The 2024 Malarkey Pledge Drive
If you pay any attention to indie/small press publishing, you’ve heard that this is a tough time for small presses. I think it’s always a tough time for small presses, but this year has brought extra challenges, chief among them the dissolution of Small Press Distribution. Malarkey was not directly affected by this because we didn’t ever distribute with SPD; however, with so many small presses being upended, they needed a lot of extra support from the literary community, and I suspect that affected our overall sales.
We’ve also been hit with a large number of returns this year. I wrote about it in our newsletter but the gist is returns hit small publishers hard. Instead of receiving a large payment from Ingram last week we received a bill. Not fun.
Another problem is the villain Louis DeJoy. I am a post office partisan; my grandfather was a rural mail carrier for twenty-five years and I think the post office is the greatest institution in the US. But under DeJoy’s demented leadership the post office has raised shipping rates over and over in the last few years. It now costs $4.63 to send a package media mail. A couple years ago media mail was less than $3. We can of course charge for shipping (and in fact we went from charging the standard media mail rate to a flat rate of $5), but we also have two subscription options, for book club and for King Ludd’s Rag, and when shipping rates increase we end up losing hundreds of dollars over the course of a year, without making that up by increasing the costs of the subscriptions.
We also took on some books that we hadn’t planned on, when their original publisher shuttered, which naturally led to unplanned-on costs.
This next one is ultimately my mistake, but because of my schedule I decided to pay for editing on a couple books. I normally edit everything myself, and of course I still copy edited these two books after they had gone trough editing; it did help us keep on schedule but it also added greatly to our costs (even though we got friend discounts for the work), and those costs are coming out of the general fund and not being counted against author royalties.
There are other factors, like printing costs, but basically sales slump + returns + postage increase + extra costs = we need to bring in more revenue to stay afloat. Malarkey has no institutional support, meaning we don’t get money from a university, or a corporation, for instance Target (no shade to Graywolf Press; I have great respect for their books, especially the ones by Percival Everett). We don’t get grants. We don’t have investors. When the coffers we don’t call a rich relative to bail us out (iykyk). I’ve almost given in a few times but I’m also committed to keeping Malarkey out of debt, so we don’t have a credit card or a loan we use to cover costs. We live and die by book sales. Some people will think this is not a great strategy, but it keeps us independent. I believe in the books we make; I volunteer my time on all of them and pay for a lot of stuff out of pocket. I don’t know if I would keep doing any of this if I thought there wasn’t interest, if no one cared, but there is interest, and people do care. We’re not going to save the world or revolutionize the publishing industry, but we are making books that matter and having fun doing it. If you like what we do now is a really great time to support our mission however you can. Below are some easy ways for you to do that, even for as little as $3 with an ebook, or $5 with a copy of The Grift. Thanks!
—Alan Good