Direct Sales are a Press's Best Friend

A little intel on $ in publishing

[Please keep in mind this is one newer, smaller publisher’s perspective. Other presses may see things differently or have different numbers, but I hope this gives a little insight either way. I’d also like to state upfront that we are in the No Submission Fees camp and do not run contests, so we’re even more committed to financing our press through conventional sales and Substack subscriptions (which include exclusive monthly posts & discounts or other special offers). We’ll have more to say about these values in future posts.]

A lot of people understand the importance of distribution in book publishing. If you’re going to put in all the work to develop a book and get it into the world, you want to maximize its visibility and make sure your readers can actually find it (and who knows? maybe even buy it).

The realities are more complicated. As the literary publishing industry becomes increasingly consolidated/corporatized, getting the attention of major distributors is challenging at best. This makes sense if you think about it: distributors have to invest their resources in the publishers that have clear plans and business viability—they need to make enough money to cover the expenses on both sides of the relationship. At the same time, there are a lot of tradeoffs for independent presses that sign up with a distributor: extra fees + a substantial cut of their sales, less control of inventory and order fulfillment, less say in how their books are actually marketed/presented to buyers, etc. Depending on your distributor, you can end up losing money (in an already strapped budget) if the fees eat up sales or the distributor runs into trouble with metadata or any other number of organizational issues. (Of course, there can be obvious benefits to having a formal distributor, but that’s for a longer conversation.)

For many smaller presses, IngramSpark POD has become a vital channel for gaining that wider visibility while maintaining relative independence. I say “relative” because Ingram has such wide control of the book market that it can be as problematic as Amazon in some ways. But for better or worse, Ingram is the preferred outlet for most booksellers, and it funnels out your book listings to places like Bookshop.org, Ama$on, ThriftBooks, Goodreads, and other book aggregator sites. For my part, I prefer to put as little energy as possible into these other outlets, though I appreciate the ways that Ingram makes it easier for bookstores to acquire their inventory, takes a few shipments off my plate, and makes our books internationally available. I also appreciate Bookshop’s vision for supporting bookstores and enjoy their listmaking capabilities.

Still, despite the wide variety of printing options that IngramSpark provides, it isn’t a perfect solution for literary presses that also print things like saddle-stitched chapbooks or prefer a handmade quality to their catalogs. Although POD (print-on-demand) quality has improved, it is not without limitations or other glitches in a vast, impersonal system. Getting your own printed stock into these sellers’ inventories comes with another whole slew of fees and complicated logistics that just aren’t worth it for smaller presses.

This is where direct sales come into play. It’s critical for independent small presses to develop a clear identity as a press that encourages their audiences to rally around them, to support the work they’re doing to bring unique, quality literature into the world and nurture authors who may be ignored by larger publishing houses. Money from an order on a small press’s website goes much further than an order through another outlet. I won’t even bother talking about Ama$on in this context because it should be clear that they do not have the interests of the book world in mind. But let me give a rough example for a hypothetical $16 paperback book to demonstrate the different ways your $ can have an impact.

For smaller-scale print runs from traditional printers—or a bulk POD order—of, say, a few hundred copies, let’s say a book costs $3.00/unit to get into a press’s inventory. This isn’t an ideal ratio (you want to widen those profit margins as much as possible), but it’s a loose estimate that would also include the original shipping costs for the publisher. If an order from an individual customer comes through a press’s website, it might look something like this:

• Cost to print book: $3

• Shipping materials (mailer, shipping label, any filler): $0.50

  • In this example, the customer would also be charged full shipping cost (media mail, presumably), so that’s left out of this calculation.

