A client reports that in the first two months after delivery, about 700 books have sold. While most of these were sold “at the back of the room” (the client is a speaker), let’s value those sales at the wholesale (discounted) price. The reason for this is that any margin between the wholesale price and the retail price really belongs to the retailer, even if that retailer is the speaker. (There are costs associated with shlepping books around, setting up a table, staffing the table, etc.; and those costs are paid by the author-as-retailer, not by the author-as-publisher.)
At a wholesale value of $15 a book, that means that the publisher has recouped $10,500 in two months. The total cost of producing the book (except for the author’s time writing it) and printing 1,600 copies was about $11,000. So at this point, my client has 900 books in inventory and has recovered all but about $500 of the original investment. If those 900 books sell in the next six months (as is likely), my client will be $13,000 ahead. That’s still not much compensation for writing the book, but it represents a doubling of the original investment in less than a year. And the client expects to order more printings and continue selling the book for several more years, with no further outlay except manufacturing costs of less than $3.00 a book. In addition, the client reports that the presence of the book on the sales table (where it is the high-price item at $25) has significantly boosted the sales of older items that were already in inventory and that can also be reprinted cheaply.
Is it a living? No. It is rare for a single book to be anyone’s sole source of income. But if a single book can add ten or fifteen or twenty thousand dollars a year to a speaker’s income, don’t you think it’s worth the effort?
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Nice piece on letterpress nouveau
Thanks to Mike Starr for the link to this encouraging article on Boing Boing.
Monday, November 01, 2010
The cookies next time
The block I live on gets light trick-or-treat traffic of mostly neighborhood children. This is a neighborhood that still supports a traditional mix of store-bought and homemade costumes. In these respects, it is not very different from the neighborhood where I grew up several decades ago.
What has changed is the nature of the treats handed out. Beginning in the mid-1960s, according to Snopes, rumors about razor blades in apples began to circulate (some suspect with help from the candy manufacturing industry), leading to police warnings, hospitals offering to x-ray kids’ hauls, and a complete shift toward individually wrapped commercial candy. No more homemade cookies. No more apples. No more anything that didn’t come out of a candy factory.
Well, that’s two generations of children experiencing a debased, corrupt, commercialized Halloween. And two generations of baseless paranoia is enough, sez I.
So I tried an experiment. In one bowl I offered candy. In a second bowl I offered beautiful, polished apples that we bought yesterday from the grower at our local farmers’ market. Of the dozen or so kids who came by last night, I’m happy to report that three chose apples. (One little girl, grabbing a handful of candy as her younger brother chose an apple, said, “He’s the smart one.”) Clearly the sample was too small to have any statistical significance, but I count as a small victory the fact that their hovering parents allowed these children to accept unwrapped apples.
Maybe next year you’ll try something similar. And the year after that your neighbors might. In Arlo Guthrie’s immortal words, “And, friends, they may thinks it’s a movement.”
What has changed is the nature of the treats handed out. Beginning in the mid-1960s, according to Snopes, rumors about razor blades in apples began to circulate (some suspect with help from the candy manufacturing industry), leading to police warnings, hospitals offering to x-ray kids’ hauls, and a complete shift toward individually wrapped commercial candy. No more homemade cookies. No more apples. No more anything that didn’t come out of a candy factory.
Well, that’s two generations of children experiencing a debased, corrupt, commercialized Halloween. And two generations of baseless paranoia is enough, sez I.
So I tried an experiment. In one bowl I offered candy. In a second bowl I offered beautiful, polished apples that we bought yesterday from the grower at our local farmers’ market. Of the dozen or so kids who came by last night, I’m happy to report that three chose apples. (One little girl, grabbing a handful of candy as her younger brother chose an apple, said, “He’s the smart one.”) Clearly the sample was too small to have any statistical significance, but I count as a small victory the fact that their hovering parents allowed these children to accept unwrapped apples.
Maybe next year you’ll try something similar. And the year after that your neighbors might. In Arlo Guthrie’s immortal words, “And, friends, they may thinks it’s a movement.”
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Thursday, September 23, 2010
How to sell $15,000 worth of books in three hours
Last Thursday the psychiatry department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, medical school held its sixtieth anniversary banquet. This is the sort of “development” (read: fund-raising) event that large institutions host several times a year. Ho-hum. Knock yourselves out. The university development people did not expect the psychiatry department to attract more than about 200 people. Instead, they had to start turning people away after reaching the fire marshall’s limit of 480 guests, as additional people tried to get in without having made reservations.
What happened?
