The real story: publishing, four and a half years on
by Sharon Blackie
Please note that our purpose is writing this article and making it available on our website is not in any way to suggest that we are tired of publishing, burned out, or contemplating the closure of Two Ravens Press. We continue to be enthusiastic about our own very personal model of publishing, we continue to believe that there are books that can change the world, and we absolutely want to be the ones to publish them. But we feel it is very important to explain the difficulties faced by independent publishers of our kind, and so to help authors, prospective authors and other interested parties to understand what things we can and cannot do, and why we choose or don't choose to do them.
Two Ravens Press began as a Sunday-afternoon idea in autumn 2006. We published our first book in February 2007, and in total our list stands at around 56 books to the end of 2011 (plus another two that are now out of print and no longer part of the list). Our books have been highly commended in, longlisted for, shortlisted for, or have won a number of major literary awards, including the Forward Prize, the international IMPAC award, the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year, The Saltire Society Book of the Year and First Book of the Year, the Saltire Society Homecomings Award, the McKitterick Prize, the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, and the inaugural Robin Jenkins Literary Award. We’ve had a whole bunch of reviews in pretty much all the major national newspapers and literary journals and beyond. We’ve been called ‘a quiet publishing revolution’ (The Herald) and ‘the most talked-about publisher in Scotland (Publishing News). Ex-Waterstone’s chief buyer and Friday Project head Scott Pack said of us: 'Two Ravens Press are prepared to take risks and as a result are one of the most interesting publishers around', and novelist Doug Johnstone in Northings magazine said 'Two Ravens have been creating a stir since they started in 2006, and in a time when major publishing houses are full of doom and gloom, the small independent press has been a beacon of light in the darkness, publishing quality work on a tight budget to considerable acclaim.' And lots of other stuff – the funniest perhaps being a Herald reviewer who called us ‘hip’ and likened us to ‘Rebel Inc without the football hooligans’. Which we thought was pretty cool.
So, sounds great. We must be doing well, right? Must be a raging success. Maybe not quite rich yet, but showing a healthy profit? At the very minimum, making the business pay?
Nothing remotely like that. How can it be possible? Well, that’s a long story, but perhaps it’s an interesting one – not only to other would-be small publishers, but to writers, and anyone else involved in the book business. I’m writing this article not to whine – that would be dull, and there are plenty of others doing that – but perhaps to educate. And to caution. And because my friend and fellow-publisher Lynn Michell of Linen Press recently wrote a Guardian Book Blog that dealt with just one of the problems that small publishers have: the costs of dealing with big businesses like Amazon. By the time I’d read to the bottom of the comments pages I was fuming. No-one – including those who appeared to have some experience of working for bigger publishers – and certainly not the so-called marketing experts – had any notion at all of what companies like us are publishing for, let alone how difficult it is in this industry – no matter how competent and innovative you are – to even cover your costs. Helpful comments like ‘do a business course’ or ‘try e-books/ print-on-demand instead’, 'what if small publishers could band together' or ‘target your specific readership by using social networking sites’ show no understanding of the issues that small independent publishers of books that are different – books that the big guys won’t take the risks to publish – face.
Our books: why we publish and why we will only publish what we publish
Why do small publishers bother? There are undoubtedly as many reasons as there are small publishers, but for people like us it’s because we’re tired of seeing the same old stuff on the bookshelves year after year after year. Safe books, based on the books that sold millions the previous year. Books that take few chances, books that fail to do anything to change the way we look at the world or ourselves. I wanted to go into a bookstore and be surprised. I wanted writing that was different, language that sang. And that’s why we started Two Ravens Press: to publish those books that big publishers were hardly bothering with any more. That’s also why the glib so-called ‘solutions’ to all the problems of an independent publisher like us that consist of helpful statements like ‘you need to have the commercial successes to fund the losses you’ll make on the literary, innovative stuff’ make absolutely no sense at all. Everyone else is publishing the commercial stuff. I don’t want to. Not doing that is my whole raison d’être as a publisher. That’s the whole point! I don’t especially LIKE commercial stuff. I don’t think it ought to be banned, I don’t look down my nose at it, sometimes I’ll even read it. But I don’t want to be yet another publisher churning out more of the same old writing. I want to do something different. I want literature. Our 'About Us' page gives all the reasons why we publish what we publish; I’m not going to repeat it here. But the problems that are faced by being a small literary publisher cannot be solved by turning yourself into a small non-literary publisher. That doesn’t make sense. The only question that remains is whether it’s possible to be a small literary publisher in this godforsaken country without having to have money to constantly throw into the business that you know you’ll never get back.
