When Small Presses Close Down
Alan Good
With the caveats that I am not an expert, a terribly smart person, or a lawyer, read on:
Small presses or indie publishers or DIY presses, whatever you want to call them, keep closing, and it’s going to keep happening. This stuff is hard. I’m not interested in speculating or criticizing; I am in no position to criticize. Malarkey is still around not because of my amazing leadership or business and publishing acumen, which I don’t have, but but only because of our writers and our readers. So, not here to call anyone out, just want to provide what little insight I have and lay out a couple ideas for how a small press can wind down in a way that’s not totally disruptive to the writers.
First thing, there are some things writers need to know when thinking about publishing with a small press. We’re all different, is one thing. We have different styles, goals, values, desires, expectations, and so on. We have different funding sources. Some indies are classified as indie because they’re not owned by one of the Big 4 publishers. That’s it. Other indies (like this one) are run out of a random person’s house. (Good small press name if you want to start one: Random Person’s House.) When I talk about indie here, or small press, I have something closer to that in mind. Small press. Small staff. Small budget.
So here’s what you need to know, or part of what you need to know, about small presses: a lot of them are run by writers. Some are run by rich people/trust funders. As much as people, myself included, enjoy taking potshots at those types, they have a built in advantage, which people recognize, that sort of immunizes them from both criticism and the cruel realities of indie publishing. They’re “indie” but they’re not indie in the way we are here at Malarkey. Catapult is an indie but I’m not talking about Catapult when I say indie. Anyway, back on topic, small presses, lot of them are run by writers, who are not necessarily wealthy, not necessarily greatly experienced in business or marketing or accounting. (I said I wasn’t here to call anyone out yet here I am calling myself out.) Some people would say these are red flags, and those people don’t have to publish their books with small presses based out of the homes of idealistic writers who randomly thought “I could run a small press” and did their best to follow through. I’m sure that’s nice for them. Not every good writer has that luxury. Our time, literature-wise, is marked by an abundance of great writing, and a scarcity of outlets for great writing. Ragtag low-budget publishers have sprung up out of necessity, to fill the void left by the big shot publishers whose goal is to make money, not fill the world with our wonderful, beautiful words (those beautiful words, for them, are a method to gain money, not a worthy end in themselves). Unfortunately, as I’ve said before, it’s a vold we can’t completely fill because we don’t have the money and we don’t have the connections. Writers need to know that. Sign with a small press, but know they might not have the money to pay for a Net Galley account. Not saying lower your expectations, but temper them. Know what’s possible, what the press and its staff?volunteers? have the bandwidth for. I think we’ve shown that an indie press can produce quality books with high production value (by that I mean great covers, well-edited, not riddled with typos, good interior layouts), but we still don’t have money for a Net Galley account.
I could go on too long, but let me just say a word about my situation, and you can extrapolate from that as you see fit: I’m a writer first, and I run Malarkey for no money, because I love books, these ones in particular, and I just believe they deserve to be out in the world and I think the publishing industry sucks. I’ve put a ton of work and time and care into the press, the admin, the books, building an audience, and every time a small press closes, even if people are laying in to them on twitter, I understand why they closed. This stuff is hard, it’s time-consuming, and you don’t make any money at it. I have a separate bank account for Malarkey, which I often supplement from my own bank account, or money I bring in from sideline editing gigs, or selling my own books. The Malarkey account was overdrawn the other day. Cost us $25. I keep a close eye on it but I paid for a lot of shipping labels earlier in the week, and used PayPal to pay for it, and because our PayPal was empty at the moment I had PayPal pull the money from the bank account. A few days go by and I need to pay some other bills, and I see there’s enough money in the bank to cover it, so I pay, only to find out later the bank had been slow to register the money that had come out of PayPal a couple days earlier so when I looked at the balance in the account there wasn’t actually as much money in there as I thought. I call it triaging the bills: I pay what I can and when the money rolls in from somewhere else (PayPal transfer, Stripe transfer, Patreon—there’s usually a delay from when an order comes into the website and when that money actually goes into our bank account) I pay the next thing. The bills never stop. Covers. Shipping labels. Proofs. Royalties. Website renewal. Software. Blah blah blah. That’s what you should know. I think the long and short is this: if you’re publishing a book with a small press and that press is essentially just one person, or even two, there’s a huge chance the press will shut down at some point. People wear down. This is too much for one person. Go for it, but know all this going in to it, and make certain you have every single necessary file to get the book back into print if the press folds. Final cover. Final PDF. Final Ebook. Final Word master. (Although you might need to get a new cover if you don’t have the rights to it.) Make sure your contract stipulates that you have the right to republish if the press closes.
