everything is totally fine: 1 year anniversary

my collection of short stories ("smallies"), everything is totally fine, was published by muumuu house exactly one year ago. it consists of 69 stories and is divided into three sections. stories from it had previously appeared in wigleaf, new world writing, xray, hobart, forever mag (solicited), bending genres, young mag (solicited), instant lit, muumuu house, the neutral spaces blog, and philosophical idiot. it was my fourth book, but only second available via general distribution channels.

this blog post is about my cool book. i tried to include a lot of 'behind the scenes' information to sate the curiosity of my potential readership (writers who publish with or aspire to publish with small presses).

zac smith book timeline as of january 2023:

December 2019 - 50 Barn Poems (clash books)

September 2020 - Chainsaw Blurbs & Other Blurbs (self-released/ghost city press)

March(?) 2021 - Two Million Shirts (co-authored with Giacomo Pope, self-released)

January 2022 - Everything is Totally Fine (muumuu house) 

November 2022 - I Hope You Enjoy the Food (self-released)

that's five books in 3 years, which makes me better and cooler than you, according to various faux-sarcastic attempts at self-validation i've seen on twitter.

brief summary of my other books:

50 Barn Poems: this is 50 short barn poems. i signed a contract with clash within 5 days of submitting the manuscript, unsolicited; i make 50% royalties per copy sold through normal distribution channels and i get to buy author copies at the cost of printing. we sold ~50 preorders (motivated by the limited release of giacomo's 50 barn blurbs with the first 50 orders, which was self-funded; i probably broke even on this endeavor). clash books, at least when i published with them used ingramspark, a print-on-demand service that enables distribution via amazon and other websites and, technically, book stores, but because of the print-on-demand nature precludes returns and thus most book stores have no interest in stocking it. clash (at the time) and i also had no pr/marketing/publicity plan or funding.i have probably made less than $300 from this book in royalties; haven't received a royalty payment in ~12 months after getting paypal'd ~$4.98 every two months or so. the book was not edited by the editors and contains one typo, one unintentionally non-existent word, and each edition misspells Stephen Merritt's name in the blurbs. the cover was done by matthew revert and the typesetting was done by leza, using some kind of free design program's presets; we had argued about the margins for a while, which i think soured her on me.

Chainsaw Blurbs & Other Blurbs: this book consists of 50 blurbs, ranging from one sentence to ~5 pages in length. similar to giacomo's book for my book, this was a preorder bonus for Chansaw Poems & Other Poems (ghost city press). it looks very similar to the barn blurbs book. i think we made 55 copies technically and i sawed one in half on video after filling it with jam as a marketing stunt. was a net loss for us; giacomo seemingly has never or rarely been paid royalties by ghost city press. i designed the cover and did the layout, based on giacomo's layout for 50 barn blurbs. it was printed by spencer printing.

Two Million Shirts: this is a book-lengthed poem. giacomo and i wrote this together and had a limited pre-order window of ~2 weeks for physical copies. we had about 70 made and sold maybe 40 and put the full poem on the internet for free, although the physical version has ~25 blurbs we wrote and an essay about publishing. unsure how many copies giacomo has left. i sent one of my two copies to michael silverblatt and shawn sullivan via one-day shipping in anticipation of our bookworm interview. i don't think either of them read it. giacomo designed and typeset this. it was printed by spencer printing.

I Hope You Enjoy the Food: made this for fun not really intending to sell copies. was prompted to updated/edit/print it because i wanted to make one as a gift for my mother in law. this is half cookbook, half long essay about cooking and food. have sold ~32 copies total so far. i designed and typeset it. it was printed by snowfall press, which we use for back patio books.

everything is totally fine: publication background

this book started as an idea for a digital-only chapbook collaboration with giacomo. the idea of a website for digital collaborative chapbooks fizzled out and we took our writing to integrate them into new book ideas. once i had a draft of ~50-70 stories i started sending it places and trying, briefly, to get an agent. i emailed exactly two agents, specifically asking them to only pitch it to melville house; one ignored me and one responded that he doesn't represent fiction books anymore.

