John Hunt Publishing / O Books / Perfect Edge

No indication of the degree to which this applies across sub genres etc...

sure; we should update it. We will. Sorry about that. I guess average sales 4 years on are going to be lower. It's just an indication, along the lines of "not every book sells 10,000 copies". It's industry figures. We get several proposals a day, where authors often estimate their sales in the tens of thousands/millions, so we thought it would be helpful to have some info there for them to see what sales more usually are.

Are we doing something wrong here?

if you made it clearer what the benefit is...if their goal is to have a copy of their book in their hand...
Sure. I think we do that throughout the user manual, too verbose certainly, it's probably clearer for authors who actually come to us where we give them more specific info, but we don't publish books unless we believe we can get them out there. At least as far as the info goes. We do a lot on social networking on most imprints, we get the info out to all the trade worldwide, we promote every title, etc. if an author just wants a few printed copies they can give to their family, fine, that's not a market we're in, we don't want to publish them.

You're tarring all authors with the same subsidy brush
It's never actually been an issue, when it comes to selling them.

There are some we won't take to Waterstones, B&N, whoever, because we know there's no point. There isn't a good enough track record of sales. As far as shops, and readers, go, I don't think there's ever been an instance of "this is a subsidized book, we're not going to stock it/buy it".

"I see a bigger problem with paying big selling authors more and low-selling authors not at all"
me too.
But we're likely to get worse...we're figuring on putting in a 25% starting royalty on print books for authors we reckon are likely to sell well (and our royalties are on the income we receive,nothing deducted), alongside the 50% on ebooks that everyone gets.

Long term, I don't think it's reasonable to say to the authors who sell well "you're not hurting, you get a decent royalty, sorry we can't put it up more because we've got to fund low-selling authors". Which seems to be what you're suggesting.

And we need to look at something an earlier post here said, at a no-cost solution, but that's going to involve less work - like ebooks only, or limited distribution. it is simply difficult to make books available worldwide, through many distributors, at the right quality, print and digital, and market them,if the author doesn't already have a track record - we try hard enough, know enough about the problems.

there's a limited pot, we keep our own "publisher costs" down to under 10% of revenues, everything else goes into the books. Question is, how to spread the money around, in paying better selling authors more (whether that's in advances, or more marketing, or higher royalties) or only taking a chance on a few new authors.

You did. Stop trying to suggest a publisher does something they don't
hey, all I did, was click on the tab below, Pro Editing Services, on the website home page, it doesn't say anything about this is a service provided by a different company. I didn't say that their site says that authors have to buy their services. I just said that, given how many copies they sell through the trade, that's probably where they're making their income from.
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i don't mean to criticize Adventure Books, looks like a really good outfit. I'm just saying that we try a heck of a lot harder in selling books, and like them, we get some support on some titles from authors for pre-print costs. But we're categorized very differently, as far as the Preditors%Editors website goes.

i'ld be amazed if they hadn't made 1000 units during the 30 years not covered by the spreadsheet data
Of course. The point of that illustration (the sales figures) is not to show what the average Man Booker prize winner sells, it's to show what the average title sells if it doesn't become a Booker price winner. Which is the reality for 99.9% of fiction titles published.

john hunt said:

It's just an indication,

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It's not an "indication". It's an isolated factoid devoid of any context that would give it meaning.

john hunt said:

Sure. I think we do that throughout the user manual, too verbose certainly, it's probably clearer for authors who actually come to us where we give them more specific info, but we don't publish books unless we believe we can get them out there.

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Your handbook states that the level 4 contract is for titles that you expect to sell less than a thousand copies, and that there is no royalty on the first thousand copies sold. Thus, the possibility of a subsidy author making their money back is approximately nil. Do you think most of your subsidy authors understand and expect this?

john hunt said:

Long term, I don't think it's reasonable to say to the authors who sell well "you're not hurting, you get a decent royalty, sorry we can't put it up more because we've got to fund low-selling authors". Which seems to be what you're suggesting.

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John, you're twisting things so much it makes my head hurt.

john hunt said:

I didn't say that their site says that authors have to buy their services. I just said that, given how many copies they sell through the trade, that's probably where they're making their income from.

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headache turning into migraine now. You said they were "obviously a vanity press." A vanity press takes money from authors either on the front end (with fees, subsidies, selling services, etc) or on the back end (expecting them to buy their own books).

John, over and over again you say one thing in the manual or contract, and when you get called on it, you claim you meant something completely different than what it said. This is problematic, especially for a legally binding contract.

I also feel like some of the questions are being dodged here. For instance, on the quoted industry sales figures, you keep focusing on the "out of date" bit, when the reasons several people have given for why they are misleading is much broader than that. It feels like you're trying to turn the question into something smaller than it is by selectively replying only to the bit that's easiest to answer. I hope that's not the case, and it's just a matter of reading the thread too quickly and missing key pieces (something I have been guilty of many a time!)

I think I'm going to need to take a break from this thread for a bit, because I'm finding myself growing increasingly frustrated.


Edited to add: I'd also suggest you remove every sentence in your manual that begins with "Most publishers...", because more of them are misleading than not.

I seriously do not understand how you can justify completely not giving some authors any income for what they worked damned hard on--to the point of actually putting them hundreds to thousands of dollars in the hole--in favor of increasing royalties more to those who sell the best.

Seriously. An author is making money on every sale if they're selling well. No one is suggesting you pay those guys less. No one is suggesting that you stop paying them. Both of those would be immoral. In fact, as it is, you have a sliding scale with higher royalties as sales increase. That's awesome and a good clause to have in the contract.

However, when you suggest that you would rather charge authors money they will never get back for THEIR WORK in favor of paying the people doing best 30% instead of 25%, there is something seriously frakked up going on there.

Let me put this in a slightly different way. You say you are currently choosing not to pay authors so that you can pay those who sell the best more, as if this is altruistic and you are doing a good thing. Yet you are choosing not to pay authors. Not only that, you have doubly screwed them over because they have had to pay you money.

There is nothing altruistic about this. Those authors did the same amount of work that the higher selling authors did. They deserve to see something for it. If their work isn't good enough to sell, then it shouldn't be published. If it is, then they damn well deserve to get paid for it.

Honestly, I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt before, but the fact that you can't see that this is blatant exploitation of your authors in favor of those who sell tons of copies, and that you are denying them the right to earn anything on their work, makes me think there is either some serious cognitive dissonance going on here, or you are just trying to make excuses for a business model that makes money from the authors.

I think the fact that no one's getting a straight answer to simple questions indicates exactly what this publisher is all about.

Yep. Some publisher is always re-inventing the wheel, and some poor writer always ends up being crushed under it.

john hunt said:

You did. Stop trying to suggest a publisher does something they don't
hey, all I did, was click on the tab below, Pro Editing Services, on the website home page, it doesn't say anything about this is a service provided by a different company.

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It's an author services yoke run by the guy who owns ABOS as far as I can see. As I said before, lots of small presses also offer editing services privately.

