Grant Funded Publishing

Diary of a Micro-Press, Week 5 - in which I chat to the Books Council of Wales

The big question with small press publishing is how to fund it. There are basically three models: (1) the publisher funds it, out of their own pocket, and through providing in-house services; (2) a hybrid model, where author and publisher split costs; and (3) the grant-funded model, where a third party supplies the money to cover some or all of the costs of publishing.

I guess there is also a fourth model, where the author covers all costs, but this is either vanity publishing, or else the sorts of paid services that self-publishers often utilise (such as through Reedsy, where I myself am a designer). There’s nothing wrong with the latter, as it’s not really “publishing”; you’re simply hiring people to help realise your book project. But vanity publishing is justly despised because, while it pretends to be “publishing”, it is actually simply the purchase of services – and which can often turn out to be overpriced and lacking in quality.

So, to get back to the three main options:

Option (1) is preferable in terms of optics and accessibility, because there is no financial barrier for authors: the costs and risks are borne by the publisher, who is investing in the author and their future success. This is usually the model favoured by most traditional, mainstream publishers. The downside of this approach for small publishers is that most do not have deep enough pockets to subsidise it. Either you’re supplying in-house services gratis in the hope that the book will reimburse you down the line (good luck with that…), or else you are paying for those services you can’t provide in-house. In my own situation, for instance, I’m a writer of fiction and non-fiction, a professional illustrator, cover designer and typesetter/formatter. So, if I were determined to do as much as I could myself, all that’s left is to hire a copy editor and proofreader. And if I’m honest, this is probably my currently favoured option. But aside from the fact that all the in-house work would be unpaid, and my cover design skills might not suit all styles of book, there’s still the question of where the money would come from to fund the out-of-house costs (proofreading, copy editing, printing, distribution and marketing). I imagine that many small presses are partnerships or small teams that possess all the skills needed, but those individuals are still working on spec, and it’s difficult to attract prospective partners on that basis.¹

Which is where the other options come in. Option (2), the hybrid model, asks the author to split costs, usually 50-50. The downside is that it begins to look a bit vanity-pressish. Prospective authors are often advised to consider any request to pay fees as a red flag – and rightly so. This is not to say that there aren’t reputable hybrid presses² – e.g. Lendal Press (which I hope will be the subject of a future interview) – but there is still the question of how that 50% of costs/in-house labour is funded.

Option (3), grant funding, seems to sidestep many of these issues, and it was for this reason that I contacted the Books Council of Wales, to see whether that might work for WoodPig Press. I spoke to Dr Ashley Owen, the BCW’s Publishing Development Officer for writing in English, who told me that if you run a publishing house/small press, and you’re based in Wales, then you are eligible for a number of publishing grants, the most relevant of which for me would be an Individual Literary Book Grant, which can then be used to contribute towards those pesky out-of-house costs. This may not only help fund cover design, typesetting, editing and proofreading, but also production costs, marketing, and even a modest author advance. “And these are grants, not loans?” I asked, a little incredulously, ever looking for the catch in the small print. Yes, grants.

OK! This looks like a viable thing, then!

Of course, there are some caveats and conditions. As already stated, the press needs to be run by someone who is based in Wales, but the projected book does not have to be in Welsh.³ The largest grant is £3,300. I did some quick maths (always a dangerous enterprise where my brain is concerned), and estimated that – based on the current going rates⁴ – a typical book would cost around £8,000. This includes the cost of printing (a minimum of 60 copies is required to be stored in BCW’s warehouse), marketing, cover design, formatting/typesetting for print and ebook, developmental and copy editing, proofreading, and other sundry costs. BCW also ask that your projected sales be taken into account. So, for example, if I envision a modest £500 as the first 18 months’ sales, then the amount of money I need to produce the book is still £7,500.

However, if we assume that developmental editing, cover design and typesetting would be me and my unpaid minions, then that leaves (conveniently) about £3,500 in out-of-house costs (the ILBG does not cover in-house costs), which leaves … (£3,500 minus £3,300) … a shortfall of only £200. That’s not bad.

Though of course, remember, there’s still the question of how those in-house costs will be covered. Unfortunately, you cannot use grant money to fund hybrid publishing, which is understandable. So, I couldn’t make up the shortfall with author contributions. However, this would not stop the press from also publishing non-grant-funded books via a hybrid model, so maybe I could do both, using different models for different titles. Something to bear in mind.

One of the other stipulations is that the press cannot be used solely for self-publishing the owner’s books – which is fair. However, some titles of this sort are allowed, as long as it can be demonstrated that there is a serious intent to publish others’ work. So, that’s all good.

One other good thing about the funding is that successful applicants will have their books stocked and distributed by BCW. For this, they ask a 55% discount off retail – which is standard in terms of distributors, in my experience – and 20% of which goes to the BCW themselves to cover the cost of warehousing, fulfilling orders and handling returns.

