Thinking your project through

Each minute of thought you put into turning your dream into reality will save you at least a day of unscrambling any mess you might get into. First do your Sums! Unless you have money to throw away, your sums are the most important thing. If you need to raise the money, no one will come up with a penny unless they can see that your proposal is going to work. In this section, you will find: :: My sums ... and the things I forgot! :: How to cover the gap between paying for production and publication date. :: Hidden extras: the cost of borrowing money :: Books cost money to move around :: Some more promotional ideas. :: How to make promotion cheaper. My Sums... When you have decided how much of the work you want to do yourself, and how much you want to contract out, you will need to discover how much each part of the process is going to cost. In my case, I have got a computer with a word-processing package, and a resident computer expert (my husband, Philip). We have got a desktop-publishing package somewhere but, for my first effort, I preferred to hand the design over to a professional - installing and finding our way round the DTP software would have taken too long, and there was too much margin for error. Ask around, consult Yellow Pages, get some ideas and some firm quotes. And remember, the quotes that you get will probably be ex VAT - I forgot! The initial quotes I worked from were: Printing: 5,000 copies in the same format as LAZY LEARNING (includes delivery) £5,064.00 Copy run on of 1,000 £713.00 100 additional covers £15.00 1,000 flyers £281.00 Page layout and production of diagrams £620.00 Cover design £126.00 Copy Editing @ £10.50 per hour, say £105.00 TOTAL (ex VAT) £6,211.00 These were the sums I took to Mark, my Bank Manager, who supports all my wild and wacky ideas. I also took the sales figures for LAZY LEARNING: eg, it was published in June '94 and was out of print by November; it has been reprinted every year; it has been translated into six foreign languages (translation rights are an excellent bonus). We compared the profit I would make by doing it myself to the royalties I received for LAZY LEARNING, and discussed the cost of borrowing the money - in other words, it would not be all pure profit. 'And there will be things you've forgotten,' he added. He was right! I'd forgotten the VAT, for a start - but I could, at least, claim that back within three months. There were then other ideas that I had for promotion. ... and the Things I Forgot I rediscovered a postcard I'd had from the journalist Andrew Roberts - it was the cover of his novel: THE AACHEN REFERENDUM - which I'd promptly gone out and bought. 'Now there's a good idea!' I thought to myself. I ordered 1,000 postcards announcing the publication date and telling people they could buy advance copies direct from me. This was very useful, because it brought in lots of orders @ £8.99 (plus postage and packing) - enough to cover the monthly repayments of the loan between the time I had to fork out for the printing and the official publication date, when people could buy the book in the shops. It also told people that the book would be around soon, and got them talking, and curious. People are far more likely to keep postcards in obvious places than letters - which get filed or thrown away. But Remember, 1,000 stamps will set you back a lot of money! Then, with perfect timing, I was repaid some money that I thought I would never see again. Time to employ a professional publicist. This is worth every penny and more (provided, that is, that you employ a good one) so include it in your original figures. It cost £2,100 plus VAT and their expenses. By my calculation, the books were already paid for, so I divided £2,100 by the price I get from the distributors, and discovered that I would only need to sell another 480 copies to get it back. It was this figure that brought the total bill for production up to about £10,000, ie £2 per book. More about the results of the publicity later. Warning! The printing prices are based on a book of a certain length. If the book is longer, the retail price will need to be higher. The thing to remember about printers is that they do everything in 32-page batches; and it's cheaper to produce a book with 30 blank pages at the end, than to add 2 pages. In other words, a whole section is cheaper than a part section; so aim to cut, in order to fit in with multiples of 32. In other words, with all your end pages, etc, your book needs to be 64, 96, 128, 160, 192 (and so on) pages, or less. (Useful tip from AuthorDocs (who designed EASY BEING): if you've got some blank pages at the end, call them 'Notes' - then it looks as though you put them in specially.) My basic overall cost for producing EASY BEING was about £10,000; ie, with a print run of 5,000, £2.00 per copy - a smaller print run would have made the book more expensive. Remember: this is only the basic cost. I haven't calculated the cost of borrowing - the Bank Rate fluctuates, and Banks will give you different quotes anyway. Also, you may have to take out insurance against your being unable to repay the loan: this can cost an arm and a leg - make sure you know exactly how much; and whether you will get a refund if you pay off the loan sooner than expected. Illustrations - Have you ever wondered why the illustrations for grown-up books are irritatingly lumped together, somewhere in the middle in two sections? Well now I know. They need special glossy paper and the rule of 32 applies again. As you discovered above, everything happens in sections, and it is much cheaper to put all your glossy paper according to the sections, eg four glossy pages in the middle, or at the beginning and end of each section. If you want to keep your costs down, restrict yourself to diagrams and line drawings: I slid a couple of photographs into EASY BEING, on ordinary paper, and they do not look at all good - they do need glossy paper to do them justice. Tip: Your designer will be able to do wondrous diagrams for you on the computer. Get him or her to put them on a disk for you - so you can use them again whenever you want: after all, you've paid for them, they are now yours, to use as you will. How to Cover the Gap between paying for production and publication date The printers may want half their money up front. Check when they give you the quote. It's a sizeable sum to have to produce - if you weren't expecting to pay it in advance. And they will want the rest within 30 days. If you have taken out a loan, monthly repayment is the normal form. Will you be able to cover this straightaway? Remember, too, that - if you are using a distributor - there will probably be a 90-day lag before you get paid. You will need to juggle accordingly. Some more Promotional Ideas As you discovered above, I lit upon the postcard idea. If you want to do this, you can use the time when others are working on your project to compile a database of everyone and anyone who might be interested in your masterpiece: friends; relations; your Christmas card list; colleagues; everyone who has ever written you a fan letter about your other books, and so on. You could, of course, just print out a whole lot of order forms instead, and send them off. This is cheaper than having postcards printed, and has the added advantage of making it much easier for people to order; but there is no picture of the jacket, and you have to put each one in an envelope: or you could send flyers - once again, envelopes will be required. You decide what would be best for you. Your outcome is for people to know the publication date, and that they can have advance copies by ordering direct from you.