House of Malarkey
A lot of people know this: Malarkey is run out my house, a house that was built by me and my wife, with some help from my dad, who was very helpful with laying out the plumbing and the electrical. Our kids helped too. They helped us pour the concrete for the foundation. They hammed the nails into the boards that would become the walls of their rooms. We did it all ourselves, from the foundation to the roof; the only thing we hired out for was the HVAC, and only because we wanted to get mini-splits and everyone said we shouldn’t DIY that, and part of me wishes we had gone ahead and done it ourselves and saved a shitload of money, and another part of me is glad we didn’t have to fuck with it.
It’s an A-frame. My kids like to make comics, and they label them all as published by A-Frame Comics. It’s sweet. Maybe one day they’ll take over Malarkey and set it up as an imprint.
I take the same approach with Malarkey. The only thing I pay for is book covers, although I did a decent job with the cover for Toadstones:
You wouldn’t believe how many hours I spent reworking the description on the back. For the most part, though, I am not a designer. Paying for book covers makes running a shoestring press a lot harder, but I couldn’t do this:
Or this:
I do everything else though. I have edited every book we’ve made except for two, Awful People and Hope and Wild Panic, which I paid some writers I trust, whom I know to have chops, to edit, except I still edited those books after they had gone through them. That’s how it’s supposed to work. Multiple rounds of edits. More eyes is good, except more eyes equals more money. I decided it wouldn’t be fair to count the money I spent on edits against royalties, so that all came out of the Malarkey general budget, which has been a bit of a hardship. Fate intervened in the form of a writer I know on twitter paying me to edit and give feedback on his book. That offset the cost of editing on one of the books. If, by the way, you’d like to hire me to copy edit your book, my email is alanludd@gmail.com. I would love it if some small presses would hire me for this, and I will give them good rates.
I have laid out the interior of every Malarkey and Death of Print title but three. Those three are Music Is Over, which I hired Michael Kazepis, who also did the cover for Backmask, to do (I should also mention that Angelo Maneage did the cover for Thunder from a Clear Blue Sky); and The Life of the Party Is Harder to Find Until You’re the Last One Around, which Adrian Sobol did himself, having both InDesign and InDesign skills; and White People on Vacation, which I entrusted to Alex Miller because he had years of newspaper design skills behind him, and he did an incredible job. Of course, there’s nothing like having your editor also lay out your book. It builds in another layer of proofreading, giving me another chance to catch those occasional mistakes I miss, being human, even though I am in fact a good editor. By the way, if you or your press have a book coming out and you need someone to lay out the interior, I could probably do it, and I would give you good rates, and I will most likely spend the money on Malarkey.
By the way, also, I also set up all our ebooks. Not big fun, one of my least favorite parts, actually, because it is so goddamn boring, but again I am available.
So. A big part of why Malarkey is still here is we follow The Minutemen’s econo ethos. In our case, we keep overhead low and do the majority of the labor in house (and I don’t pay myself). But econo doesn’t stop bookstores from returning books. I picked up a box of books a few weeks ago from the UPS store, and I couldn’t help it, the thought just flashed through my mind, an ideation, not even a thought: why am I even doing this? That doesn’t mean I considered quitting. I did not. It was depressing. It was dispiriting. It was tempting. We are in lean times at Malarkey. Store returns have hit us hard. A few titles have not sold as well as we hoped. New expenses, expected and unexpected, pop up randomly, it feels like every day: for example, we have to send a dozen books to another country for consideration for an award. Great, but also a lot of money. I think this is why a lot of indie/DIY presses shut down. You don’t sell enough books and when you do sell books it doesn’t matter because something’s going to come up, returns, awards, postage hikes, and it’s going to eat up whatever buffer you thought you had. I ideated about shutting down, but I did not think of it, not even for one second. I have a lot of really bad qualities, and one of them is I am very stubborn, but being stubborn can also be a good quality. As long as I have even one hater out there, even if that hater is someone I have made up to motivate me to keep going, I will never quit—as long, as well, as we’re making good books, and I’m able to do the work, and there’s enough money coming in to keep going. I am going to slow down a bit. Going forward Malarkey will be publishing, at most, five books a year. It means missing out on some good titles, but I can’t keep up at the rate we’ve been going. Why am I even doing this? Because I love books, and I love working with writers, it makes me happy even if I can’t make a living at it. The publishing ecosystem being the way it is, I think tiny publishers like ours are useful. I’ve always felt out of place and sort of useless, and next to being a dad being an editor might be the thing I am best at on this earth. I am also pretty good at this pool game called Slam Ball 360.
With all that said, sweet Jesus please buy some books!
—AG