PLASHMILL PRESS
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About Print On Demand
PlashMill Press is primarily a Print On Demand (POD) publisher. Make
no mistake, POD is the way of the future for print publishing. We are
also developing an eBook publishing department, which is to say that
we will make and sell digital copies of our books. Digital solutions
of this type will certainly become an increasingly important part of
the market over the next decade, but the advent of POD has breathed
new life into print publishing, especially in special-interest areas
and other short-run publishing.
POD is simply a modern printing
method in which the printer takes a formatted digital copy of the book
and prints as many or as few copies as are required. As far as the results
appear, for text and line art the quality is not noticeably different
from offset litho, the “traditional” book printing method.
Many people would be surprised to know that most “traditional”
publishers are now using POD themselves!
It is true that for high-quality
colour reproductions, at the moment it is usual to insert colour plates
at the binding stage in POD book production. However we must remember
that printing is an evolving technology and that before litho was the
standard, a mere three decades or so ago, books were usually printed
by letterpress. If you look at books printed before around 1970 you
will find that their illustrations or plates are normally inserted,
since back then there were no colour litho presses big enough to produce
full-colour books, and of course, it is not practical to do four-colour
or for that matter monochrome half-tone printing with letterpress. This
is why older books have their plates bound in.
In recent years advances in the
digital printing technology behind POD have eroded the advantages of
litho a great deal. For example, I recently priced producing a 250 page
text only book by both POD and offset litho. I contacted several book
printers in both media. In lower volumes POD was much less expensive
and litho only began to be competitive at a print run of 5,000 or more.
However I could order just one copy by POD and the unit cost would still
be as low.
Because the cost of print runs
below 5,000 by offset litho are so high, traditional publishers will
not consider books that they do not feel they can sell many thousands
of. To make matters worse, a number of major changes in the book trade
have occurred in the last twenty years which have caused traditional
publishers to become even more conservative and disinclined to take
risks. These changes include the demise of the Net Book Agreement (NBA,)
by which publishers set the minimum retail price of books; this allowed
them to factor in a margin that provided for the support and promotion
of new and more adventurous authors. The scrapping of this agreement
was forced through by the major chain retailers. At the same time these
chains began to drive very hard bargains with publishers on returns.
All of this has had several effects, only one of which is good, that
books are now cheaper. Unfortunately at the same time the small independent
book retailers have gone bust in droves and the quality and variety
of new work being published has slumped.
Most people today do not buy books
in independent specialist bookshops where the owner knew the trade and
his or her customers and would buy in books for specific clients; an
observer might suggest that this was exactly what the chain stores were
hoping would happen when the NBA was scrapped. Most over-the-counter
book sales today are in chain stores or supermarkets or airports, where
shelf space is at a premium and title turnover is high. The effect of
all this is that it is well-nigh impossible to get fiction, and very
difficult to get even non-fiction published, no matter how good it is,
unless you are already a celebrity.
On
the other hand, the inexorable rise of the WorldWide Web and Internet
Marketing as well as Amazon and other online retailers has meant that
there is still a place where it is possible to sell short-run books,
which traditional publishers cannot address using offset litho printing.
This is where POD comes in. I said above that traditional publishers
are already using POD, and they are; they’re just not letting
on. They use it to keep their back catalogue open so that a book that
is only selling a few hundred or thousands a year, probably on-line,
can still make money for them. However a POD publisher can publish a
book that may sell only a thousand copies ever and still make a tidy
profit for the author and the publisher.
From the author’s point of
view there is a significant difference between the POD publisher and
the traditional one; that of the publisher’s advance. A traditional
publisher will offer a writer an advance on the profit he expects to
make from the book. This can sometimes be very large, if the publisher
thinks he is looking at a huge bestseller with fat film and television
options. However these are very few and far between and most advances
are under £5000.
At the same time, unless you are
already a big-name bestseller, traditional publishing houses offer a
royalty of only ten percent of net profit. And remember you don’t
get a penny of royalties until the advance is paid back. So for most
authors, the advance is all they’ll ever see, and these days even
old-style publishers expect authors to do much of their own publicity.
As if that were not enough, a traditional
publisher will demand other rights over the work, including international
rights, and many an author has found him or her self having to buy back
the rights to their own work even after the publisher has put it out
of print!
So what can an author do? Well,
you can self-publish. This is pretty hard work and involves many different
skills. At the very least you need someone else to proof-read your book
and to edit it. You will most likely need the services of a typesetter
since word-processing or cheap Desktop Publishing software does not
produce results that are acceptable to commercial printers, either POD
or litho. You will need to hire a graphic designer if your cover is
to look at all professional. The fees for these professionals are in
the order of £50/hour and upwards.
