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Axes of Thought on the Independent Press
Axes of Thought on the Independent Press
We had a panel on breaking in through the small press at Norwescon. During the course of things there, I did a riff on publishing that I liked enough to attempt to reproduce here. I even took notes on my own comments. I have since lost track of them, naturally, so my crystalline wit and stunning insights of last week will be hereby transmogrified into plebian drivel for your amusement.
Nonetheless, here goes.
The discussion was around how aspiring writers evaluate markets. Do you want to be in the independent press?(My term of choice, as “small press” is misleading. See below for more discussion of this.) How do you tell what are good markets and what aren’t?
There’s several of ways to look at publishing, axes of thought as it were. One is the market factors of a press. These can be boiled down to three things.
- Pay rate
- Print run
- Prestige
“Pay rate” is self evident. For example, SFWA sets $0.05/word as the qualifying standard for short fiction pro rate.1 As a practical matter, if you had a $5,000 advance for a 100,000 word novel, you’d be at the same pay rate.
“Print run” (or its close equivalents in periodical circulation or Web page views) is also self-evident. SFWA sets a print run of 1,000, or equivalent, as the qualifying standard for pro circulation. This distorts the impact and value of POD titles, but they had to quantify it somehow, and since I very much have a dog in the POD fight, I’ll leave that argument alone.2
“Prestige” is of course unquantifiable, and very much in the eye of the beholder, but it is a factor. A micropay, relatively low-circulation market can be very well respected. For example, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. One very casual way to evaluate market prestige is to look at what writers they publish, and whether stories appearing there show up on YB recommended reading lists, as reprints in YB volumes, or on award ballots.3
These factors can be applied to both short fiction and novel outlets.
Another is production processes.
- Traditional print production
- Print on demand
- Electronic
“Tradition print production” is offset, etc. This includes periodicals such as the digests, Realms of Fantasy and Weird Tales, as well as mass market paperbacks, trade hardbacks, etc. This process front-loads the capital investment, but significantly reduces publishing cost per unit. That in turn significantly increases risk to the publisher due to the commitment of funds, warehousing and fulfillment resources. This is effective at larger economies of scale, and a great deal of effort goes into forecasting demand and managing budgets in order to manage the risk.
“Print on demand” (a/k/a POD) is the one-button publishing process where books are printed and bound as needed from electronic master files via digital process. Lightning Source is one of the big commercial providers of this, while lulu.com offers this at the retail/individual level. There’s a lot of confusion out there about POD, with numerous articles and essays criticizing it as if it were a business model. This is because people confuse POD with vanity publishing or subsidy publishing. In fact, POD is merely a production process, which is sometimes used even by the largest, most reputable houses as well as wide array of independent presses. What POD does is back-load the capital investment, pushing publishing cost and risk largely onto the retailer or end buyer. Cost per unit is much higher in this model. This allows for much smaller commitments on the publisher’s part, which in turn enables more risk taking for projects of unknown or marginal marketability, or narrow demand.
“Electronic” is a catch-all for a number of models, including open Web publishing (Strange Horizons, for example), subscription-based Web publishing (Baen’s Universe, for example), e-book publishing (
Posted: 10:28 am Mon April 09 2007 |
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