CHAPTER & VERSE

In the months before retirement I finally decided what I wanted to do for the next few years. I wanted to write books (local - meaning Norfolk - mainly history, with an occasional novel thrown in), design them, and publish them myself. Thus the embryo idea of Elmstead Publications was born. In anticipation of the great event I bought a new PC with PageMaker software, and even went on a short course to learn how to use it. When actual retirement finally came around, in 1993, I was thus more or less prepared.
Initially, it went well. I found a book distributor, completed a new title (Norfolk Fragments), struggled with the software but completed the task in the end, and then searched for a printer. And it was at this moment that a problem arose. It was in 1994, remember, before Print on Demand was readily available, before small-run digital printing had expanded, before Amazon's influence had begun to make its mark in our corner of the woods, and before web sites were easily available.
The first printer I approached who would accept my book (illustrations, full pagination) entirely on disk, said his minimum print run was 15,000. For economic reasons, he could not do anything smaller. I doubted if my modest title would attract that amount of interest. Then a second printer, citing similar reasons, plucked a minimum run of 5,000 out of the air. It was still not ideal, and I managed to talk him down to a run of 3,000 copies.
During the next seven years I produced seven titles. Sales turned out to be disappointingly small, and I made not the slightest profit on any of them. But I enjoyed it - getting several long-planned books out of my system - even though the admin and the paperwork was a serious distraction. Then I realised this vanity thing - if it was actually vanity - was costing me more and more time and money, and in the end I called a halt and sold off the remainder of the stock.
But time and money were not the main reasons I stopped.The fact was I no longer knew how to market or price titles. By this time, of course, we were into the 21st century and life in the literary world was changing fast. And is still changing. It all got above my head.
Take sales. You produced a new title, most often in the summer, and placed it in the shops at the full (unit cost plus a tiny profit) price. By late August, however, shopkeepers were looking for reduced price stock for Christmas, followed by greatly-reduced price stock for the January sales (which seemed to go on into May). In effect, this meant that I could charge the full price only in a 'window' lasting a few weeks in June and July. After that, cheapies and loss-makers ruled the roost. And the second year? Well, my title was now 'old stock,' and needed to be reduced even further.
But that was not the end of it, because some shops became increasingly unhelpful. One chain, for example, announced it was shortening the shelf life of its local books and that any unsold copies (which had already been bought and paid for by the chain) had to be returned to the publisher (dog-eared by now, of course) and the original shop purchase price refunded. I declined, of course, and lost that outlet. Another blow was that the local library service, which had previously bought 50 copies of almost any new title for its library branches, now switched tactics. Instead of a book in each branch, they bought only two copies, and moved the titles around the branches.
So with inroads into the book market eating away at the economics, I found (a) that I didn't have enough of a market left, and (b) didn't know how to price titles in order to at least try to cover costs. I suppose I'm just one more unsatisfied author with a cupboard full of unpublished manuscripts.