Ask the Fontiff
Well, no one asked, but I felt the urge to post about this anyway.
No one ever talks about the unglamourous side of publishing. Perhaps this is why so many writers suffer from the magical thinking that all they have to do is write a book, self-publish it, and it will magically appear on the bookshelves and start selling.
What does a publisher do that justifies them keeping 40% (roughly) of the cover price of a book? That's more than four times what the author gets (generalized numbers here... most authors typically get less, BNAs typically get lots more).
I'll tell you what. So they can pay someone to do what I'm doing right now.
Oh, sure, book design looks all glamourous. (Jeepers, is that how the Brits spell that word? Yeesh.) I get to play with fonts, and it's creative, and the production-y side of it is usually handled by someone else (not in my case though. I am the pre-press queen for my list for historical reasons having nothing to do with the competence of the folks in the manufacturing department, who are all superb at their jobs).
But the really arty books? Such as the two-color, art-laden jobby I'm working on right now? Totally fun and creative to lay it out, but at this moment (well, at this moment I'm blogging, but you get my point), I am going through it and sizing the art.
Yes, the art in a book is not actually drawn at the size the book prints! Shocking, I know. And the fun part is that the sketches I used to set first pass of the book don't quite match the final art, so I have to sit here with pica ruler and calculator and measure out the correct percentage before I send the whole lot to the printer for them to scan. (The printer scans it because they will optimize it for their equipment. This is better than scanning it on a flatbed in one's office.)
We're talking 100 pieces of art, here. That's not an unusual number for the type of book, but it's time consuming and grotty and kind of boring.
As malkatsheva so often points out, "That's why they call it a job. If it was tea and cakes all the time, they wouldn't have to pay someone to do it."
No one ever talks about the unglamourous side of publishing. Perhaps this is why so many writers suffer from the magical thinking that all they have to do is write a book, self-publish it, and it will magically appear on the bookshelves and start selling.
What does a publisher do that justifies them keeping 40% (roughly) of the cover price of a book? That's more than four times what the author gets (generalized numbers here... most authors typically get less, BNAs typically get lots more).
I'll tell you what. So they can pay someone to do what I'm doing right now.
Oh, sure, book design looks all glamourous. (Jeepers, is that how the Brits spell that word? Yeesh.) I get to play with fonts, and it's creative, and the production-y side of it is usually handled by someone else (not in my case though. I am the pre-press queen for my list for historical reasons having nothing to do with the competence of the folks in the manufacturing department, who are all superb at their jobs).
But the really arty books? Such as the two-color, art-laden jobby I'm working on right now? Totally fun and creative to lay it out, but at this moment (well, at this moment I'm blogging, but you get my point), I am going through it and sizing the art.
Yes, the art in a book is not actually drawn at the size the book prints! Shocking, I know. And the fun part is that the sketches I used to set first pass of the book don't quite match the final art, so I have to sit here with pica ruler and calculator and measure out the correct percentage before I send the whole lot to the printer for them to scan. (The printer scans it because they will optimize it for their equipment. This is better than scanning it on a flatbed in one's office.)
We're talking 100 pieces of art, here. That's not an unusual number for the type of book, but it's time consuming and grotty and kind of boring.
As malkatsheva so often points out, "That's why they call it a job. If it was tea and cakes all the time, they wouldn't have to pay someone to do it."