a few points;
an author with a truly publishable book will often be able to find a publisher for it, who would then provide all the things a normal publisher would for free
Sure, great. I'm not suggesting we suit everyone, and 95% of the titles on our list have had no author subsidies of any kind. It's just something we've started over the last couple of years (not on all imprints) on books which we like, but figure that the sales aren't likely to cover costs.
And then pay them up front as well
And
I’m at the stage where I’m wondering whether Mr Hunt is just pathologically opposed to the idea of paying advances. It seems to be the one point that he’s unwilling to address.
Not pathologically opposed to it, just that we don't do it in practice any more (we used to), and I hadn't meant to omit addressing it, and the reasoning is covered in our User Guide (which is on the internet)
CAN I NEGOTIATE AN ADVANCE?
Sorry, we don’t pay advances (that’s common in academic and specialist publishing, unusual in larger trade houses and mass market publishing – though things are changing).
There are several reasons;
• We work to fast schedules, with usually two to three months between initial proposal and finished files, with printed books available the following month and a publication date of three months later. So it's a modest time-lag between contract and royalties.
• It’s a gamble. Over half of all books don’t recover in royalties the advance paid for them (some sources say it’s more like 90%). We’re in the publishing business, not speculative finance
• We can’t start making exceptions for different authors, undermines co-operative principles, and it would be impossible to figure out an average advance that could be sensibly applied to all books.
If an advance is important to you, there are plenty of other publishers who pay them.
You’ld have a hard time finding readers willing to do all the upfront reading
No, we already have them. Every submission gets looked at, about half get turned down immediately (by the publisher), the others go through to the next stage, then some more get turned down, then some go through to readers reports, we have a couple of dozen readers, allocated to different imprints, our problem is not finding readers, but limiting the numbers.
Having 200,000 people on FB sounds like a nice fantasy
Sure, It was hypothetical. But it’s not impossible… We invest a lot in the systems every month, particularly on marketing. We started on FB with the first imprints last year. The take-up depends on the individual publishers, how OK with FB and stuff they are, some like it, other’s don’t, and prefer to concentrate on shop events etc.
The first one we started with last summer was on Moon Books (paganism; a niche market, not a big bookshop category, it's a sub section of a subsection of the BISAC bookstore category codes), last summer, and that now has 9,000 or so FB friends. There’s regular stuff happening there, book ideas, book giveaways etc, it sells books, brings in new authors.
The next one we started a few months ago was Zero Books (politics, philosophy, culture) that’s heading up to 5000.
So given the rate of progress, and as we develop it across other imprints, I don’t think that kind of figure is totally unrealistic.
The other elements of the idea aren’t fantasy either. True, we only have 35,000 contacts categorized by subject, locality etc at the moment, with all activities listed, which authors can see, and add to, but it’s growing fast. Can’t sort them by priority order yet, but will have that by the summer.
We show authors monthly sales, don’t pay them monthly yet because it’s too time-consuming to do wire transfers across the list every month, but that should be sorted next year, etc.
Has the proper leverage to get their book on shelves on bookstores
I think we do reasonably well in getting into the specialist trade (our chairman
Etan Ilfeld, is the owner of the major bookstore in the UK in our main subject market). If you’re talking about national chains like B&N in the US or Waterstones in the UK – it’s more variable. If an author doesn’t already have a track record of sales, it is really, really hard to get books in there, and for new authors (however much marketing you put into it) returns from B&N are often up in the 90% kind of range (and we have to pulp them). The majority of our titles are fairly niche, specialist ones, and don’t fit well in national chains. And with the % of books sold through bookstores now heading down to 50%, it makes sense to look more at different ways.
They don’t usually last very long
Sure. And I understand the bit about “most of the publishers we’ve had come in with new ideas for how things should work, they don’t usually last very long”. We’re very much “work in progress", experimenting, but it pays for itself along the way. We’re just looking for the best way of doing things, as the market changes.
A vanity publisher is one which earns money by selling things to the authors it publishers. Like you do, John.
I’m sure i’ve said this before, it’s about 3% of our revenues. Prior to a couple of years ago, close to zero. Some imprints are higher than that, some don’t ask authors for money.
A publisher which paid its authors 90% of its revenue while retaining only 10% for itself wouldn’t be able to survive without charging extortionate amounts for the books it sells...
But we operate on 10% anyway, apart from the amount we invest into software/systems, which is another 15%. The other 75% goes to printers, editors, designers, distributors, and authors. And our retail prices are competitive.
