I quietly dropped my 52 chapbook project earlier in the year. Partially this was a function of floods and work overwhelm, but the bigger problem was a massive change in the print-on-demand landscape and the major players within it right as I geared up for take-off.
Brain Jar Press (and my Eclectic Projects offshoot) is largely the child of print on demand technology. The whole business model only makes sense because I don’t have to store and warehouse books, and our predeliction for shorter books–chapbooks and novellas–is a function of the way print-on-demand is priced where page count, rather than formatting or paper, is one of the primary arbiters of final cost.
BJP & POD
My printer of choice has been Ingram Spark — a joint venture between one of hte largest distributors in the world (Ingram Distritubion) and a vederable print-on-demand house whose beens servicing small presses since I first started one back in 2005 (Lightning Source) and has since opened facilities around the globe. These two joined forces with Ingram Spark to court the indie market, offering the combination of print on demand with distribution, which basically means tht they store print-ready files and if a bookstore in Toledo wants to order a Brain Jar Press book, it gets printed and shipped from the closest printer instead of lugging a hardcopy all the way across the globe.
There’s trade-offs, of course. A print on demand book is more expensive to print than an off-set print run where a printer does thousands of copies at once, which means you’re earning less profit off the sale. It also means that you’re not warehousing thousands of copies and gambling on how many you can sell, which is a big advantage when you’re a small press with limited resources, so the trade-off makes sense to me.
That trade-off also frees you from the strict tyranny of traditional publishing’s profit-and-loss calcualtions, because there’s very little upfront expenditure on the print run. It frees you up to take chances and try things out, which is an overall net good because a) readers get access to works that otherwise wouldn’t have been viable, and b) off-beat works that take chances gradually filter through as influences on other works down the line.
Low cost doens’t mean no-cost, however. Ingram Spark charges a small fee for set-up before a book goes into distribution, and another when you revise files. These haven’t traditionally been a huge consideration because IS was in the phasew here they courted customers, offering “free set-up” codes to vairous conferences and professional organisations who might be inclined to use their services. I’m part of a lot of those conferences and organisations, and so I’ve spent approximately $25 on set-up for Brian Jar’s entire caatalogue.
A PROBLEM OF MISMATCHED EXPECTATIONS
But here’s the thing about Ingram Spark: I suspect that it’s two founding organisations weren’t quite prepared for the ways indies would use their services.
Keep in mind IS largely grew out of folks who are used to the trade side of things (Ingram) teaming with folks who were used to being the small-print-run printer of choice for small presses (Lightning Source). Their infrastructure has grown out of the assumptions attached to those two industries, and they built a system expecting indies to behave like smaller versions of the same (one of the reasons their user interface is so….well, lets call it “not user friendly”).
Indies have largely developed their strategies around the set-up for cheap-to-produce-and-update ebooks, and a large-scale sharing of informaiton. Many of these folks didn’t have a grounding in traditional publishing, and so their expectations have been shaped by their experiences with ebook retailers (and, realistically, Amazon, who has an oversized footrprint in the space).
They’e also been sharing information and strategies with one another in informal ways, through groups and forums. This means promo codes spread far wider than IS expected when they originally offered them to folks, but it also means that there’s lots of tactical things indies do (rapid release, regular back-matter updates with every new release, constant updating of covers) that aren’t a great fit for the print side of the industry. Especially when each set-up cost Ingram Spark, and those costs weren’t then being covered by the subsequent sales (or if the top end of the indie market they courted didn’t cover the loss leaders of the folks whose books weren’t covering costs in distribution sales)
Widely spread free codes meant that a lot of people were eating up IS resources doing some of the tactical stuff they do with ebooks, which led to a crackdown on Ingram Spark’s codes last year. What used to be a system where you got one code for a year became each organisation getting a unique code every month, and grave threats of being cut off if they were shared publically. There was also a new heirarchy to the codes ; some would only allow free set-up of new books, while others would also allow free revisions. Which you got largely depended on which organisation you joined.
Earlier this year–right about the point where I prepared for the 52 chapbook series–news of annother change rose to the surface: there was a hard limit on the number of codes you could use a year. Even if you were part of two orgnaisations who each offered 60 code uses every twelve months, IngramSpark would cut things off after 50.
A CHANGED POD LANDSCAPE
The responses from people running into that limit have been about as vocal as you’d expect, not least because they felt ripped off to have joined an organisation to get 60 set-up codes and suddenly learned they wouldn’t even get the full compliement. Personally, I expected something like this to happen, ableit not quite so soon. I’ve often got the feeling that the expectations of Ingram Spark wasn’t a great fit for the way indies worked, and they were taking a loss because of the codes.
More recently, they’ve been a lot more explicit about how they expected the platform to be used:
“IngramSpark was created for the independent author or small publisher to use to publish, print, and distribute their works, and generally would not publish more than 30 titles per year. This restriction on promo code usage helps to distinguish the works of our community from the millions of mass-produced and public domain books too often found in the self-publishing landscape. In this way, and many others we hope to reduce bias against self-published works.”
Source: https://help.ingramspark.com/…/5337716967949-Promotions…
My rule of thumb for indie publishing is this: don’t rail against the systems because they aren’t what I think they should be; work with the systems as they are.
When the system changes, your tactics need to change as well, and some things become less viable. Not impossible, just not the no brainer they once were.
MY CONFLICT
Here’s where the change caught me: I plan for every book to get both an initial upload (so I can do an ARC run) and a revision upload for the final print run. Brian Jar Press, if I can ever get it running as smoothly as envisioned, Brain Jar will do about 25 to 26 books a year before I do anything with the Eclectic Projects sub-brand.
When the epxectations around using Ingram Spark changed, the 52 Chapbooks project fell by the wayside because putting another 52 books on top of just the books we’re doing this year massively altered our production estimates. And while I’m confident all the books would break even, I’d need to have the cashflow to cover the period before that happens.
Currently, that cashflow is unpredictable, as selling books during a period of high inflation is tricky (books are luxury items). Our ability to predict how many copies a book will sell is out-of-whack with reality, while our costs had already gone up because I now outsource certain jobs (primarily copyediting) I no longer have time to handle that part while working 9 hours a day at the day-job.
While I could have figured out how to do the writing and layout on 52 chapbooks through floods, plague, and economic downturn, having to rethink the distribution and costing on the fly on top of everything else was a bit beyond me back in March and has largely stayed beyond me in the months since.
And that’s okay–I’ll loop around to that project again in a bit when I’ve had the space to re-think how it’ll work. There will be some research, some poking at new tools, and potentially a wait while I build up some other systems to support it, but I like the idea enough that I’ll do some iteration of it (even if it’s just leading with ebooks, and only doing print versions of collected sections).
