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.                       

So many unseens hold up publications

One of our books is suffering from considerable delays at the moment. Authors, particularly newer ones, are getting quite anxious. Those who been there before are just getting on with the next piece and have probably not even noticed that we’ve passed the next dead-line.

There are so many factors we can’t predict when we set our dates. Here are a few that we’ve encountered this time:

Authors not returning edits

Authors not supplying bios

Authors not responding to emails

Hidden tables in texts that won’t be removed – we’ve had to retype whole sections of text with the greater margin for error that that brings

Okay, so curly double quotes are unfashionable at the moment, but that’s what we’ve asked for and changing the single quotes is not as easy as you might think. If you do it too automatically you can create new errors.   

Peculiar formatting embedded in the text – so it too has had to be retyped

Normally, even with up to 24 authors, there isn’t too much of this sort of thing. There will always be some. For some reason, this time there’s rather a lot. It’s come at a time, too, when we’re changing our web site and getting out royalties.

As I’m also a published writer I can see both sides of this. So, I’m not surprised that one book has that has 43 authors contributing about 1500 words each has been delayed by 18 months. Six months or so seems to be the norm these days on complex productions.  Even a piece of flash fiction I had accepted a year ago came out two weeks ago instead of November 2011. All sorts of things can happen that are not anybody’s fault particularly. Life can catch up with us all and that often explains the delays, especially when you’re dealing with a large group of people.

In productions that involve a smaller number of people, it may be hard sometimes for writer / editor / designer to agree. This isn’t about major rows and fallings out but about each person involved trying to make sure that the most professional job possible is done.

And don’t you know it. Nearly always your editor sends you your rewrites or proofs at the worst moment possible. I remember doing my minor amendments for my PhD, responding to editorial comment on two novels, giving a final critique to a novel I was editing and marking two undergraduate classes’ final assignments in the space of two weeks. I just had to knuckle down and use some clever critical time-planning. I managed it and even had time to spare most days.   

I encourage people to follow me on Twitter. And if you DM me there I’m going to reply in up to 140 characters so it’s going to take less time. But please, look through my messages first – the information you seek may already be there.    

Believe me, publishers work hard – whether they’re one of the Big Six or a small indie. We don’t always have time to communicate, much as we’d love to and much as we love you. The ten hour day is the norm and sometimes it’s even longer. It doesn’t kill us because we love what we do. It’s a vocation, not a job. There does, however, seem to be an infinite number of tasks and only a finite amount of time. We crave your patience.                           

  

Some thoughts about book covers

It’s quite easy to make a striking cover. There are some talented artists around and there are also some very good stock pictures available, which you can download for a small fee and use more times than you’d probably be able to sell books.

However, getting the cover to look right isn’t just a matter of having a fabulous picture. You need to take several other matters into account:

Is there a natural place for the lettering?

Or the blurb?

What colour / shape should these be if they are to show up well?

Will the size of the book allow you to have a decent–sized spine? One where you can fit in the title and the author?

Will the picture bleed okay without losing integrity?

Will the paper version be a good match to what you see on screen? This point can be very vexing. Printers produce colour in a very different way from computer screens. Printers who know what they are doing can make the paper version match the digital file but they can’t guarantee that they can match what you are seeing on your own computer screen. You need to set your screen to industry standards and it’s actually not quite possible with domestic screens and totally impossible with laptops.

You also have to remember that a colour will look much darker on mass than it does in small quantities in the lettering – especially if letters are against a dark background.

Be prepared to be surprised. If you’re using a professional designer, they tend to know what they’re doing, so the surprise can be a pleasant one. You may have a few nasty shocks if you’re doing it yourself. Even so, try to look at that cover objectively. Does it actually work? Does it matter that it doesn’t look exactly as you saw it on your screen? As long as you’ve actually not got any nasty clashes it could be fine.                       

Why editors and agents have to love not just like what they see

The main problem is everyone only has a certain amount of time. We sometimes feel that if we worked with an author for a while, we could eventually help them to produce something of really good quality that exactly fits our imprint. Unfortunately we probably don’t have enough hours in the day to do that nor can we be sure that an unknown author will be capable of reacting professionally to editorial comment. We’ve also got to be sure that we’ll continue to be enthusiastic enough to get behind it with our marketing efforts. So, unless we love the work rather than just liking it, it’s probably a no go.

I’m a writer too and I know how frustrating it can be to be told by an agent / publisher that they like our work but don’t love it-  especially after they’ve held on to the script for several weeks. But if they say “I’m afraid we like this but don’t love it, but we‘d love to see more of your work.”, count this not as a rejection but as an almost acceptance. They have seen the potential of your work, they can see your professionalism, and they can see that you are almost there. It’s worth carrying on.

I’m currently looking at the entries for The Red Telephone 2011competition. I’ve seen some good writing and some fascinating ideas. There are of course other judges. And I have a few more to look at. There will be a winner, whatever happens, and whichever one we choose it will be easier to be enthusiastic about a novel we love.  