I didn't say that their site says that authors have to buy their services. I just said that, given how many copies they sell through the trade, that's probably where they're making their income from.

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No, John, you didn't. You said:

From post #77

I started looking through the website’s recommendations and warnings, beginning with “A”, and publishers that are strongly recommended are obviously vanity publishers – you take a dozen sample titles at random and none have gone into three figures through the trade, but they do offer other services which will be where they make their money.

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From post #82

But the first publisher that is “highly recommended” in Preditors & Editors, looking through it alphabetically, is Adventure Books of Seattle. So I look at a sample dozen titles on Nielsen, and not one is in more than double figures. So they’re not making money out of selling books. But they do say –
Fees vary from about $350 for a simple proofread up to $3,500 for a complete packaging service. We custom-bid each job and fees often depend on the length of the book and other factors. There are no hidden fees, and in the case of book pa
So I suspect that’s where they’re getting their income from.

OK, that’s not “proof”, maybe they’re a brilliant press. and i don't see anything wrong with it anyway. Just doesn’t seem reasonable to me that they’re highly recommended and we’re down as a vanity press because we’re more upfront about it.

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The reason you are down as a vanity press where ABOS aren't is because ABOS are not a vanity press. Those services they charge for? None of them involve publishing your book, only preparing your book for publication.

i don't mean to criticize Adventure Books, looks like a really good outfit. I'm just saying that we try a heck of a lot harder in selling books, and like them, we get some support on some titles from authors for pre-print costs. But we're categorized very differently, as far as the Preditors%Editors website goes.

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Until you can point me at the part of the website where it says they, like you, require financial support from the authors for any costs, I recommend you stop saying they do.

I'm looking at their sub guidelines. Right down at the bottom of that you'll find a rough outline of their terms including, in bold type, a note that they don't charge upfront fees from authors. There isn't even an entry fee on their Young Writers contest.

Now, I'd never heard of ABOS before this thread, so maybe they do charge, but while I can't see that on their website, in their thread here, or on Pred & Ed, I'm going to assume they don't rather than it being a really well kept secret.

i'ld be amazed if they hadn't made 1000 units during the 30 years not covered by the spreadsheet data
Of course. The point of that illustration (the sales figures) is not to show what the average Man Booker prize winner sells, it's to show what the average title sells if it doesn't become a Booker price winner. Which is the reality for 99.9% of fiction titles published.

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If you want to know how many copies an average title sells if it doesn't win the Booker, the 100 best selling titles of the year is on the Guardian's website.

At best, it shows what sales are like for a novel nominated for a major literary prize during an arbitrary period of time.

kaitie said:

I seriously do not understand how you can justify completely not giving some authors any income for what they worked damned hard on--to the point of actually putting them hundreds to thousands of dollars in the hole--in favor of increasing royalties more to those who sell the best.

Seriously. An author is making money on every sale if they're selling well. No one is suggesting you pay those guys less. No one is suggesting that you stop paying them. Both of those would be immoral. In fact, as it is, you have a sliding scale with higher royalties as sales increase. That's awesome and a good clause to have in the contract.

However, when you suggest that you would rather charge authors money they will never get back for THEIR WORK in favor of paying the people doing best 30% instead of 25%, there is something seriously frakked up going on there.

Let me put this in a slightly different way. You say you are currently choosing not to pay authors so that you can pay those who sell the best more, as if this is altruistic and you are doing a good thing. Yet you are choosing not to pay authors. Not only that, you have doubly screwed them over because they have had to pay you money.

There is nothing altruistic about this. Those authors did the same amount of work that the higher selling authors did. They deserve to see something for it. If their work isn't good enough to sell, then it shouldn't be published. If it is, then they damn well deserve to get paid for it.

Honestly, I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt before, but the fact that you can't see that this is blatant exploitation of your authors in favor of those who sell tons of copies, and that you are denying them the right to earn anything on their work, makes me think there is either some serious cognitive dissonance going on here, or you are just trying to make excuses for a business model that makes money from the authors.

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This, all of it (along with the dancing around the questions by answering the easy bits & sweeping the more challenging bits under the carpet), sums up my growing frustration on this thread.

(Though I'd have probably used a different word than "frakked", which is part of why I'm taking a break from writing lengthy responses.)

I had to edit myself.

john hunt said:

I know it's possible "to sell 500 copies and still make a small profit", and we could do that. I don't think it's possible though if you're going to do the editing/proofing/cover, and make them available physically in several different warehouses worldwide, and try and sell them to the trade, and promote them.

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Hundreds, if not thousands, of small presses manage to do exactly that. I seriously recommend you find out what they're doing that you aren't.

john hunt said:

Of course. The point of that illustration (the sales figures) is not to show what the average Man Booker prize winner sells, it's to show what the average title sells if it doesn't become a Booker price winner. Which is the reality for 99.9% of fiction titles published.

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I've never won a Booker Prize and probably never will. Yet every single one of my books has sold orders of magnitude more than what you claim is average. Why is this, do you suppose? Is it possible that I am a weird statistical outlier, way off in the 00.1% of the top tier of all authors, or is it more likely that your numbers are misleading?

"now you say your books do go out of print"

I was quoting a bit of the contract termination clause, which says that if a book goes out of print rights revert to the author. In practice, we haven't put any books out of print in the last half dozen years, because with short run printing it's easier now to keep them in print than when web-offset printings and minimum printings of a couple of thousand or so were necessary.

The possibility of a subsidy author making their money back is approximately nil. Do you think most of your subsidy authors understand and expect this?

Not quite so, Our average ebook price is around $8 (authors can choose their own price, and there’s a 50% royalty, the money we get back would be around $7, so that’s $3.50 to the author. So if it’s a 200 page book, subsidy of $260 or $320, selling 100 copies would bring them into credit. That happens.
I can’t give you an average, the retail prices are too variable.

I think we make it clear that they may not get anything back from it, eg;
If we offer you a contract with an author subsidy, and you can not afford it, we're sorry about that, please don't take it, or stretch yourself financially. If you object to it on principle, well, we just have to differ........

So we are not the cheapest route possible, but we are well down the price scale, a small fraction of these prices. We can not do what we do for less. Or more quickly. It’s the time the job takes, and getting it to the market, circulating the information. Whoever you work with, do not expect royalties to recover the cost.

You claim you meant something completely different

I don’t think so; like the quote from the contract above, maybe it would be clearer if we just took out that bit about “if a book goes out of print”. But then authors will ask us “what if the book goes out of print?” So it’s there, even though in practice it never happens.

You keep focusing on the out of date bit

Regarding the sales figures on the Booker shortlist, and the sub genres, yes, I admit they’re from the UK, they’re a few years old. But they are, at least, specific, industry figures. We’re not inventing anything. And we should update them, and across other sub genres, and other markets. It’s just a question of hours in the day....,

I seriously do not understand how you can justify completely not giving some authors any income...in favour of increasing royalties more to those who sell the best...those authors did the same amount of work that the higher selling authors did. They deserve to see something for it. If their work isn’t good enough to sell, then it shouldn’t be published.

