What happened next. As she says:

I became curious. The indie publishing world is notoriously tight-lipped about money—no one, it seems, wants to quite admit how bad off things are, for fear it might make their own projects look less viable and their company less secure, causing all the rats to jump ship. What writer will want to work with a press hanging on by a thread . . . will the media take such a publisher seriously, etc.? But of course the unspoken truth is that nearly all independent presses exist in some semblance of this impoverished state, to a greater or lesser degree. I began to nose around, though in a transparent way. I emailed some of my favorite indie editors and writers, with whom I have existing relationships, and told them I wanted to write a piece about indie publishing and money, and asked them a few questions. I even told them they could answer anonymously if they wished, and that no one would be quoted by name without express permission.

A couple of publishers did not answer me at all. In fairness, this may not be because they didn’t want to divulge information; it could be because they are busy working 70 hours per week at unpaid jobs, which necessitates they work 30 hours at some paying job, and as a result they have not slept since the 1990s . . .

Of those who answered, several stipulated that they wished to remain anonymous. One said, “Don’t use my name—quote the important publishers,” which probably epitomizes the self-deprecation that is ubiquitous in our indie community . . . I, for one, would have cited this press as one of the top 10 indies in the country! Of those editors willing to go on record, Richard Nash was the most forthcoming—not surprising since Richard is widely known to be a helpful gent. . . but perhaps also because I’d asked about his work at Soft Skull, a publisher with which he is no longer affiliated, and Soft Skull itself has been acquired by Counterpoint and so no longer operates under the model Richard was citing. Thus, anything he divulged about their operations was “passé” and thereby safe . . .

Still, some other brave and generous souls also weighed in, and quickly, clear trends emerged. I’ll share them here:

