Hey Kids, Don’t Work with Sex Leeches

A rumination on forensic accounting at Lost Art Press.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m making this publishing thing way too difficult.

We all have our personal brand of stupidity. My stupidity looks like this: slicing a steak with the knife upside down in my hand (the cutting edge facing the ceiling). It works, but it takes a stupid amount of effort.

And I eat the entire steak that way, oblivious.

Last week my wife, a public radio broadcaster, put together a show about independent book publishers. Because I’m the independent book publisher who gets to see her naked every day, she asked for suggestions of questions she could ask during her show.

That made me do something I’ve never done before: I researched a bunch of other independent publishers. And what I discovered made me rethink what the hell kind of animal Lost Art Press is.

Background: Whenever I chit-chat with the gents at the village urinal trough, I declare that my profession is “independent publisher.” Here’s what that means to me.

• We sell directly to consumers – not through mass-market channels such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble or chain stores. The pop-and-mom stores that carry our books are hand-picked. If you want to sell our full line of books, we must trust you enough to let you babysit our children. Oh, and we’ve had a meal together.

• We don’t use third-party distributors, such as Ingram, to place our books in bookstores. Why would we give up that control? Or pay a middle party to do it?

• We offer royalties to authors that are two or three times the standard industry rate. And our contracts allow for a sharing of power between the author and us. We are partners in this mad, mad mission, after all.

• Oh, and we don’t work with agents. That’s another middle person who gets a cut. Screw those leeches! (To be honest, I really have zero idea how leeches reproduce. Do they screw? I refuse to look it up.)

And so: “Der-der!” I trumpet through the cardboard tube found inside a roll of toilet paper. This is what every independent publisher does!

Or so I thought.

I quickly found out I was stupid wrong. Most independent publishers sell through Amazon and use national and international distributors, just like the monster publisher Penguin Random House (aka House of Random Penguins?).

Plus, some independent publishers declare that “our authors receive traditional publishing contracts and industry-standard royalties.”

Wait – dude, that’s not a plus. Traditional publishing contracts are hilariously unbalanced to favor the publishers. Most publishing contracts tie up your work for the rest of your life. The publisher can title the book whatever it wants, edit it to say whatever it wants and print it on toilet paper. I am not exaggerating.

And royalties? If you get 10 percent of sales as an author, you are doing well.

Also, most of the independents are happy to work with literary sex leeches (I mean agents. Yes, I know that agents are an important part of the big publishing ecosystem. But not our system.)

So if you are “independent,” why would you imitate the big and oppressive system?

After wading through all that double-talk, it made me wonder: What makes a publisher independent if they behave just like a big publisher? And the answer is: Edgy Content? That honestly seems to be the correct answer. They publish books that big publishers won’t take because they are too niche or too weird

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So I didn’t have any questions for Lucy to ask of indie publishers on her radio program. But I had some questions for me.

During the last seven days I have been asking:

• Are our business practices making our lives at Lost Art Press difficult – I mean overly?

• Is it stupid that we don’t sell through Amazon and the national distributors, who can find markets and customers that we can’t even dream of touching?

• And wouldn’t it be great for our bank account if we reduced royalties for our new authors? This change would literally double or triple our annual profits.

My conclusion: “Yes” is the smart answer to all the above questions. But F-it. What we do is working. John and I have plenty to eat. And I can sleep at night. So let’s stay on this rocky, washed-out road that’s paved with poisonous spiders.

But that decision doesn’t mean I’m not stupid.

This building was bought out from under us before we could even tour it. Thank goodness.

We are now looking for a new place to expand our business. We need a place to store our books, mail them to customers and have a place for photography and other future publishing plans. I’m in charge of finding the right building here in Covington, Ky.

We quickly decided that we should buy a building instead of leasing one. (Leasing commercial space is wild-ass expensive.) I settled on spending about $150,000 on a place and then fixing it up. And I found a few candidates here in Covington. A 1930s grocery store. A creepy-ass church. And (Lord help me) another derelict bar.

We did an analysis of the square footage we need to hold our inventory, and all three places would hold our inventory fine (but we might need to spend a little money on an exorcist) and give us room for offices, boxes and packing tables – plus maybe a little retail store someday. It would be tight, but we could purchase any of these places with cash (LAP doesn’t have any debt).

So, it would be a bit of a hard road, but I seem to love Poisonous Spider Street.

On Thursday afternoon, however, a weird switch flipped in my brain. It felt like a religious conversion. One minute I felt firmly one way. The next moment I felt passionately the opposite.

Now, we are going to buy a big building. One that is way bigger than what our future plans call for. Big enough to have a dorm for students (we will not have a dorm for students). An elevator. A building that is beautiful and is a short walk from our offices on Willard Street.

Yeah, it’s going to cost three times as much as the Church of the Bathrooms Without Doors. And yeah, we are going to have to take out our first ever loan in 16 years.

But the payment on that loan will be a small fraction of what we’d pay in a commercial lease.

Perhaps this is the blog entry that people will point to in future years as the moment that Lost Art Press did the Dumb Thing. We formulated our New Coke. Or vacuum pressed our McRib.

And someday you will find me with a cute paper hat, asking if you want to “make it a combo” with that McRib. (Pro-tip: You can cut it with an upside down knife.)

1. This entry is honestly not a criticism of independent publishers. They have to make a living. I thought we were one of them. Turns out we are something stranger and likely stupider.