I guess I’m looking at it from the point of view of the better selling authors.

Altruism aside, they might be thinking “why should my sales/income be going to subsidize other authors?” (In principle, I agree – I’ld like to see a vastly less unequal society, with people being paid more for the hours they put in rather than the profits generated, whether they’re a cleaner or nurse, or doctor or banker, but that isn’t what people vote for).

I just don’t equate intrinsic “worth” and “sales” in the same way you do. I see a lot of really excellent books that sell in dozens or hundreds (just talking about books generally here, not our publications). Sometimes they’re priced out of the market, in the $100+kind of range, sometimes they never really get to the market. I know it’s a bit different in fiction (which is a v small bit of our business). But, in general, the “if it isn’t good enough to sell, then it shouldn’t be published”, no, I don’t go with that. That’s a question of approach, philosophy, whatever, and where we could agree to differ.

Blatant exploitation of your authors in favour of those who sell tons of copies

I don’t understand this point, genuinely. We look at each book on its individual merits, in terms of content and marketability. Are you saying that bestselling authors should be subsidizing, effectively, authors that aren’t/might not sell? and if they aren't, that's exploitation?

which is, in effect, what we do, anyway. In reality, in our business, the element of author subsidy is a small fraction of the financial support given to publishing new authors by the strong selling ones, by a factor of 10 or so.

The reason you are down as a vanity press where ABOS aren’t is because ABOS are not a vanity press. Those services they charge for? None of them involve publishing your book, only preparing your book for publication.

OK. I can’t quite see the distinction though. Preparing your book for publication is the relatively easy bit, getting it to market is the difficult part. Would it be OK if we charged specifically for preparing the book for publication, but not for publishing it?

Sweeping the more challenging bits under the carpet

Not sure what these were, but as I see it, the challenging bit is that there are lots of good books around that are not going to make money for their authors – and, again, I’m talking more about non-fiction here, which is 95%+ of our business – and, often, the authors aren’t writing the books to make money.

And at the other extreme, there are very “commercial” authors who think “why should I be happy with 30% rather than 25%? Why not 50%, or 75%, or 90%? Why should my sales be supporting an office in London or NY and subsidizing decisions on new authors by a bunch of 30 yr olds?"

the actual time we spend on getting money out of authors is so small, it barely registers, compared to the amount of time we spend on editing, design, social networking, PR, marketing, sales. You probably won't believe me, but from my perspective, that's the way it is.

Is it more likely that your numbers are misleading?

The numbers are taken from the Bookseller, which is the main trade reference source here in the UK. We haven’t invented them. And some of our titles sell in orders of magnitude more than that as well.

I seriously recommend you find out what they’re doing that you aren’t.

I think we have a reasonable perspective on what other presses are doing. but we're always willing to learn and adapt. That's why I'm here.

john

john hunt said:

And at the other extreme, there are very “commercial” authors who think “why should I be happy with 30% rather than 25%? Why not 50%, or 75%, or 90%? Why should my sales be supporting an office in London or NY and subsidizing decisions on new authors by a bunch of 30 yr olds?"

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I didn't quite get this part. Is this a way of saying the "very commercial authors" are teenagers?

john hunt said:

I don’t understand this point, genuinely. We look at each book on its individual merits, in terms of content and marketability. Are you saying that bestselling authors should be subsidizing, effectively, authors that aren’t/might not sell? and if they aren't, that's exploitation?

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No, no, no.

The publisher subsidizes the books that they feel may not sell too well.

Ultimately the reading public subsidizes the books that the publisher feels are worthwhile, but may not sell too well.

There are two sources of money in the publishing world (leaving aside grants and patronage): Those sources are the reading public, and the writers. In the first case, where the reading public supplies the money, that's right and proper. In the second case, where the writers supply the money, that's the subsidy/vanity model which is rightly disparaged.

When you have a book that brings in more than it cost, including the author's royalties, that's a book that made a profit. The profit goes into the publisher's pocket, and is used for things like capital improvements, or just sits there earning interest, so that the slightest business fluctuation doesn't put that publisher into bankruptcy.

With me so far?

Something else that the publisher can do with those profits is acquire a book that, by the time it goes out of print, has earned less than it cost, including author's royalties. Those books were published at a loss.

Notice how authors pay to subsidize neither the books that are published at a profit nor the ones that are published at a loss. All books are published at the expense of the publisher.

I'm sure you've noticed in your own business that a few books bring in the majority of your money. In a well-run, non-exploitative, publishing business those few books and their income pay for all the other books that don't turn out to perform as well, and have enough left over to allow the publisher to grow the business or buffer it against temporary down-turns.

Any questions about any of this?

sorry, I didn't express that clearly enough.

There is a fairly high turnover in publishing staff, in the big corporations, with an increasing premium placed on people who can work IT systems and digital etc. so a lot of them are young-ish.

We're trying to cut out most of the central publisher cost. Most of the several dozen publishers/editors/PR people we work with are authors themselves. Some of them are refugees from the big guys (I used to work for a large American publishing corporation, which got taken over by Harper Collins, a couple of decades ago).

We're not ignorant about how things work in publishing. It's just a different kind of operation that we're trying to set up. We're trying to make things work for authors who aren't necessarily going to sell in large numbers, or get an agent, but they're good authors, good books.

It's work in progress, I'm not suggesting we've got it right, or that it's possible to do so - the market is changing so fast, in all kinds of directions, we're just trying to keep ahead of the curve.

The point I start from, is that the author owns the book, and the author should have all the income. Then you get into splitting down the costs - if it's just ebook, or regional or subject-specific distribution through particular wholesalers, or national distribution, or international distribution, how much can you afford to spend on marketing, how many print copies can you afford to send out for review etc... we invest a lot each month in making all this workable for authors who aren't necessarily obvious "sellers".

We do get down into the detail. Which is why I'm here, interested to see what's going to work, what doesn't work. Don't see many other publishers commenting here, out of the 70,000 or so that are registered as such in the USA/UK.

and I don't expect everyone's going to agree with where we're going, or what we're trying to do, can't please everyone all the time. I just kind of get aggravated when we;'re portrayed as bad guys, if only on behalf of all the authors and editors working in the business.
john

john hunt said:

The reason you are down as a vanity press where ABOS aren’t is because ABOS are not a vanity press. Those services they charge for? None of them involve publishing your book, only preparing your book for publication.

OK. I can’t quite see the distinction though. Preparing your book for publication is the relatively easy bit, getting it to market is the difficult part. Would it be OK if we charged specifically for preparing the book for publication, but not for publishing it?

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If you go to ABOS's website and read the details of what is contained within the book packaging service, maybe it will become clearer.

As far as I understand it, they do everything the publisher does except publish it, which is why you, the author, are responsible for the ISBN. The book packaging service is probably aimed at those who are self-publishing.



