Print-on-demand does not necessarily mean self-published

 

And what’s wrong with self-published anyway?

 

“We don’t stock self-published books”.

I was chatting to one of our authors at our celebration event in December and she told me of some difficulty she was having getting libraries interested in her book, a highly illustrated book suitable for very early readers / infant school children.

 

The librarians reaction had been “We don’t stock self-published books”.

 

Why we’re not self-publishers

We are a small press and we put our books through:

• Three stages of editing
• Two proof reads by humans
• One IA proof read  
• Professional book design
• Professional cover design
• World-wide distribution
• Registration with the legal deposit libraries
• A basic marketing plan

And we do all of the above rather well – even the machine proof-read.

 

Why we should cheer print-on-demand

The basic premise with POD is that you only print the books that are wanted – usually already sold. This offers several advantages:

·         Financial security for the publisher – you don’t pay for printing until the sot is recouped or paid in advance and you lose very little money if a title bombs.   

·         Care for the environment

·         Customers get pristine new copies

·         You can make slight alterations to the text without having to wait for the end of a print run = e.g. if a typos has got through the net despite the rigour described above.

·         Amazon KDP offer the further advantage of getting books available on every Amazon store without us having to worry about exports.

·         Ingrams waive shipping for their distributed titles and will print locally when they can.   

There are precedents

Academic and educational boos have always been printed on demand even before the technology for doing so was advanced. These types of book were not printed until they were sold.

 

Many small presses are now using this technology. It’s extremely useful and cost effective for niche titles.

 

More enlightened libraries

I’m pleased to say that my on local library hosts indie authors as well as those published by the small press.

 

And some libraries have stocked books similar to the one that was rejected above.

 

I reiterate: our books are NOT self-published. Not even those of my own that are published by one of the imprints that we manage. They still go through all of the stages mentioned above and I’m usually only involved in one of the proof-reads.   

 

Small Press – Advantages 2 – Print on Demand

Certain reviewers and certain authors’ societies are still snooty about Print on Demand (POD). They believe it is only for self-publishing amateurs. Yet it has been used for years in the educational and academic worlds so a book isn’t printed until it is sold. It’s an ideal system for books that are only going to sell a few copies.  And if you do get a big order, the price you have to pay is competitive with discounted bulk off-set printing.  

There is no doubt that per unit it is a lot more expensive, particularly on small print runs. Our books’ printing costs, including any shipping and admin charges work out at between 2.00 and 4.00. A traditional publishing house can obtain a unit value of 20-40p on the same size books thus making a much bigger differential between the recommended retail price (RRP) and unit cost. However, this is more than made up for by other overhead costs: nice offices in London, salaried staff and contracted outsourced staff. Small presses don’t have those.  

Lightning Source (LS) makes it particularly easy for the small publisher: For £7.00 + VAT per title per year they will make the book available world-wide, keep it hooked up to over 32 distributors / wholesalers, print locally to keep down costs  and waive all admin and shipping costs.  Even if, say, Amazon UK wanted just one copy of your book, they feed the digital information into the machine with that of all the other   books Amazon UK wants that day. They are shipped together. We don’t see the money for 90 days but LS does all the invoicing and chasing. We get a monthly statement and details of how many books have been sold in which country and the money is put directly into our bank account. This is wonderfully admin and risk-free for us.  

Our clients also have the advantage of getting a brand new book, very quickly. Notice, the Book Depository buy from us, via LS, and they insist on books being available within 24 hours of ordering.  LS naturally comes up with the goods. Customers don’t get warehouse-stressed goods. There are no warehouses at publisher / printer end.

There are environmental issues here as well.  LS uses paper from sustainable sources. No paper is wasted as only books that are required are printed.

No book need ever go out of print. Of course, from time to time you may want to revise a book. It takes about 48 hours to digitize your amendments and costs up to £52.50. So, it’s relatively simple, quick and inexpensive. An author who has grown may wish an earlier work to go out of print. For that reason, our contracts tend to run to three or four years and are renewable thereafter by mutual agreement. In practice we actually only pull the book if the author requests it. And sure, we’ll sell the rights on to one of the Big Six if they request it and our author agrees.

