
So, we’re a little late again; I should have had the issue to our crack production team at least a week before I did. A great many external forces collaborated to push me off-schedule. The weather has been national news for most of the year. The New York suburbs are still buried in feet of unmelted snow. Snow fell, followed by arctic temperatures (single digit Fahrenheit highs, subzero lows) and gale-force winds, which lead without breaks into further snow, in an unceasing cycle for six weeks. For variety, we got freezing rain, sleet, frizzle, sneer, and farkle. I fell on black ice twice in 15 minutes after one overeager morning ice storm a fortnight ago and barely made it to shelter ahead of the wolverine raiding party emboldened by their wendigo masters.
Adding to the joy was the worst head cold I’ve had in decades, which kept me running at half-speed. Chest infections and artic gales give one a fresh appreciation of the fate of the traitors trapped at the bottom of Dante’s well of sin.
And capping all of this, the two-disk RAID enclosure on which I store all the NYRSF archives went bad and wiped out the partitions on both drives. Far too much free time swirled down the drain of data recovery and byte-by-byte comparisons of the separate restorations—well, of course I wasn’t doing this with a data microscope, but it still took most of my free time for over a week.
This is the issue before the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Several members of the NYRSF staff will be in attendance, as is true every year, as well as a staggering number of people we’ve been privileged to publish over our 25+ years. We hope to see every single one of you having a wonderful, relaxing, information-packed time. (And let me just shove in the quick reminder that all IAFA members are eligible for a 33% discount on NYRSF subscriptions and back issues through Weightless Books. If you don’t know about this, please contact me directly. SFRA members are also eligible! We love you all.)
Finally, this is my editorial space, so I get to talk about what I want to talk about. I’ve had a recent insight about one of the most important new factors in publishing: Kickstarter. I love crowdfunding both in concept and in practice; I’ve backed nearly 200 successful projects, spread among books (and magazines), comics, and games (board and role-playing). I’m an easy sell. Even given that, one of the things that is most likely to make me bounce off a project is a high cost-of-product.
Too often, a Kickstarter book project will have as its main goal a 300-400 page trade paperback. A reasonable project will have a base price of $20 (including shipping); an absurd project will price it at $30—approximately twice the cost of a comparable book from an established publisher.
Now, I understand the economics here somewhat. The printing cost will be slippery, larger per book at a small print run and much lower per book for a sizable run. Shipping and fulfilment are can just be built in to the pledge, and should be low.
The most important factor in the cost of most commercial books, even small press books, is not the printing or shipping but the fixed costs. For a small-press book, these mostly consist of paying all the people who actually create the book. That includes the writer(s) and artist(s) (cover for most books, interior for others), the editors (copy- and otherwise), the book designer, and so forth.
The thing about fixed costs is that they are fixed regardless of the print run. And this is where the current crowdsourcing tools fail everyone. As a project gathers more pledges, the fixed costs can be allocated across more and more pieces, and the per-piece share of fixed costs drops dramatically. $8000 in fixed costs spread across 100 copies yields a book only a collector could want; spread that across 1000 copies and you have a competitively priced, professional trade paperback. And if the project is fantastically successful, the fixed costs per book drop to nearly nothing.
And here’s where the current crowdsourcing models fail both the consumer and the creator. It is relatively simple to build a costs spreadsheet that would dynamically lower the cost of the main book as the number of purchasers increases, granting the customer a lower cover price as sales increase. This benefits the creator by gradually lowering the cost of entry and creating an incentive for early customer to publicize the project so that their own costs go down. As it stands, creators have to sweeten a successful project with “stretch goals” (additional goods), which have a well-established track record of running completely out of control. Far better to reward the customer by simply taking less money up front.
Hey, anyone got some venture capital lying around who wants to let me test this in a brand-new site? Write to me care of the magazine. Thanks.
—Kevin J. Maroney
and the editors
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