What happened was that the department chair had the foresight a few years ago to commission a book about the department’s history. One thing led to another, and Pat McNees was selected to write the book. What was originally going to be a fairly modest project grew and grew as Pat delved into not only the department’s sixty-year history but also the hundred-year history of psychiatry in Maryland. She conducted multiple interviews each with some of the more connected informants and dozens of additional interviews and email exchanges with many more people who have at one time or another been connected with the department.
Unfortunately, the scope creep also pushed the completion date for the book. Pat had approached me in February about editing and designing it, and I had suggested mid-April as the deadline for the last of the manuscript pages, with an allowance for photos to straggle in for a month or so after. That schedule would have comfortably allowed for time to lay out the book, have it proofread, have it printed on a normal schedule and shipped in time for the banquet.
In the event, the book was put to bed on July 28.
It was 584 pages (seven by ten inches), with 175 photos.* The cover price for the softcover book was set at $49.95 and for the hardcover at $59.95. By that time, I could find no U.S. plant that would guarantee delivery in time for the September 16 banquet and was also willing to set up for binding just one hundred hardcovers out of a print run of 1,700. We ended up with a printer in Korea. Great quality. Great price. No problem with the hardcovers. The only catch? To get 350 books to Baltimore in time for the banquet, they had to be sent overnight by air, at a cost of $3,400. (The total was still cheaper than printing in the United States.)
All of Pat’s interviews and requests for photos over the last couple of years generated a lot of buzz about the forthcoming book, and that’s what boosted the attendance at the banquet to what appears to be a school record. Tickets were $250 for a couple, with one copy of the book included, or $150 for an individual, with one copy of the book included. If you do the math, that’s $100 for the banquet itself and $50 (the cover price) for the book. Of the 350 shipped in advance, a few were used as complimentary copies for various people, most were sold as part of the banquet ticket price, and the rest were sold to people who could not get into the banquet or who wanted an additional copy for someone else. The total comes to something over $15,000 worth of books during the event. And so far the responses have been enthusiastically positive.
Did this cover the full cost of writing, producing, printing, and shipping the book? No. It was a bigger project than that. But it covered a good chunk. And when the rest of the books arrive by slow boat, a good many of them will have been sold already. The initial plan was to have books in inventory for a few years to use as recruiting enticements for faculty and students. So it was not expected that the book would turn a cash profit. Now it seems that it might.
* Production note: this large and heavy a softcover book should not be perfectbound, as there are potential issues with pages pulling out. Instead, the book was Smyth-sewn (as a good hardcover book is), and the cover was drawn on. Some book manufacturers are smart enough to recognize the problem and suggest this solution. Others are not. So designers should be aware of the technique.
What happened?
What happened was that the department chair had the foresight a few years ago to commission a book about the department’s history. One thing led to another, and Pat McNees was selected to write the book. What was originally going to be a fairly modest project grew and grew as Pat delved into not only the department’s sixty-year history but also the hundred-year history of psychiatry in Maryland. She conducted multiple interviews each with some of the more connected informants and dozens of additional interviews and email exchanges with many more people who have at one time or another been connected with the department.
Unfortunately, the scope creep also pushed the completion date for the book. Pat had approached me in February about editing and designing it, and I had suggested mid-April as the deadline for the last of the manuscript pages, with an allowance for photos to straggle in for a month or so after. That schedule would have comfortably allowed for time to lay out the book, have it proofread, have it printed on a normal schedule and shipped in time for the banquet.
In the event, the book was put to bed on July 28.
It was 584 pages (seven by ten inches), with 175 photos.* The cover price for the softcover book was set at $49.95 and for the hardcover at $59.95. By that time, I could find no U.S. plant that would guarantee delivery in time for the September 16 banquet and was also willing to set up for binding just one hundred hardcovers out of a print run of 1,700. We ended up with a printer in Korea. Great quality. Great price. No problem with the hardcovers. The only catch? To get 350 books to Baltimore in time for the banquet, they had to be sent overnight by air, at a cost of $3,400. (The total was still cheaper than printing in the United States.)
All of Pat’s interviews and requests for photos over the last couple of years generated a lot of buzz about the forthcoming book, and that’s what boosted the attendance at the banquet to what appears to be a school record. Tickets were $250 for a couple, with one copy of the book included, or $150 for an individual, with one copy of the book included. If you do the math, that’s $100 for the banquet itself and $50 (the cover price) for the book. Of the 350 shipped in advance, a few were used as complimentary copies for various people, most were sold as part of the banquet ticket price, and the rest were sold to people who could not get into the banquet or who wanted an additional copy for someone else. The total comes to something over $15,000 worth of books during the event. And so far the responses have been enthusiastically positive.
