Exciting news! Quills and Cosmos attended our*1 first conference! The IBPA Publishing University conference was held April 25-27 in Denver, Colorado.*2
The conference was everything: amazing, overwhelming, and brilliant. A couple of small disappointments, but overall, worth the cost of admission.*3
Now that audio recordings of all the sessions have been posted and we've had a chance to go through the ones we weren't able to attend, we can post a full review.
Most of the sessions were well thought out and absolutely brimming with good information. The main disapointment was that the regular sessions were an hour long, and IBPA saw fit to squeeze 3 panelists and a moderator into that time. This gave each person about 15 minutes to talk, (with a Q&A sesh at end), and that simply wasn't enough time.*4
And honestly? The pre-conference slots, which were 4 hour mega-sessions, were a lot more beneficial.*5 This is where the most information-packed session took place, which was run by folks from Ingram. We didn't attend this one in person, but the slideshow was FULL! Over 100 slides, every single one of them giving solid information for someone starting out in publishing. We didn't love Ingram before this presentation,*6 but they won us over.
Now to get to the big points from the conference that were game-changers for Quills and Cosmos!
Our biggest realization came about printing. Let me give a quick summary of what offset printing vs. Print On Demand (POD) involves.
Offset printing- You pay a lot less per book, the more books you order. Here's an example from a quote I got in July of last year.
500 books 1,000 books 2,000 books
$5.95/book $3.66/book $2.62/book
($2,975) ($3,660) ($5,240)
For POD, my last estimate (in Feb 2024) is this:
500 books 1,000 books 2,000 books
$5.31 $5.15 $5.15 (yep, it's the same)
($2,655) ($5,150) ($10,300)
That makes it seem like a no-brainer, right? Less than 500 books, go POD, more than that, go offset. What the above quotes don't include- if you print offset, that means all your books print at the same time, and then go to a warehouse, where they're distributed to buyers/retailers/libraries. We don't own a warehouse,*7 so we have to pay someone that does. They also run distribution- another cost. Neither of those things are a problem with POD, which is also called digital printing: the book literally doesn't exist in paper form until it's ordered. Then each time you get an order, the POD service prints it and ships it out. No hundreds or thousands of books stored anywhere. AND you don't have to make a guess as to how many books you're going to sell, as you do with offset. (You can have more print runs, but you can see that printing 500 books four times is much more expensive than doing a 2,000 print run right out of the gate.)
Now, what does this mean for Quills and Cosmos? Basically, we were originally leaning toward offset printing. Mostly thinking that our profit margins (and, by extension, the royalties our authors get) would be higher with offset, even including the warehousing & distribution costs. This still rings true. However, when we print our first book, we're going in blind as to how well our marketing/advertising works, and therefore how many books we can sell. In the Good Book Design & Production session at IBPA, it was told to us, in no uncertain terms, that a new publisher (or author-publisher) should always start out with POD. Unanimously agreed upon by all the presenters, and backed up with solid logic. If you don't know what your selling margins are likely to be, you're just shooting in the dark to guess at a print run. What if you've ordered 1,000 books, and only sell 112? Then you're paying for storing the rest, hoping they sell (which a book's major selling period is the first three months or so.)*8
So, POD is our method of choice going forward. Another plus to this decision is the upfront cost needed. With offset printing, you pay the printer when the books are printed, not when they sell, 3 to 6 (to 12) months later. (most retailers don't pay the publisher until 90 days after sales.) This makes our business venture a bit more viable, a bit sooner. (Note that the other upfront cost that's a chunk is marketing/advertising, but we'll talk about that later.)
There are more points to cover (including diving into that Ingram session), but we're running out of time for today. Thanks for taking this journey with us! Leave a comment with your opinion on POD/offset printing, any questions you have, or what you thought of the conference! You can also subscribe to be notified when new blogs are posted.
Ta!
*1 - yep, still just Meagan here. hi! (jump back)
*2- practically in our backyard (jump back)
*3- not cheap, but included membership to IBPA, so it works (jump back)
*4- looking at you, Good Book Design & Production. Give those panelists at least 30 minutes each, please! (jump back)
*5- though thank goodness for the occasional 15-minute bio break! (jump back)
*6- mostly just cause they're the big guys and hold a lot of power (jump back)
*7- yet? (jump back)
*8- unless some influencer "discovers" it five years from now and it blows up (jump back)
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