• When asked how much publishers spend on printing costs for the first run of a book, the range was $4,000 to $6,000. In my experience, the more tech-savvy a publisher is, the less they are likely to pay on printing, because they do all the design and layout themselves and “printing costs” means only that: printing the book. For other publishers, printing costs include design and layout work. Many presses contract with printers who are out of state (upper Michigan is a popular area) and have never even met their printing reps in person. Not surprisingly, printing errors are horrifyingly common among indie publishers, and run the gamut from the new indies to the venerable ones. My friend Cris Mazza had some terrifying printing errors with Soft Skull, and my own galleys with Emergency Press initially produced 200 flawed copies that had to be given away rather than sent to the media. In the case of a problem with printing, in many cases the publisher may incur additional expenses if they choose to correct the problem.
• Print runs ran from 2,000 to 5,000. Keep in mind here that I only approached extremely reputable editors/publishers, so these numbers run a bit high by indie standards. Some indies put out a print run of 500 or 750 books; others are using POD to keep costs lower.
• Publishers are producing anywhere between 60-200 advance reading copies to send out to the media for potential review or other coverage. Most publishers in my survey did not talk specifically about how much their galleys cost, but I know my own publisher spent $800 on my galleys, which he had to re-pay after an error mandated reprinting the whole run, and one publisher cited galley costs as being as high as 1.5K. Notably, one has to factor in a good $500 on postage alone, even when sending books media rate, if a run of 200 galleys is being sent out the door.
• Most of the publishers I surveyed sang the praises of Consortium as a distributor, some saying they didn’t know how they would “do it” without Consortium. However, most also noted that while Consortium (or other big distributors) can assist indie presses radically in terms of getting their titles into stores, they also bring a big risk. Publishers who worked with Biblio/Atlas encountered this issue, such as the would-be publishers of my second novel, Impetus Press, when they went bankrupt in late 2008 as a result of being slammed with returns. Given the Depression-era distribution model, many chain stores—especially the Borders group—are notorious for overstocking titles in far greater quantities than they can realistically sell, and then just returning them, at no cost to themselves, to the publisher. The publisher is then doubly screwed, having paid higher printing costs to meet the demands of distribution, and then having to effectively pay “rent” for the books’ return and warehousing by the distributor from that time forward. Smaller indies often house boxes of books in their living rooms so as to avoid these fees, which can quickly eat up the entire revenue of a smaller operation.
• When asked how many titles actually make back their up-front costs, publishers varied on their take. Nash said this was “not a metric to focus on when you’re an ongoing business. You look cash flow much more than notional P&L.” Nonprofits, of course, may have many other sources of revenue other than just sales, such as grants and donations, and an indie with a larger list may lose money on all but one title in a given year, but if that one “successful” title really earns out, it could end up covering the other books, too—the big publishers in New York used that model for years before corporatization began demanding that almost all titles published by big houses earn big or be viewed as failures. That said, some editors I surveyed admitted that books that truly recoup their up-front costs are “1 in 50,” or that, “You basically never earn back the up front.” At Other Voices Books, our experience has been that most of our books have earned back almost all of their costs, so that they are not a financial liability, but that the distance between “earning back” and actually beginning to generate real revenue is incredibly steep: only one book we have ever published (out of 7) has really achieved true money-earning status. We also lost 6K on one of our earlier books, for a complex myriad of reasons, even though the title was well-reviewed and a finalist for a reputable prize. It’s easy to see that a publisher could quickly go bankrupt if faced with two or three titles like that in a row . . .
• This all made me curious how other authors I respect are faring economically. Like most writers, my literary friends run a gamut from those whose novels are being selected as “Target Breakout Books” and stocked by the many-thousands at megastores, to those who cannot find an agent, to those who are publishing DIY books without any conventional distribution, to those who have published more than a dozen books with reputable indies. Our financial situations, “why” we write, and how we write are wildly diverse. One friend, Allison Amend—who is also a former Other Voices Books writer and whose debut collection, Things That Pass for Love, I edited—has had a very similar journey to mine, and her second book was released a month before Slut Lullabies. Amend’s book had broken even for Other Voices/Dzanc, which is itself an achievement, but had not reached a point of her earning money on the book. She says of the money she spent touring and promoting, “I ended up about two thousand dollars in the hole after my first book. This time, it’s more like 800.” She went on to explain that novels simply “sell better,” but that she also has gotten far less shy about asking others to buy her book. “I tell my friends who aren’t lit types that they have to buy a copy, but reading it is optional,” she says. “A lot of them look relieved.” Amend adds that she’s received job offers and other opportunities that would never have come her way if her first book hadn’t come out, and that therefore, as Nash indicated, efforts may be “worth it” even if they don’t translate directly into revenue.
• Thus far, the results of my questionnaire seemed pretty predictable. As a publisher, I was not terribly surprised. The big shocker for me came when I asked these editors how many of their sales were happening via bricks-and-mortar bookstores vs. through online avenues like Amazon. Given all we hear about the “online” books market and how bookstores are being shoved out of business by Amazon, I expected this hysteria to have hit the street with indie publishers too, and perhaps for some to begin disavowing traditional distribution at all, insisting they could sell enough copies online on their own. This, however, proved to be far more media hype than reality. Almost to the last, these editors claimed that close to 90% of their sales come from bookstores, with only 10%, or at most 20% happening online. This, of course, goes a long way towards explaining why publishers continue to “put up” with a distribution model set up to rape publishers: we need the bookstores as much as ever.
• Finally, what about e-books? Other Voices Books just started doing them, since they’re all the rage. So trendy, in fact, that when Emergency Press failed to release an e-book of Slut Lullabies simultaneously with its paper release, I all but panicked . . . now with the recent release of my collection in e-form last month, I was geared up to be tickled by how positively this would impact my sales. Well . . . the editors I spoke with deterred such optimism, to put it mildly. Nash said that, when he left Soft Skull, e-sales were “all but negligible,” albeit he’s been gone from there a couple of years now. Eric Obenauf of Two Dollar Radio, however, confirmed this: TDR is an uber-hip press that’s been on the cutting edge of technology, yet Obenauf states that the press makes at most a couple hundred bucks monthly on e-books. Kate Gale of the West Coast indie icon Red Hen said, when asked what kind of business e-books generate, “Not much.”

