Reasons to Join Our Book Club
In my last post here I mentioned the closure of Small Press Distribution, which really put a hurt on a lot of small presses. If you’re not familiar with SPD or book distribution in general (I am not an expert either) here is the extremely watered down explanation: publishers get books printed but don’t have warehouses to store books or trucks to move them from store to store, library to library. That work falls to a distributor, and if you’re a small press, indie press, micropress, anything like that, it’s difficult to get a distributor to take you on (and there aren’t many to choose from). SPD filled a need for a long time, providing distribution to bookstores for a wide array of small presses. SPD had its problems, and it seems like they took a pretty big cut. Enough people, so many people, have pontificated about these problems, so I’m going to skip it. They closed up. A lot of publishers were left in the lurch and put in very precarious situations, financially. Out of this mess came a refrain, certainly not a new message, but one that was repeated with new vigor and perhaps more reach: buy books directly from small presses.
Here’s why it’s good to buy books straight from the press: the press gets more money. You buy a book for $18 on Amazon and we eventually get $2 or $3, half of which is owed to the author. Buy the same book from our website and we get $18, minus transaction fees taken out by PayPal or Stripe, depending on your payment method. Those fees, while annoying, are pretty small. We just absorb them; I don’t bother subtracting the fees when I’m doing a balance sheet. I just put that we sold x books at $18 and when we’ve sold enough copies that the amount of money we’ve brought in from a book exceeds the amount we put in to publishing it we magically owe the author money. We get to that break-even point much quicker through direct sales than through Amazon/Bookshop sales. We also work with Asterism, an indie distributor that formed I think around two years before SPD collapsed, and they have great terms for small presses, so our cut when you buy from them is much bigger than from Amazon, but still smaller than direct sales, meaning through our website. Or on the street or at a book fair. Seriously if you see me on the street I will sell you a book. Holler.
That paragraph was extolling the virtues of buying books directly from small presses. In this paragraph, I hope to persuade you to buy not just one book, but several, a year’s worth, in fact. We offer a deal we call the Malarkey Book Club, a very inventive name, where for $15 a month we send you every book we publish as long as you’re signed up. But wait, there’s more! The more being we also send you new issues of King Ludd’s Rag (two short stories per issue, each story at least 4,000 words long) and a Halloween-themed zine we make in October called Hellarkey. Hang on, if you thought that was all, boy howdy. Because we also send stickers. Sometimes we make up stickers that only go out to book club subscribers. Okay, you’re thinking, that’s got to be all. WRONG AGAIN LOSER! We also strive, whenever possible, to make sure the books are signed by the authors. Not always possible, for instance if the author lives in Canada or Mexico, or says no I don’t want to do that.
JOIN THE MALARKEY BOOK CLUB
Here’s how book club helps our authors: number one: we can assure our authors that a specific number of books will make it to readers. This year we’ve been hovering between 50 and 60 book club subscribers, so our writers know, even if no one buys a book, 50+ people will get a copy. Every once in a while there’s an article that gets shared around social media with the claim that the average book sells twelve copies. I believe that has been debunked, but anecdotally, I do know people that’s happened to. None of them have published with us, but still, being able to offer a baseline number of sales to indie writers is valuable to them and us. However, we’d really like to be able to say even if no one buys your book 100 people are going to get a copy.
Number two: money. Our writers get a cut from book club sales. We used to do 5%. We’ve hit upon a simpler formula though, one that requires less math and keeping track of numbers: $300 flat, plus $5 for every book club subscriber above 60. If we get to 100 subscribers then we’ll be looking at paying $500 per author. That is good. That would be nice.
Here’s how book club helps us: money is one. It provides a steady stream of income, helps us meet production costs. In the first few years of this we’ve been over-delivering on book club, meaning we’ve barely broken even with it. In the first year it was priced too low; then we ended up taking on some books for Death of Print and we added them to the book club deal just to be able to get those titles out to more people, but that also ended up costing a lot of money that we hadn’t budged for when we set that year’s lower book club price. Now we’re at $15 a month, which is decent for us. With nine books this year it’s still a little on the edge. But next year we’re going down to six books, but keeping the book club at $15 a month. Or $180 if paid annually. Good news: you can use a discount code to pay less on the annual if you want to. It’s possible some people will say it’s not fair to keep the price at $15 if we’re reducing the number of books; however, we will not survive another year of nine books. At least I won’t. It’s too much work and stress. Six I can handle. I am thinking of perks for book clubbers though, little extras we can send. Stickers. Bonus zines. Discounts. Maybe free back catalogue books. I am actually open to suggestions on this one.
For the first time ever, book club money, next year, should give us a cushion. Which we will need because we’ll be doing small print runs of all our new titles. We’ll print 300 copies, and let it go print on demand after that (unless we’re selling a ton, fingers crossed, of copies). So being a book club member reserves you one of those first-run books, another good reason to join.
Ultimately, no one will benefit from book club more than you. I work very hard on these books, for no actual pay, for two reasons: I love books, and I’m both extremely stubborn and kind of naive. I have a chip on my shoulder because people are quick to criticize indie books, for their covers, for typos, for their layout, so I put in a lot of hours on edits and layout to make sure the books look professional, and we hire great cover designers like Angelo Maneage and Matthew Revert to make sure the covers stand out. Most importantly, the books are good; they’re books that were written for the same reasons I put so much time into this press: the writers love what they do to the point of insanity. So—you sign up for book club, you are going to get some books that you would not have bought otherwise, and that sets you up to discover a book you love, an author you love. There is also the chance that some month you get a book that you don’t like that much. If that happens, just box it up and ask for your money back. I’m just joking, don’t do that because we won’t give it to you ! (On other hand if there is a defect in the book, like it was damaged or the printer dropped the ball, yes let me know and we’ll take care of it.) Even if you don’t like a book, so what. You’ve still done something good. You might come back to it a few years down the road and have a completely different response to it, a response it will only be possible to have if you have the foresight to sign up for the book club now.
Okay, let me circle back to the perks discussion: if you sign up now we will send you a free book from our back catalogue. You just have to email malarkeybooks at gmail dot com and tell me what book you want.
Right now we have three ways to join (looking at adding other options): patreon, paypal subscriptions, or pay up front. If you’d like to get it a little cheaper you can use discount code BOOKS! at checkout if you buy an annual subscription. That will get you $36 off. We can live with that I suppose. If you live in Canada, we will send books to you in two batches. If we ship new books as they come out the post office will take all our money.
JOIN THE MALARKEY BOOK CLUB
One more way the book club benefits you: it makes you look cool. One of our long-time subscribers always posts pictures of new arrivals with the caption “cool kids book mail.” That can be you!
With President Biden on his way out the chances of someone ending up on this website because they googled “Malarkey” are pretty low, meaning if you’ve read this post you’re someone who is interested in literature and the small press community—I actually hate going into sell mode so let me shut up now.
—Alan Good, Malarkey editor guy