i submitted the manuscript to future tense as part of their open submission period in 2020 and got a personal and supportive rejection from kevin (which was classified as spam because it originated from his personal email and not the future tense email; i have speculated about this happening to other people and them not knowing their book was rejected when we talked about future tense). i submitted it to yuka when she was editing for soft skull (and unknowingly, to me, at the time, tao's girlfriend) and received a personal and supportive rejection. i DM'd giancarlo via the tyrant books twitter and asked if i could email him a manuscript and he said sure; he never responded to my email, and i remembered reading that he only published stuff that he responded to within 24 hours, so i assumed it was rejected relatively quickly. i sent it to clash, foolishly thinking they'd be interested due to having published 50 Barn Poems, and was rejected via one-line twitter message. at some point around this time i had sent it to tao, after talking to tao about other stuff, asking for his advice about publishing. he said he had read the manuscript when i had sent it to yuka and liked it, and offered to publish a story on the muumuu house website in july 2020, which was exciting and great. multiple people who hadn't talked to me before (or since, really) DM'd me when it was published, saying they liked it. i sent the manuscript to brian alan ellis at house of vlad on october 23 2020, who offered to publish it ~october 31, then typeset it and offered zero edits, and suggested a late fall 2021 publication. i had posted a satirical, poor photoshop of a publisher's marketplace message about this, describing it as a 'nearly nice' deal (as 'nice' deals are defined as an advance of between $1 and $50k); i later found out people thought it was a real announcement, that i had paid the membership fee to publisher's marketplace to announce this, which is embarrassing to hear.

also around november 2020 i deleted my twitter account and started talking to a few people, including tao, more consistently over email. tao had asked for information about the current state of small press print-on-demand publishing and the specifics about what a house of vlad book meant, and also to read the version of the book, and offered to write a blurb for it, in january 2021. he offered to publish it via muumuu house in an email on febuary 4, citing that he felt he had been wanting to restart the press, liked my book, and could offer better promotion/exposure for the book. i agreed and awkwardly withdrew it from house of vlad; brian later mentioned not liking tao very much in a sort of bitter tone of voice in a podcast interview, i assume (partially) because of this experience. house of vlad as since, i think, ceased making books, following his most recent anthology of his own books, but did very well selling body high before that.

tao and yuka offered a good deal of copyedits and minor editorial suggestions for the book. i wrote ~10 new stories to consider for replacing other stories in this draft version, and we settled on the final 69 stories. i rejected ~30% of tao's edits, specifically for just 1-2 stories. the book was announced in may 2021, wherein i returned to twitter.

giacomo did the cover, tao wrote the synopsis, and i typeset the book and had digitally-printed copies made to send to potential blurbers. i also had stickers made, which i sent to random people whose addresses i had from the two million shirts orders or otherwise, and was reimbursed by tao. the book was printed via off-set printing (not print on demand) in october-november 2021 and officially published in january 2022, although preorder copies through the muumuu house website had been sent out prior to this. 

excerpt from the google doc "Zac Smith book"

May 15—turn in new stories (done)

May 22—tell Zac recommendations for which stories to include (done)

May 20—finish edits

May 22—order digitally-printed ARCs

May 26—write and print personalized blurb requests

June 5—send all digitally-printed ARCs

-Tao

-Megan

-Lars

-Mark

-Nicolette

-Dave Eggers

-Elizabeth Ellen

-Barthelme?

August 5—finish getting blurbs

September 1—send to printer

TBD—finalize press release and other promotional materials

TBD—mail out ARCs to media outlets and reviewers

Dec 14—paid $332.44 expenses (65 ARCs + shipping)

Jan 18—release

everything is totally fine: sales, promotion, money

muumuu house uses small press distribution, which offers promotional support to get the book stocked in some book stores and amazon. book stores tend not to stock books from print on demand services as they cannot return the unsold books, but using spd enables returns and thus a higher likelihood for a book store to stock the book. the book seems to have been stocked by a few places in NYC and at powell's in portland; i did zero outreach to bookstores or libraries about stocking my book, but probably should have.

