Three Digit Thinking

Yesterday Brain Jar Press released the sixth Writer Chap, Headstrong Girl, from the powerhouse of Australian genre, Kim Wilkins (aka Kimberly Freeman). It brings a close to season one, which was a test case for what seemed like an improbable and weird idea back in the middle of 20202.

But this isn’t a pitch for the new Writer Chap, or even the Season One subscription/bundle that gets you all six at a discount. It’s a post where I talk about my favourite bit of cover design going up on the top left corner of every Writer Chap.

I chose a very specific numbering convention, three digits for every book even though the first two are 00. Faintly ludicrous at these early stages, when a single digit is all we’re really working with, but that 00 is a subtle statement of intent that we’ll get to three digits one day. That I built the writer chaps concept with a long-term strategy in mind, and Brain Jar’s dedication to archiving the best writing about writing in Australian SF isn’t just about the here and now.

One of the early lessons you learn in publishing is this: the first book in your print run is expensive as hell, but every subsequent book gets cheaper. Set-up and development costs are relatively consistent from book to book, but quantity both makes books cheaper to print and divides your initial cost into smaller and smaller chunks of the whole. 

But here’s another less: the value of your books also goes up the more books you produce, as the weight of repetition carves out a brand, consolidates expectations around the work, and generates new leads that bring people into the backlist. 

Every new Writer Chap thus far has seen a percentage of new readers go back and buy another instalment, and many have jumped straight into the six-book subscription. Every book has a little reminder that there’s more just like it out there, and the series is driven by a  mission as much as commercial concerns.

Plus, the slow accumulation of symbolic value makes the series more attractive to future authors (there is one chapbook in season 1 where the author went from an unsure ‘I don’t really have time’ to ‘here’s my manuscript’ in the space of 48 hours, largely because it was a hell of a list of names to be included alongside). Plus, what seems like a weird pitch (“short chapbooks of writerly non-fiction, released like comic books”) becomes a little clearer with concrete examples.  

It’s notable that all of this was nearly impossible to pull off twenty years ago, when the realities of the marketplace increased the risk of thinking this long-term and made it nearly impossible to keep a three-digit backlist accessible. 

But the challenge when kicking off Brian Jar 2.0 was building a strategy based on the publishing landscape I’m working in now, rather than cleaving to conventional wisdom predicated on the realities of small press and traditional publishing that’s now decades out of date.  

Brain Jar may not make it to 120 Writer Chaps, but there’s definitely six books in the series and we’ve already contracted another six to make up Season Two. Not long after this blog posts, I’m off to do cover design, copy edits, and sales pitches for the next few books on the docket. 

And, really, once you divorce publishing from the velocity model, the only reason to stop is because you decide its time to stop. 

A quick behind-the-scenes note: You may notice there’s a bit of a backlist-driven theme going on in the next couple of weeks. That’s because I’m off to deliver a workshop on making good use of your backlist at the Romance Writers of Australia conference in December, and I’m writing the occasional blog post to clarify my thinking and make sure I’ve got language in place to field questions folks may ask (much the same reason my peak blogging-about-writing period coincided with working for Queensland Writers Centre).

If you’d like to get early access to blog posts, background thoughts, and other details, they’ve been going up over at the Eclectic Projects patreon for a few weeks now.