Locus, May 2013 Page 7
While POD doesn’t give the same economies of scale that offset printing does, it does provide other economies to a small press, especially a small press based outside of mainland USA. POD provides the opportunity to economically produce and distribute advance review copies. It also reduces the time a press has to spend packaging and mailing out orders and promotional copies, which for Ticonderoga means we can spend more time focussing on producing quality books and working with our authors.
I think that books should be items of beauty. We chose to use POD when we found a printer that could produce books to our standard, and we spent a fair amount of money trying out different outfits until we found one that was up to the task. We’re incredibly impressed with the quality Lightning Source is giving us: the binding is strong, the print quality is as good as any digital, and the covers have minimal curl in humidity. We aim to produce books that are indistinguishable from a mass market press – indeed, we do our best to make them look better.
Ticonderoga does not charge our writers anything to publish their books and we pay them advances and royalties. The money flows in one direction: from us to the writer. We source the cover art, design and typeset each book, send out promo copies, awards copies, and review copies, all at no charge to the writer. Our business model is based solely on getting books into the hands of readers, not on receiving income from our writers. In short, we operate in the same fashion as a traditional trade publisher.
When we discuss a contract with a writer, we take into account printing options. We contract for both a number of years, and for a minimum amount of copies printed. While with POD the books may not exist physically, they do exist legally, ensuring the writer will get paid for the full print run.
I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the phrase ‘‘distribution is the killer’’ in conversations about small press. For us, POD assists greatly in getting our books out to our readers. Via POD, we get our books into the Amazon and Barnes and Noble websites – something very difficult for Australian publishers as it requires jumping through a lot of hoops. Any bookseller with an Ingram account can order our books, worldwide. It’s not a magic bullet, but it certainly helps.
Ticonderoga is based in Australia, in Perth, the most isolated capital city in the world. Australian small press, while quite healthy, faces challenges that US presses don’t. Being able to use POD, and POD linked to an international corporation, gets our books into the hands of US readers. It also allows us to improve our environmental footprint: there are no boats or trucks shifting our stock by the ton across the world. If a US customer orders a book from any store linked to Ingram, that book is shipped from within the US, not from Australia. The customer gets the book faster and greener. To send a review copy to Locus, the book only makes a single trip, from the printer to Oakland; it doesn’t have to travel via Australia first.
Readers, writers, reviewers, and award juries don’t care how the books are printed. They care about how the book is put together, the editorial process, the contractual process, the overall quality of the final product, and whether the writer gets paid.
(I’d like to thank Kate Eltham, Jonathan Strahan, and Angela Slatter for their advice with this question.)
What’s next?
We’re currently contracted into 2015! This year will be a great year. We’ll shortly be publishing the second and final volume in Steven Utley’s Silurian Tales, Invisible Kingdoms. We’re bringing Glenda Larke’s debut novel, Havenstar, back into print; publishing our first original SF novel, Patty Jansen’s Ambassador; there’s an excellent romantic Orientalism anthology, Dreaming of Djinn, edited by Liz Grzyb; there’s the third volume in our Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror series, edited by Grzyb and Talie Helene; debut collections by Cat Sparks (The Bride Price), Lezli Robyn (Bittersuite), and Jason Fischer (Everything is a Graveyard); and an awesome novella collection by Kim Wilkins (The Year of Ancient Ghosts).
We’re always looking for more powerful, character-driven stories, it’s what we love to read. Great characters, a sense of adventure, something that has thoughtful ideas while forcing us into investing emotionally in the narrative. In 2014 we’ll be publishing our 50th title, and I’m slowly concocting something I hope will be pretty special.
Thoughts or predictions about publishing?
I recently chaired a panel on this at the New South Wales Writers Centre, featuring a trade publisher, a trade e-book imprint, and a self-publisher. I put forward the suggestion at the start that no one here knew what the future of publishing would be like, and no one disagreed.
