I'm starting this thread to explore an idea I mooted in the Lounge, in the "Another Rejection" thread. The suggestion I made was that perhaps there would be mileage in trying to grow a kind of mutual self-publishing venture out of this online forum. In actual fact, what I was thinking of was more along the lines of a real publishing house, but with priority being given to WW members' submissions over those from anyone else.

Who else thinks this might be a good idea? It might be a way for some of the talent here to get the airing it deserves, and for the public to get the opportunity to read stuff that the mainstream publishing industry seems blind to.

This is only the kernel of an idea at the moment, and still needs some work. Even so, I think it is worth seeing what others think of it.


Alex

I think it's a very good idea, Alex - particularly in the current market. We need to make sure quality will out!

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A
xxx

Excellent idea. Something practical.

I have had some experience of self-publishing for a group: there were two problems: I did the editing and I could have written another book in the time it took me to do this, correspond with extremely uninformed publishers (who I can't name here but will in an email). It wasn't that expensive. There were 8 of us involved and we wished to produce a book with the support of Winchester Uni on their children's writing course. Part stories part essays and contributed to by the tutors.

The second is the selling/marketing angle. We're still getting to grips with that: we know it is of limited interest. We are contacting uni libraries and course leaders throughout the country. However for more general writing such as proposed here we would need to tackle sales aspects. No problem with getting onto Amazon and other web book shops but people need to know what to look for to find us. I understand getting a book into High st publishers might not be easy, but maybe local to the writer might be the way to start.

Having said that the book on completion looked fantastic and it is a pleasure to show people. (it on amazon: "Work in progress: first steps on the road to becoming children's writers")

These are just things to resolve. I would be very interested indeed in participating in this, and would be happy to help with organisation etc.


<Added>

High street bookshops I meant! Haven't started on the bubbly honest.

Okay, here are a few more ideas/thoughts to throw into the pot:

- The decision as to what to publish could be done by somehow circulating candidate material among a group of volunteer readers/reviewers here on the site, and then getting them to vote on which MSS get included. That way, the publication decisions are based on more than one person's opinion, and should therefore (hopefully) be more in line with general public reaction.

- As Issy points out, we would need to find a way of penetrating the market. Our USP (unique selling point) could be the way editorial decisions are made (see above). After that, market penetration is just a matter of getting the word out into the public domain. If we could create grass-roots demand for the books published, bookshops would end up coming to us for copies (and I, personally, think that's just how books should be marketed).

- From what Dee said in the other thread, agreement about distributing profits might cause problems (for anthologies, at least). Is there an industry-standard way of doing this? It's surely something that crops up in all such cases, so there must be a conventional way of dealing with it.

- Do we see this as being just a small group of us trying to get this going, or do we want to see if it can become a larger-scale outgrowth of WW? If the latter, how do we need to go about organising it and getting approval?

- Yes, it's easy to get onto Amazon, but not easy to get them to make the proposition attractive. For unknown and small publishing houses, they tend to quote 4-6 week delivery times and add a "sourcing fee" to the price. See the listing for my own book, "Take a Waif", for example. However, I think grass-roots demand is again the way to address this.


Alex

We need to do something to ensure that new writers get the publicity they deserve, and if mainstream publishing houses aren't interested in new talent, well then it is down to us to get ourselves noticed.

There are a few hurdles to cross and the logistics need to be sorted out, but on the whole I think it's a great idea. Anything I can do to help, let me know.

kat

It sounds as if this is something that merits serious consideration. Does anyone have any suggestions for how we proceed? For example, is it worth getting David to set up a new Group. Or is this big enough to warrant a whole new area on the site (e.g. a PublishedWords tab)? Or maybe I'm getting ahead of myself, and I ought to run this idea past Anna, Richard and David before we go any further? I'd hate to think I might be stealing someone else's thunder.

While out walking the dog just now (an activity which seems to get my imagination working), I had some further ideas about the logistics of such an undertaking. For example, it occurs to me that the only core activities we would need to worry about ourselves are editorial matters and the overall strategy (for marketing, etc.) Everything else (marketing, the publication/printing process itself and distribution) could be outsourced to specialist suppliers.

For example:
- Publication: this could be done via one of the self-publication houses that exist. I used DreamStar Books myself, and they seem to cover most of the bases needed (typesetting, cover design, ISBN and barcode, and registration with several databases and the British Library). I can email a copy of the document they sent me that outlines what they do, to anyone who is interested. They normally charge £695 for all of that, but maybe we could negotiate a volume discount with them, if we are likely to be putting a lot of work their way.