When we started Two Ravens Press we put some capital into it. Not a huge amount; maybe at its peak the company owed us around £25,000. To fund book printing predominantly, and a very small amount of necessary equipment. We have always worked from a small office from home – we had no receptionists and no pot plants, no expensive glossy brochures – nothing that we couldn’t absolutely live without. After four and a half years we’ve made maybe half of that money back and it's going to be a while before we recoup the rest of it – though we believe that we will. In that four and a half years, we haven’t paid ourselves a single penny in salary. (We have, however, with great pride and pleasure, paid our authors several thousand pounds in royalties, but that’s another story.)
Does that mean we’re stupid? Oddly enough, we don’t think so. We’re practical educated people and both of us have had experience of managing significant budgets or companies. We’re not naive, we’re not inexperienced, and we work our socks off. Which isn’t to say that if we can’t do it, it can’t be done – but I challenge anyone to explain to us how it could have been done differently. So if you’re sitting comfortably, let’s begin ...
What does it cost to produce a book?
It varies. The kind of books we publish (high-quality trade paperbacks, often with cover flaps and coloured endpapers, ‘B’ format or demy) will cost an average of £1.50 per copy if it’s a good-sized novel and you can swing a print run of 1000 copies. (The cover flaps and coloured endpapers make little difference to that cost in the place where we print, and besides, part of our ‘branding’ relates to the quality of our books. So we’re not going to produce poorer quality books that might save us 20p but will make absolutely no difference to the overall financial picture that I’m outlining here.) 1000 copies doesn’t sound like very many, but few people know that most literary novels (whether published by big companies or little companies) are likely to achieve sales in the hundreds, not the thousands. So there’s a constant balancing act going on: do you publish 1000 copies at a lower unit price, hoping you can sell them, or do you go for a smaller print run, much more expensive on a per unit basis, that you’ll regret wholeheartedly if the book does well, because you’ll hardly make anything back on it at all once all the costs have been covered?
Publishers then have a whole bunch of other costs. Editing, copy-editing, typesetting, proofreading, cover design ... the costs add up to something astonishing. I can’t tell you what they are, exactly, because we have no experience of it. We don’t have any of those costs, because we do all that work ourselves. Every bit of it. We learned how to use Adobe Creative Suite (InDesign, Photoshop), we are both writers and pretty good editors, and we ... yes, you’ve got it – work our socks off. If we didn’t do all this ourselves, we’d have folded long ago: we simply wouldn’t be able to afford it. As will be apparent if you read on.
So, for us, the cost of producing a book is an average of £1.50 per unit, we print in runs of 1000 copies for fiction and nonfiction (poetry’s another subject entirely, which I’m not going to deal with here) and more often than not we sell 50% of those books or fewer. So: on an imaginary blackboard, let’s begin to tot up the costs of producing a single novel whose retail price is £10, and see what if anything we can make back from its sale. We so far, in the Two Ravens Press do-it-yourself model, have fixed costs of £1.50, leaving us with a notional £8.50 on every copy we sell at £10.