I think that we’ll see a point where the decline of print and the rise of the e-book even out, a point where both are valued by the reading public. Hardcopy books may not sell as well as in the past and the average print run may be lower, but they won’t disappear. And, as long as writers can continue to be paid fairly, to make a decent living from their writing, I don’t have a problem with that.
For Ticonderoga, POD is part of our response. There seems to be a strong push for globalisation, as consumers are demonstrating that when a television show, movie, or book is available somewhere in the world, they’ll go to any means to acquire it when they want it. In Australia, I’ve heard people complaining that episodes of The Walking Dead are being shown 30 hours after the US! In POD we have access to a technology that makes our books available worldwide, when the readers want them. Because we want to make it easier for readers to get our books, we also have plans for ramping up our production of e-book versions of print titles.
Some things won’t change. We’ll still be producing the best books we possibly can, working with new and established writers on exciting projects, paying our writers, and listening to what our readers have to say, contributing to an exciting worldwide conversation about books.
–Russell Farr
SUBTERRANEAN PRESS
Who founded your press? When?
Tim Holt and I started SubPress in 1995, and published two chapbooks that year, before moving into hardcover the next year.
Mission statement?
I like to tell people that our mission statement is that we publish shit that interests Bill, which, in the main, is true. A bit more seriously, we maintain a definite focus on novellas and collections, giving writers an outlet for projects that wouldn’t necessarily interest their major publishers.
What’s happening with your press now?
We’ve settled into a range of 50-60 titles a year, which seems to be a good spot for us, allowing us to promote each book, while keeping a reasonable workflow for our production staff and shipping crew. We recently released Robin Hobb’s The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince, which took a few years to come to fruition. Upcoming, we have a pair of classic Harlan Ellison collections, and our ongoing project, The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, which is only two volumes from completion. It’s going to be great to put a period on a project that we’ve been working on for so long. We’re going to continue to expand our e-book program, and concentrate on increasing direct sales.
Thoughts about publishing?
We now have an e-book program, with 90 or so titles. We’re actively expanding that, both by doing e-books of books we’ve published, and, recently, adding e-book originals such as Amityville Horrible by Kelley Armstrong, and The Ape’s Brother by Joe R. Lansdale.
–William K. Schafer
NIGHT SHADE BOOKS
Who founded your press? When?
Jason Williams founded the press in 1997. First book came out in ’98. Jeremy Lassen came on board in 2000, merging his existing Freak Press company into Night Shade. Freak Press’s first book came out in 2000, just before the merger.
Mission statement?
Generally, we started because we wanted to publish books that were not being published. As we found successes, we identified under-served niches. But our target of what a good book is,
and what under served niches we wanted to serve constantly evolved. One might joke that our core mission statement was, ‘‘Our eyes are bigger than our stomach.’’ But I feel, in reality, our core mission has always been to find the right book for the right reader, and the right reader for the right book.
What’s happening with your press now?
Including new states (trade paperback releases of previous hardcovers), we put out 41 titles in 2012. We expect to slow down in 2013 and 2014.
I’ve very excited about E.J. Swift, who’s first volume of the Osiris trilogy came out in HC last year, and is hitting paperback in June. She is an important new voice in the SF genre, writing challenging layered fiction that is at once topical and timeless. Emma’s second book just turned up in manuscript this month, and should be out later this year.
Scourge of the Betrayer by Jeff Salyards is another first in a trilogy. The first book came out in February in paperback, and it has been getting wonderful reviews. He has an incredibly unique voice that I’m very excited to be publishing. Finally, it’s also very nice to be working with M. John Harrison again. His novel Empty Space just came out.
What’s next?
Currently Night Shade is struggling to get by. The closing of Borders and the shift to e-books has made the print portion of our list either unprofitable, or far less profitable than it was. A large publisher who averages 10K print copies can better absorb a print hit of 50% – selling 5K copies is still a profitiable proposition. But when Night Shade’s print averages of 5K copies see a 50% hit down to 2,500 copies, the profitability of that print run suddenly comes into question.