This will become even more crucial for The Red Telephone shortly. Once the competition results are out we’ll be going into open submissions. We’ll only be publishing a few and I expect we’ll soon accumulate an impressive slush pile. At that point we can certainly have the luxury of only publishing what we really love. 

The Legal Deposit Libraries – curse or blessing

At first glance these seem a bit of a bugbear. Publishers have to absolutely by law deposit one copy of every book they produce with the British Library. That isn’t the rather grand building in London, but a little obscure office somewhere you probably wouldn’t have heard of otherwise. The other Legal Deposit libraries, the Bodleian of the University of Oxford, Cambridge University Library, The National Library of Scotland, The Library of Trinity College, Dublin and The National Library of Wales are entitled to request copies. The big publishers tend to send copies as a matter of course. Smaller indie publishers rather hope the libraries don’t ask – though comfort themselves if they are asked by telling themselves they must be getting important. It all costs money and eats into the scant profits.

You would think that if you send five books to the collecting agent one book would then be passed on to each library. Oh no. It’s all done alphabetically. Depending on where you are in the alphabet, your books go to one particular library. And there they sit, piled up in a room where it’s almost impossible to move, let alone find books, it would seem.

It seems such a waste.  Why can’t they be content with electronic copies? Incidentally, there is no depositing of e-books, though if they have an ISBN a record that they exist should be made known to Nielsen.

But here’s an interesting thing. We’d do well to remember the Doomsdays Books. The first one can still be read. The second more modern one, produced on BBC computer, is lost forever.

The physical book will probably endure. If a disaster happens, and all of our technology is wiped out, those books, tightly packed as they are so that they protect each other, will still be there. People will still be able to read or will find the books interesting enough that they will relearn. It may not be that dramatic. If we haven’t learnt by the BBC’s disregard for history (they lost episodes of Doctor Who for goodness sake) it may simply be that in the future we do not have the technology to read them.  

Recently the Legal Deposit libraries’ agent has requested two of our titles. They are both anthologies of short stories and were also produced for Kindle just before Christmas. Is this because we are worth preserving? We hope so: it costs us £20 a time to deposit these books.                

                 

Publishers as gatekeepers

Self-publishing and small cooperatives

Certainly the way we publish is changing. More and more people are self-publishing or forming publishing cooperatives. The sensible ones are using an editor and a copy editor. They lack the resources of the bigger publishers to promote and distribute work. However, they can sometimes feed into a niche market. This is fine.  Sometimes, however, the size and scope of the writer’s circle of influence might be what is selling the book rather than the merit of the book.

Established authors going it alone      

Some authors are going with the traditional publishers for new work but self-publishing their out-of-print titles, most commonly via Smashwords or directly to Amazon Kindle. These writers don’t have to worry too much about promotion. They already have their name. They can sell many of these titles as backlist and good old Amazon makes the link visible for them.

Crowd-funding           

There is now also crowd-funding where the great general public determine which works get published and actually offer the financial sponsorship upfront. However, again, whether a book gets published may have little to do with the content of the book but to do with how popular the writer is. Most crowd-funding organisations expect the project leader – in this case the author – to have a big following on social-networking sites. Arguably, authors should have such a following but that should be because they are good authors not because they are good at social networking.

Content overload

There is so much available to read now. Some content is offered free as an incentive and some is offered very cheaply – especially in the form of e-books. Then there are all the blogs, Facebook pages and web articles flagged up by others. We can’t possibly read it all, so how do we choose?

Developing trust  

We tend to follow the links and recommendations of people we trust, and occasionally we’ll follow something we simply find interesting. We have traditionally trusted the publishing houses to scrutinize work before it comes to us.  We all know they don’t always get it right – they can disappoint and they can also overlook gems. But on the whole, we know that the work has been vetted rigorously and some professional editorial work has gone into it.

What the reader pays for

Interestingly, many of the traditional publishers offer their e-book titles for only a few pence less than the paperback. Can we assume that this reflects just how much time and effort goes into that gatekeeping? With bulk printing, stock, warehousing and distribution only involve minimal costs. The employees of the publishing house are obviously doing something else. Cynically we might say that they are making a tidy profit. I actually rather doubt it. Even where a publishing house is doing well, if the executives put their business energy into almost any other sort of enterprise they’d make much more money. The must be some care about books in there somewhere. And in fact, publishing houses could be driven out of business because of the ease with which we can now go it alone.

Who will offer quality control now?  

If this happens how can we retain the quality control? Can this be left to the reviewers? If the publishers merely become reviewers, how will they get paid? Could they become freelance editors?

We curse our publishers often – as a writer / publisher I’ve experienced that from both sides. Both the apparently overzealous editor and the author who cannot let go of a certain character or passage of prose can annoy seriously. It strikes me though, that publishers, the big ones and the small ones still have an important role to play, even if that role is going to take a different form soon.