Tom Saunders Story of the Day

Oh thanks, Fish, I'm chuffed. Coming from you and all that. I've got one story in an anthology, but that's it. I've given up trying really, as far as a collection goes. The publishers in the UK aren't interested in short stories, it seems, not unless you can promise them a novel in the pipeline. And I am NOT a novelist.

I am starting to think very hard about this - inspired by the book that Kostasau sent me. Self-publishing, as opposed to vanity publishing. The costs and volumes are prohibitive, for one author - but if three or four authors got together and split the costs and each got an equal number of pages within the book and equal number copies to try to sell / give away, that would seem to be achievable. I think Kostasau's book (which is very good and people should ask him for a copy - and of course how much it is) , cost about £1200 for 500 copies. There is maybe a market here for people who would pay three quid or so for a book of short stories. Okay, they can read them for free here, but as Fish says, there is something different about a book. Also it is something to send publishers and we can mention abctales on the back cover. And no problem with the publishing rights, since the author retains all rights. (This is an Andrew idea, rather than an editor 90 idea).

A brilliant idea, Andrew! Wonder why no-one's thought of it before? And I love everything I've ever read by Tom - and have asked the same question as Fish.

yeah, i think that's not a bad idea in principle, Andrew. the problem is that practically no one buys short stories, and bookshops probably won't be prepared to stock it. it would be listed on amazon.co.uk and WHSmith's web site automatically, of course, but would need some kind of marketing campaign to make the public aware of it. perhaps Mykle could do the promotion?

Gardners books costs for self publishing are as follows: 96 page paperback 5,000 print run Colour cover Black and white text Delivery to one address Total £2819 = 56p per copy We may be able to help with this. It's unlikely we could afford to pay for this but if people want to mail me if they'd be interested in splitting the costs of a book in this way with details of how many books they'd be prepared to pay for/think they can sell, we can establish levels of interest and maybe help put it together/advertise it on the site etc. No guarantees cos Tony's not in the office so I can't promise anything. Hope this helps Cheers Em

does advertising on the site actually do anything for sales? how well did Eddie Gibbons' book sell? and would the Body Shop be prepared to stock it?

several people here have books self published one of whom is David Gardiner (SIRAT) who, no doubt, could explain this in more detail. His book, also called SIRAT is published by iUniverse who run a print on demand service. The costs are minimal - $99 or $299 depending upon the type of service you want. they help with cover design and your book is sold via amazon and other online outlets. of course, there is no promotional stuff that you get with a normal publisher and you have to rely on word of mouth and plugging your book on various websites and through your own website. (David's website is very good actually - there is a link to it in his details on this site) the beauty of this scheme is that the book is available in real print rather than just pdf format and you are not comitted to guessing how many books you might sell. oh, and the royalty is 20% rather than the 10% or less that ormal publishers use. by the way, I have not read David's book, so this is not a blatent plug for him but it is a good example of how to get published with minimum risk and financial outlay. I'm sure he can tell you more.

can it be sold through.. The Big Issue.. as well.. with those profits going to charity?

bugger forgot to post the link to the publisher http://www.iuniverse.com/publish/more_information.asp?pro_id=2

The sales are going to have to be legwork, but no printer will do less than 500 - if there are four authors, its a lot more possible that each can sell 60 or so than that one person could sell the 240 you'd need to break even. Page space means this works out better for poets than short story writers. On Emily's costs, of 96 pages, we could have maybe 10 poets, making it cost £290 each. (That would allow probably 9 poems each, not a bad return). You'd only have to sell the books for about two quid to break even (assuming that only half get sold). If you sell them for three quid, you lower the amount you have to sell. I do think this idea might actually be a goer. At the very least, we could have the books on sale at the abctales events where people are a) beered up b)enthusiastic about writing and c) needing some paper to get ladywriter's phone number / Eddie's autograph. And Sirat is wonderful. Sirat - email me and I will buy your book.

yeah, i was wondering that 1leg. i think, Andrew, that a lot of us would like to try and reach a wider audience than our grannies and other desperate (beered up) writers. what i look to abc for is a more powerful voice than my own. the Big Issue/Bodyshop/booksellers/radio stations won't talk to me. perhaps they would to abc. if, on the other hand, it's just me selling to my granny and other desperate writers (when they're sufficiently beered up), then i don't know how many people would be interested. on the subject of poetry, i think you could have more than just 10 poets. i would be happy to contribute just 1 or 2 poems, for example. (i don't think i've actually written 9 whole poems!) that said, people (unless they're your granny, or beered up abctalers) are even less likely to buy poetry than they are to buy short stories. in this world of short attention spans, ten very short stories may not be such a bad thing though. i reckon if you produced a book of ten short stories and called it something like 'Ten New Stories' - drop the short as it's offputtingly literary - and could get it stocked in the Body Shop, and advertised in the Big Issue (with all profits going to charity), and maybe advertised a bit generally, then that would be the kind of thing that would interest me. if you had a forward by Tony Cook advertising the merits of the Big Issue, ABC etc, and photos and short bios of the authors, then that might make it more worthy and accessible too.

