Founded: 2006
Founders: Ross White (executive director), Bill Ferris, Jeremy Griffin
What they publish: poetry chapbooks, fiction, creative nonfiction, quarterly journal
Website: bullcitypress.com
Impact of SPD’s closure: Bull City Press had close to 50 titles with SPD, with a couple thousand books warehoused that they need to get back. Fortunately, most of them are chapbooks, which don’t incur as much of a shipping cost. White has run the press out of his home since the beginning and will be putting all the stock into a storage unit in Durham, North Carolina, as he works on a long-term plan. SPD owes Bull City around $4,000 to $5,000 in sales.
Why Bull City Press used SPD: Bull City published only sporadically until 2013 and got by through self-distribution and Amazon Advantage. They started using SPD in 2016, after ramping up activity, since it was becoming too difficult to manage orders and returns. “We had grown enough that we had to have a distributor, and that was a beautiful thing,” White says. “We needed a distributor like SPD, a nonprofit that was not charging a warehousing cost, that was keeping new title fees low. The services they provided little guys like us was absolutely invaluable.” Bull City’s chapbooks sell for $12 or $13, and the margins when sold through a distributor are razor thin. In fact, White says, “There were times when we were losing money on a per-copy basis, but we did it so authors would have their books on Amazon” and so bookstores would order copies for events. “It was really author service for us. We were not really making any money from SPD.”
How Bull City Press succeeds: through book sales alone. The press’s yearly revenue fluctuates between $30,000 and $50,000 per year. It is not a nonprofit, thus does not seek grants. However, all staff, including White, work on a volunteer basis. “The goal has never been to make money. It’s been to make beautiful things,” White says.
How authors will be affected: White has already paid author royalties for the most recent quarter, but for now, Bull City will be self-distributing again. That means selling primarily through their website or through bookstores willing to set up an account directly with Bull City. (The majority of bookstores prefer to deal with Ingram and do not set up accounts with small presses.) “That takes the legs out from under the author; they’re the ones most affected by that,” White says. However, he added that Bull City’s authors have been entirely concerned about his well-being, not their own, reaching out to ask if he will be okay. “The authors that I have worked with are some of the most generous and wonderful people. I’ve had several authors go into the ‘pay what you want books’ [a specific section of Bull City’s website] and overpay for books as a way of giving us donations.”
Next steps: White says he doesn’t feel like he needs to panic in the same way as some of his peers but neither does he want to be self-distributing for an extended period. (White is responsible for fulfilling all orders via Bull City’s website: “I wake up every morning around 6:30 a.m., and the third thing on my to-do list is ship last night’s orders.”) Some of Bull City’s upcoming releases are supposed to go on pre-order soon, but he doesn’t want to move ahead if those books will release into an environment that will hurt the authors. So he’s in “wait and see” mode.
Which distributor? White’s not sure yet, but he believes someone might put together another nonprofit to take SPD’s place, ”someone who’s enterprising and nimble looks at this opportunity and says, ‘We could do that.’” He adds, “Am I hopeful? I don’t know. But do I believe that opportunity is ripe for the taking? I do, I really do.”
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