The consensus of how difficult it is for indies to stay afloat seems clear, but what also emerged is that the book publishing—and book selling—model has not changed nearly as radically as the media seems to want us to believe. At BEA 2009, I remember sitting in panel after panel where publishing professionals got their knickers in a twist about Twitter and Kindle, insisting new technologies were not just the wave of the future but already firmly upon us, and that any publisher not jumping on the boat with gusto was going to be left to dog-paddle with the sharks. By the end of BEA, I had a Twitter account and was busting my ass to figure out how to interact more fully as a publisher and author on Amazon. And yes, meanwhile ipads are selling faster than Apple can make them. But maybe these things are simply not impacting the indies the way they do the big boys in New York. After all, a customer going onto Amazon to buy a book—either an actual, physical book or an e-book on Kindle—goes to the site already knowing what s/he wants to purchase. The huge thing about online shopping is that it is still something you do when you know what you want to buy, punch in the title, and there it is, at your fingertips. Whereas indie books—not prone to get the media hype or have the name recognition of Dan Brown or J.K Rowling or . . . who’s the Mormon chick who wrote Twilight?—still may benefit most from readers who wander into a bookstore to “browse” and are taken by a cover, a blurb, a description, a title, or simply by thumbing through the book and falling in love with a stray line. It turns out that indie presses need bookstores—especially indie bookstores—as much as ever, and that e-books and online shopping are still very secondary—or less—to our success . . . yet consuming a great, great deal of our dialogue and time.

We speak of publishing as being a business “in transition,” and surely this is true. I’m not advocating that we all disavow e-books and pull our titles from Amazon, surely! There are trends afoot, and publishing is in the process of a change that will impact the rest of our careers, and how future generations define reading, and those of us who really care about this business will want to be part of that transition. Still, what my dialogue with other publishers led me to is a re-instilled belief in the basics. It also prodded me to explore what, precisely, my goal is, as both an editor and an author. If it seems clear from all sides that indie publishing just does not generate much money for anyone, and that authors generally lose money in the bargain . . . then what exactly are we all doing here? What am I—a 42-year-old mom of 3 young children—doing schlepping to Portland, scrambling for childcare and putting off that new sofa for another year? Shouldn’t we all, for god’s sake, just give up, forget these expensive book tours, and go home?

And therein lies the mystery of writing and publishing. At the end of the day, not one editor I spoke with suggested that the work was not “worth it,” and while none provided a fully-funded book tour, and most provided no money towards touring at all, every one professed that touring is “good for authors.” Because the prime goal of writers has never been to make a living, crazy as that may seem. The goal is, pure and simple, to be read—just as the goal for indie publishers is not to create a wealthy company so much as to put good books out into the world and keep a certain literary tradition alive and thriving, while also trailblazing new directions. In the oft-cited heyday of publishing, even the biggest houses understood that books existed, to a large extent, outside a traditional economic model, so that many books—often the “best” books; the editors’ favorites—were all but expected to lose money. At one time, writers of such books toiled in relative obscurity with only their editors and their own small circle of writer-friends for reassurance and communion about their work—but now, with the advent of online literary communities and blogs, writers and their readers are connecting more directly than ever before. And for all that everyone likes to make a buck, to a very real extent every reader a writer is able to reach makes touring and other forms of self-promotion singularly “worth it.” Because writers do not write to get rich, or even to be read by a million people. We write to be read by one person: by each individual person at a time.

To achieve connection, indie writers need to remain willing to go guerilla: to sleep on sofas; to take on extra paying gigs to fund our tours; to drive to and from Iowa City in one day, returning at 1 a.m. to avoid hotel costs. We need to make the process itself—the community—its own reward. And when you consider what many writers spend on MFA programs or high-profile writing conferences (neither of which necessarily leads to publication), the amount spent on promoting an actual book is a drop in the bucket, whether or not costs are recouped. So on to Iowa City, to Portland, to Seattle I forged, keeping in mind the inimitable Richard Nash’s parting advice to writers: “Reach out to concentric circles of supporters and fans from now until the day you die.”

