According to Counterpoint CEO Charlie Winton, Soft Skull will live on from California, though there will not be any one there dedicated to running it. Mr. Winton, who founded Publishers Group West in 1976 and made his name in the book business as an innovative indie distributor, said that while the number of titles published through the Soft Skull imprint will drop from around 40 per year to 20, Counterpoint's editors will acquire and publish books for the Soft Skull list, thus keeping the brand alive.

Mr. Winton's conception of that brand is broad. "We see the role of Soft Skull as introducing new writers," he said, when asked to define the imprint's sensibility. "In general, those writers are probably going to be a little younger and maybe a little edgier."

Literary agents know the Soft Skull sensibility, he said, and he expects them to continue submitting to the imprint accordingly. In addition, he hopes authors who have been associated with Soft Skull in the past will return to the imprint for future books. Eventually Mr. Winton hopes to designate a "point person" within Counterpoint who would be responsible for overseeing the Soft Skull list, but he does not expect to appoint a full-time editorial director.

It's not like this is the first time Soft Skull has undergone a major change in editorial leadership, Mr. Winton noted, referring to when Richard Nash, who ran the company for most of a decade, stepped down in the spring of 2009 to launch his publishing start-up, Cursor.

When Ms. Oswald -- whose previous job was at the Faber & Faber imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux -- took over that April, she signaled a commitment to maintaining Soft Skull's identity, telling one reporter that while she wasn't setting out to imitate Mr. Nash's publishing program, she was going to preserve the house's "take no prisoners attitude" and its dedication to "the outspoken and the contrarian, the marginal and the disenfranchised."

Ms. Oswald said that Mr. Winton flew out to New York at the end of September to inform her and Ms. Horowitz that their office was going to be closed. Ms. Oswald said Soft Skull had been suffering from diminishing sales but that Mr. Winton's decision to pull the plug came as a surprise to her.

There had been pressure over the past year and a half from Counterpoint, Ms. Oswald said, to publish more books in order to increase revenue. "I tried to explain that we can't do the work of producing good books if we're just trying to do books at volume," Ms. Oswald said. "Anne and I were working tremendously long hours just to try to stay on top of the workload and trying to bring in more projects."

Mr. Winton said that Soft Skull's revenue had fallen by a total of about 25% since 2008, and that adding more titles -- including paperback reprints of books originally issued by other publishers -- was a measure taken to justify keeping the New York office open. In the end, he said, the seismic shift that the publishing industry underwent over the past several years proved overwhelming and maintaining a bicoastal presence was deemed unfeasible. He said he has "come to terms" with the fact that Soft Skull in its diminished condition will have to publish fewer titles, not more.

In an interview, Mr. Nash praised Ms. Oswald's efforts at Soft Skull and placed the blame for the closing of the New York office on what he said was Counterpoint's insufficient commitment to publicity and marketing.  

"Anne and Denise were acquiring books that exemplified the Soft Skull spirit," Mr. Nash said. "But another part of the Soft Skull spirit is the drum banging, and their books weren't getting the drum beat hard enough for them."

The book world jumped a little in its seat last week when HarperCollins C.E.O. Jane Friedman announced that she’d hired Hyperion president Bob Miller to form an “innovative and creative” new publishing unit. It was shocking enough that Ms. Friedman had managed to hire Mr. Miller away from Hyperion after 17 years to run the new shop. But the business model the two of them had in mind? To split profits with authors 50/50 instead of paying them huge advances, to develop a distribution structure that wouldn’t allow retailers to get refunds for unsold books, to publish just 25 short, low-priced commercial hardcovers per year? All of this struck many in the industry as downright radical.

Others thought it was a lot of baloney, and they weren’t quite sure why all the papers were treating it like it was the beginning of some revolution.

“It was galling, that he was being given this amazing coverage. This made the AP wire by the end of the day!” said Dennis Johnson, who runs an independent press in Dumbo called Melville House Publishing with his wife Valerie. “The fact of the matter is that the discussion is about certain innovations in restructuring basic author contracts that small independent publishers … have been using and developing for years already. For someone not to acknowledge this either reveals a rather shocking ignorance of the business world around us… or it’s simple, old-fashioned intellectual plagiarism.”

Mr. Johnson, who rose to some prominence as a critic of the book business years ago with his blog Moby Lives, said the model Mr. Miller is proposing has been working for independent publishers for a long time, but is unlikely to succeed in the big leagues.

“The thing is, we need to be publishing like that, so it’s really a very refined, worked out system with us,” he said. “Bob Miller is a commercial publisher. He does very commercial books, and it’s hard for me to imagine him in our world.”

Other small press publishers had milder reactions to Mr. Miller’s experiment, but generally agreed that the model he is proposing does rather resemble theirs.

“My slightly snarky response to what happened last week was, ‘Duh! This is exactly what we’ve been talking about and attempting to do to varying degrees all along,’” said Richard Nash, publisher of Soft Skull Press. “But I don’t think they were like, ‘oh, let’s look at what independent publishers do and steal it!’ I think Miller looked at problems in corporate publishing and said, ‘okay, here are some things I could to fix it.’”

