2025 Update on Haywire Books
What happened to the press? Why is it on hiatus?
Hi, there. I’m Jon Sealy, founder of Haywire Books. From 2019-2020, the press was a Richmond, Virginia-based publishing house with a focus on southern and midlist authors. The press went on hiatus during the pandemic but never started back up. This post is an after-action review on what happened.
The short version is that I couldn’t make the business model work. I wanted to be small and selective (1-2 titles a year) but to make the finances work, the press needed to scale up to something like 10-20 books a year, which I don’t have the time or interest in doing.
The Original Idea
I started the press because I knew a lot of authors like myself, who had one or more traditionally published novels in the midlist range of sales and who were having trouble finding that next publisher. (“Midlist” is a squishy term for selling ok but not breaking out as a bestseller, maybe 500 to 5,000 copies.)
My first novel, The Whiskey Baron, did well in the southern independent bookstore (SIBA) circuit, so I built a business plan around southern authors on book tour. My idea was that the press could serve as a bridge between that first midlist novel and a more permanent home, ideally on a New York press.
Unfortunately, I ran into three big problems:
Money and margins
Publicity woes
The need for scale
Money and Margins
When I decided to start a press, my accountant gave me some sound advice: “Publishing is a great way to make a small fortune—provided you can start with a large fortune.”
Money in publishing is all over the place, but here I’ll unpack two sources of income, starting with the traditional “book trade,” which refers to the network of wholesalers, distributors, and retailers who sell books. You can bypass the book trade and sell directly to a select few bookstores, but there’s no easy way to scale it.
If you want to sell a book through traditional channels (i.e., through physical bookstores), you sell it to wholesalers at a 55% discount on the cover price. The wholesaler takes a cut (usually 15%) and the retailer gets the rest (usually 40%).
For example, here’s where the money of a $20 paperback might go:
$8 – 40% for the retailer (bookstore)
$3 – 15% for the wholesaler (Ingram, Baker & Taylor, etc.)
$1 – freight shipping
$2 – distribution fees (warehouse and fulfillment)
$2-3 – printing per copy
$1.50 – author royalty
$2 – publisher profit
That last line is the one you want to pay attention to. The publisher makes about $2 per copy sold. You can go through a print-on-demand (POD) system, where the money shakes out a little differently but the net is still the same.
As a small publisher, you’re doing a PHENOMENAL job if you can sell 1,000 print copies of a book with a $1,000 investment and 100 hours of labor. Your break-even, therefore, is 500 print copies, and then you’ve earned $5/hour. More realistically, you’re going to put more than $1,000 into a book to sell only a few hundred copies, so you’ll be fortunate to break even.
What about e-book sales?
E-books are all over the map, but here’s one story. Amazon pays a royalty of 70% if you price the Kindle edition between $2.99 and $9.99. Anything outside those bounds, and you get 30%.
You might get it in your head to run a one-day $0.99 promotion. You spend time designing and scheduling a series of ads that run you $200. On sales day, you get a big pop of 1,000 copies at $0.99, with a royalty of about $300, which is a $100 net. Great!
But under a standard contract, your author gets 50% of e-book royalties, so you’ve just lost $50. Maybe on day 2, when the book goes back to $9.99, you’ll make a few residual sales to make up for the loss, but these sales gimmicks aren’t all that profitable for one book. To make it work, an author needs multiple books. A $0.99 sale on book 1 can help juice the sales for a full-priced book 2.
Hence, the need for scale.
Publicity Woes
These days, it’s very easy for an author to self-publish, either on their own or by using one of the many “publishing services” options available. What value does a traditional publisher bring to the table?
Platform. In an ideal world, the publisher gets the book into stores and on review lists in a way the author couldn’t do alone. And this happens via “publicity.” This is too big to discuss in a single post, but here are two publicity levers a publisher can pull to launch a book.
First, you could go to a trade show or book festival. You don’t want to spend your money on Frankfurt, but maybe a regional independent booksellers association conference, where you can get copies into the hands of booksellers and reviewers.