As for it being okay, I don't know why you are asking me as I'm not the publishing police. If you are asking whether offering self-publishing services rather than vanity publishing will have your "not recommended" stamp removed from Pred & Ed, I suggest you ask them.

OK. I can’t quite see the distinction though. Preparing your book for publication is the relatively easy bit, getting it to market is the difficult part. Would it be OK if we charged specifically for preparing the book for publication, but not for publishing it?

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ABOS is not charging any money to the AUTHORS IT IS PUBLISHING.

It is offering paid services to authors it is NOT publising, and who are NOT under the impression that using those services means that ABOS will/might publish them, and who had NOT first submitted to ABOS.

If a publisher receives money FROM THE AUTHORS IT IS PUBLISHING, or FROM THE AUTHORS WHO SUBMIT, it's a vanity press.

john hunt said:

Not quite so, Our average ebook price is around $8 (authors can choose their own price, and there’s a 50% royalty, the money we get back would be around $7, so that’s $3.50 to the author. So if it’s a 200 page book, subsidy of $260 or $320, selling 100 copies would bring them into credit. That happens.

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Do you recognize that you are changing the numbers every single time you give them? Last time it was the average subsidy is $800. So how many of your $800 subsidy authors ever earn back?

Also according to the numbers you give on your website quoted here:

Level 3 £10/$16 per 1,000 words.
Level 4 £20/$32 per 1,000 words.

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A 200 page book on average will be around 60,000 words (approximately 300 per page). That's 60 X 16, which is hell of a lot more than $200. It's actually more around $1000.

So if your author is making $3.50 per book, they'd need to sell 285 copies to break even. Now, I should probably also keep in mind that you said authors for ebooks don't get royalties on the first few dozen books because those go to pay a formatting fee or whichever fee it was, so let's just make it around 350 or 400 copies to break even. And this is of a book you've declared isn't likely to sell well.

That same 200 page book would cost the author $2000.

Here's an easy question. How many of your subsidy authors make back all the money they've paid (not counting the books they've sold that you haven't paid royalties on) within two years?

Here's another easy question. How many authors have you signed subsidy for $200.

I guess I’m looking at it from the point of view of the better selling authors.

Altruism aside, they might be thinking “why should my sales/income be going to subsidize other authors?” (In principle, I agree – I’ld like to see a vastly less unequal society, with people being paid more for the hours they put in rather than the profits generated, whether they’re a cleaner or nurse, or doctor or banker, but that isn’t what people vote for).

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Um...because that's how publishing works? Do you think Stephen King is ranting to his publisher about how he refuses to let them publish any more of his books because they're using profits from his books to pay for other, less profitable books to be printed?

This isn't about being an unequal society. It's about you doing something that's, quite frankly, a dastardly thing to do. You say these books you're publishing for subsidy have worth. You say they're great, they deserve to be seen by the world. You're doing this to help authors.

Well, if those authors really have a great book the world deserves to see, then those authors deserve to be paid just the same as the rest of the authors on your payroll.

I honestly cannot understand how you don't see that you're hurting authors by doing things this way. Hell, if I'm being honest, it almost strikes me as you're stealing their work. You're able to profit from it, but they aren't. They're the ones who wrote the damn books. Then they get the privilege of paying you to put it out there. You don't have to pay for them. You don't take any risk. You just take their work, put it out there, and put ways in place that limit the chances of the author ever seeing a dime.

Here's how commercial publishing works: the publisher takes the risk, not the author. They do that by using profits (gained from all books) to cover costs. If a book flops, they eat the cost. If a book doesn't look commercial and the company can't afford to eat the costs, they don't publish it.

I just don’t equate intrinsic “worth” and “sales” in the same way you do. I see a lot of really excellent books that sell in dozens or hundreds (just talking about books generally here, not our publications). Sometimes they’re priced out of the market, in the $100+kind of range, sometimes they never really get to the market. I know it’s a bit different in fiction (which is a v small bit of our business). But, in general, the “if it isn’t good enough to sell, then it shouldn’t be published”, no, I don’t go with that. That’s a question of approach, philosophy, whatever, and where we could agree to differ.

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Are you saying this to me? Because I sure as hell guarantee I don't see worth and sales being equated. Ironically, that seems to be what you're saying. Those authors with high sales have books that are a worth more. A book with low sales isn't worth paying anything for at all.

Worth is related to monetary value. That's exactly what you're doing when you say big sellers deserve more than low sellers.

I know books that are amazing that don't sell very well. I've seen great books not sell at all (mine included). But I also think enough of myself and those other authors, and I have enough respect for them, to think that they have the right to be paid for the work they put in.

As a publisher, it is your job to pay authors for their work. Not the other way around.

I don’t understand this point, genuinely. We look at each book on its individual merits, in terms of content and marketability. Are you saying that bestselling authors should be subsidizing, effectively, authors that aren’t/might not sell? and if they aren't, that's exploitation?

Click to expand...

Yes, the profits from authors who sell well should go to ones that are more limited. That's how publishing works. And you know why it's not exploitation? Because those authors are getting paid. You are being disingenuous. There is absolutely no way that you can honestly not see how having authors pay you is exploiting those authors. We are talking about the difference between using windfall profits (out of which the authors have already gotten their fair share) to pay for low-selling books and using money authors pay you to cover publishing costs.

And if you as a publisher don't have the funds to pay for the lower-selling books, then don't publish them.

To be honest, I don't see how you can make a claim like "knowing" which books will sell what in the first place. The reasons publishers pay is that they're the ones taking the risk. You could put out a book you're sure will sell a million copies and have it sell a few thousand. That sort of thing has happened before. Thing about those authors? They were still paid.

which is, in effect, what we do, anyway. In reality, in our business, the element of author subsidy is a small fraction of the financial support given to publishing new authors by the strong selling ones, by a factor of 10 or so.

Click to expand...

If this was really in effect what you do anyway, then there is no reason for you to have the subsidy running in the first place.

For curiosity sake, how much money do you typically spend on a new book? Especially considering it seems you don't do developmental editing and you charge authors for any extensive editing that needs to be done, I'm curious to know.

Not sure what these were, but as I see it, the challenging bit is that there are lots of good books around that are not going to make money for their authors – and, again, I’m talking more about non-fiction here, which is 95%+ of our business – and, often, the authors aren’t writing the books to make money.

And at the other extreme, there are very “commercial” authors who think “why should I be happy with 30% rather than 25%? Why not 50%, or 75%, or 90%? Why should my sales be supporting an office in London or NY and subsidizing decisions on new authors by a bunch of 30 yr olds?"

Click to expand...

First of all, those authors can self-publish if they want percents that high. Maybe I'm just not meeting the right authors, but the majority of authors I meet understand why the publishing company gets a portion of the money. They understand that they aren't the only one behind the book, and that editors, artists, marketers, promoters, formatters, typesetters, and so on all work on the book as well.