this, of course, begs the question of who i should like to see in a short story collection. the compilation would be an art in itself. i would start with a story by perennial favourite Ivoryfishbone - quality + popularity. chapter two would be something slick and accessible by Andrea. by now, the reader should be well and truly inside the book. Marcus and Johnnygriff would have to be there, though kept apart because they're slightly similar in the spareness of their styles. something by Andrew - preferable grotesque - to break things up. something by Tom, of course. something in Funky's street-speaking style, but no talking elves or computers please. sounding pretty good to me already...

An Australian author named Matthew Reilly (Area 7, Ice Station, Temple, Contest) spent $8000 for a small print paperback print run of his first novel, Contest. He then went to every bookshop he could in Sydney (concentrating on those near the area of Sydney where a lot of the big publishers are based). He wasn't really planning on making money (or even breaking even) -- we was aiming to get discovered. And it worked. He sold enough books to get in the front window of Bookworld and a commissioning editor from Pan Macmillan (i think) saw it, picked it up, liked it... the rest is history. Big risk, though. What about a FREE weekly/monthly magazine, paid for by advertising, aimed at commuters and distributed in a similar way to the Metro, TNT etc?

Free publications no matter how basic, to distribute in any large amounts (think about how many copies of Metro and TNT go out) are generally cost prohibitive. Those that are able to sustain themselves are supported by advertising and you still need an ad sales team (who expect good salaries and commission) and a bloody good sales pitch to get this to work. I work for an international publishing company (we publish scientific journals, books and publish online) in marketing and advertising dept, so know that the marketing of any work be it science, poetry , novels or short stories is really tough. I think you have to first identify who you want to reach, then any money you plough into marketing is at least targeted at the right sector (targeted advertising is a big buzzword) I'd eventually like to see (more of) my work in print. However, for the moment reaching as many of my target audience as possible is my aim. My target audience is the 18 - 30 year old clubber, the sort that like Irvine Welsh, anthologies like Disco Biscuits, and generally getting ripped on chemicals. The great thing about them is that its easy to get a large number of them in one place at the same time - Clubs and events have capacities ranging from a couple of hundred to tens of thousands. This is where myself and some intend to distribute flyers which will direct to our website (Which I'm currently building). Flyers as an artform have a special place in the hearts of clubbers. We are going to create some club-style flyers with samples of our writing on and web address. They are incredibly inexpensive to produce and response rates (ie - %age of people who will go to the website) range between 1 and 10%. We are going to launch when the weather gets warmer - because flyer distribution outside clubs at 6am is no fun in January. I'll let you know how it goes

Hello Colin and everyone else. Thanks for telling me about this thread. I would certainly be interested in publishing a few short stories in any way that I can, but the real problem with iUniverse, 1stBooks and other Print On Demand publishers is that they are American based and it's quite expensive just to get copies shipped across to sell in this country. As far as I know there is no Print on Demand (POD) PRINTER (as distinct from publisher) in the UK, so if you publish with iUniverse you are going to have to pay the full carriage costs to get the books to England, which will add at least £1 to every copy, and takes time to organize as well. The other big problem, as you have said, is promotion, which they will not do, especially in this country. They will set up book-signings and the like for you in America, being 51% owned by Barnes & Noble, and they will circulate details to various lists and make it available on Amazon and a few other American web-based sales sites, but really the promotion is up to you. In fact I was one of their first authors, and at that time they did not charge anything but just selected what they would publish in the usual way. They were one of many publishers that I contacted by e-mail with details of my novel and where it could be downloaded and read. I am presently trying to negotiate with Bastardbooks (which I think has links with The Big Issue) to see if they would be at all interested in doing a collection of my stories. "SIRAT" was moderately successful (well, it has sold just under a 1000 and made me about £800 in total so far) because it was a "genre" book, and the Internet is full of sites devoted to sciece fiction, so it was fairly easy to tell people about it and get it reviewed on the Net. The most useful publicity was a review and author interview on Sci Fi Dimensions, which is about the best-known sci fi site, but I learned a fair bit about promoting a book from the iUnivese experience, mainly that it is a difficult and expensive thing to do on your own. I would much prefer to have a publisher in this country who would help a little bit with the promotional side, at least to the extent of getting a few pre-publication copies out for review. With oUniverse, due to the delays in getting copies across the Atlantic, it was months after the theoretical publication date before I had actual copies in my hand that I could send out. iUniverse is very good in many ways, the POD technology works well and produces nice-looking paperbacks, but trying to do it all at long range across the Atlantic is not a good idea.

