It’s the Peschel Press Newsletter for August 2022!
Welcome back! We enjoyed a very successful Peach Festival (mmmm, fresh juicy peaches). We sold books, covered our costs, and impressed our relatives. None of those things were guaranteed, so we’re happy. Happy enough that we’ll probably do the Peach Festival again next year.
We’ve got three events coming up so if you’re in the central Pennsylvania area, mark your calendar and stop by.
On Sunday, 21 August 22 from 11 am until 1 pm, I’ll be at Cupboard Maker Books for Bookstore Romance Day! I’ll be sharing a table with A. E. Faulkner who writes YA dystopia so you can meet another local author. Cupboard Maker will host authors all day Sunday, so if you like romance, you’ll meet a new, favorite author. Saturday, too, if you want to come out both days. If you like something spicier, come Friday evening.
Even better, I’ll debut The Vanished Pearls of Orlov. This book has been a long time coming, what with one thing after another. I think it turned out great!
Our next event is Books, Books, Books on Saturday, 17SEP2022, at the Groff Center in Lancaster. There’s us and fifty-some other authors so you’ll have a wide variety of genres to choose from. It should be a fun event, for us and for readers.
Then, Saturday, 1OCT2022, is the Chocolate Town Book Festival! We’ll be sharing Chocolatetown Park (the intersection of Chocolate Avenue and Cocoa Avenue) with a wide variety of writers. It promises to be a great day, so come on out.
The Hershey Public Library is sponsoring the book festival and they have plans to grow and grow and grow, each year bigger than the year before.
You’ll notice that these three events have something in common. They take place in the real world and that means physical books. It’s not necessary to have physical books to have a successful writing career. Plenty of indie authors produce eBooks only and are happy sticking to that format.
But if you want a signing at your library, you have to have real, printed-on-paper books. If you want a book to show your technophobe grandmother what you write, only a “real” book will do.
Laying out a trade paperback can be learned. It helps if you’ve already got layout skills or a good eye. If you don’t, copy your layout from an existing book that’s in your genre and you like how it looks. Have similar margins, use the same arrangement of front matter and back matter, headers and footers, and the like.
We’ve got plans for a book called No-Cost Publishing that will let anyone publish their writing. It will include a chapter on laying out a trade paperback. Since we have zero idea of when that book will see print (within the next five years?), I’ll let you do your own research online. As with eBook formatting, if you’re detail-oriented and can follow directions, you’ll manage.
Trade paperback layout is worth learning because it’s very expensive compared to formatting an eBook. That’s because each page is a separate element. Changing font size can result in a book multiple pages shorter or longer. Changing the size of the book itself can result in the book being multiple pages shorter or longer.
But right here, right now, I’ll assume you’ve figured out how to get your book turned into paper and are considering printing costs. I can’t write anything more substantial mainly because Bill does our trade paperback layout so I rely on his expertise.
With the book laid out for printing, you’re now faced with two choices:
Offset printing (how books are traditionally printed)
Print-On-Demand (essentially Xeroxing and binding)
There’s no question that offset printing, involving huge printing presses, produces not just a top-quality book. It also costs you, dear author, far less per copy. That means when you sell your book at literary festivals and comic book conventions, you earn more money.
Print-On-Demand (POD) costs you more $$ for each copy.
The choice is easy, yes? Except that offset printing requires great, big print runs to get that low cost. We’re talking several hundred to several thousand copies of your book that you have to buy and store in order to get that low per-book price.
POD books let you order only what you think you can sell.
If you believe you’ll sell several hundred copies of your book each year, then finding a local printer and ordering five hundred copies might work for you. Except, you’ve got to pay the printer a large, upfront fee leaving you with a mountain of inventory that might not sell as well as you’d hoped. Consider how much space 500 books, each 6 by 9, and each 300 pages long will occupy.
Now multiply that space by each of your titles. If you’ve written 31 titles (like us) that’s 500 x 31 or 15, 500 books you need to store. Hope you have enough room in your climate-controlled garage. And that you had enough money to pay the printer upfront. In addition to tying up your cash, your mountain of books might get shopworn just from sitting around collecting dust and having cats sleep on them. They have to be stored cool, dry, in the dark, kept mildew-free, and safe from silverfish and mice (hence the cats).
It’s perfectly possible that your local printer can print a smaller run. But the smaller the run, the higher the cost per book.
This is where POD books come in. The books cost you more, sometimes as much as a few dollars per copy more. Accept that going in. But if you don’t know how many copies of a given title you’ll sell, then order a dozen POD copies and find out. You may be pleasantly surprised when your book flies off your table at the local literary festival and you sell out.
Or you may realize after a few years that no one wants your book and you end up quietly donating copies to every Little Free Library within driving distance.
Some printers are now offering an in-between stage. Although we haven’t yet done this, we’ve been told some printers offer a POD service but with a minimum order of 25 units. Twenty-five copies isn’t a huge amount and if you can pick up the book in person and save yourself the shipping costs, it will cost less per copy than buying your PODs two or three at a time. It’s worth checking to see what’s available in your area.
In the meantime, there are online services that will do POD and ship the finished books to you for use at your events.
We use Amazon for our Print-On-Demand author copies that we resell.
We recommend Amazon for POD.
I can say plenty about the Zon’s impact on indie bookstores, but the fact remains that they don’t charge a setup fee, their quality is good, they’re fast compared to the competition, and you can order as many or as few copies as you like. In addition, Amazon will sell and deliver your trade paperbacks to their online customers so you don’t have to do that fulfillment.
Amazon’s not competitive at selling your books to a wider distribution; that is, bookstores and libraries. They don’t offer a volume discount or a break on shipping if you order large quantities. But if individual readers want to buy their physical copies directly from them? They’re great.
But you don’t have to take my word for it. Reedsy did a nice piece on the subject: https://blog.reedsy.com/print-on-demand-books/
In the end, your decision depends on your needs. But when you’re starting out and you have no idea how many books you’ll be able to physically sell, POD is your friend.
Thanks again for joining us and we hope we’ll meet you, dear reader, in person at one of our events. Then you can look over Bill’s fabulous layouts and evaluate our Print-On-Demand books yourself. They can look just as good as anything a traditional publisher produces.
See you next month!