Project Malarkey
Sorry
This is a struggle. Our website revenue is down 62% over the last thirty days. I am thinking about why: partly, perhaps, because of the election. People were preoccupied, there being more important things, admittedly, than small press books, and people were donating money. It’s conceivable, no way to know if it happened unless someone just comes out and tells us, that there were people who looked at the choice between spending $20 on a book, or throwing $20 at a political candidate with the hope of beating Trump, and chose to forego the book. We can’t fault anyone for that. Add to this, our most reliable marketing platform really seems to be on the skids. We’ve had some rough patches with twitter since Musk took over, but, for now, this time it feels different. And the other avenues are not picking up the slack. There is, also, the selection of books. We have ended the year with a string of short story collections, which are notoriously hard to sell, on top of which they are by authors who are not famous or popular or influential or having a moment. They are fine, marvelous writers all the same. Personally, I believe the books we publish are beyond reproach, but I am always cognizant of the big downside to my approach to acquisitions: I pick a book because I like it and want to work on it. That’s it. I don’t factor in the author’s platform, or salability. The result is sometimes, not infrequently, we publish books by writers who simply aren’t going to sell a lot of books on their own. We’re relying on our good name, our brand, if you will, to draw interest. This is in stark contrast to our competitors? adversaries? nemeses?—none of those words really fits because a place like Hachette is completely unaware of us; we have no relationship to or with them, rendering our rivalry one-sided and imaginary and embarrassing. Nevertheless, you won’t catch Malarkey creating some bogus imprint devoted to publishing right-wing books in an effort to cash in on the think tank boost. You won’t see us publishing books by celebrities. You won’t see us piggybacking on the latest trends. What you will see us doing is publishing interesting books by under-the-radar authors, and if that’s important to you (sorry for being impolite) then we have to ask you, once again, sorry, for your support, because without it we will not exist. Sorry. I have said this before, but it’s true enough to repeat: for all our talk of independent literature, we are not independent at all; we depend on our readers, and we are grateful for every one.
Some ways to support Malarkey
Ebooks
One of the easiest, and cheapest, ways to help our cause is to purchase ebooks directly from our website. Most of them are also available from Amazon or Barnes and Noble or Apple, but if you buy them straight from us the money goes straight to us. Instead of Amazon taking more than half of the sale, we get the full $5, minus a relatively small fee from Paypal or Stripe, depending on how you pay. (It’s true, for a long time we sold our ebooks for $3 on the website; then I started setting the prices at $5 and marking them on sale for $3. Recently I went ahead and marked most of the ebooks at $5, which matches the Amazon price. $5 for an ebook is pretty low compared to what Big 5 publishers are charging.
Preorders
If you’re reading this, you’ve most likely heard about the importance of preorders. That importance is not exaggerated. We have most of the covers for 2025 lined up and have to pay for them well before the books come out. The following books are currently available for preorder (with more on the way):
Francis Top’s Lost Cipher by Craig Rodgers
Detective Novel by Craig Rodgers
Boxcutters by John Chrostek
Hair Shirt by Adrian Sobol
The Barre Incidents by Lauren Bolger
Book Club
Buy yourself a year of book mail with a subscription to our book club. You’ll get Detective Novel, Boxcutters, Hair Shirt, and The Barren Incidents, as well as the poetry collection My Ardent Love of the Pencil by Vi Khi Nao (not yet available for individual preorder). You’ll also get, I don’t know, three or four or five issues of King Ludd’s Rag, plus Hellarkey. I say three or four or five, and the answer genuinely will depend on how many book club subscribers we have. More subscribers will allow us to publish more issues—becasuse of money. I am also going to sew some notebooks by hand and send them out to book clubbers. I’ve set the price for book club at $13 a month for 2025, which feels steep, but here’s how it breaks down. Let’s say you pay $150 up front for the annual subscription. Or let’s say you only pay $127.50 because you get 15% off by taking advantage of this code: PROJECTMALARKEY. Well, out of that, at a minimum, $23.15 will go toward shipping. That is if the rates don’t go up again. Another $25 will go to the authors. Another $35-$40 will be eaten up by the costs of the books. $150 leaves us with a custhion, to go toward envelopes, to go toward paper, to go toward ink, to go toward paying writers for their King Ludd’s stories, to help pay for the website. to help cover award entries. to God knows what other costs will turn up.
Books
We’ve published a lot of great books: novels, story collections, poetry collections. Horror. Literary. Speculative. With most orders through our website, we try to throw in the latest issue of King Ludd’s Rag. The PROJECTMALARKEY discount code I mentioned above will also apply to individual books.
Tip Jar
This is weird, but you can just give us money. If you have enough books on your to-be-read pile, you can just give us $5, or $25, or $50, or actually any amount, go for it!