A finished copy of Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas arrived on my desk last week; a beautiful volume with a textured, distressed jacket and an elegantly designed page layout which betrayed the care and attention lavished upon it. Given the critical and commercial success of his two other novels – The Savage Detectives and 2666 – so far published in the UK, readers will expect nothing less. Yet I still marvel that these books found a home in the UK at all.

An ex-colleague of mine bought The Savage Detectives, a book about which he was fiercely passionate, for Picador, but he was realistic about its chances in the marketplace. Although I remember him being more hopeful than expectant of its success, it had nevertheless become something of a personal quest for him to see the book published,

The general consensus these days is that the editor in the traditional sense of the word – ie a purchaser, shaper and champion of a novel – is dead; that all books are now bought by a panel of sales and marketing folk who care little about a book's worth and only about its sales potential. While this may be broadly true, there are a few signs – Bolaño being just one of them – that things may be beginning to tip back in the other direction.

Leaving aside Bolaño, there's the case of David Vann and his book Legend of a Suicide. Such has been its success in critical circles that it takes an effort to remember that its publication was far from a commercial decision. Brought out by a US university press, this collection of linked stories was never likely to trouble the bestseller list, but in-house enthusiasm – which from the editor downwards was feverish – pushed a straight-to-paperback piece of debut fiction into the literary limelight. The editor was trusted to stick with her judgement, and it's to her and the publicity department at Penguin that we owe the chance of reading one of the best books of the year.

Next year also sees the British publication of a novel called Tony And Susan by Austin Wright. It comes bearing a quote from Saul Bellow, which immediately gave me pause, given that Bellow died almost five years ago. But Wright himself has been dead for nearer to six years, and the novel was first published in 1993, though not over here. I asked Atlantic why they were republishing an obscure, long-forgotten novel in hardback around the time when some of the biggest hitters in world fiction are releasing their new novels. The answer was simply that the editor concerned truly believed in the book.

Again, we should be thankful for the tenacity of the editor in getting the book through the nightmare of acquisition: Tony and Susan is a thrilling, unusual novel of the stories we tell each other and the stories we tell ourselves. It's the kind of discovery that as a reader I crave: a book that genuinely surprises. But with all that said, I wouldn't have fancied presenting a 16-year-old novel by a dead American with no UK pedigree to the sales force.

I'm not naive enough to suggest that these three fine examples constitute a sea change in the way books are commissioned, but I do think they illustrate a trend of which publishers would do well to take heed. If you publish with verve and conviction, the lack of overt commerciality in a book isn't so much of a problem – in fact, it's this that gives such books a competitive advantage: they stand out from the crowd. Nurturing and keeping the people who can sniff out such books and writers will become, I believe, ever more important as publishing enters a truly digital age.

As the trade becomes more conservative in the light of economic and technological uncertainties, those publishers that take risks and stand out from the crowd may yet have the last laugh. It was thought that the glory days of Picador in the 1970s and 1980s – with their iconic white spines and impressive roster of great writing from around the world – was impossible to replicate. But if publishers trust in the instincts of their editorial teams, such a list might not be an exercise in nostalgia. After all, it worked for Bolaño.