Driving to a regional book conference will run you at least two grand for travel, lodging, a table at the trade show, and some promotional copies of the book. Since you’re looking at a profit of $2/sale, you’ll need to sell at least 1,000 copies to break even on this investment. That won’t happen with one book. It might work if you publish four books in a year, but it would be a safer investment if you published 10+ books in a year.
Here’s what will happen: You’ll meet three booksellers in your author’s target market who will each buy a box of 25 books. Another 25 booksellers will order exactly one copy and will not buy more after they sell it. That’s 100 copies for each book you promote. Ten books nets you 1,000 sales, or the $2,000 you need to cover the cost of the conference.
Again, we see the need for scale. Publishing 1-2 quality books per year won’t cut it.
A second way to get publicity for a book is to engage a publicist. Whether you are an author or a publisher, a freelance publicist will charge you a boatload to make noise for a book. The process is opaque, but here’ s a story about how it kinda-sorta works1 in the big leagues:
Say a Super Duper Publicist gets 10 client authors in a year. Seven of them paid $10,000, two of them paid $20,000, and one of them paid $30,000. The publicist goes to the Washington Post and says, “Hey, Super Duper Review Editor, here are 10 books we’re pushing this year. I thought Reviewer A might like these three, Reviewer B might like these two, and Reviewer C might like these two.” That covers the $10,000 books.
Then the publicist will say, “I know space is tight, so these three are the ones that are really going to break out. You’ll want to make sure you’ve got coverage of them.” Finally, holding up the $30,000 book, she’ll say: “This is my favorite, and I thought you personally should check it out. Do me a favor, and make sure this one gets some love.”
The publicist will badger that editor to make sure the $30,000 book gets positive coverage. Then she’ll rinse and repeat this process at the New York Times, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and whoever else. The three “high-end” books might get pushed to some trend-setting book clubs, and maybe the $30,000 book will find its way onto the longlist for the National Book Award. And so on.
There’s more to it than this, of course, and most publicists I know earn their keep with time and connections (it must be an impossible job these days). But for a small publisher on a budget, you’re going to be shut out of most traditional publicity. You might mail your book to all of these review places, and maybe it’ll get picked out of the slush for one review. (But probably it won’t.)
With the right connections, you can gets some regional and low-impact coverage, but so much of a book’s success is up to an author’s hustle. To which I ask, again: What value is the publisher bringing to the table?
The Need for Scale
I’ve alluded to this already, but because the margins are so low and publicity is so expensive, publishing works best if you can scale up. Judging by other publishing operations, 10 books a year seems like the turning point for creating a functional business.
At that scale, however, your authors are likely to suffer. How much editing and marketing support can a one-man show (or even a small staff) provide? The business model is likely to become one where nine books sell 200 copies each and one book breaks out, sells 5,000 copies, and subsidizes the rest. Maybe that’s fine, but what do you tell those other nine authors?
Plus, for you as a publisher, operating on that scale means you spend little time doing the fun stuff of editing. Instead, you’re playing whack-a-mole with contractors, chasing down invoices, negotiating discounts for shipping, reconciling spreadsheets, and networking with various muckety mucks.
What kind of life is that? Publishing becomes just another job—and not a particularly lucrative one. You’d make more money and probably have just as much fun selling solar panels door-to-door or “working in IT” for some mega-corporation.
And that, dear reader, is why Haywire Books is on hiatus.
More from Jon Sealy:
To read more of my thoughts on publishing, consider buying a copy of my craft memoir, So You Want to Be a Novelist. While Haywire Books is on hiatus as a traditional publisher, I do offer a limited number of editing and publishing consultations every year. Read more here.
Publicity is the black box of publishing. You can find regional publicists who will charge $50-$75/hour to get a few features and set up a book tour, and there are big players who have the ear of every book reviewer in New York and charge in the five figures. The key message for most of us is, in the words of George Carlin, “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.”