BS here. I appreciate Gina’s time and energy and openness as she wrote this. I think we’re all tired of hand waving. I think we’re all looking for more people to tell it like it is. I suspect a dose of reality won’t dissuade those whose passions are writing and publishing. Learning from others, however, will help next generations make smart choices.

The post The Glamorous Life? (Notes from the Indie Trenches) Part Two appeared first on Booksquare.

It turns out there is far more optimism, pragmatism, and creativity than there are worries about the demise of the industry. Today and tomorrow, I am pleased to feature author and publisher Gina Frangello as she focuses on independent press and book tours and making money in the world of small press. The first installment focuses on her experiences surrounding her current story collection Slut Lullabies. The second will look at the state of small press.

And now to Gina:

I have done just about everything there is to do in publishing, except actually get paid.

Well, okay, maybe that’s a misleading sentence on a couple of fronts:

1. I do get paid a little, for some of my writing/editing pursuits
2. “Not get paid” is, alas, very much something to do in indie publishing, so could actually go in the “things I’ve done” column as well as functioning in the negative.

At this point, I have been working in publishing for fifteen years. In my experience, there are two ways one enters the publishing arena. The first is to go to Oberlin (substitute Sarah Lawrence, Brown, etc.) and get a low-paid, entry-level position in New York at a corporate publishing house, where you slave for several years before working your way up the ladder, become a senior editor eventually, enjoy some period of (underpaid but prestigious) success, make a misstep in your editorial choices and lose money for your corporate shareholders, lose your job, and either get lucky enough to be snagged by another corporate imprint, or proceed to spend the remainder of your days on Twitter, snarking about the demise of publishing.

The second is to volunteer as a “first reader” of an independent or university-affiliated literary magazine, where you slave for several years before working your way up the ladder, become the Associate Editor, wait for the Editor to retire, take over the magazine, launch a book press, teach at various universities to make ends meet since your editing work does not actually pay, enjoy some period of (unpaid but fulfilling) success before your indie magazine/press goes bankrupt, or get lucky enough to find a Sugar Daddy to acquire you as an imprint (go, Dzanc Books!) Otherwise, revert to spending the remainder of your days on Twitter, snarking about the demise of publishing.

In first of the scenarios, you will have more expensive shoes and will receive invitations to the Hamptons.

In the second, you will have more editorial control, and are virtually guaranteed never having to work for a Republican.

Life is all about choices; that’s all I’m saying.

Needless to say, I came up through the second route. My work at Other Voices magazine eventually led to co-founding Other Voices Books. Publishing short work in literary journals eventually led to my meeting Lidia Yuknavitch, who herself went on to launch a book press—Chiasmus—and published my first novel, My Sister’s Continent. That novel led, indirectly, to my being invited to blog for the online literary collective The Nervous Breakdown, where I was eventually invited to become the co-editor of the Fiction Section, and my work at OV and TNB has led to various invitations to guest-edit anthologies or serve as the faculty supervisor for TriQuarterly when the magazine transitioned online. Indie lit circles led me to meet my current editor, Bryan Tomasovich, at AWP 2009, where he solicited a manuscript from me—a collection entitled Slut Lullabies—that was just released at the end of May.

My collection was ten years in the making, and seeing it out in the world was a dream come true. Sometimes, when one dream comes true, a girl can get greedy. Another lifelong dream of mine? Book tour!

See, when my first novel came out, I was nine months pregnant and in the hospital for double pneumonia. I then spent the first few months of my novel’s life nursing my son, unable to leave Chicago for longer than a few hours. This time around, I resolved to do pretty much anything anyone invited me to do. Podcast, interview, reading, book group, panel. Writer for hire!

