Update: Economics of Self-Publishing & A Second Printing?

December 5th, 2012

—I initially posted some of this story in August and updated it in September after we launched. I’ve updated it a third time as we begin to contemplate a second printing.–

I spent a good part of the summer of 2012 on  Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology , a collection of over 50 essays and images edited by Richey Piiparinen and myself. We conceived of the project as pop-up civic action of sorts–a way for a community to come together and put out a book, lickety-split. For me, it was also a way to learn more about publishing, specifcally, self-publishing, from the inside out. (In The Atlantic, Alan Jacobs mentioned this as part of my status as a “DCE”–a Digital Cultural Entrepreneur”–I can’t say that without laughing myself)

 I have pulled together the receipts, the spreadsheet, distribution and sales numbers to share with those interested in the back-end of this project. Here’s how it rolled:

Costs To Produce and Publish Book: 

–Domain name for website–$30

–Website help (some mishegas we needed sorted out) –$60

–LLC–we decided we should become a business to handle money.  This was a pretty simple  affair involving  the Ohio Secretary of State–$125

–ISBN–turns out there’s this weird monopoly on ISBNs, and you have to buy them in bulk. So now we own 10 ISBNs (give a shout if you want one). $250

–Barcode–don’t forget those lines and numbers; add another $25

–Designer–ah, perhaps the best stroke of luck we had in this whole endeavor was the incredible designer we hired. You needs a good one, folks, to do this right, and a good one must know InDesign and also be really cool. I’m not telling you what we paid the designer, but if you are trying this at home, estimate $2000.

–Cover designer–oh we have the most prettiest cover in the whole wide world.. Maybe you’ll get lucky like us. No real estimate for this–anwhere from your computer’s free clip art to thousands.

–Printing–How many to print? This was a big decision. I wanted to print 1000 initially; Richey said 2000. The economies of scale favored 2000, as it costs far less than twice as much to print 2000 as it would have to print 1000.   We thought we would either: 1.) have the proverbial garages full of unsold copies; or, if we were luckier, 2.) sell the 2000 over the course of 12 months. We decided we wanted to have the books printed off-set and found a good one.  We paid the printer $4150.

–Proofreading: I forgot to add this in my initial post. We had a team of volunteer proofreaders, and then we hired a friend who gave it another read for a “friends and family” discounted rate.

–We’ve promised our contributors that we’ll pay it forward: if  we sell over a certain amount of copies, we will give one contributor a lump sum of $5000 towards their own self-publishing venture (this, we decided, was better than giving each person $100 for their contribution). So we did not have any initial honoraria cost.

–It goes without saying the co-editors did not charge or get paid. In face, we laid out:

Total: We sunk about $7000 into publishing the book. 

******

We pubbed on September 10. By September 24 we were in the black, having sold $7,000 worth of books (thanks to social media and contributor shout-outs, we sold most of those in pre-orders).

We distribute the book variously:

–We ship  orders through our bigcartel website. We put them into envelopes and take them to the post office ourselves.

–We drive around town and drop off orders (and re-orders) to the many local stores who we reached out to asking if they wanted to stock our book.  We charge stores $12 wholesale (we retail for $20).

–We also listed in Ingram, which allows us to be stocked by stores whom we are not in direct contact with and, for better or worse–be listed in Amazon and other online chains.

Our ebook is a cinch to distribute! But hard to figure out. We lowered the ebook to $2.99 for a three day sale last month and sold a bundle during that period. Then we raised the price back up to $7.99. We’re still experimenting with pricing of the ebook. And we still forget, too often, to promote it. Our decision to include 12 additional essays only in the ebook was probably the right one, but I don’t think we get the word out about the “expanded” features as well as we should.

Marketing

We were fortunate to have many requests for readings and events. We have held a launch party, done 4 readings and been part of an art show that holds a monthly event at which we sold books. We have been covered by all the local media markets, including the NPR station and major paper in town.

Although I set aside an hour or two a day to market the book, most of my efforts could be generously called “half-assed.” We had to put faith in the quality of our product. And then we relied on community word-of-mouth,and luck. We’ve had both.

So How’s It Going? 

By 12/6 we have sold about 1500 or our 2000 copy print run. This we never expected (see “Printing” above). We now need to decide whether or not we should do a second printing, and if so, how to go about it. (Do we still want to do our own distribution? Do we want to go to POD and sacrifice the quality and look of the physical book? Should we just fade out and say–well that’s that?)

We have now made a profit. Sometime soon Richey and I will take some of this profit out and pay ourselves for a soupçon of our time.

But here’s the thing:  moving away from the economics and into the mushy: lots of people like our book.  If the summer was a crazed mania of excited putting-together; the fall has been a slow, warm, soul-enlarging process of people in the community finding us, cheering us, coming to hear us, thanking us. Word has not spread virally: it has spread by word of mouth, bookseller to customer, reader to friend. We wanted to do something for the city and at this point we can say, Hey. We did that. Oh and here are a few pics: http://pinterest.com/rustbeltchic/rust-belt-chic/