Horror and Poetry
Summer’s not over but it feels like it’s over, because here in Missouri the weather was nice for three days in a row (a record) and school is just a couple weeks away—indeed, I told myself I would check my work email today, although I haven’t got up the nerve to do it yet—but also because I am working on Hellarkey. This is a magazine we publish every October, and this year for once I got a jump on it. We’ll have copies printed and in the mail in September. We should. It is also a cursed magazine and something always goes awry just at the moment I think it’s all going perfect. We’ll see.
The editors, Lauren Bolger, OF Cieri, and Eric Williams, have picked out ten stories of mayhem and terror, and I’ve got them all laid out, with just a couple pages left to fill. I’m going to send the files to the printer this week or next so that Lauren Bolger will get a stack of copies delivered to her in time to be able to send one out with every copy of her new novel, The Barre Incidents, she signs.
Speaking of The Barre Incidents, we are getting a small run of books printed by Bookmobile, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and these first editions will only be available through our website, Asterism Books, or in-person events, like Printers Row in Chicago on September 6, where Lauren will have copies available for sale almost a month ahead of the publication date. I don’t know if it is uncouth for us to sell the book before it comes out, but we’re going to have space at the Bizzaro Horror table and I wanted Lauren’s new book to be there. If you want to be one of the first people in history to get a copy of The Barre Incidents, go to Printers Row.
We will also have print on demand copies available through Bookshop, Amazon, B&N, etc. Those links will be available soon.
The Barre Incidents comes out on October 1. Anyone who orders from our website before then will receive a signed first edition, along with a bookmark and a copy of Hellarkey vol. IV. Feel free to use code PREORDER to save 15%.
Preorder The Barre Incidents
Read a sample of The Barre Incidents by Lauren Bolger
If you’d like to order Hellarkey separately, you can get $3 off with code HELLARKEYISREAL at checkout at malarkeybooks.com.
Our second poetry title comes out next month. My Ardent Love for the Pencil by Vi Khi Nao is a playful reflection on friendship, love, and creation, filled with knockout sentences and poems that blend into each other. Our first book to include color photographs, it is printed on photo quality paper, and we have about twenty signed first editions left. The first editions, printed by Bookmobile, are absolutely gorgeous. The code PREORDER is still good for 15% off.
Read a selection of pieces from My Ardent Love for the Pencil.
Preorder a signed copy of My Ardent Love for the Pencil
We don’t have any full-length poetry titles scheduled for next year. We still want to publish some poetry, though, and this is our plan: we’re going to put out a series of poetry EPs, or zines/micro-chapbooks, however you like to look at it. It will be four or it will be six or it will be twelve EPs, depending on how much funding we get. These won’t be available for individual sale; rather, they’ll go out to all book club subscribers, and we’ll send them out as a bonus with orders that come in through the website. We wanted to incorporate some small-scale projects that don’t require a ton of money or marketing, that are more for fun. We’ll cover the printing costs out of book club and general operational funds, but we’re relying on patrons to help pay the authors. We’re looking for two to ten more patrons to sign up so we can make this project happen. For more info, or to become a poet-of-the-month patron, look here.
Poet of the month, at this moment, is a misnomer, because at this moment we can only commit to doing these quarterly; however, if we get twelve patrons then we’ll do one per month next year. Either way, we will put out some submission guidelines soon.
July was our best month this year, our best month in a long time, and we need to keep it going. November and December tend to be very slow, and I anticipate attacks on public media rippling out and cutting into small press sales as people shift to increasing their support for PBS and NPR. My wife and I let our PBS support lapse when we left Colorado, but we just re-upped with our local station and I encourage anyone who can to support public media. Without turning this into too much of a rant, there was a pompous ass from Reason magazine (a magazine for and by pompous asses) who argued that he was all for public media but he didn’t want government paying into it because the state shouldn’t be interfering in news stories, which is a really easy argument to make. Maybe it’s one I could buy if there was evidence of the state dictating PBS and NPR news coverage. Meanwhile one need not look far to find the state manipulating and dictating coverage from privately owned media companies, from CBS currying favor with the president (a polite way of saying bribing the president), to the White House planting a story of Harvard planning to pay $500 million to regain access to federal funding and the New York Times running with it, even though it’s apparently not true. I’m sorry; I actually wrote a much bleaker newsletter than this one, and then I thought, no, don’t send that, but the bleakness has snuck back in. Anyway, I would very much love to be wrong about the ripple effect of defunding public media. I would love for public media and small presses to thrive simultaneously. What makes me think we’ll take a hit is that when Small Press Distribution shut down our sales did as well, as people in the literary community rallied to support the presses that were affected by SPD’s closure. There’s only so much money to go around. We’ll see. We’ll see.
We’ll wrap this up with the reminder that Malarkey does not get institutional or government support, nor support from a wealthy relative who floats us in the lean times (if you know you know). All we have is our readers, and a line of credit from the Credit Union of Colorado that we only dip into in emergencies. Every book we sell makes the next one possible.
Thanks for reading. Stay safe out there.