Night Shade has been carrying a significant amount of back debt, mostly incurred during the year after Borders closed, and staying current on that means that current production bills and advances are constantly getting paid late. While Night Shade might be able to limp forward, we feel that continuing to ask our authors to wait while we get our financial house in order is unfair.
We have a possible sale in place to SkyHorse and Start Publishing, but that sale is contingent on Sky and Start renegotiating certain terms with our authors. We hope this deal goes through, thus ensuring our authors get paid, and the imprint continues with our editorial input, as a SF line owned by someone else.
If the deal doesn’t go through, Night Shade will continue to look for other buyers who have less onerous terms to impose on our authors, and/or will consider various reorganization strategies. This is, of course, a euphemism for bankruptcy. We will do everything in our power to avoid this, however.
Thoughts or predictions about publishing?
E-books are going to flat out replace mass market paperbacks. I’ve been saying this for years, and the sales data over the last few years has borne this out. Traditional mass market genres like romance have fully embraced e-book, and mass market print runs are down for everything except for established NY Times bestsellers.
I think the biggest threat to publishing is the threat of a retail monopoly. Another emerging threat is the possible rise of ‘‘used e-books,’’ which would never have any traction whatsoever, unless there was a monopoly in place to force writers and publishers to sign up for ‘‘used e-book’’ programs. Self-published authors will be the first to agree to royalty-free ‘‘used e-book’’ sales, for the privilege of being listed/sold in the first place. Smaller publishers will be forced to follow. We’ve seen this happen before… agree to these new, less favorable terms, or we will delist your print and/or e-books. And when publishers tried to stand up against this, the DOJ forced publishers to go along with the monopolist. That DOJ antitrust suit against the Big Five is the most terrifying thing to ever happen to publishing. A monopolist now has the DOJ as their enforcer.
Our business has changed because e-books are coming out of print sales. Our print runs used to be substantial but now are pretty small, almost to the point of breaking even/losing money. I watch the e-book sales rise, and print sales fall, and hope those trend lines meet, while I’m still around to publish books. But right now, each book out of the print column means less sales to pay for print costs, meaning that even if I do make up that sale on the e-book side, since the print copies are less profitable at a smaller print run, I am making less money than I was in a pre-e-book world. That’s a challenge.
The second biggest challenge is that people are finding out about new books in entirely new ways. It used to be, if you were in the 1,200 or so chain bookstore shelves for the four-to-six months that books were kept there, eventually, readers would find your book, or have seen it enough to finally take a chance on purchasing it. Now, there are less than half those chain bookstore shelves and you get a month or two tops to be on that shelf. So readers are finding out about books in entirely new ways, and no one discovery method is replacing that single chain-store discovery mechanism. The challenge is finding cost-effective (or even effective, costs be damned) ways of putting your books in front of people. If it’s the right reader, the book will sell itself, but getting it in front of that reader is the hard part. It always has been, but since buying patterns and discovery mechanisms are in flux right now, it’s more challenging than ever.
–Jeremy Lassen
Return to In This Issue listing.
PEOPLE AND PUBLISHING
MILESTONES
HARLAN ELLISON, 78, fell out of ‘‘one of the ancient, rickety old swivel chairs they use to furnish the Writer’s Enclave’’ at 20th Century Fox Studios on April 4, 2013, where Ellison was recording a part for an upcoming appearance on TV show The Simpsons. The fall was painful and ‘‘had me in bed for a week,’’ but Ellison reports on his website that he’s fine: ‘‘I ache, but I’m ambulant. After a lifetime of falling off trestles, terraces, boxcars and buildings, I am 60% Silly Putty and bounce well.’’
Nnedi Okorafor (2012)
CHRISTOPHER BARZAK has received tenure and a promotion to associate professor at Youngstown State University.