- Marketing: again, there are companies specialising in this. Unless any of us are already marketing specialists, it would make sense to use a specialist service provider. Again, maybe we could negotiate discounted rates or fixed price packages. I'm not sure if a specialist in the book marketing industry would be needed (they might be as blinkered as the existing publication industry).


Alex

I'm still with this Alex and mulling over the points made. I like the idea of the professional marketing. I have seen this done in business and had not previously thought of applying it to books. There would be quite a cost factor involved as they would undertake research to come up with a marketing plan, but it seems to me that once done for similar books/ages/genres there would be less involved in subsequent research - at least for a period of a year or two.

Our anthology for Winchester uni was about hundred pounds cheaper but I would not recommend the publishers concerned on their organisation, although their final offering was excellent. Still having problems as the sales are not showing up on our statements. Certainly if experience was good with DreamStar this would sound a good place to start.

The editing process also sounds good. I can't help thinking that there needs to be a core of people committed to getting things done. It was me for the anthology mentioned and it takes a lot of work to get everything to completion even when the group of people know each other personally: there are decisions to be made, and different views to accommodate. I can quite see where the problems of agreeing costs and profits share are going to come in, and it is a heavy committment to do all this work.

However, as mentined, could WW themselves offer expertise in various ways? I am willing to help but I don't know the business at all.

Yes, Christmas got in the way, but I’m still interested in this – even if it’s only support from the sidelines.

I think the only workable way to sort out who gets what in terms of the profit from a joint anthology is to give it all to an agreed charity. These ventures don’t make pots of dosh for anyone. The idea is to get published, to have something in print. Divided between a dozen or so writers, any profit would amount to practically nothing but, combined, would make a contribution to a worthwhile cause. And, if all contributors could agree to a charity, it would avoid a lot of potential disagreements over money.

As a start, can I suggest the NSPCC Full Stop campaign? After all, we use a lot of them, don’t we…

Dee

Three at the end of the last sentence, for starters ;-)

How about if we picked a pool of charities, rather than just one? I know what you mean about low profits. A friend of mine by the name of Nat McBride writes entry-level computing books, and he reckons he gets around 30p per copy sold in the form of royalties. If that sort of figure is typical, contributors to an anthology would only be losing 2p, at the most, by donating it to charity.

Having said that, it can be quite a lengthy process to get charities to agree to let their names be used. I approached Shelter about doing this with "Take a Waif", and they sent me a form to fill in, but it disappeared into the ether after I sent it back. It also seemed to assume that any money-making activity would be in the form of a sponsored walk or similar, and would happen on a specific date.


Alex

We are talking about an anthology then rather than individual longer pieces?

One of the MAJOR problems I had with editing the group work mentioned earlier was that everyone used a different format - even though they changed it to rtf the variety was picked up in the publishers rtf. It was a nightmare to put right - indents, spacing, italics. I was using a mac and so was the publisher and still it was chaos. I could not go through all that again- I could have written a book myself in the time it took to put right.

Also a house style needs to be agreed.

However, jumping ahead here.

I have a friend who had a story in Saucy Shorts for Chefs which, for those who don’t know, is an anthology published to promote breast cancer awareness. I’ll ask her if she knows it got off the ground.

Dee

I only mentioned an anthology because that was one of the ideas I floated initially. If we are talking about a publishing house type of venture, rather than just the odd one or two published books, then we could vary both the type of book (anthology or novel) and the genre to suit the material to hand. If it is an outgrowth of this community, then the variety ought to do justice to the variety on the website. (If we really wanted to send the marketing people into loops, we could even have a multi-genre anthology.)


Alex

Just skimmed through, and Issy's post made me smile, only because I did an anthology a year or so ago, and although I was asked not to edit the text, the type-setting edits alone took a long, long time and were a real pain in the arse. Why do some people still put a double space after a full stop??? Okay, an easy one to fix, but forgetting tabs is a pain and one guy did everything in full caps, another took scans of typed pages (on a typewriter) and sent them to me as images.

Get ready for some late nights



Colin

I suppose part of the answer to the editing problem would be to insist on a standard MS format (courier font, double-spaced, 3cm margins, etc.) and require RTF files for electronic submissions. A strict policy of rejecting anything that doesn't conform to the stated parameters would encourage people to do their own editing.


Alex

That might not be the complete solution though. We went for rtf files to be sent to me, but even though everything looked OK eventually (yes the double spacing and the inverted commas had to be done manually Colin!) ~On submission to publishers so much hidden formatting appeared that it took hours and hours over months and months to get the print ready pdf files right. I vowed I would never ever edit an anthology again, because it took up so much more of my own writing time than I had expected.