I don't think anyone I know who knows anything about publishing thinks publishers or editors or any of those people are rich. In fact, I think authors and agents have a better chance of getting rich in publishing than any other person involved.

And you know what? Some books don't sell. There are plenty of authors out there who don't. And there are plenty of options available to them. They can go with a small press. If that doesn't work, they can self-publish. They can put that book in a drawer and write another one that's better and more marketable.

You aren't making life more fair by publishing those books. If anything, you're harming those authors by forcing them to pay for services that would be standard at any other legitimate publisher.

the actual time we spend on getting money out of authors is so small, it barely registers, compared to the amount of time we spend on editing, design, social networking, PR, marketing, sales. You probably won't believe me, but from my perspective, that's the way it is.

Click to expand...

Probably because a lot of authors are misinformed, partly because of websites like yours that spread information. And a lot of authors are desperate to see a "yes" and will make sacrifices to pay the costs because they think finally someone recognizes the brilliance of their book.

The sad thing is that if these books are really that good, those authors could probably have taken them to another small press and gotten a contract that allowed them to be paid rather than the other way around.

And really, to say you don't spend time getting money out of them is meaningless. The people who recognize this as a vanity operation aren't worth trying to get money out of. The ones you get money from are the ones who don't know enough to know better, and they'd be more than willing.

/rant

So having the better selling authors "subsidize" (It's already been pointed out how little sense it makes to look at it that way, but whatever) the lower selling authors is an anathema, but having the lower-selling authors subsidizing (literally, by paying a subsidy) the rest of the business is AOK? if you consider lower-selling authors such third-rate citizens, why do you publish them at all? They're better off going to someone who has at least a smidgen of respect for them and their hard work.

Mr Hunt's explanations have more twists and turns than a twisty turny thing.

Than the entire series run of Lost?

The publisher subsidizes the books that they feel may not sell too well

But the publishers’ revenues are all from the author sales. So,however it’s sliced and diced, isn’t it, effectively, the strong selling authors subsidizing the weaker ones? Where else does the money come from? Who's the "publisher? (you're just talking about shareholders here, in most cases).

The reading public subsidizes the books that the publisher feels are worthwhile, but may not sell

Obviously the case with academic books, where 95% of the sales are at high prices to libraries etc, but if there’s a really good book, that isn’t selling, that isn’t going to make it onto limited bookshelf space, that may not come across on the internet, then how do the public subsidize it?

I’m sure you’ve noticed in your own business that a few books bring in the majority of your money

Sure, it’s around 80%, probably more, as usual.

And on that basis, along the lines of that model, we’ld publish half a dozen extra titles a month, that we were pretty sure were going to sell in the thousands, rather than several dozen.

And, sure, we haven’t got the balance right yet. We publish too many titles that we lose money on, subsidy or not. Readers, editors, publishers, get too enthusiastic about authors/titles. We should probably get far tougher about it, and maybe, as you suggest, just not publish any subsidy titles. If it’s not going to sell in thousands, we rule it out.

I just think that’s going to rule out a heck of a lot of good books from getting properly published. And not everyone in this business, is just in it to make money.

ASBOS is not charging any money to the AUTHORS IT IS PUBLISHING. It is offering paid services to the AUTHORS IT IS NOT PUBLISHING.

Fair enough. Didn’t seem clear to me on the website. Looking at the Nielsen sales figures, and where books are made available, doesn’t seem they’re doing much, but that’s fine...I back down.

Do you recognize that you are changing the numbers every single time you give them? Last time iot was the average subsidy is $800.

No I hadn’t, but you’re quite right. I said -
Not quite so, Our average ebook price is around $8 (authors can choose their own price, and there’s a 50% royalty, the money we get back would be around $7, so that’s $3.50 to the author. So if it’s a 200 page book, subsidy of $260 or $320, selling 100 copies would bring them into credit. That happens.
I can’t give you an average, the retail prices are too variable.

Should have been $2600 or $3200.
Sorry, you’re right, I was going too fast.

How many of your subsidy authors make back all the money they’ve paid within two years

Can’t really answer that one, because we haven’t had subsidy contracts for two years and more. But we make it clear that they may not, and in the areas we mostly publish in, most authors aren’t that bothered about the income, that’s not why they’re writing books. they want what they say to get around, and we work as hard as we can on that, but it doesn't necessarily translate into bookshop sales.

Do you think stpehen King is ranting to his publisher about how he refuses to let them publish any more of his books because they’re using profits from his books to pay for other, less profitable books to be printed?

Not necessarily him, or his agent. But the upward pressure on royalties for brand name authors, yes.

You’re able to profit it, they aren’t

Well,not much. We pay people to do the work, who are usually authors themselves, we pay for the print, the amount we take for overheads/salaries/rent and everything else that doesn’t go directly into individual books is under 10%, apart from another 14% or so on developing marketing systems/software.

You don’t take any risk

Got to laugh at that one. I’ve put six figure sums into the business, I’m not rich, it meant mortgaging the house, and I earned last year £36000 for something like an 80 hr week, and I was the highest paid person around here. So, OK, maybe that’s profiteering.

And if you as a publisher don’t have the funds to pay for selling books, then don’t publish them

OK, fair point, thinking about it. Maybe we should just cut right back on the number of titles we publish.

For curiosity sake, how much money do you spend on a new book?

That’s a difficult one, depends how you define it, direct costs (copy editing, proof reading, design, advertising and so on) and indirect costs (sending the info out, editing that, visiting accounts, marketing (usually a few hundred “activities” there), communications etc. – reckon there’s generally a couple of hundred emails/notifications on any new title, all the way through from commissioning to royalty payments, on average. Sometimes several times that.) But if you take a really rough kind of average, it’s in the low $thousands.

Basically, we allocate a publisher, editor, copy editor, proof reader, PR person, and various others on marketing/admin/sales/foreign rights, for every new title. And they all want to be paid.

"now you say your books do go out of print"

I was quoting a bit of the contract termination clause, which says that if a book goes out of print rights revert to the author. In practice, we haven't put any books out of print in the last half dozen years, because with short run printing it's easier now to keep them in print than when web-offset printings and minimum printings of a couple of thousand or so were necessary.

The possibility of a subsidy author making their money back is approximately nil. Do you think most of your subsidy authors understand and expect this?

Not quite so, Our average ebook price is around $8 (authors can choose their own price, and there’s a 50% royalty, the money we get back would be around $7, so that’s $3.50 to the author. So if it’s a 200 page book, subsidy of $260 or $320, selling 100 copies would bring them into credit. That happens.
I can’t give you precise figures, the retail prices are too variable.

I think we make it clear that they may not get anything back from it, eg;
If we offer you a contract with an author subsidy, and you can not afford it, we're sorry about that, please don't take it, or stretch yourself financially. If you object to it on principle, well, we just have to differ........
So we are not the cheapest route possible, but we are well down the price scale, a small fraction of these prices. We can not do what we do for less. Or more quickly. It’s the time the job takes, and getting it to the market, circulating the information. Whoever you work with, do not expect royalties to recover the cost.



