Failure
I wanted to say something funny about failure. I had a sentence typed out, but it felt empty, superficial. Failure is serious, not like we can’t joke about it, but it has serious consequences, sometimes good, like inspiring me to start a press, sometimes dreadful, no example needed. I am thinking about failure because my latest plan is failing.
A couple years ago I ordered a book called Hey You Assholes from a small press that, not longer after I placed the order, turned around and failed incredibly. That failure led, though, to Kyle Seibel (good guy, don’t know if you will read this, sir, but if you do, congrats) eventually publishing his book with a much better small press, Clash Books. Here I am, supposed to be promoting our books, and including a link to a book put out by a rival publisher—the thing is, we’re not rivals, though. We’re on friendly terms, not that we hang out or go on long walks with each other, but I’ve bought Clash books and those folks have bought Malarkey books—and just like a bunch of other presses I have nothing but good things to say about them along with great respect. So anyway like a year ago I repreordered Hey You Assholes, with a new cover and new publisher, and a few weeks ago I finally got my copy. I’ve been reading a story or two a day and loving it, and at some point I decided, I want to get copies of this book for my coteachers. I’m a special education teacher (for the next six weeks at least, moving over to regular education next year) and in addition to teaching resource classes on my own I’m also a coteacher part of the day, working with two different teachers. We happen to be in a short story unit, and these teachers have been so good to me this year, so supportive, that I wanted to get them a little something, that little something being a short story collection called Hey You Assholes. It’s a really good book and I thought they might enjoy some of the stories, even if we can’t teach them in class, and I thought it would be funny to give them a book called Hey You Assholes. Something we could laugh about. Like next year I’ll see them in the hallway and we won’t be teaching together anymore but we’ll still be friends and I’ll say Hey you assholes and we’ll laugh. Now we get to the point, the thing that really drove home for me the reality of my current failure: I ordered two more copies of Hey You Assholes and when I went to write a little note in the front of each copy, well, it was challenging, because the book doesn’t want to fold back like a normal book, because the book is a print on demand from Ingram. It just doesn’t fold or bend the way an offset book does, not without messing up the glue. I ended up just writing diagonally on the title page because I didn’t want to over-stress the cover by folding it back. This is not a criticism of Kyle or of Clash, or me slagging on the quality of the book, because most of our books have the exact same problem, since they’re also print on demand from Ingram. (I thought about being vague about what book I was talking about because I didn’t want to come off the wrong way, but in the end I felt like spending this much space talking about Kyle’s book might make someone want to read it, in which case it’s worth it. You definitely should read it.)
Printing on demand with Ingram makes complete sense: the overall quality is usually decent, except when they print someone else’s book inside your cover—anyone want to buy a copy of The Muu-Antiques or Gloria Patri with the wrong books printed inside?—and it’s economical, since you don’t have to come up with thousands of dollars to do a print run. That doesn’t mean I like doing it.
Decent quality is fine and all, but I wanted really nice quality, and I got it, with Hair Shirt and Boxcutters, books that you can fold the front pages back and write a nice little note for the wonderful friends you’ve bought it for. It’s not traditionally printed, still digital, but it is a higher quality of printing. We ordered 300 copies of each book with Bookmobile and they are beautiful, even if I accidentally picked laminate for the Hair Shirt cover. They feel so nice, they look so good. It genuinely pains me to look at them because I don’t know if we’ll be able to do it again. Bookmobile doesn’t do print on demand, but I figured we could do modest print runs, sell enough copies to cover the costs, and well, we’re still 97 copies away from breaking even on Boxcutters. We’ll get there eventually, I’m sure, but we kind of need to be there now, if we’re going print really nice copies of our other books this year, or next year. So my plan was we’d do this with all our books this year, but we’re pretty clearly going to fail.
Failure in this scenario will not be apocalyptic. We won’t shut down. It will just mean going back to print on demand. It will be efficient. It will be fine. Most people won’t notice. Just me and the people who’ve seen Hair Shirt and Boxcutters. We’ll know, we’ll think about what could have been. But we’ll be okay. Maybe we’ll try again.
This is a postscript, I guess. I didn’t want to shoehorn this in to the main deal, but I also didn’t want to leave it unsaid: the books are not failures at all. They’re wonderful. Naturally I feel like a failure for not being better at selling them, but as works of art, as cohesive books, as physical objects, they’re magnificent. My public mantra is often This shit is expensive, but my actual one is more like This shit is hard. It’s hard to sell books. Anyway I just want it known that if I say, man, it sucks, but we just aren’t selling enough books to justify dropping $2,500 on print runs, it’s not because of the books, it’s because of the world and it’s because of me. Hair Shirt and Boxcutters, they’re fucking beautiful.