The Secret Life of a Publishing Company – Part III

March 8, 2024 | By Women Writers Women Books | Reply More

The Secret Life of a Publishing Company – Part III

Welcome to Part III of The Secret Life of a Publishing Company. Part I outlined the motivation for setting up Inkspot Publishing in the first place. Part II presented the blueprint for action, the steps required to bring a book to life. This third instalment is all about mistakes, by which I mean our mistakes. Doubtless, we could have blundered in multiple ways, and in fact we could have made egregious mistakes without even realising it, but in listing the ones I’m aware of, I hope to save others from repeating them.

Some of our errors seem so embarrassingly obvious, but here goes:

Unless you have an army of staff, never launch two books simultaneously. Your stress levels will hit the roof. Our debut launch was for two books. The upside was that we just had one launch party to organise, but in retrospect, the marketing hype for both books was somewhat diminished. All future titles will be single releases, with at least a couple of months on either side.
Give yourself extra time for everything. Don’t rush. Good books don’t spoil. When you decide on a publication date, add an extra month, unless you’re aiming for the Christmas market. You will thank yourself for your foresight. If you are aiming for a Christmas launch, make sure you have all your ducks in a row by Easter at the latest.
It’s tempting to go for huge print runs, as the incremental cost of additional books becomes incredibly cheap. Restrain yourself. In the first place, you’ll need that money for other things (‘What other things?’ I hear you ask. Trust me. Other things.) Secondly, you will have to sell your stocks, and until you do, you will pay for storage. We have a remaining ten months to sell our stocks of All Grown Up and Fireweed. After that, the storage costs eat into any savings we made on the print runs.
Don’t spend a huge amount of money on a launch party. It was fun and we had a blast, but we also had a lot of thirsty guests who enthusiastically guzzled our top notch wine and scoffed our very fancy canapés. The book sales at the event did not remotely cover the catering bill. Of course it’s important to celebrate: if it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a small town to launch a book. It’s a monumental achievement. But in future, it’ll be cheap plonk and peanuts all the way.

There is a frequent mistake that small publishers and indie authors make which I do not believe we are guilty of: we have not relied on content alone to sell books. We have backed our titles with great PR and advertising. When I consider the vast marketing budgets of the big guys, it would be vain in the extreme to think that we can rely on word of mouth alone.

Beyond mistakes, there are some drawbacks that I did not foresee. One of our authors is such a perfectionist that their book will never be finished. They are constantly refining, editing and adding new material. Apparently, Claude Monet’s agent had to periodically march to his house in Giverny and wrestle his canvases out of his hands. Otherwise, the great man would paint and repaint over and over, never regarding his work as finished. At some point soon, I will have to rip the manuscript from the hands of this obsessive author. One day, they will thank me. Every child has to leave home one day, and it’s better that they do so before they become irremedially spoilt.

Another author had to stop work on a memoir because their initial catharsis morphed into trauma. Some of the events depicted in their book have been so triggering that they have required therapy and time off work. I’m delighted to say that our author is now recovered and back at the drawing board again, but for this particular book, we have slowed the whole process down, and we check in constantly to ensure that our author is a-ok. I’m truly full of admiration for people who write so intimately about their own lives; I would only ever contemplate doing so once everyone I ever knew was dead.

To be successful in this business, you need to think big and dream big, no matter how micro you are. Most indie publishing firms are kept in bread and butter by the success of one or two books. All the others are carried in the wake of these successes. The beauty of publishing is that books have long tails. I have no doubt that ours will be read with as much enjoyment in ten, twenty, fifty years’ time as they are now. We’re playing the long game. Lots of hard work and a little bit of luck is bound to do the trick.

If I haven’t yet put you off, it would be remiss of me not to give the following warning: If you decide to become a publisher, your To-Do-List will be eternally full. You will forever be busy, pre-occupied with multiple tasks and your work will never be done. There will always be something demanding your attention. Imagine having homework every day for the rest of your life. So if you don’t do it for love, don’t do it at all. But … to filch a quote from Mark Twain: ‘Find a job you enjoy and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.’

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Catherine Evans, Cathy Horlick, Silver Apples Photography

Catherine Evans was born in South Africa and grew up in Swaziland and Malawi. After a degree in English Literature and Psychology with UNISA (the University of South Africa), she worked in the City for twenty years. She is currently a Non-Executive Director for Phoenix Copper Limited, which focuses on the exploration of green metals in Idaho, USA. She lives in Oxfordshire with her husband and daughter. She also has three stepdaughters. She is the author of The Wrong’un. All Grown Up is her second book. She set up Inkspot Publishing with Jurcell Virginia in 2022.

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