Did this cover the full cost of writing, producing, printing, and shipping the book? No. It was a bigger project than that. But it covered a good chunk. And when the rest of the books arrive by slow boat, a good many of them will have been sold already. The initial plan was to have books in inventory for a few years to use as recruiting enticements for faculty and students. So it was not expected that the book would turn a cash profit. Now it seems that it might.
* Production note: this large and heavy a softcover book should not be perfectbound, as there are potential issues with pages pulling out. Instead, the book was Smyth-sewn (as a good hardcover book is), and the cover was drawn on. Some book manufacturers are smart enough to recognize the problem and suggest this solution. Others are not. So designers should be aware of the technique.
Sunday, September 05, 2010
Visual thinkers. And others.
Client 1
My client sent me a book she likes the look of and said she wanted her book to be approximately the same format. She sent me a photograph she already owned the rights to and asked me to use it for the cover. From beginning to end, she was with me at every turn, considering the alternatives I offered, choosing decisively, suggesting improvements, reacting to my suggestions. The book came out both beautiful and completely appropriate to its subject and audience. If I were the sort of person who entered design contests, I’d consider entering this book.
Client 2
Given the subject of my client’s book, I wasn’t sure which of two general approaches was going to be more to his liking. I sent two very different trial designs, one that I described to him as quite stiff and formal, the other that I described to him as very casual and friendly. I made it clear that I was just looking for a quick reaction, that we could then refine either design to get it just the way he wanted it. Basing his choice entirely on my description in the cover email and not on looking at the samples, he chose one of the two designs. He allowed as how really didn’t have the vocabulary to discuss design further and would leave the rest up to me. That book will come out looking pretty good, too.
I try to involve clients in design choices, because I’m creating their books, not my own. I’ve begun sending every new design client a copy of Michael Brady’s Thinking Like a Designer: How to save money by being a smart client. My hope is that they’ll read it and be able to interact more productively with me. Some clients are visual thinkers. Some have a little bit of visual sense but know their limitations. Some are completely oblivious and realize it. I’m happy to work with any of them, and I try to do good work for all of them, whether I think they’ll understand the subtleties or not.
The people I feel sorry for are those who delude themselves into thinking design doesn’t matter to anyone and just send their unformatted Word document to a vanity press, hoping for the best. Design matters to readers, even if it doesn’t matter to you. If you understand that much, it makes no difference whether you think visually or don’t.
My client sent me a book she likes the look of and said she wanted her book to be approximately the same format. She sent me a photograph she already owned the rights to and asked me to use it for the cover. From beginning to end, she was with me at every turn, considering the alternatives I offered, choosing decisively, suggesting improvements, reacting to my suggestions. The book came out both beautiful and completely appropriate to its subject and audience. If I were the sort of person who entered design contests, I’d consider entering this book.
Client 2
Given the subject of my client’s book, I wasn’t sure which of two general approaches was going to be more to his liking. I sent two very different trial designs, one that I described to him as quite stiff and formal, the other that I described to him as very casual and friendly. I made it clear that I was just looking for a quick reaction, that we could then refine either design to get it just the way he wanted it. Basing his choice entirely on my description in the cover email and not on looking at the samples, he chose one of the two designs. He allowed as how really didn’t have the vocabulary to discuss design further and would leave the rest up to me. That book will come out looking pretty good, too.
I try to involve clients in design choices, because I’m creating their books, not my own. I’ve begun sending every new design client a copy of Michael Brady’s Thinking Like a Designer: How to save money by being a smart client. My hope is that they’ll read it and be able to interact more productively with me. Some clients are visual thinkers. Some have a little bit of visual sense but know their limitations. Some are completely oblivious and realize it. I’m happy to work with any of them, and I try to do good work for all of them, whether I think they’ll understand the subtleties or not.
The people I feel sorry for are those who delude themselves into thinking design doesn’t matter to anyone and just send their unformatted Word document to a vanity press, hoping for the best. Design matters to readers, even if it doesn’t matter to you. If you understand that much, it makes no difference whether you think visually or don’t.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
A bizarre disconnect
I use a virtual company to manufacture some books. My direct contact is with a U.S. firm that consists of a sales office, a customer service office, and a warehouse where they receive books from printing plants and ship them on to publishers. A second U.S.-based company consists of a prepress studio, where technicians review customer files for flaws before releasing them to the company in Asia that does the actual printing. At the printing company, another prepress office processes the files to prepare them for the machines that produce the printing plates.
