A metaphorical bloodbath has occurred at Canada-based independent horror publisher DarkLit Press, with authors clawing back rights, publicly splitting with the company, and claiming royalties have gone unpaid. A year ago, DarkLit was announcing new imprints and developing its audio offerings, but its website and social media accounts have gone black, and the company is not listed in the Canadian Business Registry.
Andrew Robert, who founded DarkLit in 2021 and writes about horror under the name Andrew Fowlow, stepped down in April. He left operations in the hands of Caitlin Marceau, a DarkLit author and the editor of DarkLit imprint Hedone Books, but authors have claimed the company was in trouble even before Robert left and that Marceau never had full access to the company finances or assets. Marceau, in a call with PW, confirmed that she and other staffers did not have access to DarkLit files, adding, "People forget that I was also an author under Andrew, and we never knew what the numbers were. We're all in this together when it comes to our missing royalties." Robert did not respond to a request for comment.
"Hedone has always been a separate entity" and will continue publishing, Marceau said, explaining that Hedone’s website was migrating to Shopify and was temporarily inactive, but is now restored. Marceau also maintains a social media presence and is following through with a former DarkLit Kickstarter project, a pirate horror series called Dark Sails, that crowdfunded C$10,275. That account remains live and updated, with the first book in the series released in paperback on August 8 and seven more titles projected through 2025. Author William Sterling, whose Dead Men’s Chests (Oct.) is set to be part of the series, believes that Hedone intends to complete Dark Sails.
Sterling has another project, the anthology Punk Goes Horror, under way with western Washington-based Truborn Press, a former imprint of DarkLit and a survivor of the debacle. Founded by DarkLit designer and cover artist Kristina Osborn, Truborn became one of the press’s imprints in July 2023 and announced an "amicable separation" from the company in late June. “Whatever was happening over there, I didn’t have any part of it,” Osborn said. “Andrew gave his company essentially to Caitlin and I guess it wasn’t a very smooth handoff. People started getting nervous about me because I had just signed all these new authors.”
Of Robert, Osborn said, “I think he’s doing OK and probably just regrets how everything went down.” Truborn is now an LLC and forging ahead with projects including Kenya Moss-Dyme’s Progeny, out this week. “I feel like I’ve built a good reputation of paying on time, designing on time, and being open in communication,” said Osborn.
Third Estate Books, an indie horror publishing cooperative in western Massachusetts, also joined DarkLit as an imprint this spring, only to leave the company a few weeks later. Founder Aquino Loayza, who identifies as Indigenous Peruvian and Sicilian, says Third Estate has a mission to support writers of historically marginalized identities. He told PW that Third Estate’s plan with DarkLit—which by that time was under Marceau’s leadership—was “more like an MOU we had signed with them, where we’d get access to their reviewer network and 10% of our profits would be put into an initiative called Dark Futures” aimed at mentoring writers and leading craft workshops.
That arrangement crumbled when authors began expressing dissatisfaction with DarkLit. “Third Estate Books has dissolved our partnership with DarkLit moving forward,” Loayza posted June 28 on X. “We feel for the authors who have been impacted by the situation unraveling and hope everyone finds a new home expeditiously.”
Joe Hempel, whose company Fright Night Audio partnered with DarkLit in July 2023, cut ties with DarkLit this July after creating five books. "The whole thing was pretty disorganized after we merged," Hempel said. "It seemed like for all the good ideas and intent Andrew had, he bit off more than he could chew and wasn't really transparent about the financials."
Hempel asked Robert to give him the audiobook rights for the work Fright Night had completed, "and he said sure, so it's all right on my end. I was holding on to all the royalties because I was paying Andrew directly—my contracts were with him and not DarkLit." He's now scrubbing the DarkLit name from the titles he recorded, and he has been in touch with authors: "I've reached out and offered, if you've got audio and you've been hurt in this, I'll make sure your audio gets taken care of from Fright Night's perspective."
Other authors and associates of the press have been vocal in their outrage. In June, after Marceau posted and then deleted screenshots of their exchanges with author Yolanda Sfetsos on X, Sfetsos posted her own account of withdrawing her work from publication.
“The aftermath of DarkLit Press changing hands turned out to be an unexpected nightmare,” Sfetsos told PW. “I did get my rights back for all of the books I had contracted. The experience was awful and rocky, but I was very happy about severing ties.” Last week, she checked Amazon and said she was “horrified to find that over a month after rights were reverted to me [while the book was available for preorder], the paperback of Wings of Sorrow is currently being sold by DarkLit.” Not all authors have pulled their work; 19 DarkLit titles remain available online in paperback editions, with Sfetsos’s concerns as yet unresolved.
Horror author Steve Stred last week devoted his Substack to his experiences with the publisher. He wrote that his fellow DarkLit authors told him about “lack of royalty payments, [and] having to chase down being paid for royalties,” even before Marceau took over leadership. In addition, former DarkLit managing editor Austrian Spencer "reached out to me, asking if I was aware that Yolanda Sfetsos had been asked to pay for editing and covers on the books she’d pulled.” Stred’s DarkLit title When I Look at the Sky, All I See Are Stars (June) was reviewed as an e-book by PW, but the title no longer is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Bookshop. Stred republished the paperback through his own imprint, Black Void.
Another author, Wendy Dalrymple, publicly posted about pulling her book Summer Breeze from publication with DarkLit. Managing editor Spencer, who’d joined the press April 11, published his account of the situation on his Substack in order to share it with close industry friends, but removed the piece when it began drawing unwanted attention beyond his circle. The story was out by then anyway, and on Reddit, the r/horrorwriters group shared an archived DarkLit Twitter thread. The postmortem is out there, in all its gory detail.
This article has been updated with further information.
