An apology.
Hola Fahrenhistas,
We’re sorry.
Seems the headline of our newsletter yesterday put the fear of god into a whole bunch of you who thought we were announcing our own demise.
In retrospect we can see how “And now we face the final curtain…” could be misconstrued but honestly when we wrote it we didn’t give it a second thought - the final curtain in question was a reference to The Ballad Of Hanging Lees the final book in David Nolan’s #MancNoir trilogy.
We genuinely didn’t mean to worry any of you. Sorry.
That said, it has raised an interesting subject though - we got so many messages expressing relief (and some of annoyance) that we almost got a glimpse of what it would be like to be at our own funeral.
I’m going to level with you.
Times have been tough over the last couple of years (for all of us) - we were going great guns before the pandemic with lots of exciting expansion plans but like almost everyone else we had to shelf all that and concentrate on a strategy of survival.
Unlike literally hundreds of other indie publishers, with your support we managed to come through the worst of it. We had a good Christmas season at the end of 2021 and January 2022 started strongly so we began 2022 with high hopes of better things to come.
Sadly since then (and this is the same for indies right across the board) sales have fallen off a cliff.
We are already down 38% on this time last year.
What’s the reason?
It’s not complicated, most people are skint and when you’re concentrating on feeding your family, paying for electricity and figuring out where you’re gonna find £100 to fill your car, it’s natural that spending £10 on a book or £20 on a t-shirt isn’t gonna be at the top of your priority list.
We get it. It’s one of the reasons we’ve been making a different book free every week for the last couple of months (during the pandemic we did the same thing and in the end gave away almost 19,000 books to people in difficulty).
We can see demand is still there for the books - for the ones we’ve made free over the last couple of months an average of 648 people have downloaded a copy each weekend - so people want the books they just can’t (or don’t want) to pay for them.
And the point of telling you all this?
Well the point is that this week by being a bit cack-handed with our newsletter subject line we accidentally made a whole bunch of you think we were about to close down and that seemed to cause some genuine concern among readers and Fahrenheit fans.
The sad truth is that at some point if things don’t improve we inevitably will have to sit down and write that newsletter for real.
We hustle more than any other indie publisher out there which is why we’re still here publishing amazing books by amazing authors but it doesn’t happen by magic - we need to keep the tills ringing to keep bringing these massively talented writers into your lives.
If you’re skint, you’re skint and that’s that - we’ve got your back and we’ll keep supplying you with free books until the repo men drag us kicking & screaming out of The Bunker.
If you do have some spare cash though and you support what we’ve created here then help us out by buying a few books now and again - don’t wait for that horrible goodbye newsletter to drop into your inbox before you realise what you’ve lost and take to social media telling the world how awesome that little punk publisher Fahrenheit Press used to be….
And sorry again for the false alarm, we genuinely didn’t mean to cause any distress.
We kiss you
xx