Yes, we have no publishing experience. That having been said, in my day-job I've been dealing with vendors for almost thirty years (and publishing is nothing more than dealing with vendors and marketing). My other author has been in the game publishing business for twenty plus years and I've been associated with it.
I worked in game-publishing for a while before switching to book publishing, and the two are very different. If you don't have publishing experience you're not going to know what you're missing, and this is going to cause problems for the authors you publish.
And as others have said, publishing is a LOT more than "dealing with vendors".
We are just wrapping up our first year of convention seasons / personal appearances. I do about 12 conventions a year (gaming and scifi) both local and away.
This might help sell your books, but it's not going to help you publish books well.
I give seminars on writing / marketing and other fun topics.
What qualifies you to give other people advice on writing or marketing?
There seems to be a misunderstanding. By vendors I mean any vendor providing a service to TANSTAAFL Press. Someone mentioned editor.. we contract a freelance editor for each book. We contract a freelance typesetter. TANSTAAFL also contracts an illustrator for the cover illustrations.
Publishing involves a lot more than dealing with "vendors" in this way.
I do the cover layout (not difficult if you know photoshop).
If this is true, why do trade publishers pay good salaries to highly-trained designers?
We define a list of costs that TANSTAAFL Press is going to incur. The author has the right to pay some, all or none of these cost. As gross receipts come in, the expenses are paid back to TANSTAAFL and the Author in exact % that they were paid. After those initial costs are recouped (by both parties) then royalties start being paid in a sliding scale based on participation. If the author provided nothing, the amount might be (this is a negotiation point so these numbers are just for argument sake) 50% of all further income (minus expenses that are defined by contract) goes to the Author. This could slide all the way up to 85% if the author chose to pay those expenses himself. I keep my financial books completely open to my Authors both by contract and by my policy to hide nothing from the people I do business with. Author's retain their own Copyright and we take only first print right for a negotiated length (which could also affect the percentage listed above).
If your authors contribute to the costs of their own publication with you, you are a vanity press.
There is no wiggle-room here.
Further, if you recoup all your publishing costs prior to paying any royalties (which is a very bad deal for your authors), why do you then pay lower royalties to the authors who didn't pay for publication? Once your costs have been recouped everything you get is profit: why give some authors a bigger share than others?
So basically, if the author doesn't want to be on the hook for publication expenses, the publisher keeps all sales proceeds until the expenses are recouped (and I'm sorry to be blunt, but based on your books' sales rankings on Amazon, I'm guessing that this takes a very long time). Alternatively, the author can pay part or all of the costs and gamble that he or she will make his/her money back and maybe start earning royalties. This doesn't sound to me like a good deal at all.
Agreed.
Victoria the touchstone of a fair deal is if it feels the same on both sides and that is what I work toward.
No: the "touchstone of a fair deal" is if it's fair. Not how the two signatories feel about it.
If an author doesn't feel proud and excited about their work enough to invest $$ and time then why should I?
That argument is direct from the vanity presses. It's misleading and illogical.
Authors invest in their books by writing them.
Publishers invest in books by publishing them.
The costs are not only defined up front (and approximate values listed) there is none of the "crap" that traditional publishers pull by just piling on new expenses so there is no "net".
I've worked for many trade publishers, large and small, and not one of them have done what you say they do.
A rough idea printing - (~$5 per book), cover art ($800), editing ($1000), typesetting ($500). $200 for some marketing material (banners / handouts, etc). Hell I don't even charge for doing the cover layout. Most books are sold at $12 so after printing $7 per book to defray $2500 or about 350 sold before "profit" is being realized. Honestly 350 is not that many books.
If you're confident of selling 350 copies or more per book, offset would probably be cheaper than POD. You're close to the break-even point at 350 copies.
Most Indie published books sell less than 100 because the person has no plan and no drive putting it into the category of a vanity press.
Are you talking about books from independent presses, or books which are self published?
You're right that statistics show that most self published books sell fewer than 100 copies apiece: but those statistics refer to print editions, not digital editions, which are a different kettle of fish.
The poor sales, in most part, had nothing to do with the authors' drive or plan: the poor sales were due to things like poor writing, poor publication, and a lack of distribution. Distributors won't work with most self publishers. When digital editions became available, the distribution issue was resolved to some degree, and so their sales took off.
What distribution do you have? Which distributor do you work with?
Again, all of these points are negotiable with the writer themselves, something most publishers won't even consider (here sign this contract.. no don't change it.. just sign).
This is nonsense.
Over the last thirty years I've acquired many books for many publishers. Every single contract that I offered was negotiable, and was negotiated.
Re Marketing... most of my marketing at this point is of the "I'm HERE!" type. As I'm a relatively dynamic individual, this works to not only pull people into our booth but to excite them. Had one young lady at a seminar at Origins Game Fair say "You would make a great motivational speaker." We are vendors at 12+ conventions a year (and growing that number!) as far away as Ohio (hopefully I'll increase that range in the future), I give seminars on a number of different topics, I encourage my author(s) to do the same to spread their name. We are working to become invited Guest speakers at conventions, not only to lower cost but to improve our visibility. Print and visual media as it can be obtained.
Appearing at conventions is all very well and good: but do you get your books into bookshops? Because that's where you'll make your sales.
We tried some local advertising in movie theaters but it didn't really pay off.
If your books weren't simultaneously available for sale in local bookshops, it wouldn't help your sales.
Few trade publishers pay for advertising because advertising is not an effective way of selling books.
I mentioned that we are neophytes and we are trying many things and remembering the ones that work and ditching the ones that don't.
So you're experimenting with the books you've already acquired.
We just crossed over into our second convention season so (as some of you have said) "Let's see where they are in 3 years or so." Hopefully by then I'm smare enough to have a fairly solid marketing plan for each new book.
If you don't already have a solid marketing plan in place for your business and the books you publish, I don't think you should be publishing anything.
Note that marketing investments are NOT "costs" that I assign toward the books. This are all part of what a publisher SHOULD do for their cut and rarely does.
Publishers do market and promote the books they publish: it's a myth that they don't.
I was asked bluntly at the NW Book Festival (in Portland) yesterday "Where do you see yourself in ten years."
"Easy. In ten years I will be doing this full time (and making as much as I do on my day job) and putting out 3-4 books a year. Conventions will be contacting and paying me to attend their convention as a guest speaker. I'll do book signings at those conventions and sell over a hundred books without even having a booth." It caught the gentleman off guard.
Publishers can't live off the income from three to four new books a year.
Selling over a hundred books per convention is unlikely. Twenty or thirty? You might manage that. But one hundred? Few speakers manage that. I've spoken at several prestigious, established events, and I have friends who do the same, some of them big best-sellers: book sales rarely equal the numbers you're aiming for.
I hate to be the one to burst your pipe dream, but conventions just simply don't pay for small publishers to speak at their events.
This might be true of the convention you organise, Karen, but it's not true of many of them. I've been paid to speak at all the events I've attended, and so have many people I know: writers, agents, and editors.
To go off-topic for a while, I won't take part in events which don't pay. The event organisers charge people to attend, they pay the caterers, the location, and everyone else involved: why shouldn't they also pay the talent, without which there could be no event?