Well, figuratively speaking. I mean, I was only hired twice, by universities, to come in and read/speak to the students. The rest was gonna be on my own dime.

My fabulous publisher, Emergency Press, is not long on money. I was about to defensively stipulate that “no indie is,” but these days, almost no publisher is, period. Author book tours have been slashed and burned by the big houses too, with only select writers each season being chosen as the likely big-sellers and paraded around. Other big-house writers often languish on the vine, as under-promoted as indie writers or more so, since indies at least tend to have smaller lists and, even if short on money and time, focus their energies on fewer writers.

I, however, was undeterred by financial constraints. Due to an academic invitation, I had my plane fare to LA covered, and a stipend for my gig out there (in Palm Springs) that would cover two additional tickets—to Austin and New York. Other legs of my tour would focus on the Midwest (Iowa City, Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, Madison, Milwaukee), where I would drive around with several other writers, sharing gas expenses and—whenever possible—returning home the same night so as to minimize costs. I was scheduled to hit Seattle (where my editor lives) and Portland in late July, by which time my book would have been out for two months. My blithe assumption was that, by then, the book would have made enough money that my publisher would be able to cover my costs to the Pacific Northwest . . .

I know, I know: I am a publisher; I should have known better. But hope springs eternal.

Even once it was clear that my fabulous book had not rendered Emergency Press so flush with cash that it would start handing out tickets to Seattle on street corners, no problem: an academic invitation in the Midwest promised a stipend that would cover those costs, and a running workshop in Tacoma would help too. Back on track! Have book, will travel . . .

And so, two months in, I have “worked it.” I’ve read in some of the coolest, warmest indie bookstores in the country, from Bookwoman in Austin to WordWord in Brooklyn to Chicago’s own Book Cellar to Prairie Lights in Iowa City to Powell’s in Portland—my new personal fave being the living-room-like, cozy Pilot Books of Seattle. I’ve appeared at series ranging from Rachel Kramer Bussel’s “True Sex Confessions” at the Happy Ending Lounge in New York, to Stan Kent’s “Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll” series at the Hustler Hollywood in LA. (Oh, it just strikes me that these last two do not provide much of a range! Okay, also The Nervous Breakdown Literary Experience in Denver, and an upcoming appearance at the Cherry Bomb in Grand Rapids.) To say I have had a blast along the way would be a radical understatement. Writers can be an isolated lot, and while the thriving online community has done much to make this less true than in previous eras, it is still a rare pleasure to get to read with and hang with one’s writer friends from other states. Particularly in New York (where Emergency Press threw me a book release party), and in LA (where The Nervous Breakdown is based), I have had so much fun that there can be no justification for calling this tour “work.” Yep, I am extremely fortunate to have a job that I love so much I would do it for free.

Especially since I actually do it for free.

Still, everyone in publishing knows what book tours are really for, and it’s not money. As indie-publishing-god Richard Nash put it, when I asked him if book tours are worth it: “I wouldn’t separate out the book tour and ask is it worth it. We shouldn’t be doing anything to market books if it isn’t providing a decent return. But we have to look more holistically at the return. For a debut writer who tends write 20 books in a lifetime, to spend $500 cultivating a relationship with a few influential book people in a given town—a blogger, a critic, a local producer and two bookstore staff persons, could provide a superb ROI even if you only sell 8 books that day. But to land in a town, meet no one, sell 35 books at the local B&N, and move onto the next, that might not be worth it at all. It is all about making connections between people . . .”

As Nash alludes to, the hope of local media coverage is a major impetus behind touring. A writer is, of course, far more likely to be booked on a radio show or have a feature written about her if she is actually in town and having an event. And the radio program or feature may ultimately lead to more book sales—or more name recognition that could benefit the writer down the line—than anything that happens in the actual bookstore or reading series where the author is making her immediate local appearance.