The Main Point of This Piece:
Now here’s what I think small presses should do when they shut down. I understand when they close. There’s a lot of pressure, there’s a lot of responsibility, there’s no money. You can turn out beautiful books and it seems like no one notices but make a mistake and you’re trash. I understand the temptation to say fuck it, but I still don’t like it when I see a press close without giving any real notice to the writers, without an escape plan, the books just disappear. Not the way to do it. If you’re going to take on the responsibility of publishing someone’s book, which is a big and important responsibility, then you ought to give it your best, and if you find you can’t do that anymore, if you can’t keep up, if there’s no fun in it anymore, if you just can’t keep pulling out of your own pocket to keep the press running, there’s no shame in packing it in. Just make sure you give the authors notice, and give them a chance to keep the press going.
If you’re set up as a business there’s nothing stopping you from transferring that boring paperwork over to the writers. Let them find out how fun it is to deal with all that nonsense. You can also just sell the press. It probably won’t be valued very highly. You probably won’t get much money for it. But you can offload it, put in someone else’s hands, then this thing you built doesn’t just die a meaningless, ignominious death. The books still have a home. If you use Ingram to print your books, you can transfer an account. All those files in there don’t have to be stuck in limbo. In my opinion, you should hand everything over to the authors themselves, sell it to them for like $1, and the authors should just get together, take over the press as an authors’ collective, designate one of their number to manage the Ingram account, and carry on without you to the best of their abilities. The original publisher transfers the titles over. Not that painful. Now it’s their problem, and you don’t have every writer on twitter yelling at you. If the authors don’t want to do that, give them time to set up individual Ingram accounts and transfer titles to each author individually. If an author don’t want to do that it’s on them. But you gave them the opportunity. None of this is terribly hard, but I do sort of think a lot of the time no one even knows this is an option. I mention Ingram because that’s what I’m familiar with. A press closed recently that uses Lulu. I’m too lazy to look up whether Lulu allows account/title transfers, but I can say with confidence there’s always a workaround. You’ll figure it out.
Maybe, writers, if your press shuts down, your publisher might not give you these options, but if you’ve got all your files, you can get the book back out. My advice, self-publish it. It’s not that hard, the royalties go right to you, you’re not wasting time looking for a new publisher. This is more if the book has already been published; if your press closes down before the book even comes out then I’d keep looking for a home, and it’s totally fine to play the damn-my-book-got-canceled-because-my-publisher-folded-with-nothing-more-than-a-note-on-twitter card. Someone might come along and pick it up. In fact, Malarkey has a little imprint called Death of Print, and after Bear Creek Press shut down we picked up three of their books. Consumption and Other Vices by Tyler Dempsey is out now. Awful People by Scott Mitchel May comes out in February of 2024 (but is open for preorders now. This is a hint. To buy it.). And Leigh Chadwick’s Donner Party novel is scheduled to come out, on Malarkey, in 2025. To be clear I am not saying Malarkey or Death of Print will take your cast-off book, only that it’s something we have done, and someone else might do it too.
If you’re a writer with a small press, I don’t see why you couldn’t have a conversation with your editor or publisher about what is the contingency plan if the press is ever going to close. Go for it.
Back to what writers should know about small presses: you’re not just a writer. If you want your book to be successful, if you want the press to stay solvent, pitch in where you can. Whatever your skills are. If you’re good at making graphics, offer to make some sell sheets or quote cards for the books on your press’s lineup, not just your own. We’re lucky at Malarkey to have writers who support each other, lift each other up, and lift the press up. A bunch of them are helping out lately just by doing data entry, adding contact info to spreadsheets so we can all reach out to bookstores, reviewers, and so on. We’re all in this together.
Alan Good is the print editor for Malarkey Books. He wants you to buy some Malarkey books.