You claim you meant something completely different

I don’t think so; like the quote from the contract above, maybe it would be clearer if we just too out that bit about “if a book goes out of print”. But then authors will ask us “what if the book goes out of print?” So it’s there, even though in practice it never happens.

You keep focusing on the out of date bit

Regarding the sales figures on the Booker shortlist, and the sub genres, yes, I admit they’re from the UK, they’re a few years old. But they are, at least, specific, industry figures, and the trends as far as bricks and mortar shops goes are all downwards anyway. We’re not inventing anything. And we should update them, and across other sub genres, and other markets, sure. It’s just a question of hours in the day....,

I seriously do not understand how you can justify completely not giving some authors any income...in favour of increasing royalties more to those who sell the best...those authors did the same amount of work that the higher selling authors did. They deserve to see something for it. If their work isn’t good enough to sell, then it shouldn’t be published.

I guess I’m looking at it from the point of view of the better selling authors. Altruism aside, they might be thinking “why should my sales/income be going to subsidize other authors?” (In principle, I agree – I’ld like to see a vastly less unequal society, with people being paid more for the hours they put in rather than the profits generated, whether they’re a cleaner or nurse, or doctor or banker, but that isn’t what people vote for).

I just don’t equate intrinsic “worth” and “sales” in the same way you do. I see a lot of really excellent books that sell in dozens or hundreds (just talking about books generally here, not our publications). Sometimes they’re priced out of the market, in the $100+kind of range, sometimes they never really get to the market. I know it’s a bit different in fiction (which is a v small bit of our business). But, in general, the “if it isn’t good enough to sell, then it shouldn’t be published”, no, I don’t go with that. That’s a question of approach, philosophy, whatever.

Blatant exploitation of your authors in favour of those who sell tons of copies

I don’t understand this point, genuinely. We look at each book on its individual merits, in terms of content and marketability. Are you saying that bestselling authors should be subsidizing, effectively, authors that aren’t/might not sell? Redistribution of income, irrespective of results/productivity/sales? Are you a socialist? (don't mind if you are, I've voted labour all my life).

In reality, in our business, anyway, the element of author subsidy is a small fraction of the financial support given to publishing new authors by the strong selling ones, by a factor of 10 or so.

The reason you are down as a vanity press where ABOS aren’t is because ABOS are not a vanity press. Those services they charge for? None of them involve publishing your book, only preparing your book for publication.

OK. I can’t quite see the distinction though, between publishing your book, and preparing the book for publication. for us, the two go together, along with the marketing/sales etc.

Sweeping the more challenging bits under the carpet

As I see it, the challenging bit is that there are lots of good books around that are not going to make money for their authors – and, again, I’m talking more about non-fiction here, which is 95%+ of our business – and, often, the authors aren’t writing the books to make money in the first place.

And at the other extreme, there are very “commercial” authors who think “why should I be happy with 30% rather than 25%? Why not 50%, or 75%?

Is it more likely that your numbers are misleading?

The numbers are taken from the Bookseller, which is the main trade reference source here in the UK. We haven’t invented them. And some of our titles sell in orders of magnitude more than that as well.

I seriously recommend you find out what they’re doing that you aren’t

I think we have a reasonable perspective on what other small presses are doing.

The publisher subsidizes the books that they feel may not sell too well

But the publishers’ revenues are all from the author sales. So,however it’s sliced and diced, isn’t it, effectively, the strong selling authors subsidizing the weaker ones? Where else does the money come from?

The reading public subsidizes the books that the publisher feels are worthwhile, but may not sell

Obviously the case with academic books, where 95% of the sales are at high prices to libraries etc, but if there’s a really good book, that isn’t selling, that isn’t going to make it onto limited bookshelf space, that then may not come across on the internet, then how do the public subsidize it?

I’#m sure you’ve noticed in your own business that a few books bring in the majority of your money

Sure, it’s around 80%, probably more, as usual.

And on that basis, along the lines of that model, we’ld publish half a dozen extra titles a month, that we were pretty sure were going to sell in the thousands, rather than several dozen.

And, sure, we haven’t got the balance right yet. We publish too many titles that we lose money on, subsidy or not. Readers, editors, publishers, get too enthusiastic about authors/titles. We should probably get far tougher about it, and maybe, as you suggest, just not publish any subsidy titles. If it’s not going to sell in thousands, we rule it out.

I just think that’s going to rule out a heck of a lot of good books from getting properly published. And not everyone in this business, is just in it to make money.

ASBOS is not charging any money to the AUTHORS IT IS PUBLISHING. It is offering paid services to the AUTHORS IT IS NOT PUBLISHING.

Fair enough. Didn’t seem clear to me on the website. Looking at the Nielsen sales figures, and where books are made available, doesn’t seem they’re doing much, but that’s fine...I back down.

Do you recognize that you are changing the numbers every single time you give them? Last time it was the average subsidy is $800.

I think that’s about right. and yes, where I said "if it’s a 200 page book, subsidy of $260 or $320,", I missed out a zero. It's not meaning to mislead, the info is there on the user manual on the internet, it's just down to me trying to do too much - and i don't see thousands of other publishers on this site justifying how they work, or bothering to look at it.

OK, maybe that's because we're a crap publisher - all round shout of "yes" -

john

Not sure what glitched where, but one of your previous posts seems to have been appended to the end (or inserted into the middle of?) your most recent post.

john hunt said:

Do you recognize that you are changing the numbers every single time you give them? Last time iot was the average subsidy is $800.

Click to expand...

No I hadn’t, but you’re quite right. I said -

Not quite so, Our average ebook price is around $8 (authors can choose their own price, and there’s a 50% royalty, the money we get back would be around $7, so that’s $3.50 to the author. So if it’s a 200 page book, subsidy of $260 or $320, selling 100 copies would bring them into credit. That happens.
I can’t give you an average, the retail prices are too variable.

Click to expand...

Should have been $2600 or $3200.
Sorry, you’re right, I was going too fast.

Click to expand...

Which means, by your own numbers, the author would need to sell 1000 copies to break even, not 100. And since you specifically offer that contract to books you don't expect will sell that many copies...


Not sure why you are so determined to
A. Charge some authors subsidies while
B. Insisting that you are not a subsidy publisher.

You get to have one or the other, but not both.

Five pages in, and really nothing new. I for one have seen enough.

yeah, me too. Is there some way of closing this thread down? I'ld like to keep corresponding in some ways, but I've got the general drift of it, there are things we can improve, and there are some points we'll always differ on, but there's no point in dragging this out indefinitely.

sorry about the confusing middle bit - just too late at night.

john

Since it took me several times reading through to get completely clear on which bits were quotes, and which bits were part of this post, I've taken the liberty of adding Quote-tags to make it easier for others:

This is the first part of the new post, which will be repeated again further down:

john hunt said:

The publisher subsidizes the books that they feel may not sell too well

Click to expand...

