ifounditinbooks is basically non-profit. I’ve saved what little I’ve made (little is possibly a big word for it…) and I dream of making some books. I’ve dreamt that for a while. But just what will that take? Let’s explore it.
I read Secrets of MicroPublishing: For Those Who Aspire to Publish and I read Publisher Not Found: A Decade of Disruption, 404 Ink 2016 – 2026. I saw the stylish work of Fitzcarraldo Editions, and reviewed a few of their books, and listening to founder Jacques Testard’s interview at The Book Club Review. That’s after reading Diana Athill’s Stet and Roberto Calasso’s The Art of the Publisher a few years ago.
I was aware that founding publishers is something that people can do since I heard Penguin Random House’s marketing proverb about Allen Lane seeing a business opportunity in railway station shops. I heard tales of old indie SF publishers on youtube. I joined the Fly on the Wall Press Publishing Academy to learn about the state of the industry on the professional side.
From this research it seems to me (as of today, and oh how I imagine that will change) that a few things are true:
- Making books is something you can easily do with a bit of money
You really just need a text, a printer, and a cover artist. Going by a lot of modern indie and self-published efforts, you barely need the latter. If you think about what you’re doing (it currently seems to me) you can probably do better style-wise than the worst efforts of the ‘big four’ monopoly publishers. Possibly a lot better.
- Making money from making books is hard
I want the thing to work on its own. ‘Wash its face’ as the unusually crisp idiom has it. I don’t want to have to make applications to the arts council (Publisher Not Found makes it clear that though this is fantastic, and enables more cultural production, it doesn’t necessarily make it easier.) I have a separate full time job and two bookshops to stock.
Maybe for the future, but for now I think that, since ifound is lucky in that we can sell books through the bar cafés and through eBay, we have a chance of being okay as long as we take it at our own pace. The things that cause cash flow issues are the ‘futures’ – distributor costs and retail returns etc. (and… wages.) So, avoiding those ‘futures’ is the safest option. Commissioning costs, royalties, printing costs, and marketing, are all easy to structure and pay in a predictable way, invoice and order based, and this will be made evident in any agreements with authors, artists etc. This will complicate my relationship with the normal book distribution system.
In order to smooth the amount of money coming in and out from book to book, which is something that always comes up when talking of the issues of publishing, the publisher could build series which will aim to be collected (as a lot of crowd funded publishers do, though I don’t much like the idea of crowdfunding at the moment – maybe for the future.) We can mix copyright free texts, whose authors died more than 75 years ago (copyright ends at that point, generally) with modern translations and novellas. We will have slow and steady expansion, without wide swings in the current account. Small is beautiful, and small is less apt to collapse spectacularly. I’m thinking extremely small. Micropublishing is the term for it. This is me, as owner/manager (god help us) commissioning people whose work I like, and probably my friends, to do set work.
- The form of the publisher is weird, and the internet makes it weirder
Our publisher, as I see it, should basically be a body which organises text production in order to try and stimulate a kind of cultural production, in order to give direction to, organise and remunerate artists and writers, so they can spend more time creating, rather than interacting with publics and other producers. Part marketer, part supplier, part commissioner, part paragon of style. This is all for the reader, the buyer, appreciative of something beautiful, interesting, and well thought through.
So a bit like a guild, which I’d guess the publisher as form descended out of. There are an incredible number of ways to go about organising that, now we have the internet, which brings digital editions, subscriptions, etc. etc. Things are perhaps easier to connect, but wilder. Lots of things big publishers do, that we don’t have to. The business form is incredibly contingent in general.
The legal form of the publisher is also odd. Maybe I’ll go more into this as we progress, but at the moment the main relevant legal aspect seem to be the commissioning agreements, copyright, and the fact that we need to give each book an ISBN/barcode and supply a copy of each book to the British Library. Books are VAT free objects, which must lead to some legal weirdness around book production in the country, and I’d like to look into that further as we go too.
- There are a lot of random publishing conventions which can be changed
People make big books, and they’re expensive to produce. But small books are easier to use and cheaper to produce. Paragon indie Fitzcarraldo use beautiful paper, embossed and with flaps, but they’re still pretty big and probably expensive, even without the ink for illustrations. The Fitz is an insider publisher, using the means and methods of the mainstream, in a sense, also – founded by insiders. 404 ink tried to make smaller books, and disrupt, but they also charged a lot less for them, founded by outsiders, I believe. These are kind of stars in the firmament to orient ourselves by.
Hardbacks are just horrible to interact with, in general, for a modern reader, as they just ache to be placed on a reading table and have their pages turned with a special stick. But we’re mostly walking around, or on buses, and we need a little book that goes in your bag next to your phone. Paperback only, this much is evident for me. Style wise as well. And then there’s the digital question. A question for a post of its own.
We can make random and interesting leaps in format, typography and presentation, as we’re small and we can do whatever the f*** we want as long as we can sell it though. We can do classics in sans-serif font (shock horror.) I love the idea of going back to A format, which was the main format in the UK until the 80s where (proverbially) Picador was so fantastically stylish that they forced an industry wide change (a bit like the Fitz is doing now with Penguin modern classics, which are coming out in Fitzcarraldo x Penguin format.)
We can use as many imprints as we want, because imprints are essentially style guides with a logo, and aren’t legal entities. I’m thinking we can have one uniform format, with four or five different imprints.
These are all just notes dashed out on the bus.
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The last part of the first is this: there remains a question I ask myself four or five times a week. Isn’t it stupid to found a publisher now? A waste – ecologically? (Another post needed for that too.) Isn’t the smartphone, the computer, the future of cultural production? Isn’t the paradigm format of text the microblogging platform or the email newsletter blog?
My first answer is, maybe, but I don’t care (apart from about the ecological bit.) The second is: books still sell, this I know. They’re beautiful objects when made well, and things that people like to have on shelves in their homes. Like candles, records, etc. they are a factor in people’s aesthetic self creation. They feel nice on your hand, and sit quietly, occasionally whispering, unlike a horrible little bit of black glass which is constantly vibrating trying to get your attention. I feel optimistic about them, and any optimism I have must be hard won in general. But I also think there are cogent arguments to the effect that a book is functionally superior in certain contexts, to a computer, for information transfer and tactile, haptic reasons.
Next post, I’ll go into a couple more books I’m reading on publishers and publishing. As the project develops, I’ll develop more thoughts here. On the form of the publisher, the contracts, the name, the style, the legality, the ecology, and anything else that seems interesting. And you can follow along with the madcap endeavour.
My name’s Adam, I run ifounditinbooks, and I want to make some books.
ifounditinbooks 