Publishing

So, how are we doing in the publishing enterprise department?

Yesterday I applied a little English-major math to a moment of taking stock.

The goal is to have an inventory of 100 short works online by the end of March. The 18 Fire-Rider serials count toward that total, as will any boxed sets the several contract authors and I can create for the series we dream up.

We can do that. Given what we have in hand now, reaching our goal will require us to publish 9 items a month. That’s two creative items per month, per worker.

Assuming The Copyeditor’s Desk retains its bread-and-butter client (never a safe assumption…but then, what is?), and assuming none of our efforts ever turns a dime, at the end of six months — on March 31 — we will almost break even: we’ll be $86 in the hole.

Here’s how this looks in Excel:

Yes. That’s right. I am trying to capitalize a business on $7500. That would be the very definition of “a long shot.”

However. I think it ‘s unlikely that our publications will earn nothing, zero point zero-zero dollars. For hevvinsake, Slave Labor turns a couple of bucks every month…and who in their right mind would want to read that thing?

So, if an obscure book on a subject no one cares about (if anyone cared, we wouldn’t have adjuncts) can sell a few copies with almost no active marketing, a passel of rollicking sexy tales should find their readers, sooner or later. The bet on the come (heh) (sorry) (writing this stuff is not good for you…) ( 🙄 ) is that at least some of our bookoids will find them sooner, not later.

So, I believe we have a good shot of at least breaking even, with a decent probability of staying afloat for an additional six months, after which the vessel will either unfurl its sails and take off across the bounding main or…sink.

The gigantic albatross in that metaphor is the sheer quantity of time-consuming work involved in supervising writers, formatting documents, dealing with various bureaucratic requirements, keeping the books, publishing the stuff, and trying to market it. The time suck leaves just about zero space for writing.

Today, for example, Saturday: For the first time in weeks, I took off exactly one-half day to junket around town with a friend.

Shouldn’t have done that. Because…today I need to post another Fire-Rider episode, post widgets at three websites (to build ONE widget takes exactly 12 ditzy steps), post notices on the few social media I have going, figure out how to build an author’s page on Goodreads, figure out first whether I have more than one “author’s page” so as to create sites for our pseudonymous authors…but first figure out why this computer is entering the characters ...is while my fingers are burning through …uter, a process that undoubtedly will entail closing out of everything, shutting down, and rebooting…a distracting process that will interfere with deciding whether to hire a subcontractor to format copy for Smashwords (which entails deciding whether to go with Smashwords at all, not a slam-dunk by any means) or whether to find someone who would format the MSS only for Nook and then go out and find such a person, first figuring out how to assess applicants’ alleged skills and also while I’m at it writing a contract for such persons, then try to figure out how to do a Facebook page that will preclude FB from blitzing my churchly friends with announcements for salacious novelettes and also try to figure out how to block FB from learning very much about me and my business since it’s none of FB’s damn business and while I’m at it do a little research on the cost/benefit ratio and efficacy of FB ads and…can you count up the number of hours these adventures will consume on the fingers of one hand?

Claro, if this bidness is going to thrive, I’m not going to be doing much writing. My job is going to be project management. Not quite what I signed on for…but still. Better than teaching freshman comp.

I figure that to stay solvent — that doesn’t include making a noticeable profit — Camptown Races Press will have to net about $1,200 to $1,500 a month, by the end of March. If it isn’t earning that much and I still can’t do any writing because I’m too busy doing all the housekeeping and marketing, then we’re sunk. We’ll have to cut back on producing the smut or I’ll have to take on two more jobs I’m not qualified to do — cover design and complicated computer file formatting. Or throw in the towel.

At a net return on sales of $2.09 per bookoid (optimistic!), we would have to sell about 575 copies to achieve a $1,200 revenue. That’s a little less than six copies per title.

Is that an unreasonable number? It may not be, especially since we’re talking about sexually oriented fiction. Sex does sell. However, it will never do to forget that most books posted on Amazon sell fewer than one copy per month. A bunch of theories tend to convince writers and publishers that sales increase as product volume increases. The leading hypothesis, as far as I can tell, is that your backlist feeds your new book sales and your new book sales feed your backlist sales.

That’s a little circular for my taste. I’d love to believe it’s true — and indeed, the throw of my dice is predicated, to some degree on this claim — but I’ll believe it when I see it.

What drives sales — of books as of any other product or service — is strong marketing. People who have the drive and commitment to build a large backlist also have the drive and motivation to build a strong marketing campaign. Thus the backlist-new sales feed loop is an illusion: such a publisher’s success with sales has less to do with the number of products as with determination to market the products.

So. My job right now is to learn how to market on the Internet and then to do it.