Whisper House Press

Notes from the desk of the editor are offered in the interests of personal posterity and transparency for writers and other potential editors who wish to learn from my experience.

– the editor

Another lesson learned—and this is one I’m sure a savvy business owner would spot a mile away and avoid without messing it up. But I’m not that savvy at business; and it turns out the thing that allows me to dismiss losses incurred for the sake of sticking to my mission and values isn’t just a feature but also has some buggy aspects.

The problem: I determined what I thought would be a reasonable price for Year One: A Whisper House Press Anthology after offering my standard contracted discount to contributing authors and bookstores (40% off for bookstores & 45% off if bought outright, and 40% off for contributing authors) but many months before I calculated printing costs. I decided that above the ten-dollar price point, the book would become less attractive. It’s a small book, and I wanted it to seem like a great value proposition for the customer. Turns out, it’s a really good value proposition for everyone—everyone, that is, except for Whisper House Press.

Are you seeing the discrepancy? That’s right, the printing cost is 65% of the list price (and that’s without any shipping fees). So if I give anyone 40% (heaven forbid, 45%) off that list price, I lose around $.50 per copy.

D’oh! Right?

So here’s the lesson:

(1) Set the list price comfortably higher than what the printing price could possibly be (this can only ever be an estimate, of course, and there’s always room for error),

(2) print with cheaper materials (e.g. use smaller dimensions and lighter-weight paper, shrink the number of pages using smaller fonts and/or chapters starting on the left-hand side as well as just the right, etc),

(3) don’t offer to contributors the standard 40% discount (use, instead, 30% or some other combination of benefits entirely) on author copies on cheaper books which, counterintuitively, cost more to produce than the bigger, presumably fancier books,

(4) and/or do not set a list price until after everything else is finalized.

Truth is, the last thing is probably the smartest move, and I put myself in a big of a tight spot only giving ten weeks of prep between decision day and publication day. I figured: All the hard work (in editing, etc.) was done (and it was). But I didn’t figure I should determine all costs before setting a projected on-sale price or discounts to purchasers. That’s the boo-boo, here.

So what shall I do? The business already loses money, but that’s not something I want to commit to (I aim to be profit neutral in the next couple of years and in the positive within five at most—note to self: Make a real business plan). I think the best move is to do a mea culpa with authors and ask their permission to charge them $6.48 + shipping per copy, which is my cost, exactly. If they insist on the contractual terms (I honestly can’t imagine that someone would, but it would be absurd of me not to honor my own terms), I’ll take the fifty-cent loss per book and hope they don’t want more than ten. The pricing thing is, after all, my error and not theirs.

In the future, one of my options might be to provide an author copy or two plus a 25% discount or something less extravagant, though there’s a cost to me there, too, and does that cost exceed an average of $.50 per copy? It would depend on how many author copies go out (for my last two books, it was something like a hundred copies each). This is an algorithmic evaluation I’d have to do for each title, but maybe there’s some kind of ground rule I can set to guide my future decisions.

Let it be stated: I will project costs with more care (there is a production cost calculator available to me, though if I’m doing what I hope and working six+ months in advance of anything coming out, it won’t be precisely accurate) and attempt to do the calculating before setting forth terms to contributing authors.

In the meantime, I’ll apologize for my error and hope for understanding. It’s not a huge deal, but I want to get this stuff right and don’t want to be an annoying publisher to work with. I want every author to love the experience. And some won’t, for sure, but I don’t want to provide reasons where I can avoid doing so…

If you’re a small publisher, what’s your process for determining offers or standard offer to contributing authors? Have you made mistakes like this one? If so, let’s hear about it in the comments.

’til next time (next error?)…

Steve

---