I’m just not sure that trying to do everything for every book, one-size-fits-all, is a sensible long-term solution. It penalizes many books/authors that have a more specialist/limited market. Why not let the author pick the options, and deduct the relevant % that’s saved from the income. Had one author recently for instance who said he didn’t
want a print edition of his book, because he would earn nearly 10 times more per copy with an ebook at the same retail price with a 50% royalty, than 10% on the print book discounted by 50% to the trade.
The idea behind the hypothetical company would be that the author chose the service/format they wanted, pays for it direct where/when they wanted it, and the company would only get its 10% if the book did sell.
What’s to stop me getting some of my good friends to sin up as readers
That's where the selection/quality process comes in.
I guarantee you that readers will blame YOU for any problems
Sure, we get that now anyway, That’s what the 10% retained is there for, to keep the quality.
If you can’t capitalize your start up, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it.
It’s not actually a start up. And we're well enough capitalized. And we don't have bank borrowings, so there's no interest charges in the equation. It's more a question of "this is a good book, but it's market is likely to be in the low hundreds, how can we fund it?". (And if you think there aren't lots of really good books around that only sell in hundreds, or manuscripts that have the potential to do that but aren't likely to do more, then...dunno what to say....other than we're not looking at the same trade figures).
You can’t afford to be too picky when your primary profit comes from authors fees
As before, it’s a very small % of revenues, and that goes to offsetting direct costs, not profit. There are single titles where we earn more on foreign sub rights than all the author fees we get put together.
Spending time with a house that was either an imprint of the big six....without a clear idea of how trade/commercial publishing works...
Fair enough. I worked for a number of years as the MD of the UK subsidiary of Zondervan, a US publisher, owned by Harper Collins, but most of my working life has been spent dealing with overseas publishers, so, yes, my knowledge of the N American/UK book trade is limited. when I started, it was relatively easy - bookshops were the only outlets, you had a team of sales representatives who went calling on them, a couple of ads in relevant magazines/papers, and so on....
What editing do all your manuscripts receive that the author does not have to pay for?
Doing it to our house style. So copy editing (spelling and grammar, run on sentences, clichés, repetition) and proof reading, yes. Inconsistencies in characterization, plot holes, tightening up narrative, not necessarily, though that would normally be covered in the reader reports, and the extent of the different publisher’s involvement then varies.
but in this situation Mr Harper keeps complaining about the better selling authors
I didn’t mean to complain about better selling authors subsidizing the poor selling ones, just meant that it seems an odd way to run a business if you look at it from the outside, or from the perspective of the better-selling authors.
I’ve heard it said many times in trade publishing (OK, haven’t got a particular source for it, unlike for the sales figures, but it sounds right), that out of an average 10 titles, there are a few duds, sales-wise. A few will wash their face, cost-wise. A couple will do reasonably. And one, title x, will take off. It’s those title xs that drive the advances, the bookshop sales, etc.
The reason in traditional publishing royalties are in the 10% or 15% kind of range (the average across all books sold in the trade in the US/UK is 10.7% of receipts) is because to get that title x the publisher has the cost of bringing 10 to market, funding the advances and the returns across all of them, etc..
The world is changing, electronic point of sale which gives booksellers access to all sales figures on every author so you can't bluff them, digital, online, less than half the number of bookstores there were 20 years ago, etc. Everyone’s looking at different ways of doing things. (Penguin didn’t spend $120 million (which represents a heck of a lot of decent advances) on buying AuthorHouse last year to get hold of the thousands of new titles every month selling in two figures).
Over the last couple of centuries books have variously been driven/led by printers, booksellers, more recently in the last century by publishers, and in the last few decades increasingly modified by literary agents. In the next century, it will probably be driven by authors. I’m not saying the current system is “broken”, just that there are alternatives rapidly growing in significance. The model of “advance payment and flood the bookshop market with copies” is going to apply to proportionately fewer authors. The model for most is going to be more along the lines of royalties in the 50-90% range, starting off in selected markets, certain formats, spreading as the sales warrant it. How best to organize that, is the question.
You may also be interested in looking up And Other Stories. They are a not for profit publisher who have a unusual business model - you buy a subscription to their books and they also get Arts Council funding.
I’m familiar with them. Looks like a throwback to me. “We can’t make these books work financially, so lets get the taxpayer to fund it”. I thought that was the kind of thing you were against (ie; subsidies - why is it so much better/proper/ethical if the taxpayer provides them rather than the author?).
Plenty of small presses don't pay advances, and I can deal with that, as long as I know that royalties are decent, how they're calculated, and that the press will pay up.
I think our royalty payments to authors are about twice the average of small presses, and competitive with the big publishers. If we didn't pay up, consistently, across 1500 authors the internet would be deluged with complaints.
john