cost

Technology Risk and the Independent Author

February 7, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

Two years ago I looked at hundreds of WordPress themes in anticipation of putting up this site. I’d never paid for a theme before, but time and again I kept coming back to the themes at StudioPress.com. Their designs were clean, their support seemed solid, and after a while I decided to pull the trigger on their Streamline theme, which is the theme you see on this site.

For a year and a half I was perfectly satisfied. The support was excellent, the theme performed as expected, and I was able to get on with the business of blogging.

About six months ago, however — give or take — StudioPress became a subsidiary of CopyBlogger, the underlying software for the themes was radically altered, and the support on the site became spottier and more contentious. I never faulted the moderators for putting limits on the amount of customization they offered, but the tone and frequency of such reprimands seemed to signal an intent to drive additional fee-for-service revenue from the basic themes being sold.

Because I knew upgrading my current theme would break a number of modifications I’d made, I put off the upgrade as long as possible. At the same time I faced an ever-growing backlog of changes I wanted to make on my site, and at some point it became obvious that I should upgrade before making any additional changes to an older version I had every intention of migrating away from. [ Read more ]

The ISBN Ownership Question

December 6, 2010 By Mark 25 Comments

In preparing to publish my first print-on-demand book I’ve had to confront a number of issues. Along with formatting and pricing and cover design I’ve gone back and forth about the ISBN ownership question. In the end I’ve come to a conclusion about ISBN’s that surprises me a bit, but I think I’m right. And if I’m not right, I don’t think it will cost me anything.

If you don’t know much about ISBN’s, don’t feel bad. I didn’t know anything about them until a year ago, when I set out to learn what I could. It’s a measure of how naive I was that I thought ISBN’s were some sort of quasi-governmental tracking number. In fact, ISBN’s are a product sold by the monopolistic R.R. Bowker company (which doesn’t go out of its way to make clear that it is not, in fact, a quasi-governmental agency).

I don’t dispute the publishing industry’s need for something like an ISBN. Given that a single book can be published in different versions and editions, and in different languages and countries, there obviously needs to be some way to differentiate between all those variations. If you want the Romanian large-print edition of Moby Dick, you need some means of ordering that ensures you get the version you’re expecting. The ISBN system makes that possible.

I’m also not against the idea that a for-profit company services the ISBN market. I don’t like monopolies, and R.R. Bowker is clearly a monopoly. But every publisher, bookseller and book manufacturer relies on the ISBN numbering system, and until that changes — or somebody shoves the Sherman Anti-Trust Act down Bowker’s throat — there’s no point in fighting the beast. (Some of you are wondering how multiple companies could hand out ISBN’s without the whole system collapsing. It’s a fair question, answered in full by the various companies registering domain names all over the world.) [ Read more ]

Evaluating Self-Publishing Expenses

December 2, 2010 By Mark 7 Comments

During Cover Design Week I said this about self-publishing costs:

Unfortunately, what we have to spend says nothing about how we should spend it, and what things cost now says little or nothing about their total cost over time. The only thing we can say for sure is that if we don’t have [enough money] we’re out of luck. Other than that, even knowing the cost of the service does little to help validate the expense.

As regular readers know, I think the most important thing an independent artist can do is control costs. At some point, however, authors interested in writing professionally will have to confront publishing expenses (site hosting, POD fees, etc.), as well as consider a number of author services (proofreading, cover design, etc.).

To my mind the only useful way an independent author can assess such costs is to compare each outlay to potential revenue. That’s obviously Business 101, but it’s a mindset many independent authors fail to adopt. Instead, self-published writers often see expenses as worthwhile or necessary because they fund the physical production of a book: money gets spent and a book — your book! — springs to life. The problem with this approach is that it omits any relationship to sales or revenue, which means each expense is not a business decision so much as a purchasing decision, like buying fruit at the grocery store or a new pair of jeans.

If you’re trying to be a professional writer, implicit in that goal is doing what you can to avoid going broke. You don’t have to aspire to wild profits, and there are good reasons for not doing so, but at the very least your minimal goal should be recovering direct costs, if not also compensating yourself for your time. Even the ultimate goal of writing full time and living on one’s earnings demands similar analysis, because the realization of that lofty dream is directly related to your cost of living. The cheaper you’re willing to live, the longer you’ll be able to stay in business for any amount of generated revenue.