Gosh, Chant... ...completely overwhelmed...honoured...blushing...an' all that. Mark K should be in there too...and Liza Granville...and..and...and...where IS Funk, anyway?

Sirat, is there any chance you could write an article about your iUniverse experience for the site and include your promotion tips learned? Think it may be of interest to quite a few people on the site. However, didn't I read something about some uproar over them keeping copyright on author's books published through them? Or am I imagining that entirely/was it another site? Do you stillr etain copyright on your book?

Judith, I for one would buy a book of yours at a club or similar gathering. If you ever want someone to flyer out side a club, I'll dot it!! (God knows, I have stood wild eyed at 4am handing out colourful bits of paper in the rain promoting my mates new night. People are much more receptive in the wee hours, than in broad daylight don't you find?) Man, you could make a killing by targeting the 18-30 age group. I look forward to checking out your website.

Chant - you are right of course, we all want to get to a wider market, but some of the costs can be offset in the way I suggested. Being realistic, even if a publisher takes one of us on, how hard do you think they're going to market an unknown poet or short story writer who isn't shagging a celebrity or on tv ? Whereas there are independent bookshops (some of whom have sections for local authors) who might be prepared to take a chance on stocking a few copies of your book on a sale or return 50-50 split basis. Picking a compilation is a little exercise I've done from time to time - very little doing a compilation tape. Realistically on numbers, based on Emily's quote (and let's face it London printers are possibly not the cheapest in the world) a 96 page book costs £3000 and you get 5000 copies. As a rough estimate then, for every page an author wants to take up in the book, they pay thirty quid (say forty for postage) and get fifty copies. That doesn't sound like a bad deal to me. It's also less difficult to tell someone how wonderful a book is if it has stuff written by other people in it - you don't have to blow your own trumpet, which is embarassing and people often undersell themselves. But telling people that a book with stories and poems by Eddie, Ivory, Julian Simpson, Tom Saunders et al in it is worth £2.50 - I think that's doable. The ideas about converting the Body Shop into a book store are probably over-ambitious, but abc does have Lisa doing PR (I don't think any of us individually have a PR person with contacts who could get some publicity). We can send the book to every publisher that takes on new people. It probably won't get anywhere, but it might, just might be more appealing for someone to read than the stack of manuscripts they get each day.

But who's gonna decide who goes in it, Andrew? You'll probably have people clamouring! Probably have to publish 4 or 5 (which might not be a bad idea, on reflection). ABC - A ABC - B ABC - C etc

This is my point Andrea - who decides who goes in it is the writers themselves - by working together we can achieve what would be impossible for people on their own, let's do it, let's buy it dot com (sorry, went off on one for a minute). You get about 500 words to a page (of prose) much less for poetry. Figure probably one poem per page (unless they're epics) So get together with some like-minded people and work out how many pages you'd want each. Once you've got 96 pages together, you're good to go. Someone (probably the person submitting the most pages) or by vote amongst the writers becomes the editor, decides on the order of pieces and can get in touch with abc, we can work out some way of getting a set of proofs and off we go. Maybe if there is the demand for a few people doing this we can try to bargain for some sort of discount. (Or advertising on the back cover - is that a possibility ?) Maybe the way to do it is to have each page assigned thirty copies of the book to the author, abc keep the rest to try to sell through the site or at events and work out some way to divvy up the proceeds with the authors concerned. (That stops us here having to decide whether we want to buy a copy of the book from Terry or from Bob, both of whom are in it and both of whom we like. )

