Sometimes we publish books that are fringe or out of the way or obviously always going to be under the radar, underground books that belong on a small press with limited reach and resources, that’s just making books out of love and stubbornness. And sometimes we publish books that really should have been picked up by one of the big-time presses but, due to the vagaries and whims and cardinal sins of the publishing industry, did not get picked up by one of the big-time presses. Gloria Patri, a novel by Austin Ross, is the latter.
This is a post about bookstore returns, but it’s really a post about a book that should be a best-seller. In fact we have sold a lot of copies of it, but it should be like a best-seller on The New York Times kind of best-seller.
Here is what I said about the book on Goodreads: “Gloria Patri is a novel about the dissolution of a family and a nation. The book is fiction but the characters are real. They’re deluded and fanatical but Austin Ross renders them not as caricatures but as real, extremely flawed human beings. From a craft perspective this book has a perfect balance of plot and character development, but more importantly from a reader’s perspective it’s just a well-told story, a book that, as unpleasant as it is to read at times because of the characters and the things they do and the decisions they make, you don’t want to put down.”
Here is what someone slightly more well-known than me said about the book:
“The book contains one surprise after the next but the events also have a sense of inevitability about them. And what a profound meditation on isolation and loneliness. I wish the book didn’t ring so true about contemporary American life.” —Senator Tim Kaine
Here is the official book description: “Several years after the bitter dissolution of the Becker family, Richard and Solomon—father and son—die on the same day. Shortly after returning home and still unaware of the violence ahead of them, Naomi and her mother Ruth travel across the country to collect the remains of both men and confront the legacies they left behind. Along the way, Naomi and her mother discover secrets about their family and each other, and soon encounter the dangerous and paranoid militia extremists with whom Solomon—along with an old childhood friend, Andrew Cook—had become entangled. As violent forces collide, Naomi, Ruth, and Andrew are forced to reckon with their pasts and their place in an increasingly dangerous world.”
Last year around this time we started getting copies of One More Number returned, quite a lot of copies. It was a mystery, because we hadn’t pitched it to stores very much, but apparently there had been a tiktok going around about how to scam amazon by returning books within thirty days, which would give you enough time to read the book. There’s no way to tell if that’s what happened, but I guess I should note it’s not amazon being scammed, it’s the publisher and the author. It was a pain, but not the end of the world. We gave some copies away, sold a few at AWP, sent the rest to the Asterism Books warehouse in Seattle. It was a bit of a roadblock, but we got past it.
We are once again being plagued with returns, this time most likely from bookstores. Last year, again around this time, I made a big pitch to bookstores around the country for Gloria Patri, a novel that the Washington Independent Review of Books calls “a pulsating literary thriller” and Dan Chaon calls “a thoughtful and provocative journey into the dark, bloody heart of American lunacy” and, as a result, a lot of stores ordered the book, and, as a result, a lot of copies were returned to us by bookstores. The sky is not falling; Publishers Weekly tells me the average return rate is about 30%, and that’s right where we’re at. Our problem is we sold a lot of books so 30% of that is a much bigger roadblock than we’re used to.
I want to be clear that none of this is the fault of bookstores. Returns are part of how they do business, how they stay open. While I wish every bookstore would reach out and say hey Malarkey, we want to order all your books and we promise to display them prominently with a whole Malarkey wall, and to always have a copy of your newest title right there at the register, and to never return them—I really genuinely wish that too, please do it!—it’s our fault, it’s my fault, for not having a promotional budget. Or actually it’s nobody’s fault because like I said above we’re right on the average for returns. I’ve said this before and it’s true: our biggest mistake is not being owned by a rich person. If that was the case these returns would be a no-stress deal. We’ve never had money to throw at anything. Everything gets paid for out of sales, and any gaps are filled out of my pocket, and unfortunately my pockets aren’t terribly deep.
If you don’t know much about publishing and distribution, returns work, basically, like this: most bookstores get their books from a distributor called Ingram, and most bookstores will not order your books if they’re not returnable; if a store orders your books, they can return them and the costs get passed on to the publisher. In general, in my experience, a returned book ends up costing about $10, while a sale will net you $2-$4, depending on how you price your books. We tend to price our books as low as possible to keep them affordable, which is trouble. Let’s say you sell 100 books and 30 get returned, well you’ve just earned $0 in net revenue through bookstore sales. A big part of the moral here is we need to set our prices higher, but that’s tough. The retail price on Gloria Patri, at 320 pages, is already $18. I guess we should be charging $20 but damn.