[ Read more ]

Joe Konrath on Cover Design Costs (and more)

September 27, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

This post is part of Cover Design Week. To see other posts click the CDW tag below.

Over at his blog, A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing, Joe Konrath puts an axe to industry-determined royalties and costs, including the cost of designing a book cover. It’s a must-read for any independent author trying to make sense of the current pricing/cost landscape.

Joe’s post is also an important reminder that valuing a book’s viability or merit based on the perpetuation of publishing’s own overhead is invalid on its face, if not fraudulent. In fact, I think the idea that authors should take advice and accept criticism from people whose steady paychecks and health care plans are paid for by exploiting author’s works has run its course. If the only defense of the publishing industry you can muster is also a defense of how you yourself directly profit from the status quo, then you have no defense. What you have is self interest, bias and creeping fear disguised as experience.

For my money, the first person in the publishing industry who figures out how to value any author’s work apart from protecting industry overhead will be the person to watch.

On a related tangent, careful readers will note that Cover Design Week is now in its second week here on Ditchwalk. Because no good deed ever goes unpunished, I fell behind last week when I tried to correct a small problem with my computer using my original WinXP Pro disc — which promptly rendered my main computer completely inoperable. (Amazing, but true. The hardware I’m now running was unrecognizable to the original disc, but that didn’t keep Microsoft’s install routine from rewriting critical sections of my MBR, turning what had been a perfectly functioning machine into a brick.) The irony in this case is that while a wealth of computer experience (and support from others) helped me diagnose the problem, it’s a problem I wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t been mucking around with my machine.

— Mark Barrett

Calculating Cover Design Cost

September 22, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

This post is part of Cover Design Week. To see the other posts click the CDW tag below.

Whether you’ve been doing your own covers or this is your first self-publishing effort, the decision to involve someone else in the cover-design process carries inherent risks and costs. On the risk side, there’s the chance that the person you employ might let you down, produce something awful, or involve you in some horrific ongoing battle over billing or copyright issues. On the cost side, there’s time and money.

For this post I’m going to assume that the are no risks. The only thing we have to figure out is how much it will cost to have someone else to design (or execute) a cover for our book.

As a line item in a publishing budget, we want to know how many hours it will take at how many dollars to produce the image files we need. Because we’re making this all up, let’s assume we’re able to find someone reliable who can produce our image files for $50.

As creatures of a global consumer culture, it’s tempting to immediately leap to either or both of the following short-sighted conclusions. First, that we should take the deal if we have $50 on hand. Second, that our immediate cost necessarily says something about the total cost of our decision.

Unfortunately, what we have to spend says nothing about how we should spend it, and what things cost now says little or nothing about their total cost over time. The only thing we can say for sure is that if we don’t have $50 we’re out of luck. Other than that, even knowing the cost of the service does little to help validate the expense. [ Read more ]

The Ditchwalk Print-On-Demand Roadmap

August 25, 2010 By Mark 14 Comments

As regular readers know, I put a collection of short stories on Smashwords four months ago, where it can be sampled, purchased and downloaded in various e-book formats. I now want to make a print-on-demand (POD) version of that content available, so people can order a physical copy of the book. (This post rejoins a conversation I had with myself — and many helpful commenters — shortly after making the e-book available. More here and here.)

Paranoid Overview
There are a lot of companies offering print-on-demand publishing to independent authors. I also know there are a lot of disreputable companies — known variously as vanity or subsidy publishers — whose business model is predicated on charging abusive up-front fees for middling or nonexistent services. Industry propaganda against fee-for-service publishing says that money should flow to the author, not from the author, but as I noted late last year that propaganda has always been a self-serving fraud. Authors can be ripped off by anyone.

For any independent author, controlling costs and maximizing each dollar spent is critical. Philosophically I don’t care whether costs are up-front, fee-for-service charges or back-end participation. What matters is getting the most service or product for my money. As a practical matter, however, minimizing out-of-pocket costs is important because it preserves operating capital. The longer I can keep my head above water the longer I can write, and the longer I can write the more chance I have of seeing a profit. [ Read more ]