This is akin to the game of telephone you may have played as a child. As a result, sometimes the publisher’s and designer’s intent is not translated perfectly into finished product. Frankly, it’s amazing the system works as well as it does most of the time.
End sheets
The odd thing that happened yesterday was a message from the U.S. prepress company telling me that I needed to make some technical corrections in the files I had submitted. These were all minor and consisted of changing some parameters related to ink color and, in one case, the location of some printer’s marks. Ten minutes work altogether. Not a problem.
But the final request puzzled me.
I should say, as an aside, that I don’t often work on books with printed end sheets.
The end sheet is the stiff paper that is glued to the inside of the case on a hardcover book, where it conceals the edges of the cover material, and to the first page or last page of the book block (the sewn signatures of printed pages), thus helping hold the cover onto the book.
Most of the hardcover books I work on call for plain end sheets or perhaps end sheets printed in a solid color or made from solid-colored paper. However, the book I uploaded yesterday called for illustrated end sheets, the first time I had done them with this particular printer. Because the end sheet is a single piece of paper the size of two book pages, that’s how I laid it out—one landscape page twice the size of a book page, with the illustration placed on it.
The message instructed me that the end sheet should be laid out as two pages rather than as a single wide page. This struck me as so strange that I called the prepress guy who sent the email. He told me, yep, the plant printed the end sheet as two separate pages. I suggested he actually open up a hardcover book and look at it—that the end sheet had to be printed as a single sheet; otherwise it would not serve the purpose of holding the cover onto the book. Nope, he said, two pages. He was sure this plant printed end sheets that way, and that’s how I was to submit the file.
In the end, I submitted the file that way, and no harm done. It will print fine—as a single sheet of paper.
But the disconnect that stunned me is that I was talking to someone who went to school to master the arcane details of prepress work (a highly skilled trade requiring intelligence, talent, and training) but who had perhaps never been inside a book bindery or even thought about how a book is assembled from its parts. He knew only that the printing plant we were dealing with wanted the files formatted a particular way and made no connection between that and the actual printing of the end sheet or gluing up of the book.
The digitization of the printing industry has created a situation where the person preparing matter to be printed on a press and bound into a book need have no firsthand knowledge of any of the physical processes involved. I’m flabbergasted that the process works at all.
This is akin to the game of telephone you may have played as a child. As a result, sometimes the publisher’s and designer’s intent is not translated perfectly into finished product. Frankly, it’s amazing the system works as well as it does most of the time.
End sheets
The odd thing that happened yesterday was a message from the U.S. prepress company telling me that I needed to make some technical corrections in the files I had submitted. These were all minor and consisted of changing some parameters related to ink color and, in one case, the location of some printer’s marks. Ten minutes work altogether. Not a problem.
But the final request puzzled me.
I should say, as an aside, that I don’t often work on books with printed end sheets.
The end sheet is the stiff paper that is glued to the inside of the case on a hardcover book, where it conceals the edges of the cover material, and to the first page or last page of the book block (the sewn signatures of printed pages), thus helping hold the cover onto the book.
Most of the hardcover books I work on call for plain end sheets or perhaps end sheets printed in a solid color or made from solid-colored paper. However, the book I uploaded yesterday called for illustrated end sheets, the first time I had done them with this particular printer. Because the end sheet is a single piece of paper the size of two book pages, that’s how I laid it out—one landscape page twice the size of a book page, with the illustration placed on it.
The message instructed me that the end sheet should be laid out as two pages rather than as a single wide page. This struck me as so strange that I called the prepress guy who sent the email. He told me, yep, the plant printed the end sheet as two separate pages. I suggested he actually open up a hardcover book and look at it—that the end sheet had to be printed as a single sheet; otherwise it would not serve the purpose of holding the cover onto the book. Nope, he said, two pages. He was sure this plant printed end sheets that way, and that’s how I was to submit the file.
In the end, I submitted the file that way, and no harm done. It will print fine—as a single sheet of paper.
But the disconnect that stunned me is that I was talking to someone who went to school to master the arcane details of prepress work (a highly skilled trade requiring intelligence, talent, and training) but who had perhaps never been inside a book bindery or even thought about how a book is assembled from its parts. He knew only that the printing plant we were dealing with wanted the files formatted a particular way and made no connection between that and the actual printing of the end sheet or gluing up of the book.
The digitization of the printing industry has created a situation where the person preparing matter to be printed on a press and bound into a book need have no firsthand knowledge of any of the physical processes involved. I’m flabbergasted that the process works at all.
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