So, we’re sitting on a lot of returned copies of Gloria Patri, which, by the way, is an excellent book. For a big publisher this is a blip; it would ruin (has ruined) some small/micro-presses. For us, we’ll be okay, but we’ll be a lot okayer if we can get these re-sold.
I went through and sorted the returns into two categories: excellent and dinged up. The dinged-up copies are still in good shape, but they might have small creases or folds on the cover or some pages. A couple have a smudge on the front. We’re selling the dinged-up copies at half-price, which is $9, and the excellent condition copies at $15, which is $3 off the retail price. We’re also throwing in a copy of King Ludd’s Rag that has a story by Austin in it.
If you haven’t read Austin’s work, check out “For the Sake of Our Bodies,” which we published in 2022. I was blown away by this story, and genuinely moved, when I first read it. I guess now I’ve had the honor to work with him on two of his stories and a novel, and I think he’s a fantastic writer and a great guy and I think everyone should read this book, not just because it’s timely, or says something about our world, or gives real human insight into types of people we might see as caricatures, but mostly because it sings. It’s just a perfectly crafted novel with glorious prose.
One more deal: if you sign up for our book club before the end of the month we’ll send you a copy of Gloria Patri for free.
You can find out more about Austin Ross at his website.
In addition to being a great writer, Austin is also a great editor, and he wrote about his experience trying to get this novel published for Publishers Weekly. This is a really good article that should probably be required reading for all writers.
"From Both Sides Now"
Publishers Weekly, August 7, 2023
Here’s an interview Austin did with Aaron Burch last year:
"Conversations Between Friends: Aaron Burch and Austin Ross"
CRAFT Literary, August 2023
And gonna conclude by sharing so many great blurbs people were generous enough to write for this book:
"A family is together and then forever apart in this astute, focused exploration of how fundamentalism and extremism can usurp one's identity to tragic effect. In Gloria Patri, Austin Ross identifies the root of zealousness, a malformed version of love seeped in fear. The story is heartbreaking but the message is powerful in this moving and beautifully written novel. If love can be salvaged, and perhaps that is all that is worth salvaging, faith and hope and new life just might carry us forward."
—SINDYA BHANOO, author of Seeking Fortune Elsewhere, finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize
"With a dark intensity reminiscent of writers as varied as Tim O’Brien, Jesmyn Ward, and even Faulkner, Austin Ross has brought off a family drama full of arson, intrigue, and mystery. Gloria Patri simply brims with energy and fierce, evocative intelligence. Not a book you’ll soon forget."
—DANIEL TORDAY, two-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award and author of The 12th Commandment
“Engrossing . . . a great novel.”
—RACHEL KING, author of Bratwurst Haven
"Gloria Patri is a journey to a far-off, terrifying country—except the country is ours, the time is now, and the danger is deeper and more pervasive than we could have imagined. This is a world that’s worth knowing . . . and the people that inhabit this world are worth knowing too, even when their journey is hard to watch. You won’t be able to take your eyes off it.”
—KEVIN HAWORTH, author of The Discontinuity of Small Things, finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize
"Set in the world of fundamentalism, religious and nationalistic extremism, and domestic terrorism, Gloria Patri is a novel that can be at times hard to read—as it can be to live in—but it is also a page-turning, hard-to-put-down joy that I wanted to start over as soon as I'd finished. A little like a mash-up of Dan Chaon, Brian Evenson, and the current events of our daily news, all while feeling wholly like its own thing, it is the kind of magic trick that the best novels strive for. I’m not sure how Ross pulled it off."
—AARON BURCH, author of Year of the Buffalo
"This timely novel unfolds against a backdrop of evangelical, fundamentalist anarchy. The novel reveals itself as a mystery as it moves back and forth through time and encompasses: survivalism, militias, bombings, conspiracy theories, racism and white supremacy, murders, infidelity, and religious hypocrisy . . . This powerful novel almost hurts, but it also hints that there may yet be a way to heal."