French Flaps
People compliment us on the quality of our books sometimes, and I have to shamefacedly admit that they’re all print on demand. In some circles, print on demand books are declassé, even though the quality has improved in the last few years. And even though the quality has improved in the last few years, we still sometimes end up with books that have an entire book that we didn’t publish bound inside one of our covers. If you want to buy one of these freaks of nature just say the word (and give us some money). I don’t need to retrace my entire thought process, but this perception of low quality has always weighed on me. I’ve always wanted to do a real print run, but our scale made that seem impossible and impractical. As Asterism (relatively new indie book distributor out of Seattle) has grown, however, I’ve been thinking of ways we could switch away from Ingram (big giant book distribution monopoly who also happens to print our books). In theory we could now print however many books we want and let Asterism handle a lot of the distribution. It would solve our biggest problem, since Asterism doesn’t allow stores to return books. In practice, I don’t know if we’ll fully break off from Ingram, but we have decided to do set print runs of 300 each for the five books in our 2025 lineup. That means we’re going to print 300 copies of each book, minimum. If we sell them all, great. If we don’t sell them all, bad, bad bad, very bad. I think the quality will be a little higher. I think they’ll be more fun. At least two of them will have French flaps. Adrian Sobol is going to write a poem to put on one of those flaps. John Chrostek is going to write a really short story to go on one of his flaps. Other publishers use that space for blurbs. Not us. That real estate is too precious to give over to blurbs and author photos. It should be used for art.
This is going to cost money. It will be nice. The books will be nice. And they’re good books and they deserve to be done up. The plan, basically, is there’ll be two versions of the books, a cool special version and a regular old print-on-demand version. The plan, also, is to print the books with Bookmobile. That’s who Graywolf uses. So let’s say you want the special cool version: the way to get it is to preorder or be part of our book club. Whatever is left of our admittedly small print runs will be sent to Asterism for distribution (both wholesale and retail). Print on demand versions will be out there for everyone else.
Here’s where I say, “We need your support.” We need your support. We have set up a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to cover printing (and other, so many other) costs, and we need your support. I will now outline the basic rewards:
for $5, you’ll get a digital Malarkey sampler, featuring work by a variety of our authors;
for $50, you can get a code to download any and all of our ebooks (this is currently a $150+ value by the way);
also for $50, you’ll get a 2025 zine subscription (King Ludd’s Rag + Hellarkey + some single-author stories we’re going to publish) and a t-shirt. We’re going to print nice t-shirts with a place out of Tulsa, OK, called Mythic Press;
for $200, you’ll get all five books from 2025, plus all the zines, plus stickers, plus a hand-made notebook, plus a t-shirt.
for $500, you get the sampler, the ebooks code, the t-shirt, the notebook, the stickers, and print copies of issues 1-22 of King Ludd’s Rag, and most importantly you’ll get the books!
we’ll also have some additional rewards, but this is where we’re starting.
We have an all-or-nothing goal of $11,500. I’m stressing now because I can’t change that number now that the campaign is live. They really should have got someone who knows more about this to set up this campaign, but there was no one better available. Can we do it? God, I don’t know, but I hope so.
So, that’s it for now. If you like what we do, if you care about literature, please think about supporting this project. I think the rewards are pretty nice. I know the books are good. I am always torn, when I’m working on Malarkey stuff, between joy that I get to work on such rewarding, beautiful books, with such delightful and devoted writers, and sadness that they’re publishing with a tiny, low-budget outfit like ours. I don’t mean to be self-deprecating; it’s just something I do. The truth is I’m really proud of this press, the work we do, the words we publish, and I genuinely love it.