But the publishers’ revenues are all from the author sales. So,however it’s sliced and diced, isn’t it, effectively, the strong selling authors subsidizing the weaker ones? Where else does the money come from? Who's the "publisher? (you're just talking about shareholders here, in most cases).

The reading public subsidizes the books that the publisher feels are worthwhile, but may not sell

Click to expand...

Obviously the case with academic books, where 95% of the sales are at high prices to libraries etc, but if there’s a really good book, that isn’t selling, that isn’t going to make it onto limited bookshelf space, that may not come across on the internet, then how do the public subsidize it?

I’m sure you’ve noticed in your own business that a few books bring in the majority of your money

Click to expand...

Sure, it’s around 80%, probably more, as usual.

And on that basis, along the lines of that model, we’ld publish half a dozen extra titles a month, that we were pretty sure were going to sell in the thousands, rather than several dozen.

And, sure, we haven’t got the balance right yet. We publish too many titles that we lose money on, subsidy or not. Readers, editors, publishers, get too enthusiastic about authors/titles. We should probably get far tougher about it, and maybe, as you suggest, just not publish any subsidy titles. If it’s not going to sell in thousands, we rule it out.

I just think that’s going to rule out a heck of a lot of good books from getting properly published. And not everyone in this business, is just in it to make money.

ASBOS is not charging any money to the AUTHORS IT IS PUBLISHING. It is offering paid services to the AUTHORS IT IS NOT PUBLISHING.

Click to expand...

Fair enough. Didn’t seem clear to me on the website. Looking at the Nielsen sales figures, and where books are made available, doesn’t seem they’re doing much, but that’s fine...I back down.

Click to expand...

This bit ISN'T duplicated:

Do you recognize that you are changing the numbers every single time you give them? Last time iot was the average subsidy is $800.

Click to expand...

No I hadn’t, but you’re quite right. I said -

Not quite so, Our average ebook price is around $8 (authors can choose their own price, and there’s a 50% royalty, the money we get back would be around $7, so that’s $3.50 to the author. So if it’s a 200 page book, subsidy of $260 or $320, selling 100 copies would bring them into credit. That happens.
I can’t give you an average, the retail prices are too variable.

Click to expand...

Should have been $2600 or $3200.
Sorry, you’re right, I was going too fast.

How many of your subsidy authors make back all the money they’ve paid within two years

Click to expand...

Can’t really answer that one, because we haven’t had subsidy contracts for two years and more. But we make it clear that they may not, and in the areas we mostly publish in, most authors aren’t that bothered about the income, that’s not why they’re writing books. they want what they say to get around, and we work as hard as we can on that, but it doesn't necessarily translate into bookshop sales.

Do you think stpehen King is ranting to his publisher about how he refuses to let them publish any more of his books because they’re using profits from his books to pay for other, less profitable books to be printed?

Click to expand...

Not necessarily him, or his agent. But the upward pressure on royalties for brand name authors, yes.

You’re able to profit it, they aren’t

Click to expand...

Well,not much. We pay people to do the work, who are usually authors themselves, we pay for the print, the amount we take for overheads/salaries/rent and everything else that doesn’t go directly into individual books is under 10%, apart from another 14% or so on developing marketing systems/software.

You don’t take any risk

Click to expand...

Got to laugh at that one. I’ve put six figure sums into the business, I’m not rich, it meant mortgaging the house, and I earned last year £36000 for something like an 80 hr week, and I was the highest paid person around here. So, OK, maybe that’s profiteering.

And if you as a publisher don’t have the funds to pay for selling books, then don’t publish them

Click to expand...

OK, fair point, thinking about it. Maybe we should just cut right back on the number of titles we publish.

For curiosity sake, how much money do you spend on a new book?

Click to expand...

That’s a difficult one, depends how you define it, direct costs (copy editing, proof reading, design, advertising and so on) and indirect costs (sending the info out, editing that, visiting accounts, marketing (usually a few hundred “activities” there), communications etc. – reckon there’s generally a couple of hundred emails/notifications on any new title, all the way through from commissioning to royalty payments, on average. Sometimes several times that.) But if you take a really rough kind of average, it’s in the low $thousands.

Basically, we allocate a publisher, editor, copy editor, proof reader, PR person, and various others on marketing/admin/sales/foreign rights, for every new title. And they all want to be paid.

Click to expand...

This is the bit that seems to have been inserted from a previous response.

"now you say your books do go out of print"

Click to expand...

I was quoting a bit of the contract termination clause, which says that if a book goes out of print rights revert to the author. In practice, we haven't put any books out of print in the last half dozen years, because with short run printing it's easier now to keep them in print than when web-offset printings and minimum printings of a couple of thousand or so were necessary.

The possibility of a subsidy author making their money back is approximately nil. Do you think most of your subsidy authors understand and expect this?

Click to expand...

Not quite so, Our average ebook price is around $8 (authors can choose their own price, and there’s a 50% royalty, the money we get back would be around $7, so that’s $3.50 to the author. So if it’s a 200 page book, subsidy of $260 or $320, selling 100 copies would bring them into credit. That happens.
I can’t give you precise figures, the retail prices are too variable.

I think we make it clear that they may not get anything back from it, eg;

If we offer you a contract with an author subsidy, and you can not afford it, we're sorry about that, please don't take it, or stretch yourself financially. If you object to it on principle, well, we just have to differ........
So we are not the cheapest route possible, but we are well down the price scale, a small fraction of these prices. We can not do what we do for less. Or more quickly. It’s the time the job takes, and getting it to the market, circulating the information. Whoever you work with, do not expect royalties to recover the cost.

Click to expand...

You claim you meant something completely different

Click to expand...

I don’t think so; like the quote from the contract above, maybe it would be clearer if we just too out that bit about “if a book goes out of print”. But then authors will ask us “what if the book goes out of print?” So it’s there, even though in practice it never happens.

You keep focusing on the out of date bit

Click to expand...

Regarding the sales figures on the Booker shortlist, and the sub genres, yes, I admit they’re from the UK, they’re a few years old. But they are, at least, specific, industry figures, and the trends as far as bricks and mortar shops goes are all downwards anyway. We’re not inventing anything. And we should update them, and across other sub genres, and other markets, sure. It’s just a question of hours in the day....,

I seriously do not understand how you can justify completely not giving some authors any income...in favour of increasing royalties more to those who sell the best...those authors did the same amount of work that the higher selling authors did. They deserve to see something for it. If their work isn’t good enough to sell, then it shouldn’t be published.

Click to expand...

I guess I’m looking at it from the point of view of the better selling authors. Altruism aside, they might be thinking “why should my sales/income be going to subsidize other authors?” (In principle, I agree – I’ld like to see a vastly less unequal society, with people being paid more for the hours they put in rather than the profits generated, whether they’re a cleaner or nurse, or doctor or banker, but that isn’t what people vote for).

