I think Peter and Tim have hit various nails on their heads. Chris
touched on one point though that ought to be given attention and
that's the issue of management. I have some sympathy with presses
that find that they lose their grants after years of repeat funding,
but my sympathy reduces when I hear of abuses such as those Alison
referred to, or a case in the western part of these isles where the
owner's wine-cellar has (allegedly) been much improved by the
publishing grants that he has received.
The thing is the Arts Council has no idea how to manage things
either. I had a chat with my local Literature Officer a while back -
she's very supportive and I have a grant for Shearsman from them,
without which things like advertising and promotion would be
difficult. I mentioned to her a case I had come across of a well-
respected journal with a solid readership and a subscriber list of
some 350 (no names here, for obvious reasons); the editor was in a
panic that the journal's grant would be withdrawn which would result
in the collapse of the enterprise. I confess I didn't understand why,
with 350 upfront sales, it was in danger of collapse and asked for
details of their costs: within 30 minutes I had worked out that I
could cut their costs by 40%, and perhaps even 60%, by the simple
expedient of asking for competitive quotes for the printing, and by
cutting out some unnecessary luxuries. They were also paying for a
pro designer to do the set-up and layout - he charged a friendship
price, I will admit, certainly not a commercial one, but they could
have brought all this in house by using some of the easily available
software packages on the market. There's a bit of a learning curve
to these, but courses are widely available, and the cost of the
software could have been recouped with the savings over 2 issues.
Because they had a grant and they put forward these costs to support
the grant application, they had no need to look any further. What's
more, because they then got the money and didn't want to give back
any surplus, they had no incentive to do things more efficiently. I
suggested that perhaps the ACE should be helping such innocents to
set their operations up properly - they do see enough grants to judge
what a market rate is for things like printing - but it seems they
don't like doing this and usually don't have the expertise themselves
- which then begs the question of how they can evaluate the proposals.
Ergo, there is a mutually-supporting inefficiency, which in the long
run doesn't help anyone, unless you get the kind of funding that Ian
Hamilton used to get for the benighted New Review, in which case you
could probably retire to Bermuda and hire a locum to run the press
(or whatever) for you.
Tony
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Tony Frazer
Shearsman Books Ltd
58 Velwell Road
Exeter EX4 4LD
England
Tel / Fax: (+44) (0) 1392-434511
http://www.shearsman.com/
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