For eight years, Engine Books was a self-funded, one-woman show. It never generated enough income to cover expenses. So now, Engine Books is joining a new tax-exempt organization, Engine Books Literary Works, to encourage stabilization of funding and professionalization of operations. Join us with a tax-exempt donation!
Donate via our Square store here, or write to gifts@enginebooks.org for a mailing address if you'd prefer to send a check.
As you may have heard or noticed, big changes are afoot at Engine Books. Though we all know how tough times are right now, I hope you’ll want to be a part of them in whatever way you can.
This September, we ended our relationship with Consortium Distribution. It was a great choice for our books: because the press was still new when we joined in 2013, distribution lent us a bit of credibility as we introduced our wonderful books to media outlets and independent booksellers nationwide, helping pave the way for reviews in the top book columns and review outlets. And most importantly, it meant that our authors got to see their books in bookstores everywhere.
But distribution is expensive. A distributor is paid with a percentage of sales income of course. Mandatory catalogue fees. Warehouse fees. Marketing and co-op fees. Freight charges for every bookstore stock order. Fees for processing bookstore returns. Exorbitant costs to print large enough runs to meet pie-in-the-sky sales projections, and then costs for returns and warehousing and recycling of all that extra stock. Mandatory discounts and fees that actually meant that we took a loss for every copy sold of a couple of titles. Costs for mandatory travel twice a year to sales conferences. Expectations that we would participate in promotions at substantial costs, and accusations of insufficient promotion if we couldn’t afford those expenses or chose to use our limited resources elsewhere.
Yet for the first few years, I still feel it was worthwhile, even though I poured money from my own family budget into the press to cover those expenses. So what changed?
In 2017, Ingram, the biggest distributor in the world, took over Consortium. From that day on, Engine Books titles have not sold well (or much at all) in the new system. I am told this is attributable to reduced marketing on our part, but in fact our marketing plans have been identical to our pre-Ingram work. It’s been much harder under the current presidential administration to secure media coverage for anything non-political, especially literary fiction, it’s true. But the transition also meant discontinued marketing support from the distributor—marketing support that was excellent and vital to our bookstore and library outreach. Further, during the transition, a new warehouse system was implemented that left booksellers confused and frustrated and allowed our titles to fall out of favor.
While this may not have had disastrous affects on every client publisher in the system, it seems clear, from my view, that the new system is not built for presses as small as Engine Books, whereas the old one, expensive as it was, worked for us. Instead, we’ve been operating in a deficit through our distribution account, which means we’ve seen no payment from them in several years. Now, as we leave this contract, we are in arrears of approximately $11,000.
What now?
In the short term, I have lent the nonprofit organization that now governs EB, Engine Books Literary Works, enough cash to proceed for an indefinite period of time. We will be keeping the books we fought so hard to publish in print and we intend, after our current pandemic hiatus, move forward to publish more. We will continue to promote those books fiercely, and edit and design them beautifully, as we always have.
Our titles are available through Ingram distribution and remain available at all the usual outlets; they can be ordered via Ingram for bookstore stock, without the extensive costs of the system we’re leaving. They’ll still be available via all your favorite online outlets (Hi, Bookshop!), too, and as ebooks.
The great news is that our hiatus comes at a time that will help lessen the impact we feel from the pandemic, which is putting loads of wonderful small presses in danger of closure, and we are moving forward. Our nonprofit status has been secured (and after a paperwork hiccup, reaffirmed), so we are well positioned to build a new, stronger-than-ever Engine Books.
Would you like to help? We’d love for you to. Here are some ways, whether you've got cash to give or not:
If you’re financially able and willing to give funds, donations are 100% tax deductible. (Please see below for campaign goal and budget.)
Got a fancy friend who’d like to drop some end-of-year cash? Let them know what’s up, and ask them to join you in supporting EBLW.
You can buy and read our books! Paperbacks are available at our square store, Bookshop, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and elsewhere.
Did you read and love one of our titles? Reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, your blog, and anywhere else you see fit are a lovely gift of visibility. Tweet at the author! Post a book selfie on Instagram! Help us remind everyone how great the books we’ve been lucky enough to publish really are.
Follow us on FB and Twitter, and share our posts across your own profiles.
And as always, keep reading more great books.
With love and hope,
Victoria Barrett
Editor and Publisher, Engine Books
Board President, Engine Books Literary Works
Goal: $25,000
Budget
$11,000: Distribution account payoff (one-time cost)
$8,000: Office rent, utilities, and supplies for all of 2021
$2,000: Office furnishings and related expenses (one-time cost)
$1,000: Administrative assistance to manage big changes (one-time cost)
$3,000: printing and promotion of one title in 2021 as we relaunch our program
any additional or unused funds (for example, if we find cheaper rent) will go to a fund to pay author advances for future titles
Donate via our Square store here, or write to gifts@enginebooks.org for a mailing address if you'd prefer to send a check.