The End of Subterranean Press

A fine press serving the fantasy and science fiction genre shuts down

Our friends at Fandom Pulse published a story yesterday about the end of a well-respected deluxe publishing house that was essentially the American Folio Society of science fiction and fantasy.

Bill Schafer announced Monday that Subterranean Press, the Burton, Michigan specialty publisher he founded in 1995, will permanently close. The press intends to continue publishing through the end of 2027, which Schafer says “may bleed into 2028 as we wrap things up.”

What made SubPress different from every other publisher operating in the genre was its physical product. The company’s collector’s and limited editions were issued with author signatures, in both numbered and lettered states, and produced using high-grade book papers and bindings with matching slipcases and traycases. Numbered editions typically ran 500 copies. Lettered editions — bound in cloth-and-leather, housed in custom traycases — ran 26. The books were physical objects built to last a century. In an era when trade publishers are shrinking trim sizes, cutting paper quality, and pushing readers toward ebooks, Subterranean was doing the opposite. Every production decision treated the book as an artifact worth owning.

The press published approximately 45 titles a year and won awards including the World Fantasy, Locus, Horror Writers Association, and Hugo awards. Subterranean won the 2025 Locus Award for Best Publisher — meaning the announcement of its closure came one year after it received the field’s recognition as the best at what it does.

The broader context around this closure is not encouraging. Small Press Distribution, the nonprofit book distributor that had served small presses since 1969, abruptly closed in March 2024. Diamond Comics’ bankruptcy the following year pulled another distribution pillar out from under independent publishers — the same collapse currently bleeding Paizo dry. Between 2025 and 2026, many science fiction and horror publishers focused on the genre closed, either to submissions or entirely. The infrastructure that allowed specialty publishing to function — distribution networks, reliable fulfillment, the collector market that subsidized literary risk-taking — has been contracting for years.

Subterranean was one of the last major operators doing what it did at the level it did it. Grim Oak Press, PS Publishing out of the UK, and a handful of others occupy the same space, but none of them have the thirty-year back catalog or the author relationships that Schafer built. The Dresden Files collector’s editions alone, fifteen volumes in matching slipcases spanning 2008 through 2022, represent the kind of sustained publishing commitment that requires both capital and trust.

The genre has fewer places now that take physical craft seriously, fewer outlets for the novella, and one fewer press that operates on the premise that a book should be built to outlast the person who bought it.

The end of Subterranean Press is a genuine loss to the genre and to the industry. It’s no secret that the book industry is contracting, being squeezed by independent ebook authors and AI production on the supply side, Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited sucking up the majority of readers on the distribution side, and rising prices on the production and shipping sides.

So, it’s important, especially in light of Castalia Library’s considerable backlog, to reassure everyone that we are very healthy, very solid, and in a considerably stronger position than we were five years ago, three years ago, and even one year ago. Allow me to introduce the evidence.

That is a photo, taken yesterday, of some of the more than 550 copies of DE BELLO GALLICO, the Castalia History subscription book, that have been bound and have already been shrink-wrapped and palletized in preparation for being shipped to the warehouse in the USA next week. Unlike nearly every other publisher in the industry, our production costs have been methodically reduced over time, because, thanks to all the supporters who helped us build it, we now have a fully operational leather book bindery. We’re now making our own books; unlike Folio Society, Subterranean Press, and most other deluxe publishers, we’re not sending them out to be made for us. This is a significant and fundamental advantage.

And not only have our production costs been reduced over time, but the level of quality of books we’re producing is rising, even as the quality of the books we used to have produced for us has fallen. Longtime supporters will recall that the reason we originally decided to build our own bindery was because we observed, relatively early on, that the quality of the books we were receiving was not only well short of the Franklin Library standard to which we aspire, but was actually beginning to slip. Below, you can see an unretouched photograph of a book that is fresh off the crusher. Notice how clean even the most detailed stamping is, and the genuine texture of the real pigskin.

The books coming out of the Castalia bindery are observably, palpably, and tactilely better than anything we’ve produced to date. They’re not perfect, and they’re still not quite at the Franklin level, but we are continuing to improve them with each and every print run. For example, we have already identified three more things we are going to do to further improve our production processes.

Moreover, we’re now starting to receive inquiries from other publishers, both large and small. We’ve already completed one print run bigger than any of our current runs, and we’re knocking out a very small one for an independent author this weekend while we’re gearing up to produce A HISTORY OF THE FREEDOM OF THOUGHT for Castalia Library next week.

But the failure of one of our esteemed competitors underlines that these are challenging times, and we appreciate your ongoing support. If you want to know what you can do to help us, the two easiest things are a) buy our remaining books from print runs that remain in stock and b) subscribe to our translation subscription here on this site. Both of those things are effectively cost-free from our end, since the cost of producing them has already been paid, so it allows us to direct the income to shoring up the areas where the revenue won’t come in for a while.

It’s worth mentioning that even without a subscription you can obtain one of the 50 or so extra copies of DE BELLO GALLICO at NDM Express.