Sakura of DOOM

(Video ID: a white person with short reddish hair and gold-rimmed glasses sits before a bookshelf and talks. /end ID)

Transcript: This is a long question so bear with me.

I’d like to hear about some of the structural challenges that make it hard for indie presses to compete with trad pub. For example, I know distribution is a huge challenge and that the big five have the advantages of ordering bigger numbers and they can eat losses more easily because they usually have a handful of massive hits that help them absorb risk. I feel like there are a lot of invisible barriers that readers and authors don’t get to see.

Uh, yeah. I would say the ones already mentioned are big one. Getting a distribution deal is very very challenging for an indie press alone. I haven’t even tried yet. Of all of the indie press people I know, exactly one has managed it. He was trying for years. He finally did it last year. He was this close to giving up because it was that hard.

I think that, in some ways it almost ends up comparing and apples and oranges. It’s very easy to look at a small press like mine, and look at a big press like, you know, Harper Collins or Penguin or whatever, and go, “You’re in the same business.” But it’s actually kind of not. What I do is extremely different because I don’t have access to the advertising budget. I don’t have access to bookstores. I have to expect to bring in customers, readers, people who like merch, all of that, you know those people are getting brought in by completely different channels. I’ve only paid for advertising, I don’t know, maybe a dozen times, and it’s pretty much never helped. Whereas, you know, the new big release from the big five gets billboards in New York City and movie deals and all of that.

I would say that it’s apples and oranges to some extent because we’re really almost not doing even close to the same thing. Sorry, I’m just checking what else it said.

Obviously, the risk, obviously ordering higher numbers. I’m a little alarmed by how popular, like, the really fancy hardcovers with the sprayed edges are getting, because in order to even attempt to get into that market, you have to be looking at minimums of 500 lots, usually coming from China. And most of our books don’t sell 500 copies, at least not initially. Like, I can’t afford that upfront, and even if we sell 200 in a Kickstarter, what would I even do with the other 300? I run this business out of my home. Our books are stored in my basement. Like, I can’t afford a storage unit to keep this stuff. I can’t afford to front huge amounts of money for a larger print run with fancier features. So I’m really hoping that stuff like that doesn’t become the norm because it’s gonna make it a lot more challenging.

There’s also a lot of gatekeeping from multiple ctors. I run into traditionally published authors who won’t even consider indie press as, like, their equals because we didn’t jump through all of the hoops of abuse that one has to be prepared to endure in order to be traditionally published. That must mean we aren’t as good writers, or something. I know I’m perpetually annoyed with Publishers Weekly, who when we tried to get them to do a deal announcement for us, which is a service that they offer, and I believe it costs money for an announcement, it wasn’t like we were asking something for nothing, they said that they couldn’t do that because we are a vanity press.

We’re not a vanity press. That’s complete bull– I’m not supposed to curse, bleep that out. We’re not a vanity press. We don’t take money from our creators. I’ve never taken money from a creator and I never would. We just crowdfund because we don’t have the capital and the investors to cover getting everything done ahead of done and hope that it sells. It’s really frustrating how a lot of sort of traditional publishing streams, even when they’re not tradpub themselves, like someplace like Publishers Weekly, are really not interested in recognizing and supporting new ways of doing these models, given – by which I mean publishing models – given the tools and resources available.

It’s much like everything else, they’re really trying to make it a rich person’s game instead of an industry that, you know, an average middle-class person could potentially break into as a small business.

Anyway, this is already getting long. I could probably keep going. But yes, there are a lot of barriers. But I think we get around that because of the apples to oranges thing. I’m not trying to do what they’re doing. I don’t want to do what they do. I want to do what we’re doing. And that’s part of why I opened a small press – to do things differently.

Ask me anything. I own an independent publisher. Bye!