the initial run was 500 copies, ~130 of which were sent out as ARCs for promotion, and was out of stock due to demand shortly after the bookworm interview in march 2022. the second printing of 1,000 copies includes a corrected typo. we also made an ebook version available on amazon, which seemingly has sold ~50+ copies.

tao paid me an advance of $2.50/book for each print run, minus author copies, for a total of ~$3,000 (unsure specifics as the first payment was via paypal, the second via check - some amount was reserved for more author copies). we later agreed to decrease this to [edit] $1/book $1.5/book for future print runs based on the changes to the economics of small press publishing using spd and print runs between 2011 and 2022. i have sold 3 copies (as eitf x 50bp bundles) via flat dog distro and ~25 copies via twitter direct message. i have given away several copies, maybe 15, to friends and family and one of my high school english teachers.

tao sent ARCs to 31 bookstores and ~100 people/reviewers (individual addresses - scott mcclanahan and juliet escoria treated as one 'people', for example) -- the doc gets confusing, as some names are listed twice, some aren't. recipients include brett easton ellis, ottessa moshfegh, diane williams, the new york times, and josh sherman. i had discouraged tao from sending the book to at 1-2 people who had decided to disassociate from me between the time of the book announcement and the marketing effort, in an attempt to save him ~$6-$14. just noticed some funnier names included on the final list, enjoying speculating at what they thought upon receipt of the book.

as a result of all these advance copies, the book was reviewed by full stop, new pages, heavy feather review, maudlin house, the la review of books, and 3-4 blog posts. i was also interviewed 7 times. aurora huiza interviewed me and published it on neutral spaces sometime late 2021. i was interviewed by rebecca grandsen for x-ray lit in october 2021. i was interviewed by crow for bomb magazine, published january 18 2022, which i think resulted in the highest number of DMs asking to buy the book. i was interviewed by michael wheaton on the lives of writers podcast in january 2022 after he asked for pdfs of all my books, which he seemingly read very quickly and impressively asked interesting questions about. gabriel hart interviewed me for lit reactor in february 2022. the bookworm episodes came out in march 2022. i was on otherppl in april 2022, after some tao-mediated negotiations concerning the fact that brad thought i had shittalked him or the show at some point on twitter -- i think this was when he said he'd only interview me for 50 Barn Poems if i was physically in LA, and then the pandemic happened and everything was virtual, so i emailed him again and he ignored me, and i grumpily posted about this on twitter. i can't think of any other time i shittalk him or the show, but maybe i did, i wouldn't put it past myself. i was interviewed for writing the rapids but due to consideration for the podcast's audience we agreed to not post it. i turned down an interview for peach magazine for similar reasons. the book was also featured on dennis cooper's blog, which resulted in a spike in sales, according to tao, and showing up later also as part of his year-end recap. gabriel hart also included my book in a year-end recap about books that emphasize intrusive thoughts.

i did not personally 'cold call' any venues for reviews or interviews, although i did solicit addresses from a couple people i know from online who i thought would be interested in getting an ARC for review, and provided this information to tao. only a few of these resulted in anything concrete (josh sherman has bragged to me about acquiring multiple ARCs for books he had no intention of reviewing, for example).

neither of us hired a publicist or similar marketing strategy companies or whatever. i have a deep dislike for the idea of hiring a publicist. i do not have an agent. tao submitted the book to the believer book awards; the believer was almost immediately thereafter shut down. i don't think it was submitted to any other awards, which are, i think, almost all terrible scams.

my only social media presence is on twitter. i have not interacted with anything on facebook since ~2018 and did not post about my book on facebook, which would have presumably induced purchases by people in my extended family or friendship/higher education colleague diaspora, but didn't feel worth it, to me. i have made and abandoned instagram 2x, feeling a deep disinterest in understanding the interface and social expectations. i have approached promotional tweets/retweets with a disaffected, sarcastic persona.