You will have to register as a
publisher with the ISBN Authority and pay the fee, and you will have
to buy a minimum of ten ISBN numbers, which cannot be transferred to
another publisher. All of this costs money.
Since to make litho competitive
you need a print run of 5000 or more, which in the example above would
mean an investment of at least £12000, you will almost certainly
have to go to POD, which means you will have to pay to the selected
POD printer a set-up fee and an annual retention fee.
Furthermore, the book trade, while
getting used to POD publishers, is as suspicious of self-publishing
authors as ever, because of the problems in ordering, trade discount
and returns.
Alternatively you can go to a POD
publisher, who will look after all these issues for you. These fall
into two categories, in general. The first are basically somewhere between
vanity publishers and POD printers. There are a number of these and
some are very big. They often have many thousands of authors and many
more titles.
They charge a fee up front, which
is often hidden, for example a proofing fee or a design or typesetting
fee. These fees can quickly mount up. In general they pay a pitiful
royalty, and the lower the up-front fee the more pitiful the royalty.
There is no “submissions process” as such. They don’t
even read your manuscript before accepting it and why should they? These
“publishers” want to “publish” as many books
as they possibly can, no matter what the quality. They make money from
the services they sell to you, not from sales of your book. How much
personal attention do you really expect to get from a publisher that
“boasts” of having 10,000 titles in print?
Furthermore these houses usually
have very restrictive clauses about contract termination and on-selling
so that if a traditional publisher does pick your book up, you may not
be able to sign up for a very long time—possibly years—or
have to pay a hefty contract severance fee and may lose the opportunity
altogether. Be very careful with these outfits, many of which appear
to be American, or offshoots of American parent companies. Indeed, the
very fact that a publisher advertises the fact that it handles its own
printing and binding in-house should be a warning to all authors. In
my opinion these are just huge vanity publishers, only existing to relieve
hopeful and foolish authors of money.
However, there is another type
of POD Publisher. This type is a genuine publisher, not a printer or
a vanity publisher. This type of publisher has a limited stable of authors
and reads every manuscript published. There is a proper submissions
procedure and the publisher almost certainly rejects many more titles
than are accepted. In other words the publisher is a real publisher,
concerned about the standard of work published under his imprint.
This is the key, of course, and
it is where POD has come to the rescue of new authors. While the nature
of the changes in the book trade over the last decade have pushed old-style
publishers out of short-run publishing, POD technology has opened it
up to a new generation of smaller houses. Such a publisher contracts
out the printing, rather than doing it himself; in my view this difference
is crucial. With such a publisher there is unlikely to be an Advance
and there may well be a fee for proofing and other services; however
the royalty structure of this type of house is significantly more attractive
to authors, since this type of publisher is interested in developing
and supporting new authors, not just fleecing them.
We at PlashMill Press are proud
to count ourselves in the latter group. We are small. We like that.
We want to get to know each of our authors personally, and to be excited
about their work and their careers. We can’t pay an advance and
we do make a realistic charge for the services we provide, but we also
have a very fair royalty structure that aims to encourage authors, not
put them off. We only publish books we believe in. Not only do we have
to like and be excited about the work, we have to be convinced that
the author can recoup his stake in the publication and turn a healthy
profit before we will accept a manuscript for publication.
Our Publisher’s Offer states
exactly what the Author’s Stake in the publication will be. There
are NO hidden extras. We do offer supplementary services such as photography
and enhanced marketing and publicity, but it’s entirely up to
you whether you use them or not. Publishing your book is conditional
on the quality of the work, not on how many supplementary services we
can persuade you to buy.
Once your book is published we
will maintain it in print for as long as you want for an annual fee
of £25. And you have complete freedom, so if a big publisher decides
you’re the next hot poop, there’s no severance fee—you
just cancel your contract and we will settle up, wish you very well
indeed, and offer to read your next manuscript. We want
our authors to hit the big-time! It’s good for our other authors
and for PlashMill Press! Naturally you retain all film and other rights
at all times.
While your book is in print with
us we do reserve the exclusive right to sell through the book trade
and from our site. The books that we sell will generate a royalty of
50% of net profit for you. You may buy books at the special Author Price
so you can sell them yourself or through your website, a stall at the
County Show or the boot of your car and keep all the profit. However,
you must not sell to the book trade or through on-line sellers such
as Amazon in competition with ourselves. That is all that we ask.
Click Here for
examples of how this works.
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