Akashic Books publisher Johnny Temple, who is something of a figurehead in the small press community here, said he is used to seeing good ideas generated in the indie world only to be repackaged and used by bigger companies amidst a howl of media hype.

“I’m so familiar with that dynamic that I’m comfortable with it,” Mr. Temple said. He added that he is friendly with Mr. Miller, who he said has historically been supportive of Akashic.

Mr. Miller, for his part, readily acknowledged that some aspects of his proposal were inspired by independent presses.

“It's absolutely true that small presses have been experimenting with author terms for years,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Many small presses… have also been marketing creatively with limited resources in ways that the larger trade houses would do well to emulate. The new venture at HarperCollins simply puts together a number of these elements--profit-sharing with authors, non-returnable sales to booksellers, distribution of e-books and audiobooks as part of the physical book's sales--in one place.”

For Mr. Johnson, though, the notion of adopting small press tactics in a corporate context is a preposterous one. He said that if Mr. Miller plans to publish books by authors as commercial as the ones whom he published at Hyperion—David Halberstam, Mitch Albom, Caroline Kennedy, et cetera—he’s going to run into some insurmountable structural obstacles.

“I don’t think the level of writers he’s used to working with are going to go for [the no-advance policy],” he said. “Their agents won't permit that. I've been there--I've gone to those kinds of writers and said, ‘here’s an idea for a book that no one else will do—your publisher won’t do it, no other big publisher would do it.’ And the writer says, ‘I love it, let’s do it. Talk to my agent.’ And the agent says drop dead.”

As a result, Mr. Johnson, Melville House doesn’t deal with agents very often, and when they go after a writer as famous as, say, former Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, whose book With the Beatles Melville published in 2005, they deal with them directly and offer only a nominal advance. “The pie is just not big enough in the small press world,” Mr. Johnson said.

He added later: “I hope [Miller] makes a liar out of me. If he can pull off everything he's talking about, he’s a hero. But there are a lot of heroes who are already pulling it off.”

But the book of the moment, Matthew Sharpe's stunning, offbeat coming-of-age novel, The Sleeping Father , a tale of two teenagers whose father has recently come out of a coma, had neither of the above. Rejected by more than 20 major publishers, Sharpe's third book-his first two, Stories from the Tube and Nothing Is Terrible , were published by Villard, which passed on this one-was bought by tiny, Brooklyn-based Soft Skull Press for an advance of $1,000. The publisher, which employs five people in various part-time arrangements, has no publicity or marketing budget to speak of. What's more, the book is a paperback original-and paperbacks traditionally get next to no space in rapidly shrinking review vehicles. Still, The Sleeping Father received a full-page rave in The New York Times Book Review -and four weeks in a coveted "And Bear in Mind" slot-and a mention, also in The Times , by the novelist Anne Tyler. The novelist Susan Isaacs chose it for the February Today show Book Club pick, and as of last week, it has gone into a third printing, bringing the total to almost 40,000. As of this writing, it's the 548th best-selling book on Amazon.com.

This kind of success almost never happens in contemporary publishing. While many paperback originals-Downtown Press' Chick-lit series, for example-sell reasonably well, I can think of only two that broke out: Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City , which spawned a whole genre, and Jhumpa Lahiri's debut story collection, Interpreter of Maladies , which won a Pulitzer Prize. And while out-of-the-mainstream publishers occasionally produce a best-seller like Girl with a Pearl Earring or The Time Traveler's Wife , most of the books you know about come from the same old New York biggies.

So The Sleeping Father is an interesting case-especially when you factor in that until late 2001, Soft Skull was best known, if it was known at all, for re-releasing the scandal-ridden George W. Bush biography, Fortunate Son . Why, then, has The Sleeping Father made such noise?

The answer, of course, is as complex as the book itself, and involves at least as many characters. There's the tireless agent, Collins McCormick's Leslie Falk, a fan of Sharpe's underread earlier works, who represented the book along with her boss, David McCormick; there's the eagle-eyed journalists, outgoing NYTBR head Chip McGrath, and his editor, Alida Becker, who, Mr. McGrath said, "picked up on" the book early on. There's the Irish-born theater-director-turned-publisher Richard Nash, who in late 2001 stepped in to take care of Soft Skull's disastrous finances and "by default" became the publisher. And, of course, there's Matthew Sharpe himself, who, after all, wrote the "perfect book" that Mr. Nash bought.

But this being publishing, there's also a moral to the story, a moral that is one part David and Goliath and one part The Little Engine That Could . While Mr. Sharpe is quick to credit Villard editor Bruce Tracy-who, he says, sent him a note after The Sleeping Father was picked by the Today show-for "launching my career," there has to be at least a little glee that the book Mr. Tracy rejected is the one that took off. (Mr. Tracy did not return a call for comment.) "I hate to hearken back to the old days," said one established novelist who admires Mr. Sharpe's work, "but publishers used to nurture authors, not toss them aside after one novel." Or, as Mr. Nash puts it, the story of The Sleeping Father 's publication is practically mythic. "The two-book deal with a big publisher is supposed to be the Holy Grail," he said. "But it turned out, in this case, that the Grail was made of bronze." In the end, it took a tiny publisher to restore Mr. Sharpe's luster.