Of course, media coverage right now is more of a long shot than ever. With review space shrinking in almost every print publication in the country, an out-of-town, indie writer promoting a short story collection of all things (!), has less hope of traditional coverage than was the case when my first novel came out in 2006. And so bloggers and local podcasters often stand in for the big guns of old. For example, my first novel was reviewed by Booklist, but even though the publication had given me a previous rave and my author “platform” has grown in the past 4 years, this time around my collection was not covered. I admit that, as far as indie collections go, I’ve proven much luckier than most writers: my first moments of obscene excitement came when Slut Lullabies was plugged—all of one sentence!—in June’s Vanity Fair, and recently a lengthier recommendation in More magazine all but caused me to hyperventilate (mainly with happiness, but also because you know you’re really over 40 when More starts touting you!) Still, if looked at on a national level, Slut Lullabies’ coverage—while unilaterally positive to date—has been shorter on traditional review venues like newspapers and print mags, and longer on blogs or other online forums . . . excepting in my hometown Chicago, where the media is very good to its writers. Locally, I’ve been covered by the Sun-Times, Tribune, Reader, Newcity, and on several radio programs as well as Chicago Tonight, to the point that a number of my Chicago friends have enthused about “all the attention” my book is getting, unaware that all this “attention” is mostly happening here, where I live.

In the end, all the “fun” I’ve been having—all the nice reviews and the thrill of hearing journalism legend Rick Kogan read from my book aloud on his radio show—has effectively set me back a couple grand.

Yes, yes, I know: I just got finished justifying how those academic stipends funded my book tour, based on invitations I’d received because of my new book . . . so that’s not really the same as paying for my tour out-of-pocket, right? Well, looked at one way, that’s true. Without the book, I wouldn’t have received those invitations or earned that money. But looked at another way (which I try to avoid), if I’d simply pocketed those stipends—instead of going to NYC, Austin, Seattle, Portland, etc.—I’d have walked away with a nice, tidy little sum that I could have applied to my son’s preschool tuition, or our need for a new sofa that hasn’t been drawn on with permanent marker (or ever vomited on by 3 kids or 2 cats.) Then, had I kept the cash and viewed it as “income,” rather than “tour funds,” I might be less strung out that it’s becoming apparent I may never actually see any money on Slut Lullabies, since my publisher first needs to recoup its own costs so as to keep its head above water and keep fighting the good fight for indie lit—me included, since EP aims to publish another of my books down the line.

And as a publisher myself, I know the score. I know how few of Other Voices Books’ authors have ever actually received checks from us after their original (tiny) advance, because the money we put in—for printing costs, distribution (warehousing, returns), events, travel stipend (unlike most indies, we do offer one)—easily ends up amounting to 10K for any given title. And what it takes for an independently published short story collection (OV specializes in collections, so again, I knew going in how hard they are to sell) to earn out more than 10K could be described not just as “Herculean” but almost “preposterous.”

Who did I think I was, Jhumpa Lahiri?

Well, no . . . but. But. After all this touring, blogging, podcasting, interviewing, and a small but glorious little flurry of nice press—could it be true that my book was just not going to make any money? When I mentioned this concern to my friend Cris Mazza, who was a mentor to me early in my career, I noticed she all but snorted at the crazy expectation that I would . . . get paid. I thought of how guilty I’ve felt every time I’ve been unable to really pay my writers what I believe they deserve, and how every single time—even after all these years—I convince myself that the next book is going to be “the one” that makes some significant money: that Dzanc will be rewarded for all their support; that our brilliant author will be able to go on a splashy vacation; that my co-editor Stacy Bierlein and I will even have a little something left over for ourselves. And every time it doesn’t happen, I wonder what I did wrong—what angle my author and I failed to hit; what hours I spent sleeping that I should have been pimping my writer’s book. Had those worries all been delusional? Was the lack of income—for any of us—a given from the get-go, no matter what we did? After fifteen years in the publishing trenches, was it possible I had simply missed this memo?

Tomorrow: What did Gina Frangello, publisher, learn?

The post The Glamorous Life? (Notes from the Indie Trenches) Part One appeared first on Booksquare.