1342
We sold 1,342 books in 2025. This figure does not include book club orders, zines, or anthologies. I’m just looking at the books we have to pay royalties on, which has me reflecting on why small presses fail.
In the past, it is weird to admit, I have taken the closings of small presses personally—more the criticisms of those presses. Even when it was really clear that the failures were due to easily avoidable mistakes, it bothered me that so many people seemed happy and eager to pounce on the people who made those mistakes. If we abided by the rule of let whoever has had to prepare royalty statements and fill cover art invoices post the first quote-tweet these pile-ons would have been largely avoided. I don’t see the pile-ons as much these days, since ditching twitter, but always in my mind there’s the somewhat paranoid but not completely off-base thought that if I ever make a big enough mistake there are people who have never given Malarkey a second thought, never bought a book or zine, never shared a post, never read a story or poem that we’ve published online, who will appear from the ether, like clusterflies on a warm day in winter, to gloat over my colossal fuckups. If we accept that small presses are small businesses, then it should be no surprise when small presses fail, and I doubt whether they fail at higher rates than any other small businesses, but still some people treat the shuttering of a small press as a moral failure, which is probably what gets to me.
This press is not about to go under or anything. Malarkey is okay. I make a lot of mistakes and have no business acumen but we are still okay. At any point this could have been one of the presses that failed, though, and looking at a number like 1,342 I can see exactly why presses fail. They don’t all sell that many books, or come close, and no matter how good your intentions you can’t stay open if you don’t sell books. It’s not like they don’t try. It’s incredibly hard to sell books. And if you do sell 1,342, that’s probably a break-even number, unless you only publish one or two titles. To me it looks like a lot only because it felt like we weren’t selling anything for long stretches of the year. For now we’re fine breaking even every year, but that doesn’t work for every press. A few years barely breaking even, for all the labor and stress that goes into this, it makes sense why people give it up. A lot of presses greatly out-sell us, and I’m happy for them and want to do that too. 1,342 makes me feel like we can get there, like we can keep this going.
We processed 541 orders through our website in 2025. We also sold books through Asterism and Ingram distribution, as well as at AWP in Los Angeles and Printers Row in Chicago. Our resolution for the new year is to move 1,000 orders through our website, both downloads and physical orders. Our first order of the year was for a copy of Boxcutters by John Chrostek, and the second was a $0.50 download of King Ludd’s Rag No. 6, featuring stories by Zachary Kocanda and Caroljean Gavin, so we’re on our way.
I’m going through all our sales info for 2025 because I’m calculating the royalties we owe (already paid out $2,000 so far) and even though it’s stressful to watch that money drain out of our accounts I also know we can cover it because we sold 1,342 goddamn books last year. 1,342 isn’t best-seller territory but it’s still a lot of books. We sold them without glossy ads, inside connections, or star-chasing. It’s beautiful to know that in this time of supposed short attention spans and AI revolution we can sell 1,342 books. This is reason for hope. Thank you!
Speaking of hope, I hope you will join the Malarkey Book Club, getting yourself a year of fine book mail while helping us keep this un-lucrative but important operation rolling.
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