I just don’t equate intrinsic “worth” and “sales” in the same way you do. I see a lot of really excellent books that sell in dozens or hundreds (just talking about books generally here, not our publications). Sometimes they’re priced out of the market, in the $100+kind of range, sometimes they never really get to the market. I know it’s a bit different in fiction (which is a v small bit of our business). But, in general, the “if it isn’t good enough to sell, then it shouldn’t be published”, no, I don’t go with that. That’s a question of approach, philosophy, whatever.

Blatant exploitation of your authors in favour of those who sell tons of copies

Click to expand...

I don’t understand this point, genuinely. We look at each book on its individual merits, in terms of content and marketability. Are you saying that bestselling authors should be subsidizing, effectively, authors that aren’t/might not sell? Redistribution of income, irrespective of results/productivity/sales? Are you a socialist? (don't mind if you are, I've voted labour all my life).

In reality, in our business, anyway, the element of author subsidy is a small fraction of the financial support given to publishing new authors by the strong selling ones, by a factor of 10 or so.

The reason you are down as a vanity press where ABOS aren’t is because ABOS are not a vanity press. Those services they charge for? None of them involve publishing your book, only preparing your book for publication.

Click to expand...

OK. I can’t quite see the distinction though, between publishing your book, and preparing the book for publication. for us, the two go together, along with the marketing/sales etc.

Sweeping the more challenging bits under the carpet

Click to expand...

As I see it, the challenging bit is that there are lots of good books around that are not going to make money for their authors – and, again, I’m talking more about non-fiction here, which is 95%+ of our business – and, often, the authors aren’t writing the books to make money in the first place.

And at the other extreme, there are very “commercial” authors who think “why should I be happy with 30% rather than 25%? Why not 50%, or 75%?

Is it more likely that your numbers are misleading?

Click to expand...

The numbers are taken from the Bookseller, which is the main trade reference source here in the UK. We haven’t invented them. And some of our titles sell in orders of magnitude more than that as well.

I seriously recommend you find out what they’re doing that you aren’t

Click to expand...

I think we have a reasonable perspective on what other small presses are doing.

Click to expand...

THen we repeat the first part of this response...

The publisher subsidizes the books that they feel may not sell too well

Click to expand...

But the publishers’ revenues are all from the author sales. So,however it’s sliced and diced, isn’t it, effectively, the strong selling authors subsidizing the weaker ones? Where else does the money come from?

The reading public subsidizes the books that the publisher feels are worthwhile, but may not sell

Click to expand...

Obviously the case with academic books, where 95% of the sales are at high prices to libraries etc, but if there’s a really good book, that isn’t selling, that isn’t going to make it onto limited bookshelf space, that then may not come across on the internet, then how do the public subsidize it?

I’#m sure you’ve noticed in your own business that a few books bring in the majority of your money

Click to expand...

Sure, it’s around 80%, probably more, as usual.

And on that basis, along the lines of that model, we’ld publish half a dozen extra titles a month, that we were pretty sure were going to sell in the thousands, rather than several dozen.

And, sure, we haven’t got the balance right yet. We publish too many titles that we lose money on, subsidy or not. Readers, editors, publishers, get too enthusiastic about authors/titles. We should probably get far tougher about it, and maybe, as you suggest, just not publish any subsidy titles. If it’s not going to sell in thousands, we rule it out.

I just think that’s going to rule out a heck of a lot of good books from getting properly published. And not everyone in this business, is just in it to make money.

ASBOS is not charging any money to the AUTHORS IT IS PUBLISHING. It is offering paid services to the AUTHORS IT IS NOT PUBLISHING.

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Fair enough. Didn’t seem clear to me on the website. Looking at the Nielsen sales figures, and where books are made available, doesn’t seem they’re doing much, but that’s fine...I back down.

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And then we continue with something that isn't a duplicate of what came before:

Do you recognize that you are changing the numbers every single time you give them? Last time it was the average subsidy is $800.

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I think that’s about right. and yes, where I said "if it’s a 200 page book, subsidy of $260 or $320,", I missed out a zero. It's not meaning to mislead, the info is there on the user manual on the internet, it's just down to me trying to do too much - and i don't see thousands of other publishers on this site justifying how they work, or bothering to look at it.

OK, maybe that's because we're a crap publisher - all round shout of "yes" -

john

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john hunt:
But the publishers’ revenues are all from the author sales. So,however it’s sliced and diced, isn’t it, effectively, the strong selling authors subsidizing the weaker ones? Where else does the money come from? Who's the "publisher? (you're just talking about shareholders here, in most cases).

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That's why you pay authors advances and have the concept of an 'earn out'. Stephen King isn't complaining about his sales helping his publisher to invest in new authors or more experimental fiction because Stephen King gets a big old 7 figure advance *and* his royalty payments *and* the publisher still earns enough from all that to make their investment.

My issue with your take on this, is that you're really not offering your subsidised authors anything. You're just taking their money and giving them a chance to play at being an author, knowing that they're probably not going to sell enough copies to make that money back. It's very poor faith, predatory and frankly, it leaves an unpleasant taste.

john hunt:
Obviously the case with academic books, where 95% of the sales are at high prices to libraries etc, but if there’s a really good book, that isn’t selling, that isn’t going to make it onto limited bookshelf space, that may not come across on the internet, then how do the public subsidize it?

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Actually with academic books a large chunk of the cash comes from hard sales - the whole point of writing an academic book is to get it onto a college reading list and if you're a professor, then onto your course reading list. Obviously, sales to libraries help but that's not where the bulk of the cash comes from.

john hunt:
I just think that’s going to rule out a heck of a lot of good books from getting properly published. And not everyone in this business, is just in it to make money.

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Your business model is up to you. Publishing's a risky business and part of the reason so many small publishers fail is because of the mix issues your describe. However, if you're charging people to publish books that you don't think you can sell to a profitable level, then don't kid yourself that you're helping a book that would otherwise be unpublished find an audience. You're just taking someone's money.

john hunt:
Do you think stpehen King is ranting to his publisher about how he refuses to let them publish any more of his books because they’re using profits from his books to pay for other, less profitable books to be printed
Not necessarily him, or his agent. But the upward pressure on royalties for brand name authors, yes.

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Again, you're forgetting that big name authors get big name advances. There's a trade off that gets made, which means that royalty pressures become much less of a factor than you would have people believe.

john hunt:
I guess I’m looking at it from the point of view of the better selling authors. Altruism aside, they might be thinking “why should my sales/income be going to subsidize other authors?” (In principle, I agree – I’ld like to see a vastly less unequal society, with people being paid more for the hours they put in rather than the profits generated, whether they’re a cleaner or nurse, or doctor or banker, but that isn’t what people vote for).

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If "altruism" is seriously something that's keeping you up at night, pay those authors an advance for their next book and negotiate the royalty rates appropriately. It's business, it's an understood commercial practice.

john hunt:
Is there some way of closing this thread down?

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No. This thread doesn't exist to help you improve your business model, it exists to help writers make an informed decision about your company.

MM