I’ve been very fortunate to have a few folks who follow me, and are very kind enough to buy my books. I am now working on book no.6. Something I never thought I’d hear myself say. Getting book no.1 off the ground always felt like a momentous thing to achieve. A dream.
There are a few things we have learned over the years of designing and printing books. I think this post today is really to cover one question I get asked a lot: “will there be a reprint, as I missed out on the last book?”. The answer is always no, and there are very strong reasons for no reprints. So I’d like to go over them. But first we need to go back to the first book I printed and discuss some of the things we learned upon first print.
No.1 Over-personalising it
There is this common understanding in house buying that folks who buy a second home to rent out, tend to over-personalise it. They tend to get carried away and before you know it, they’ve spent so much money on the 2nd home that it almost negates the purpose of buying the 2nd home as an investment to make some additional income each month by renting it out.
The same can be true about printing your first book. Looking back, I went for the grandest format I could. It was large, it was hardback, and at first I tried to go for the best paper quality available. I even went overboard on the dust jacket which was double layered. Over the months that I worked with the printer in China, the cost of the book escalated, and before I knew it, I was wondering how I was going to break even printing it. Printing a hard back quality coffee table book is very costly. We’re talking about over 20K depending on the specification.
Since that first book, both myself and my friend Darren - who is the main designer behind the books I print, have tried to get as economical as we can. A fine balance between value for money and print quality / presentation, without there being a detriment to one or the other. It’s a hard balancing act, but we’ve learned that it’s all too easy to get obsessed with your book - particularly your first one - and go overboard on it.
No.2 Volume
When I originally began talking to a printer about my first book, I had thought that 3,000 copies would be a reasonable size of print run. My friend Neil Mclwraith who owns Beyond Words book shop assured me that ‘whatever print run you go for, you are usually left with about half of it rotting in a basement’. He was not wrong.
Even though I had revised the print run down to 1,000 copies, I found the order arrived on three full pallets and it took a whole day to move off the street and into a climate controlled room in the office I shared with friends. It took about 5 to 6 years to sell all the books. This is related to the initial question ‘will there be a reprint?’.
No.3 Storing of books
Storing books is difficult. They need to be kept somewhere that is dry, and at a constant temperature each year. They are also bulky and very heavy. Garage will not work. The books will get damp. Attic is just as bad due to the temperature fluctuations that will happen over the years you are storing them. You need a climate controlled, damp free room, which for most people printing a book will mean some spare room in their house. And for 1,000 books, that’s an awful lot of space.
No.4 Postage costs / weight
Printing a large book can make it almost cost-prohibitive to buy, if you intend to post it. There is a 2KG limit here in the UK where prices rise considerably once you hit that limit. Most hard backs can easily be around 1.5 kg without a slipcase, and then over 2kg with the slipcase and packaging included.
This is why my book ‘Colourchrome’ was small. We had a bad reaction to the unwieldy size of the first book that we figured a small book would be easier to ship, and less troublesome too in terms of handling (book boxes are extremely heavy).
Print Run / Re-evaluating
After storing old stock for such a long time, and the problems encountered with this, plus the problems of paying for stock that you cannot sell for many years, your motivation turns from ‘over-personalised-grand-project-with-no-expense-spared’ to ‘simple-elegant-economical-small-print-size-small-production-run’, and the print run is reduced for this single reason:
Book Sales over time
The first six weeks is when most folks will buy a copy of your book upon promoting it. If you’re lucky to have a following at all, then you might sell a lot of copies in that first six weeks. But once the book has been out for more than that, interest drops off quite dramatically.
For my first book ‘Art of Adventure’, we found that by the 2nd month, there were almost no sales at all. Perhaps one or two books would sell a month, but if you consider that you sold 300 copies in the first month, and almost nothing in the 2nd month, you soon realise that it’s going to take a long time to sell the remaining 900 copies that you just stock piled in your spare room.
What’s your market size?
So the question soon comes down to - how many people follow you, and more importantly, how many of them are willing to buy your book? That, in my view only comes over producing a number of titles. Which is where I am today.
I have discovered that I tend to have enough interest in the first month to sell around 300 copies. After that month, interest is almost zero, and sure, I will keep selling copies of the book over the coming year or two, but very very slowly.
So it soon became apparent to me that looking for a print run of 300 copies was my ‘sweet spot’. And this has been backed up by Neil who told me that most independent photographers should really opt for a print run of around 500 copies max for any book they want to get printed.
So back to the original question: will I be doing a reprint?
As you can probably see from my detailed explanation above, trying to sell an edition of a book is pretty hard to begin with if you print more than the initial interest for the first six weeks or so. So the chances of even doing a reprint of the book is very highly unlikely.