Paul McVeigh and Kirsty Logan are authors you may have heard of. Both of their debuts were published by Salt, an independent publisher. Paul McVeigh’s The Good Son was shortlisted for a bunch of awards, and won the Polari first book prize this year. Kirsty Logan’s The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales won three awards — including the Polari in 2015— and Logan had her next book published with Harvill Secker, a division of Penguin Random House. The same trajectory is likely for Paul McVeigh. It’s a familiar story.

Independent publishers have existed since the 19th century; it wasn’t until the 20th and the 21st that we saw the industry dominated by a few corporations. “The Big Four” publishers – Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Hachette and HarperCollins – have grown big by buying up small publishers. Hogarth, for example, was founded by Leonard and Virginia Woolf in 1917; now it is an imprint at the Crown Publishing Group, which is in turn a part of Penguin Random House – which itself used to be Penguin and Random House before their merger in 2013. Phew.

Independent publishers, though, are the ones who made literature a commodity in the first place – or perhaps supplied the demand that already existed – so we shouldn’t be surprised at the success of small and independent publishers, picking up prizes and acclaim at an enviable pace in recent years. Yet the capitalist nature of big publishing and the doom-and-gloom forecasts we’ve been hearing for the last decade or so have created a climate in which we are, indeed, surprised.

There are many, many small presses out there today, in a world where anyone can set up a website and declare themselves a small press. Enough naive authors have been burned by scams to be wary. For example, the class-action lawsuit that was filed against and later settled with Author Solutions Inc. But a few independent publishers are looming ever larger in a crowded scene.

Graeme Macrae Burnet. His book His Bloody Project, published by Contraband, outsold the rest of the Man Booker shortlist until Beatty was announced as the winner.

Some success stories have already been written about, both on the Guardian and elsewhere. His Bloody Project, published by Contraband – a imprint of Saraband, which is run by two people – was nominated for the Man Booker prize, for example, and Transoceanic Lights by S Li was published on a shoestring budget by Harvard Square Editions and named as one of the National Book Foundation’s Five Under 35. Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, which won the Booker in October, was published in the UK by the relatively large small press, Oneworld Publications, the 20-strong team that also published the 2015 winner, Marlon James. Another two-person operation, Galley Beggar Press, published Eimear McBride’s debut A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing in its first year trading. McBride won numerous prizes, including the Baileys women’s prize for fiction. They’ve continued to publish fiction in line with their mission: “We believe in the beauty of books and the printed word, in the importance of nurturing authors and paying serious attention to editing, and in the vital importance of art as well as commerce.”

Since many small presses often lack the resources that mid-sized publishers like Graywolf and Oneworld have, so when an author becomes successful, it is in the best interest of both author and small press to move the rights over to a firm with more money and a wider distribution network. McBride, as an example, went to Hogarth with her second. T Geronimo Johnson’s well-reviewed debut, Hold It ’Til It Hurts, was published by Coffee House Press and his second, Welcome to Braggsville, was published by William Morrow – an imprint of HarperCollins. Similarly, Nell Zink’s debut The Wallcreeper was published by author Danielle Dutton’s press, Dorothy: A Publishing Project but Zink’s next two books were published by Ecco, a HarperCollins imprint.

Way back in the 1970s, when Rita Mae Brown first published Rubyfruit Jungle, her now-iconic bildungsroman about an unapologetic lesbian, her publisher (a two-woman press long defunct) couldn’t keep up with demand. Though they printed and sold some 70,000 copies, they eventually had to sell the rights to Bantam, which has since itself been bought by Random House. The success of Rubyfruit Jungle was an underground affair – people passed the book along, shared it with those they could trust, told people about it in letters. There were no advertisements for it, no publicity plan. Today, many independent publishers work very hard to publicise their books, with varying success – but word of mouth remains crucial.

Writer Nell Zink, pictured at the Edinburgh international book festival. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

As more authors jump to prominence from small presses, and as conversations around them become louder – publishers such as And Other Stories and Civil Coping Mechanisms Press – a question that may be worth asking is: are big publishers unwilling to take risks any more? Increasingly, “risky” authors, those who’ve been rejected over and over again by traditional publishers or dozens of agents, are being picked up by small presses whose modus operandi is to take risks on literature that is exciting, innovative, or that they deem important either stylistically or politically. Then the big publishers swoop in and profit from the hard work and risk-taking of the small presses.

That is a good thing, in a way, because it means everyone makes more money from the art and a wider audience is reached. But it does seem like big publishers are hedging their bets more and more often, operating as if they are not too big to fail. It is a shame that the heavy lifting is being left to those who are only big in ambition.