There are four windows for grant applications per year, and there’s nothing to stop a press from applying for consecutive grants. In fact, many presses owe their existence to BCW money, and the bigger Welsh small presses (e.g. Seren, Parthian) have five year grants that fund multiple titles.

So, where does this leave WoodPig Press? Well, it all looks promising, to be sure. I’m still getting my head around the various stipulations, but in principle it would seem to be a more than viable option.

However – (how many is that?) – there are a couple of significant challenges.

First of all, how do submissions work? If WoodPig Press decides to take on an author, then I have to apply for a grant and await an outcome before I can confirm that we will definitely publish their work. I’m not sure an author would be happy to be kept hanging in limbo while the grant subcommittee decides if there’ll be money to publish them or not. What if the author gets fed up and goes elsewhere, or we have to rescind our offer to publish them? Yes, books can be submitted to the subcommittee in pre-edited form, so decisions are based on the potential of a book, before money has been invested in editing. But it’s still not ideal.

The other issue is margins. As I said, 55% discount off retail is fairly standard for distributors, and being in the BCW warehouse does make it easier to get a favourable listing on Gardners (I hope), and thereby be available more easily to Waterstones, etc.⁵ But this does push up the retail price quite a bit – especially when you bear in mind that the BCW requires that an author receives 10% royalties on retail. Which is great – for the author. But let’s say (again, dodgy maths alert), that a book sells for around £10, which is a nice, customer friendly price tag for a bookshop. According to my estimates, printing for an 80k word book would cost about £4.05.⁶ But we must sell it to the BCW at 55% off retail (i.e. at £4.50), so that’s a further reduction of £5.50. So, retail (£10) minus printing costs (£4.05) minus retailer discount (£5.50), equals approx £0.45.

And that’s publisher profit. From this we must give the author 10% royalties – and that’s 10% of retail price, remember, not of profits. So, the author gets £1. Which gives an overall profit for the publisher of -£0.55. That is, for you non-maths people, a 55p loss per book.

So, what does this mean?

First of all, it means that £10 is not a viable retail price for this funding model. In fact, we would need to charge £12 just to creep into profit, and £13 sees a publisher profit of only £0.50. And that’s just for an 80k word book. Anything longer and the costs (and minimum retail price) creep up.

However,⁷ a recent visit to Waterstones did give me some food for thought, because the minimum price point of your standard paperback seems to be creeping up there, too – and not just for longer books. In fact – I lurched backwards in a giddy faint and a friendly bookseller had to catch me in her arms⁸ – I came across some new paperback editions of Martha Wells’ Murderbot series, which were selling for £16.99! Is this a new pricing trend? Don’t know, but perhaps it indicates that the £10 book has now had its day.⁹

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So, there you have it. As you can see, there is lots in favour of this model, and I’m still investigating it. The funding is significant enough to make a difference, but it does leave unaddressed the in-house costs. There is also the problem of how to deal with author limbo while the grant money is applied for. BCW distribution will get you into Gardners and make you available to bookshops on a sale or return basis (which, as I said last week, is the primary barrier for booksellers accepting indie titles), but the margins are tight – or else involve non-competitive pricing (arguably) of well over the £10 mark.

Anyway, next week I will delve deeper into all this when I interview Alan Bilton, who runs Watermark Press, and who receives help from BCW to publish.

Thanks to Dr Ashley Owen for making the time for a fascinating conversation, and for her ongoing patience with my interminable list of questions.

1. If you are such an editor, proofreader, cover designer, etc, and this thankless and speculative form of employment appeals to you, then please get in touch! But get in touch anyway, as I’m also looking for freelancers for paid work.

2. Up until recently, I would also have mentioned Unbound, here, as they supplied an innovative crowdfunding model that is essentially hybrid. However, they’ve subsequently gone bust, leaving a number of angry authors and their supporters out of pocket. Which isn’t to say that such a model can’t work, of course, and the company have just relaunched as Boundless. We’ll see how that goes.

3. Interestingly, there is money to fund translation of Welsh titles into English, but not the other way around – which I guess makes sense if you see it in terms of expanding the readership of Welsh language books, and factor in that most Welsh speakers are bilingual.

4. See, e.g., here.

5. There’s also the option of submitting previously published titles to be stocked and distributed via BCW (though these wouldn’t be eligible for grant money). However, this would be an interesting option for WoodPig Press’s previously published titles.

6. I’m basing this on printing via Bookvault, which offers a nice midpoint between quality and economy.

7. I really must discover a new … conjunction? Adverb…? Grammatical advice welcome.

8. This didn’t happen.

9. Funny anecdote: I was sitting in a local cafe, sipping my oat milk decaf cortado, when I overheard someone saying that they wanted to buy a book, but it was £10! “That’s a lot for a book,” her companion responded. It took me all my power of restraint and inbred social etiquette not to stride over and give them an insight into publishing margins! I can only assume that they were used to buying books from supermarkets – with which, no bookshop can compete, let alone small press or indie author.