Rose Metal Press

By now many of you may have heard that our distributor, Small Press Distribution (SPD), ceased operations on Thursday, March 28 without any warning. SPD’s closure came as a great shock and created a difficult financial and logistical situation for the 400+ presses distributed by them, including Rose Metal Press. We worked with SPD for 16 years and were communicating with their staff on future plans and restocks as recently as mid-March.

Since the sudden closure of SPD, which paused all our book sales except via our website, we’ve been working hard to keep the press steady, stable, and future-focused, including figuring out how to get access to the 3,300+ RMP books that had been warehoused at Ingram by SPD, as well as finding a new distributor to get our books back on sale and available to bookstores, colleges, online sellers, and all readers with minimal disruption. After a week of meetings with distributors, we will have a new distributor in place by the end of the week and our books on the move to their new home hopefully next week.

With our logistical plan becoming clear and a new distributor almost in place, the biggest challenge of this situation is financial. The eventual cost of getting our books safely transferred to our new distributor will be significant, likely between $8,000 and $10,000. Moreover, SPD owes us an estimated $40,000 to $50,000 in book sales royalties. Distributors generally pay is on a delayed system as they get paid. With SPD, we got paid with about a six-month delay. When SPD closed, we had not been paid for NINE months of book sales: Quarters 3 and 4 of 2023 and Quarter 1 of 2024. The Quarter 3 2023 payment was due right before SPD shuttered. Quarter 4 2023 and Quarter 1 2024 were due this spring and summer. $40,000 to $50,000 is well over half of our usual total sales income for an entire year—quite a significant sum for us and crucial to our operations. Sales from Quarters 3 and 4 of 2023 include all the book release sales for both The RMP Field Guide to Graphic Literature and The Hurricane Book, both SPD bestsellers.

Although we will be trying our best to get SPD to honor their commitments to us and countless other small presses, we have reason to believe, due to the hasty and irresponsible nature of the abrupt closure and their non-communicativeness in the days since, that we might never be able to recoup this enormous loss from them or from their dissolution process overseen by the Superior Court of California.

So we are turning to you. We are in urgent need of your support to make up the significant loss of sales income and the cost of moving all our books to the new distributor. The $50,000 goal includes the two losses listed above:

—The $40,000+ owed to us by SPD when they closed

—The $5,000-$10,000 to move our books from the Ingram warehouse to our new distributor.

We are committed to continuing work on all upcoming books and projects, to keeping our backlist on sale and in print, and to paying our authors the royalties they are owed for the missing quarters of sales income, whether we fully recoup our losses or not.

We appreciate any and all donations. If you'd like to donate via check, please contact us directly

If you are unable to make a donation at this time, we’d be grateful if you could share a link to this fundraiser with like-minded friends and family who believe in the importance of independent publishing and innovative literature.

With your help, we are confident we can weather this unexpected storm and keep our mission of getting beautifully produced books of hybrid genre literature into the hands and classrooms and libraries of readers going strong. Over 18 years, we have built a stable, financially viable, and well-respected nonprofit literary press, and we deeply appreciate your support for our efforts to meet the challenges of this moment and continue to publish innovative authors.

Thank you,

Abby & Kathleen

Read more about the SPD closure and the fallout here:

The Washington Post (Publisher Abby Beckel quoted)

Jane Friedman's The Hot Sheet (RMP featured, publisher Abby Beckel quoted, and a great explainer about book distribution)

Publishers Weekly (3/28/24)

Publishers Weekly (4/2/24)

Publishers Weekly (4/8/24)

Lit Hub

NPR