Tony, have you thought of only publishing free poetry ebooks? You’ll get more readers a month that way than you would probably get in yearly book sales. It would save you having to apply for funding. I realise, though, that there is still a stigma against poetry ebooks—especially free ones. But if poetry publishers really believe poetry should be widely read, then perhaps that is the way forward.

As far as I can tell, Geoffrey Gatza was a pioneer in that. I started doing it from his example. So hats off to him.




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From:
Tony Frazer <[log in to unmask]>


OK. First there’s some confusion with regards to nomenclature. Print on demand is a method whereby the book is available though online sellers, and is printed (one at a time) to meet the customer order. The publisher does nothing other than to establish the title, and place it on the printer’s computers. As far as I’m aware no-one in the poetry world uses pure p-o-d (including Salt in its heyday), and the biggest users of the system are the self-publishing intermediaries such as Lulu. There are also only 3 real p-o-d suppliers, I think, in this country, and one of those is Amazon’s closed environment, CreateSpace. 

What just about everyone IS doing is using Short Run Digital Printing (SRDP), whereby we print our books using digital presses, where the unit costs are higher than offset litho but where we can viably order, say, 10 copies at a time. To get a decent unit cost via offset litho, you need to print a minimum of 500 copies (I’ve heard that this may have dropped to about 400, but the point still stands). It will be no surprise to you that few poetry books sell 500 copies. (I’ve been told that a sale of 500 is good going for a poetry small press in the USA, for instance, where the population is 5 times larger.) What many people miss in the midst of these numbers is that there is one other important factor, which is WHEN the stock is sold. The great advantage of SRDP is that fact that one is able to respond to sudden demand by quick restocking, and not have cash tied up prior to that. Because it’s lack of cashflow that cripples all small businesses, and carrying large unsold stock = cash tied up doing nothing. The other advantage is that, if you have a successful title — one that sells out its 500-copy offset run — you face an awkward choice: let it go out of print, or re-order another 500, when demand might actually be only for another 50. With SRDP you can respond to the demand. I believe Carcanet uses offset litho for its initial print-runs, and then restocks thereafter using SRDP, if necessary. 

I'd have to place a spreadsheet here to explain the issue most easily, but, if you compare 2 situations:

1) where in month one, you buy 500 copies offset-printed, at, say, £1 per copy, and then figure on that chart when the sales occur at, say, 60% of retail, and see when cashflow is positive.

2) you go SRDP, print 100 at, say, £1.75 per copy, sell some of those, reprint 25 a month later to meet demand, etc, etc. 

It only makes sense to go offset if you can sell 500 copies relatively quickly, or if you have regular demand for your titles from bookstores. If you’re Faber, or Picador, for instance, one copy in every Waterstone’s would justify the initial offset print-run.

Shearsman uses a mix of SRDP and P-o-D, with about 35% of sales going through P-o-D. I have stock of all Shearsman titles, but not large stock — and in some cases, mostly very old titles, I only have one or two copies. I can restock within 3 or 4 days, and quicker if necessary, which is good enough to respond to unexpected demand. To give some classic examples from the Shearsman list:

1) a book by a writer who will remain unnamed has sold all of 17 copies over several years, and that includes 10 that the author bought. The author is not well-known; the book is interesting, albeit showing some of the difficulties inherent in a first collection. If I’d printed that through offset the losses would have been substantial.

2) Some books just sell in trickles, all the time. No sudden burst of sales, ever. These are often by classic authors: in my case the Spanish poets, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and Rosalía de Castro, which Shearsman published in bilingual editions 10 years ago, sell on average 2 copies every month, without fail. (Sales over 10 years come to around 290 of each title.) These are mostly through the p-o-d channel and sell, I imagine, to students of Spanish literature who are struggling with the original texts. No yellowed and ageing stock, but freshly printed copies all the time (or recently-printed if sold by me direct).

3) You might recall that Helen Macdonald won the Costa Prize three years ago. She then wrote an article in The Guardian about the 6 books that had most influenced her writing on nature. As I recall, only 2 of these were in print, and one of those was R.F. Langley’s Journals, published by Shearsman in 2006. Up until that point the book had sold a highly respectable 600 copies or so. In the month after Helen’s article appeared, I shifted another 250. Not long after that the New York Times reprinted the article in the US, and a whole bunch more shifted through the American P-o-D channel. The book has now sold close to 1,400 copies. If I’d been wedded to offset printing, I’d most likely have lost those sales by not being able to respond to the demand in good time.


One advantage I’ve not mentioned so far is drop-shipping. This is an order to the printer to send a batch of books to a third party. I do this a lot, where it’s more cost effective to do so than have the books sent to me and then onward ship them to the third-party. It means I get the printer’s discounted freight charges from UPS, rather than the list price. I also use SPD in California to wholesale my US titles, and drop-ship stock to them from a California print facility. This means no shipping across the Atlantic — an enormous advantage. 

Sorry if this is boring…

Tony