Founded: 2006
Founders: Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney
What they publish: literary works that move beyond traditional categories (hybrid genres), as well as flash fiction, flash nonfiction, and novels in verse
Website: rosemetalpress.com
Impact of SPD’s closure: Rose Metal Press was one of the biggest-selling publishers for SPD. It had just printed and shipped books to help fulfill course adoptions; roughly 3,300 books are now sitting in a warehouse that have to be moved to a new distributor. Rose Metal is owed at least $40,000—about 60 to 70 percent of their annual book sales revenue—by SPD for sales in 2023 and 2024.
Why Rose Metal Press used SPD: Beckel says, “We probably had some other [distribution] options as we grew. SPD created some incentives for us to stay. We took those.” With the benefit of hindsight, she recognizes maybe that was a mistake. But Beckel benefited from regular, even daily, conversations with SPD’s staff because of Rose Metal’s sales. She believes the staff was working with her in good faith right up until the day SPD announced it was closing. “For an organization whose entire mission was to support small, literary presses, this was not the way to end it. There could have been a softer landing for most of us,” she says.
How Rose Metal Press succeeds: Book sales represent more than half of Rose Metal’s income; many sales consist of course adoptions. Some of the press’s most successful books are genre field guides and anthologies. About 85 percent of their print book sales were through SPD at the time of its closing. Direct sales and event sales, in addition to ebook sales and distribution that Rose Metal handles itself, account for the rest.
Rose Metal also raises money—an amount that typically covers printing of their books—through an annual fund drive. In the past (but not recently), they’ve succeeded in obtaining NEA and state grants. “Our books keep selling more and more, but grant funding is not in a great position right now,” Beckel says.
How authors will be affected: Rose Metal publishes two new titles a year, but this spring, due to a special project, no new title is releasing—a “weird miracle” Beckel says. Rose Metal doesn’t have sales reports from SPD for the third or fourth quarters of 2023 or any of 2024, making it impossible to calculate royalty payments. Beckel says Rose Metal has already been in touch with their authors to assure them they will get paid royalties for all books sold, no matter what—once they can figure out what they’re owed.
Next steps: Beckel is now deciding which distributor to move to, which will allow her to get all of Rose Metal’s books back on sale. Books can be bought direct from Rose Metal’s website and fulfilled from inventory sitting in Beckel’s basement, but she’s not encouraging that—it only adds to the workload when she has no time to spare.
The cost of moving books to a new distributor will be in the thousands of dollars; Beckel is planning a special fundraiser to cover that cost, plus recoup sales they’ve lost through SPD’s closure. “I’m hoping we’ll have some angel donors that will give a one-time gift.” For now, she has no fears about Rose Metal’s future because, during good years, she’s always put aside money into an emergency fund. So there is a cushion to operate normally. “We’ve had great sales. We’ve been lucky to catch the zeitgeist on hybrid and flash fiction. People want to teach those genres, and we’ve got the books to do it.”
Which distributor? Beckel believes Rose Metal will end up with Itasca or IPG. Fortunately, “With our strong backlist of anthologies, we actually have more distributor options than I thought,” she says. “I think it will take six months to a year to truly assess whether we are making a comparable amount of sales money to when we were at SPD, but I’m optimistic now that it actually won’t be that big of a drop in sales income and might even improve our margins.”
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.
