On the Economics of Small Presses
At World Fantasy this year, Scott Andrews of Beneath Ceaseless Skies gave a speech about the economics of short fiction magazines. His point was that, while they pay writers very well, and pay people such as slush readers, they mostly don’t pay the actual editors. This, Andrews maintained, meant that only people with a substantial amount of personal privilege could afford to be an editor, and that necessarily limited the diversity of the field.
Andrews was specifically talking about short fiction magazines, but he did add that he thought that similar issues affected small presses, and he is dead right. When I started Wizard’s Tower, I promised myself that the company would not lose money. Technically it makes a small profit each year, but that’s only because if I charged all of my convention travel to expenses it would make a big loss and the tax man would get suspicious. So I mostly account for things like flights and hotel bills as my hobby. I’d be going anyway, regardless of whether I’d be selling books.
Clearly I have a lot of privilege to be able to do this. I have a reasonable income from other work. My time is fairly flexible. And these days I get a state pension as well. So I’m old, white and fairly comfortably off, which is what people tend to think of when it comes to privilege. I would like to publish a more diverse range of writers, but I suspect that a lot of the people I’d like to work with either wouldn’t trust me, or would not want to be associated with me. There’s not a lot I can do about that. Thankfully I have managed to publish a number of stories by trans people, which makes me happy.
But the economics of small presses skews strangely in other ways. There is a hierarchy when it comes to who gets paid. I don’t take a salary at all, so all of the layouts, the admin and what marketing I can manage to get done is all unpaid. I don’t pay the authors an advance, but I do pay royalties. That means that the authors are taking a risk that their books will sell well, and that therefore they’ll get some decent money. That works for some, but not for others.
There are other people who are needed to get a book out. You need a cover artist, and unless the author is very experienced you need an editor. Even the best authors will produce better books if they are edited. These people are freelance professionals and they expect to get paid market rates. Most people who work with small presses don’t get the sort of money they would get if they were working for a mainstream publisher, but they do expect a decent rate. What’s more they expect to put their prices up on a regular basis. Over the 13 years that Wizard’s Tower has been running, the costs have gone up quite a bit.
Let’s look at an example. Suppose I have to pay £400 for a cover, and another £400 to an editor. If I only do an ebook there are no additional costs except the ISBN. Suppose I sell it on Amazon at £5. That means I get £3.50 per copy, if Amazon don’t discount it. That means I would have to sell just shy of 230 copies to break even. But that assumes no money to the author. I probably need to sell nearer 500 copies. The chances of that are not good. And all this is without considering a paperback edition, where the costs are higher and the margins razor-thin.
With those numbers, the author would be getting a little over £800 for the book, which is not to be sniffed at. But in terms of an hourly rate it is still way less than the cover artist and editor are getting. Writing a novel takes a long time.
There are, of course, people out there prepared to do a job for “mates rates”. But that just leaves the publisher feeling guilty about not having paid the going rate, and wondering when someone is going to call her out for exploiting people.
It would be nice if I could put the prices of the books up. I’ve had to do it with the paper editions because the cost of paper went through the roof over the past few years. Putting the prices of ebooks up is only going to lead to lower sales.
As a result, I’m not sure how much longer I can do this. I’m not going to invest £1000 or so in each book with little hope of getting the money back, because I promised myself that I would not run the company at a loss. Also I don’t fancy being investigated by the tax man. It is all very challenging, and not sustainable in the long run.