What does it cost to sell a book? – the retail bind
Except that we don’t make £10 on ANY of our books. Because, leaving aside sales through our own website (which we discount anyway, to be competitive, but where we do actually make a healthy profit per copy) we sell through booksellers. The minimum discount that a bookseller will normally accept to stock one of your books is 35%. In other words, we sell at book that retails at £10 to them for £6.50. Remember: that’s the minimum. Most booksellers want 40 %, Waterstone’s want more, and the books that go through a wholesaler (to most online retailers, for example) attract a discount of 50%. I’d say that our average (mean) discount is 45%. Which means we get an average of £5.50 back for every book that we sell at £10. Sounds grand, until you remember that we have distributor fees and postage on top of that. Our distributor takes 14% of what we get back, and postage varies but let’s say it’s an average of 30p per book if the books go out through a distributor. Let’s be optimistic and say that’s £1 per book in distribution and postage costs. Which leaves us with £4.50 out of our original £10. When we take off the £1.50 for print costs, 80p for royalties ... we’re left with somewhere in the region of £2.20.
Well, that’s better than nothing, right?
Right. But when you imagine that the average literary small-press book will be lucky to shift 500 copies, £1100 (what we might get back from selling 500 of a print run at a return of £2.20 per book) doesn’t come close to covering the office overheads (oh, a long list. Printer cartridges, paper, stationery, electricity and other bills, telephone, internet and postage, occasional travel, etc etc ...) and the large numbers of ‘free’ review copies that we have to send out to reviewers etc (at least 50 for each publication, at an average cost of £2.50 each), let alone paying ourselves for all the hours and hours of work we’ve put in to produce and promote the book (typesetting, design, editing, copyediting, proofing, publicity, marketing...) and which other publishers are paying external folk to do.
But that’s not the worst of it. Because there’s another sting in the tail of the book business: when you sell a book to a bookseller, it’s not a firm sale. They can buy ten books from you, sell two, and some months later send the rest back and get a refund. Yes, they really can. And do. It’s called ‘returns’. There are notional guidelines on what’s appropriate – the proportion of an order that can be returned, the condition of the books, time elapsed before returns can be made – but in practice they’re often ignored. We reckon that overall, about 20-25% of all books we’ve ever sold to Waterstone’s, for example, have come winging their way back in various states of (dis)repair. Ah well, you might say: nothing lost, nothing gained. But actually, there’s rather a lot lost here for very little gain. Because we haven’t just lost the sale of that particular book that’s sent back, we’ve lost quite a lot of money. We’ve lost the 14% that our distributor charges to send the books out to the bookseller in the first place, we’ve lost the cost of the P&P to send them to Waterstone’s, and we’ve lost the additional 10% that our distributor charges to take the books back from Waterstone’s or another bookseller and re-shelve them.
Returns hurt. And I find myself so often raging against the system, unable to think of any other industry in the world where almost all the risks are taken by the producer, and hardly any by the seller; where you can buy product and if you’ve misjudged and buy too many or don’t manage to sell it, you just get to send it back with no downside at all! Utterly astonishing. How on earth did it ever come to this? How did the bigger publishers ever allow it to happen, and why do they continue to do so?
And so, not surprisingly, we prefer internet sales to bookshop sales. Even though our sales through Amazon, for example, go out at the highest discounts we ever give, we love them. Because they represent firm sales, and they never come back again.
So how do we get more sales, to make up for the returns? Well, when we first started publishing we were told we needed a sales force, to persuade bookstores to stock our books. We couldn’t afford to pay ourselves, let alone a sales force! But we struck a deal with another Scottish publisher and used their sales force for a 10% fee. They sold our books! We were delighted! Until, a few months later, we started getting the returns. Petrifying. We promptly set aside the sales agreement and began to think very carefully about whether counting success by our ability to get our books into bookstores was the right thing. Which doesn’t make sense, when you first think about it. How are you going to sell books if they’re not in bookstores? But the problem is, how are you going to sell them if they are in bookstores? And how are you going to stay in business if you have to foot the bill for them coming back?