we planned no promotional readings or events. tao had experienced limited interest/attendance for his online book reading 'in conversation' events in promoting leave society, and i felt a strong disinterest in doing any myself. since it was still pandemicky and we had our second baby in november 2022, i had no plans on doing any in-person events. i was invited to a virtual book club Q&A hosted by the oakland library in california, which has some kind of relationship with small press distro, for which i think ~10 copies of my book were purchased by the library or participants.

things i didn't do but could have done to conceivably gotten better press attention: 1. pitch interviews, reviews, articles, or misc. writing to bigger name/paying magazines prior to publication, 2. organize readings or events at stores or bars with/without other writers, 3. directly plead with bookstores to stock my book, 4. solicit more blurbs, 5. post constant and deranged tweets telling people to buy my book, 6. message the editors of places who had previously published me to ask them to post promotional tweets for my book, and/or 7. do something illegal that would garner national media attention.

on a more serious note, having listened to various episodes of indiecast and understanding more about media press/hype cycles, i would recommend not publishing a book in january. this is too early in the year to generally keep anyone's attention for year-end recaps, and complicates things like submitting to awards because of the change in the calendar year. it is also a hard time, i believe, for sales as people tend to focus on year-end purchases for the holidays and not preordering things for january. my book was also released roughly around the same time as fuccboi, which got a lot more (mostly negative) attention in the small press/indie lit world and potentially overshadowed my book's press cycle, but no one could have really planned/accounted for that.

i believe that something like 95% of press/attention for the book was simply due to tao/muumuu house. using a real printer and distributor also lent a significant amount of authority to the book which i believe encouraged stores to stock it and people to review it who otherwise would not have bothered. i also believe that several people, because of jealousy or a misdirected sense of entitlement regarding tao/muumuu house, chose to ignore, shittalk, or disassociate from me. it is obvious to me that the benefits outweigh these negatives.

conclusion / the future

because of the book, i was solicited for writing by tess pollack for animal blood magazine in NYC and by jonathan brott for l'amour, la mort in sweden. jonathan also proposed translating the book to swedish and secured a publisher for it. the swedish edition should be published sometime 'in the spring'; i was paid a $500 advance for it. i would enjoy seeing my book(s) translated to more languages. 

after one year in print, my book has 120 ratings and 35 reviews on goodreads. i haven't seen the recent full tally of sales, but i hypothesize this means it has sold ~750 copies.

i enjoyed the experience of publishing my book with tao and muumuu house immensely. he is a supportive, enthusiastic, and detail-oriented editor/publisher who invested deeply in my book. i feel lucky and excited about having written the book that encouraged tao to publish books via muumuu house again. i hope he continues to publish new books. i like his writing, his friendship, his enthusiasm for literature, and his commitment to publishing.

i am happy with the book and surprised by the good (for small press books) sales. i am thankful to everyone who read and/or purchased the book, and i am forever indebted to and grateful toward everyone who interviewed me and/or reviewed/blurbed the book.

[edit] also i want to express deep gratitude to crow, graham, and mo'b for reading early versions of the book and providing analysis and feedback, and asking thoughtful questions that helped me better understand my own book and intentions. and also to alan good for providing minor copy edits for 10 stories in exchange for some records, i think; i still often think about how subaru trunks are supposed to be called 'waybacks' or something equally deranged.

i'm trying to figure out how to make this section sound earnest. i'm being earnest: i'm really happy with the book and all the cool, funny, and unexpected things that happened because of it. i probably most enjoyed getting out o bed at ~11pm one night to talk to michael silverblatt as a sort of pre-interview, sitting in my cold office, nervous and shivering in the cold room in my underwear, talking about frederick barthelme and suicide ideation. he's an incredibly sweet and charismatic person and made me feel good about myself and my writing.

in general, large (artistic) accomplishments almost always result in a depressive episode, i think, for lack of some sense of expected fulfillment. this was true for me and this book, as i expected. however, making the book was fun. i feel proud of it, happy about it, and happily disconnected from thinking of having a 'career arc' or trying to leverage this book into 'the next thing.' it basically all went much better than i ever anticipated. i recommend getting involved in publishing on your own terms and prioritizing your vision over sales or fame, whoever you are, reading this.

thank you for reading my blog post.