We seem to be on the brink of starting a publishing house here! Let's say we costed out the price of getting a book printed up and then simply formed a company limited by guarantee or a partnership or call it what you will for the purpose of publishing our own work. The publishing house wouldn't need to make a profit, in fact it might even be eligible for charitable status. It could simply exist to publish the work of its membrs (or others if we wished) and we could pay the costs of each book in proportion to the number of pages we wanted to contribute. Let's say I wanted three of my stories in the book and that took up 25%of the book. I would then pay 25% of the production costs and receive 25% of the profits from sales. And so on pro rata. If I wanted a book consisting entirely of my work I would have to pay the whole of the production costs but would receive all of the sales income generated. The production costs would need to cover any incidental expenses like hiring someone to handle the administration and paper-work, registering the copyright and obtaining ISBN numbers etc. There would be several advantages in this idea over the notion of POD publishing or self-publishing as individuals. Most obviously, we would get far higher royalties from sales. Additionally the book wouldn't LOOK like a self-published item, which has negative connotations for most people, even though if someone manages to produce a film (say) without help from the big studios it's seen as a major accomplishment. Finally, as a company, however small, we could probably persuade one or more of the mainstream distributers to handle our stuff on sale or return or SOME basis, and we could negotiate collectively with the media for promotional purposes. It might need one or two full-time employees eventually, but initially maybe we could hire someone to put in a few hours on a part-time basis. There would be all kind of details to work out no doubt but on the face of it it seems like quite an exciting idea.

I like it. For me, who has been published due to pressure on my auntie's publisher. My book is called ' The square root of nothing' and I got 100 copies published for only £65...NAPC is the publishers name. My Auntie is a semi famous writer of new age/ aromatherapy treatments. I have still got 50 copies left so if anyone wants to read ( buy!) my book of short stories, poems and haiku's...email me at spaghetti_si@abctales.com I doubt you will but hey....worth a shot.. btw I did the photo and my auntie wrote a few paragraphs about it on the back.... so costs were minimal.. but how about this ABC anthology I keep hearing about... why don't we use at least one poem or short story from each person who goes on the site... If we all would buy these anthologies ...then the costs would pay for themselves.

Sorry Emily, I see I haven't replied to what you asked. < Sirat, is there any chance you could write an article about your iUniverse experience for the site and include your promotion tips learned? Think it may be of interest to quite a few people on the site. However, didn't I read something about some uproar over them keeping copyright on author's books published through them? Or am I imagining that entirely/was it another site? Do you stillr etain copyright on your book? > I haven't got a great deal to say about iUniverse. They do what they claim, publish your book, technically they seem to do a reasonably good job, although they are (or were) quite slow, and if you aren't US based you really have to do all promotion work yourself. Also due to being printed in the 'States your book is going to be relatively expensive in this country, and you're going to have to import the copies yourself. You don't have any say in the cover price, and even for the American market your book is going to cost a bit more than books from the big publication houses. That is true of any small publishing house doing small print-runs. Royalties on sales are a bit better than with a conventional publisher because it is "print on demand", they don't print books and then fail to sell them, so their overheads are very low. Distributers don't like them very much because they won't accept returns, which seems to be a big issue in America. People buy books, bring them back a few days later and expect their money back! Nevertheless one of the big American distributers has taken them on (Ingrams) but it does not distribute outside the USA. Again you have to make your own arrangements. Barnes & Nobles carry a small stock of the more popular POD books (including, I'm happy to say, mine) in its American shops, but not in its one and only UK branch in London. I think iUniverse (or its equivalent, because a few more POD publishers have appeared now) makes good sense if your book is one you can sell pretty well exclusively through Amazon and the Web-based sales sites, and if it is something you can promote yourself in one way or another. Looking back, the only little dispute I had with iUniverse was over the cover art for "SIRAT", and maybe I was a bit too picky. I didn't like their first suggestion and asked for changes, then didn't much like the new version and wanted more changes, but I didn't get them! I believe you can now supply your own cover art if you're paying the $99, so this probably wouldn't arise now. I think they've got a lot quicker as well, my book took nearly a year to come out which is no better than most conventional publishers. I think it was all a bit chaotic back then, probably a lot better now. My experience is a couple of years back - I'm not sure that I would be the best person to write the article. I think the best thing I could do is write to a few people who have used iUniverse more recently than I have and ask them for their comments or a short article. Would that be okay? Re the copyright, no, that is retained by the author in the usual way but iUniverse gets the (paper) publication rights for the US only for a period of two years after the publication date. Much the same terms as most publishers, I think.

Sirat, thanks for your useful postings. I like your co-operative publishing house idea. There is certainly enough material on this site (<11, 000 pieces) for an excellent book or two or three.. Assuming persons would like to get their material published. Count me in.

Sirat, thanks for your useful postings. I like your co-operative publishing house idea. There is certainly enough material on this site (<11, 000 pieces) for an excellent book or two or three.. Assuming persons would like to get their material published. Count me in.

That's two pages, Leg - 80 quid, please!