We are now very careful about the bookstores we market to. We favour a small number of independents that like our books, tell customers about them, and give them a certain prominence in the shop. Our worst nightmare? An order for 10 copies of a book by a Waterstone’s store, because we know they’ll stick those books on a shelf at the back of the store, hardly anyone will notice them, they’ll just blend in with all the rest, and most of them will come back, dented and nicked, three months later.
So what about more publicity for the books?
Good question. What we do know is that a book won’t sell, whether from our website or through a high-street retailer, unless people know about it. Very few books are bought by browsers (a fact that I personally find very surprising, as I buy almost all my books by browsing, whether it be browsing in the flesh or browsing online stores like Amazon who make it easy and fun to do so). So the trick is making potential readers aware of your books. Now how on earth are you going to do that???
If you assume you have very little or no money to play with (have you counted up all the things we have to do with that notional £1100?) advertising isn’t an option. We have occasionally advertised in selected highly targeted publications, but if an ad costs £250, for example, you can easily do the sums on how many books you’d have to sell just to cover the cost of that ad. Too many: more than most ads sell. ‘Experts’ say that advertising is generally a poor way to sell a book, especially a work of fiction by an author who isn’t already well-known.
Promotions in bookstores? Great idea. In 2007 we carried out about seven ‘3 for 2’-type promotions with Waterstone’s and Borders. The smallest discount we could negotiate was 59% i.e. they pay us £4.10 for a £10 book. Sounds possible – except that we make hardly anything on those sales, and the returns were outrageous, because promotional books are always bought in bulk. To cut a long and painful story short, we actively lost money on every single one of those promotions. We have never done it again, and in fact we have grown to think that it’s just plain wrong. The constant efforts by bookstores and supermarkets to push down the prices of books devalues them. It makes no sense, and in my view it’s all very simple: publishers should say no. But the big guys won’t. Because even though they make hardly anything per book, they have volume on their side, and unit costs can reduce dramatically with high volumes. They still make money even on those outrageous deals.
Okay, so promotions really aren’t the answer either. I know – reviews. Get the books reviewed, and they’ll sell. Right? – Wrong. Almost all of our books have had serious and positive reviews in major national newspapers and literary magazines. And in other publications. And on blogs. And even on Radio 4. And only three of our novels have ever sold more than 1000 copies, no matter how glowing the reviews and how extensive the publicity.
Well, then you need more book events. Book festivals, readings, that kind of thing. Right? – This is probably getting as tedious for you as it is for us, but actually we need book events like a hole in the head. We’ve had authors at some of the biggest book festivals in the world – the Edinburgh International Book festival being the obvious one – and I don’t think we’ve had a single event there that has sold more than 25 copies. Readings in bookstores are more likely to shift half a dozen copies, if you’re lucky. We’ve had events and readings that have sold no more than two (and the organisers almost always have ordered 20 books – ‘just in case’. Would be terrible to sell out on the night, wouldn’t it?) And if we’re asked by the bookstore to contribute to the cost of a few bottles of wine for those attending the event – yes, you’ve guessed it: we make no money from those events and more often than not they don’t even cover their costs. More often than not, ANY event doesn't cover its costs.
Well, we’re missing out somewhere along the line – we must be. We must need more coverage on blogs! – We’ve had 'more coverage' on blogs. You know what's interesting? Appearing on a literary blog hardly ever sells lots of books - if any books. Not even the bigger blogs that win all the awards and have a huge following. Some of our least successful novels in terms of sales figures have been praised to the hilt by Scott Pack, ex-senior Waterstone's buyer and head of The Friday Project - one of THE people to listen to in the book world, one of THE most popular book blogs. His effusive praise and even interviews with authors didn't create even a single tiny blip in the pattern of virtually no sales for these books. I know: that goes against all the conventional wisdom. But we have seen it be so, time and time again. Our sales are small enough that we can track them surprisingly accurately.
