listed contributors, the vast majority of whom have only written once or twice, and who, in aggregate, increasingly reflect an editorial penchant for millennial memoirs, semi-ironically packaged as service content (“How To Be My Boyfriend.”)

Thought Catalog’s style is an easy target for teasing Internet upperclassmen, but the site has four times as many Twitter followers as The Awl, and enjoys roughly three times the monthly visitors, according to QuantCast. Contributors share their articles, and comments often rival the posts themselves in length, driving the kind of writing-as-group-therapy social traffic more akin to Tumblr’s shallow reflecting pool than the competitive, reverse-chronological stream of Twitter- or news-driven blogs.

For The Awl, the pivot from scrappy start-up to model media player seems to have come in the form of the ability to pay themselves—which coincided with the appearance in Mr. Carr’s column. Spin-off sites focusing on humor (Splitsider) and women (The Hairpin), had just been launched, and a managing editor would be hired soon after.

Such organic growth was attractive to traditional media players. The Awl lost its founding publisher, David Cho, to Grantland—an ESPN property, albeit with its own similarities to the Awl—earlier this year. Its new publisher, John Shankman, has a more conventional marketing background. He comes to The Awl from The Huffington Post, but prior to that worked at Federated Media, which sells advertising for independent new media companies, including Digg and TechCrunch in their early days, BoingBoing, and The Awl.

He has come up with a marketing term for the ineffable editorial quality that’s inspired imitators.

“The audience that we attract is “indielectual,” Mr. Shankman told The Observer. “That’s the big challenge for us, ‘How do we scale smart?’ What’s happened in a lot of entrepreneurial media companies is they sacrifice quality for the sake of growth,” he added. “We’re not falling victim to that.”

Similarly, at the time of its launch, Rookie managing editor Emily Condon told the Observer that it was produced on volunteer labor, but planned on using future advertising revenue to pay contributors. This week WWD reported that Ms. Condon is headed back to her day job at This American Life. In searching for a replacement, she invoked the entrepreneurial appeal of the job.

“We’re brand new, but the growth potential could be really significant for someone willing to buy in and take a bit of a (calculated) risk,” she wrote in an e-mail obtained by WWD.

And for all The Classical’s lofty editorial ambitions—it will combine post-punk and critical theory—it has modest business goals. The $50,000 first-year budget is just enough to build up the website’s infrastructure and pay a yet-unnamed publisher a “nominal” salary to sell enough advertisements to keep it going.

Even outside the Manhattan media bubble, a group of academics and critics are united by an editorially entrepreneurial spirit. University of California-Riverside professor Tom Lutz launched a website for them this summer, the Los Angeles Review of Books. It aims to replace the long-lost Sunday literary supplements, which give academics a popular platform and were never fully supplanted by literary blogs. The University is an institutional sponsor, and the site collects commissions on any titles purchased through an affiliate independent online bookseller. For additional revenue, LARB plans to launch a book imprint and collect advertising revenue, gifts and grants.

“We hope to build an institution that will continue to function as a public service, having the best writers and artists responding to the best artists and writers, for years to come,” Mr. Lutz wrote The Observer in an e-mail.

LARB is perhaps most transparent about the fundamental earnestness underlying this wave of editorial entrepreneurs. It has by now surpassed that of the The Awl, which much of the time is a weird news and animal videos aggregation blog.

“We really are literary idealists,” Mr. Lutz added, “the whole lot of us.”