MADELEINE L’ENGLE and H.P. LOVECRAFT each had craters in the south pole region of Mercury named in their honor – craters L’Engle and Lovecraft respectively – by the International Astronomical Union.
GEORGE SAUNDERS was included in Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people of 2013.
PAUL McAULEY was one of 140 people listed on Time magazine’s list of the year’s best Twitter accounts. He tweets at
PHILIP PULLMAN is taking over as president of the Society of Authors in the UK.
BOOKS SOLD
EOIN COLFER, KENNETH OPPEL, JACQUELINE WILSON, and JACQUELINE WOODSON are among 29 authors from 34 countries nominated for the 2014 Hans Christian Andersen Award, given every other year by IBBY (the International Board on Books for Young People) to an author and illustrator whose complete works have made an important, lasting contribution to children’s literature. Winners will be announced March 24, 2014 at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair.
NNEDI OKORAFOR sold Lagoon and two more books to Anne Perry of Hodder & Stoughton via Cameron McClure of the Donald Maass Literary Agency.
STEVE RASNIC TEM’s Blood Kin sold to Jonathan Oliver at Solaris via Robert Fleck of the Fleck Agency.
Tobias S. Buckell (2008)
TOBIAS S. BUCKELL sold Hurricane Fever and Antarctica Ascendant to Paul Stevens at Tor via Joshua Bilmes and Eddie Schneider of JABberwocky Literary Agency. UK rights sold to Michael Rowley at Ebury via John Berlyne at Zeno Agency on behalf of JABberwocky.
NICK MAMATAS sold a collection of his Lovecraftian stories, The Nickronomicon, to Innsmouth Free Press.
GWENDA BOND sold Girl on a Wire to Tim Ditlow at Amazon Children’s via Jennifer Laughran of the Andrea Brown Literary Agency.
KRISTEN PAINTER sold three books in new fantasy series House of the Rising Sun to Devi Pillai at Orbit via Elaine Spencer of the Knight Agency.
DAVID WELLINGTON sold Positive to Diana Gill at Voy
ager US via Russell Galen of Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency.
JOEL SHEPHERD sold Operation Shield, second in a new Cassandra Kresnov trilogy, to Lou Anders at Pyr.
BEN PEEK sold epic fantasy Children trilogy – Innocence, Incarnation, and Immolation – to Julie Crisp at Tor UK via John Jarrold for six figures at auction.
JAMES A. MOORE sold two books in new epic fantasy series Seven Forges to Marc Gascoigne of Angry Robot via Donald Morhaim.
CAITLIN KITTREDGE sold Black Dog and a second book in a new urban fantasy series to Diana Gill at Voyager via Barry Goldblatt of Barry Goldblatt Literary.
C.T. ADAMS & CATHY CLAMP, writing as CAT ADAMS, sold the seventh, eighth, and ninth Blood Singer novels to Melissa Singer at Tor via Lucienne Diver of the Knight Agency.
CHRIS WILLRICH sold The Scroll of Years and The Silk Map to Lou Anders at Pyr via Joe Monti of Barry Goldblatt Literary.
ELIZABETH BLACKWELL’s While Beauty Slept: The Truth is No Fairytale, a retelling of Sleeping Beauty, went to Amy Einhorn for her eponymous imprint at Penguin via Danielle Egan-Miller and Joanna MacKenzie of Browne & Miller Literary Associates.
FREYA ROBERTSON sold Heartwood and a second book in the new fantasy duology to Lee Harris at Angry Robot.
JANIE CHANG’s Three Souls went to Jennifer Brehl at William Morrow and to Iris Tupholme at Harper Canada in a pre-empt via Jill Marr of the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency.
LIV SPECTOR’s The Infinity Murders, about a detective who travels back in time to solve a murder, as well as a second book sold to May Chen at William Morrow via Joelle Hobeika of Alloy Entertainment.
KIERAN SHEA sold Koko Takes a Holiday to Cath Trechman at Titan via Stacia Decker of the Donald Maass Literary Agency.