Gravity Again

Tue 18 Jan 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | Posted by: Gavin

On January 1st of this year I hung up my space boots and Weightless Books became the sole property of my friend and cofounder, Michael J. DeLuca.

Michael and I began Weightless in late 2009. Weightless was nominally owned by me as I had the Small Beer business infrastructure in place so that I could pay sales tax and send out annual 1099s but it was an equal collaboration: we were each paid equally every quarter and we made decisions together. I admire Michael both for his work ethic (how American of me!) but also his wandering off to the woods, the way he and his wife are raising their kid, his way of moving through the world, his home brewing and baking, and although Weightless is a small niche website that could always be better, I have always enjoyed it as an excuse to work with him.

Where and Why Weightless

In 2009 Michael and I had been redoing the Small Beer Press website from a clunky hand-coded html site to an up-to-date (for its time) WordPress site and among the problems  we ran into was that of selling both print and ebook formats simultaneously from the site. (Let’s not talk about the difficulty of trying to bring in years of my hand-coded zine pages over!)

We’d been selling ebooks on the old site since 2005 but the PayPal cart architecture made selling both formats complicated. As is still true, Am*zon was dominating ebook sales and part of their method was to remove or threaten to remove the buy button on a on a book’s page. I did not want to have all the Small Beer ebooks in one basket so I self-distributed them to Fictionwise, Google, and B&N as well as Am*zon — as then, they dominate the ebook market. However, if we had our own site we’d never need to worry that one company could make all of our books disappear.

When it comes to publishing, I always like seeing if I can do something myself so we decided to try building a website that could automate some of the ebook delivery work. Michael is the technological heart of the website and he coded it. At the start, we had some Small Beer interns who helped – shout out to Diana Cao and Felice Ling! — but over the years it has been Michael on the tech side and then both of us doing everything else: importing ebooks, sending them out, fixing our own and publisher errors, paying royalties, hunting down missing ebook formats, importing yet more ebooks, dealing with hosting failures or PayPal and WordPress blips where sales did not come through, &c., &c. In the weeks since the new year I’ve already found it odd not to be regularly checking the Weightless email to see if there are questions. We designed the site as one that we’d be happy to buy from — although no matter what we did, it would always have been better if we’d had more money to make it load faster — so:

  • there are no pop-ups
  • we never sold ads
  • we never sold anyone’s information
  • we only stocked DRM-free ebooks.

In early 2011, friends of ours who run Blind Eye Books published a huge ten-part serialized novel by Ginn Hale called The Rifter which was incredibly popular and it helped us realize how much people like subscriptions. We approached mostly sf&f publishers and some of them tried the site and left and some are still there. We found that genre (primarily science fiction, fantasy, & horror and to a small extent, mystery) ebooks generally outsold nongenre ebooks. We worked with big and small publishers although given the time constraints of two people working in the interstices of their lives we had to set limits to what we could bring on — some of the parts we’d hoped to automate had never quite worked — so after bringing on many small magazines (closer to my heart on paper than ebook, but still) we eventually closed to new publishers although since we are both interested in forefronting diverse voices in recent months we did manage to bring on khōréō and Constelación.

But Also

In the past 11 years Michael and I have done a lot of other things. Most of my time has been taken up with our kid or Small Beer Press and a few years ago Michael founded Reckoning, an annual journal of creative writing on environmental justice.

Then in 2018 a used and new bookshop came up for sale in the next town over, Easthampton, where our Small Beer office is. I met my wife, Kelly, while working at a bookshop in Boston and I love the diversity of viewpoints independent bookshops put out into the world. At Small Beer we can only publish 6-10 books a year. At a bookshop we could put hundreds of books in front of people.

Kelly and I had long played with the idea of running a bookshop — but it was play. I knew we couldn’t afford to buy or open one in Northampton and since I hope never to move house again it was safe to think it would never be more than play. Our bookstore could be four stories with an elevator; 10,000 sq ft on one floor; it could only sell books by 19th century left-handed Scots writers. Besides, although we’d both worked at a couple of bookshops, we didn’t know how to run one. But on inquiring, it turned out the bookshop was much quieter than we’d known, and therefore affordable, and in 2019 Kelly used part of her MacArthur grant to buy it.

Kelly’s a full-time writer as well as the art director and editor of many Small Beer books, so as we imagined how our lives would be if bought the shop (and while we bounced hundreds of possible names for it off one another), it became clear we could only do so if I spent a fair amount of time there — which I wanted to — and if we found people we could work with.

The bookshop, Book Moon, has been fun and I’m happy to say we found great people to work with — although the first few months of the pandemic were a grind and as I type two booksellers are out with Covid (fingers crossed) and we are back to being only open for Curbside Pickup again. But over the past two pandemic years I kept running into the problem of there being too little time or not enough me to do all I wanted and I realized that something had to go: Small Beer, Weightless, or Book Moon.

3, 2, 1, You’re Out!

During one of our regular discussions on the future of Weightless, Michael said he would be happy to run it himself. Even though I knew I had to leave, I didn’t jump at this quite as fast as I expected I would. Not surprisingly, I found it quite hard to give up something I’d helped start, worked on, and still enjoy. But it seemed better for the site if I stood down since Michael was re-energized and excited about future possibilities. Michael has built a strong community with Reckoning which made me think that perhaps he could grow Weightless, too. Besides, if needed, I can still pitch in.

I’ve found the hard part is not to think I have lots of free time so I should go start something else. So far that’s been somewhat easy as (sorry, writers) there’s a lot of Small Beer reading to catch up on, 1099s are due, and our next book, Richard Butner’s The Adventurists, is coming out soon.

So now I’m part of the great resignation. Michael has registered the business in Michigan, the PayPal and bank accounts are now his, the hosting and url registration has been transferred. Historically Weightless didn’t made tons of money. It wasn’t volunteering but it was more that the site was a service that we liked providing, a place for readers to find something interesting and not just be part of the datacloud Am*zon etc. are eating every day. The site pays does not pay anything resembling Michael’s actual coding rates so  so I did not “cash out” my half of the business. I transferred it to Michael and walked away.

Thanks to everyone who has ever bought a book or subscribed to a magazine on Weightless. It was, believe or not, fun. It’s much better to have tried it, it did ok, than not try it. I strongly believe in the principles we founded the site on so Small Beer ebooks will still be distributed DRM-free on the site and I look forward to working with Michael for years to come.