POD ought to get a better press. LS, though a bit of a monopoly, is a good company to work with. Generally the books are of good quality and any problems, of which there are few, are dealt with swiftly.                

                  

Small Press – Advantages 1 Financial Security

One of the greatest advantages of the small press is that publishers can operate in a financially secure way. If they use a Print on Demand company, such as Lightning Source, they can set up titles so that they pay for nothing until after the customer has paid. All three publishers I’m involved with – Bridge House, The Red Telephone and Chapeltown Books use Lightning Source. Lightning Source, for £8.50 a year per title  – this includes VAT – hooks publishers up to distributers world-wide. We have to offer a discount – we choose 35%. We price books to cover that discount, printing costs and a reasonable profit. We offer our authors deals if they buy five or more copies – usually 75% of RRP plus free shipping.     

There are overhead costs per book: set-up with LS costs about £52.50. It’s good to have a proof copy. That’s another £21.00. If we use a cover artist, that’s about £250.00.  Or we can buy a stock photo / illustration for a lot less – about £8.50. This includes a license for about 250,000 print copies and unlimited web usage. Sometimes we even create a cover ourselves. We have to supply one copy to the British Library and sometimes the other Legal deposit libraries request a copy. Review copies we send out at our discretion. It may depend on how much money is in the bank. Authors receive 7.5% royalty on net price, going up to 10% once 1,000 copies are sold.

We do full editorials – first edit, line edit, copy edit and proof read. Our books are carefully designed. More often than not the partners themselves do all of this, though if we’re cash rich and time poor we’ll outsource. We sometimes outsource and pay by profit share. The contractor does work initially for free but gets a permanent royalty. The partners take a profit share. So, they earn only a very little but one day, if we get a best-seller …

When we publish to Kindle there are no upfront costs. We receive 70% of the RRP, without VAT, and we pass 50% of that on to the author(s) minus a small royalty for any partners who have worked on the book.

We tend to keep a couple of books’ worth of set-up costs in our bank account. There’s never a time when we can’t set up a new title. If that did happen, we’d wait.

We have no fancy offices to pay for in London and we have no staff salaries to cover. We do pay an annual subscription to the Independent Publishers’ Guild (IPG). This is our only general overhead. But it is useful. It makes us feel professional, they have important information and they can often help us solve problems. That costs just over £200 a year, including VAT.

All of this leads to several other advantages, which I’ll discuss in further blog posts.                       

Print On Demand

A lot of people still talk about this and there is still a bit of a perception that POD smack of self-publishing or worse still, vanity publishing.
Yet shouldn’t POD technology be welcomed? It is so less wasteful of paper and time. Customers can have pristine copies within a week – often sooner. Okay, so Lightning Source has the monopoly, but that considered they are very good to the publisher who use them:

• Their product is superior to many of those of traditional printers.
• They are quick and efficient.
• There are rarely problems, but when there are, they are quick to respond.
• They have an efficient support team ready to lend a hand when needed.
• They are very well connected and if you go direct with them you have access to many distributors.
• You can have books printed locally, thus saving on shipping costs.

There are other arguments anyway in favour of POD:
Books need never go out of print. This could be construed as a disadvantage. However, there is nothing to stop you taking a book out of print if you want to. It’s just that you don’t have to.
For the sake of a new ISBN and a new set-up cost, so, about £50.00, you can make frequent minor alterations to a book.
One disadvantage may be cost. A title that cost £1.50 to print may cost £0.20 using more traditional off-set printing. But for the latter you are talking about print-runs of thousands. Smaller companies may not be able to pay those sorts of figures up-front. Besides, the sort of companies who use POD – some of the 80,000 small presses - have few overheads so can still make a tidy profit on some ways of selling though generally price their books so that even the least lucrative way of selling makes a profit. For instance, Bridge House’s charity book, 100 for Haiti makes £7.00 for the appeal when bought straight from our site, though individual ones ordered by bookshops only make a few pence. Small presses can stay in charge. Once they’ve recouped the set up costs of the book, each book looks after itself.
Many people probably do not realise that most educational books and academic books are printed on demand. They tend not to be printed until they are ordered. This seems very sensible to me.
Print on Demand is very 21st century. Personally, I love it. I think we should embrace it whole-heartedly.