FLASH ANTHOLOGY

[kailhofer]

Some of you may have seen the discussions last month about print on demand for Aphelion stories. At the time, I was considering starting my own publishing business.

I'm not abandoning that idea, but I thought maybe it would be good to test the waters first. I don't have any experience in the POD market, and I'd like to see a proven track record before taking on that kind of risk.

On Hero's advice, I took a good look at Lulu. It occurred to me as I looked that Lulu may be able to handle all the storefront, printing, shipping, and payment end of it without me having to shell out for all that with no guaranteed return. Lulu charges nothing for setup and does have online distribution channels, but you're on your own for promotion.

I also thought that the flash stories that so many of us write might just be an excellent choice for this kind of publishing. They're hard to sell to someone else since they've been published online, and they're too small for most paying short story venues.

What I'm thinking of is kind of a cooperative effort. Since I am a graphic designer and the Flash Editor, I'd select & edit the stories, and set them up in book form. I'd set up the account & storefront on Lulu. Everyone who has a story in the book promotes it as best they can (such as plugs in your electronic signatures, posts where you think someone would want to see it, word of mouth--basically anything that's free), then everyone shares the profits or "creator revenues", as Lulu calls it.

Personally, I was thinking a pocket-sized paperback with a nice color cover, BW inside pages on cheap stock. No frills, really, but since POD costs more out of the box, we'd still want people to be able to afford them.

Lulu takes 20% above production costs. My thought on the revenue split is one equal share for each story included, plus one share for me to do all the setup, and one share to whomever does the cover. If I do the cover, I don't think that deserves a whole extra share to me. Lulu doesn't offer split royalties out of the box, but the FAQ files say you can have the feature added to your account with a help request, but every author would need to have a Lulu account to make it work. You get paid either in quarterly checks or monthly (if paypal and you've made over $5). Lulu will take taxes out on your payments for you, too, if you have your account set up that way.

After we've uploaded it, got the storefront going, put it in all our signatures in every forum we frequent, told all our friends and relatives etc., that's all we really have to do. If someone wants to do more promotion on their own, that's up to them, as long as it doesn't cost anything, because if you're like me, you're not about to pay for an ad somewhere. I couldn't afford it, anyway.

So, I'm asking how many are interested, and for you all to double check me on whether you think Lulu is ok. We'd need a consensus on book size, selling price, revenue splitting, some kind of agreement that I can use to prove I have your permission to upload a book that has your story in it (and that you haven't sold the rights to someone else), and some thought to content issues (what is legally ok to put in--some stories are graphic or likely to offend in some places). None of us want to get sued.

Since we could have to split 60 or so shares 15-20 ways, I highly doubt any of us will get rich on something that might only have $3-4 markup in it to begin with (depending what we can agree on), but maybe you could take your family out for dinner a couple of times a year, and that would be nice, too. I can't make any promises, since this is uncharted territory for me.

What do you all think?

Nate

[kailhofer]

Wonderful idea. I'm in with all my flash stories and I have plenty of others that were never in the competition if you want a look at them.

-- david j.

I think they should need to have been in the competition to be in "Flash of Aphelion" (working title), especially with over 200 to choose from.

6 X 9 is a good standard size. I'd recommend making it available in hardcover as well as softcover. There is only a little more set up involved, since you need to lay the cover image out for a dustjacket. But for one extra step and no added cost you can have two versions of the book available. Of course you could always add the hard cover version later. I'd pay extra for a hardcover, but I'm kind of a book snob.



Hero

I guess it depends on what everybody likes and the cost/price point factor. I checked my shelves and the only book I have that is actually US Trade 6x9 is my copy of 2010. All of the rest of them are smaller or bigger than 6x9. I do however, have a number of pocket paperbacks. Obviously, more of a story could fit on a 6x9 page, and we'd need fewer pages. I might need to set it up both ways to sizes where we'd be in terms of selling price.

In theory, I see no reason why we couldn't do both hard and softcover or even an e-book version, too. Formatting text really isn't that hard, and I already have every challenge story in Word on my hard drive. It's not like it costs us anything to have more than one version. Would have to learn a lot more about e-books, though.

Nate

[kailhofer]

The benefit of using the US Trade 6X9 perfect bound softcover is that you won't have to reformat if you want to do a hardcover, since Lulu's hardcover with dustjacket is 6x9. Formatting takes some work and even if you already have the book in a desktop publishing program, changing the size will require you to check all the running heads and page numbers, etc... not to mention proof the whole thing again just to be sure something didn't get mucked up. Of course, this all assumes you want to do a hardcover, at all.

That's a good point.

If you want to make some of these decisions by committee, you might want to give us the options you are considering and then take a vote. But narrow the choices down to two or three options first. Otherwise the thing will never get out of committee.

Obviously, I don't want a committee structure to kill this thing. My hope was to get a very general consensus, then set some choices up with hard details. After all, I wouldn't know what kind of price we can offer until I see how big the book would need to be, and that depends on how many I pick and which authors are ok with the idea. It's different when you're already a publisher and you've already done this so you have some framework in which to work. It's all new to me.

Nate

[kailhofer]

6 X 9 is a good standard size. I'd recommend making it available in hardcover as well as softcover. There is only a little more set up involved, since you need to lay the cover image out for a dustjacket. But for one extra step and no added cost you can have two versions of the book available. Of course you could always add the hard cover version later. I'd pay extra for a hardcover, but I'm kind of a book snob.



Hero

I'll second this idea. I do think there's a little residual respect value in having a hardcover edition available. The great thing about POD is it's the Slow Nickel. It used to take a herculean squabble with the forces of the publishing parnassus to get something like this out. Now we can do it ourselves.

For me the most important part is not the money, but the protection from the cycle of OutOfPrint. Nate, can you check if they charge maintenance fees?

Also, I'd float the idea of Story2.0 from a while back. What if authors had a chance to revise their stories for ongoing editions?

I'll check on the Maint. fees.

I'll have to edit the stories anyway to change formatting and maybe catch a few boo-boos, so those edits would have to be run past the authors. We can negotiate about any changes at that point, but I'm not really in favor of changing much. I guess it would depend on how the story would change, and that it still stayed 1000 words or less. That rule is set in stone.