• Author royalties (10% of cover price for this example): $1.60

• Payment processing fees: $1 (rounded between Stripe’s lower cut and PayPal’s higher cut)

• Net revenue: $9.90

Keep in mind that amount goes toward many other hidden expenses for the publisher: maybe paying a cover artist, the cost of equipment like a label printer and postal scale, or any promo materials they might include in the shipment (postcards, bookmarks, coupons, etc.). Publishers also need to pay web hosting fees for their online shops (a few hundred $ or more/year), various business fees to their local/state governments, and costs for ISBNs (which they should be buying in bulk—100 ISBNS cost $575, for instance) and other title setup fees (the latter of which are now going away with IngramSpark but will be replaced with a small “Market Access” fee per sale). We pay annual membership dues to CLMP and IBPA (~$260 combined/year) in order to gain their support and access to other discounts/opportunities. Presses may also have the expense of design/typesetting software (Canva Pro, Adobe Suite, etc.). It costs $ to travel and table at events (booth fees, merchandising materials, banners, swag, etc.) that may or may not be totally recouped at those events. That direct sale also helps cover things like the author’s complimentary copies or author discounts on additional copies. If a press hasn’t yet sold enough copies to recoup their print run (easily over $1,000 or more for small small presses), all that $ is still trying to keep the press from actively losing money on a book. Notably, my notes here do not include any kind of salary or other staff compensation—as we all know, a lot of smaller presses aren’t generating enough revenue to make publishing their full-time gig (though it’s certainly a dream of mine one day). If you consider the many layers of expense in running a business and producing a book, it becomes easy to see how quickly that $ can evaporate.

Now, let’s say a bookstore orders 5 copies direct through a press (thank you!). The numbers might look more like this with a 40% wholesale discount:

• Cost to print five books: $15

• Shipping materials (box, shipping label, tape, extra filler material to prevent damage): $1

• Shipping costs: $6

  • Rough estimate for a press that covers media mail shipping to bookstores (as we do)

  • We deliver to a handful of our local/area bookstore partners to minimize this cost, but obviously that’s not feasible for most bookstores.

• Author royalties: $8

• Payment processing fees (if the bookstore pays online through an invoice, but would be waived if they paid via check): $1.69 (Stripe fee estimate)

• Net revenue (for a $47.85 order—$15.95 X 60% of list price X 5 copies): $16.16 (or $3.23/copy)

Of course, if a press has recouped the costs of their print run, the revenue “increases” as they’re not trying to cover that $3-$15 anymore—another reason that publishers’ backlists are so important, by the way. (For instance, if a press had recouped their print costs through individual customer sales and was still selling through their own stock to bookstores instead of new POD copies, a press could net $6.23/copy from a bookstore sale. Compare that to the IngramSpark numbers below and you’ll see one tiny example of how Ingram doesn’t necessarily have publishers’ best interests at heart.) Still, I hope these numbers make clear how slim those profit margins are after considering all the expense it takes to actually get a book where it needs to go. I didn’t even acknowledge the role that returns can play in complicating this whole formula because it’s too exhausting for a post intended to keep things relatively simple. Just remember that a publisher’s cash flow is constrained by many factors.

NOW, if an order comes through IngramSpark, a POD book in this example might net approximately $4.50/copy regardless of who orders it (a bookstore bulk order or an individual customer on Bookshop) before taking a royalty cut, so it would be more like $2.90/copy for the publisher. That doesn’t quite cover the cost to print one of the books in the publisher’s original inventory, so promoting these external sales is not really in a press’s best interests if they keep their own copies in stock.

SO, I think the main reasons I decided to share all this are to 1: reinforce the value of direct sales by individual customers to small presses’ websites and 2: clarify the many expenses for independent publishers. Every author (and press!) loves to see their books in indie bookstores; we’re all part of a wider ecosystem trying to bring good books to the people, and we need to support each other. But we also need to do as much as we can to make sure presses can earn enough $ to keep making those books possible. When readers or writers assume that publishers have “all the money” (a direct quote of more than one tweet I’ve seen in recent months), it reflects a lack of perspective about the labor and resources it really takes to make publishing sustainable. I encourage anyone who tries to be intentional in their book purchases to consider the ways their support can make the most mutually beneficial impact. A better publishing world is possible, my friends. We can all do our part to make it happen.

And if you’re looking for suggestions from our ever-growing catalog, Spellbook for the Sabbath Queen (poetry) is just out today, and Child Craft (hybrid prose) opened for pre-orders yesterday!