So does publicity actually work? At all? Ever? Isn’t it just that we’re bad at it? That, no matter how smart we are, we just don’t know how to do publicity properly? So why don’t we get someone who does? – Easy: the cost. For the average book, a publicity person will set you back £1000. Where does that come from? From the notional £1100 that has to cover everything else noted above? Oh – I forgot; it’d all be okay because we’d easily make back that £1000 or more in the extra sales generated by the fact that we have a competent publicity person, right?
Wrong. In 2010 we were fortunate enough to receive a small grant from the Scottish Arts Council which we used to fund a freelance publicity person to cover our list of around 10 books. At a cost of around £10,000. She was wonderful. Very competent, efficient, had all the right contacts: we loved her. But it made hardly any difference at all to our overall book sales. We had two appearances on Radio 4 that we probably otherwise wouldn’t have had – but our book sales per title for 2010 were actually lower than for any previous year. (No, I’m not suggesting a causal relationship here. Just pointing out that even a great publicity person didn’t make the difference.)
But you’ve missed the obvious solution! – we’re told. Make e-books, and then you’ll have no print costs! Right. But you have fixed costs to make the e-book file in the first place, and the ongoing costs of secure storage facilities, and distributors and wholesalers still take the same percentages for e-books as for print books, and there are still royalties to be paid, and the overheads for running the business don’t much change ... just missing out on print costs doesn’t help nearly as much as you’d imagine. And besides – whatever the publishing ‘experts’ would like to tell us, e-book sales are still pretty slim in this country – especially for literary fiction. We’ve had e-books for a couple of years now, sold through our website and also fully distributed through a major wholesaler, and our bestselling e-book has sold about ten copies.
Interestingly, a short time after posting a link to an earlier version of this article on our Facebook page, the answer came. Twitter! We are not tweeting! If only we were to tweet, everything would be fine. Ah. Right. There's a little bit of deja vu emerging here. Does anyone else begin to see the pattern? Four years ago, when publishing blogging was all the rage, all we needed to do was blog ourselves (and get our authors in on the global literary blog tours) and everything would be all right. We did; it wasn't. (We still do, though with considerably less enthusiasm.) Three years ago, all we needed to do was have a Facebook page and everything would be all right, because Facebook pages were 'where it was at'. We did; it wasn't. (We still do, though with considerably less enthusiasm.) Two years ago, we needed to make e-books because e-books and 'digital technology' (blah) were the answers. We did; they weren't. Twitter (which is something we simply couldn't do, whether it makes sense to you or not – we all have to say no sometime) would no more represent The Answer than any of these other 'solutions' have been The Answer. People would still have to find us amid the noise and the haste. (Remember what peace there may be in silence?) People would still have to want to listen to us. To want to read what we published. And so on, again and again and again.
So: arguably we’ve done all the things we were supposed to (except tweeting). Where does all this leave us?
Is there a way forward?
And after four and a half years, we think we know the answer. For Two Ravens Press, at least. There simply isn’t a big enough market, and a great enough taste in the ‘literary establishment’, for the specific kind of books we have published in the past – especially our innovative and challenging fiction list. Our target audience is small. The tastes of the reading population have become so impossibly homogenised that they take a look at books of the kind we publish and can’t imagine why they would want to read them. There is little taste for the different, the difficult, the life-changing. We are unlikely to be able to sell the kind of books we produce (especially in the fiction field) in the kinds of quantities that are going to pay us for the time we spend publishing them. Nonfiction can be a different matter, and that is why (to ensure our survival) we are currently focusing more on nonfiction than we have previously chosen to do. But this shift isn't just a business decision: there are issues that we (and others) genuinely care about, books that still need to be written about the how the world is and how it needs to change, and we want to be the ones to publish those books.
And so, we keep on keeping on. Because we do this for love, and because, after much soul-searching over the past couple of years and many changes to the way we do business, we want to carry on publishing books that we love and authors that we believe in.
Someone has to keep the fires burning; and as long as Two Ravens Press exists, we'll continue to see that as our job.
