Gordon Woolf's Blog

All those great unpublished books?

Having sold The Worsley Press to business consultant and fellow author Geoffrey Heard a few years ago, I've been slowly clearing out a lot of old paperwork.

Part of that was that I decided to rid myself of a stack of old manuscripts which I'd rejected, and not returned because they didn't come with a prepaid envelope or because return was not requested.

I decided to check a random sample by searching on Google for the authors' names.

Of about a dozen which produced some reference, only one was published (and by the larger publisher I suggested the author contact!) though it does not seem to have warranted a second edition in around 10 years.

Another came up with an author's site which featured her several successful novels but no mention of the book she submitted to me on how to run a low-cost wedding. Her novels have been published on three continents in several languages.

I was a just a little concerned that I might have rejected that major title which someone else picked up (after all I did listen to Brian Epstein extolling his new band which was to play at the Cavern club that night in Liverpool in the 1960s and did not take up the offer of a free ticket).

Fortunately, or unfortunately, according to your point of view, it seems that did not happen with these manuscripts.

A magazine title someone else has used?

It is among the more common questions I get: I am starting a magazine and I assume I need to make sure no one else is using the title I want and that it is not already copyrighted. How do I check that and how do I then copyright that name?

Titles as such can't be copyrighted, but it is normal for them to be registered either as a trading (business) name or as a trade mark.

However, it really depends on how important this is to you. The protection you may need is only really within the narrow field of the publication. It is not unusual for regional publications, for example, to have the same name with a suffix or prefix added in very small type on the cover and seldom used within the local area. Think of newspapers and particularly the many with News, Times, Chronicle etc as their name.

Registration as a business name/trade mark is more common in the US than in the UK or Australia, but I've previously mentioned the magazine known as the Musician which I published in the UK in the '60s. There was also a Musician published by the Salvation Army and one by the Brass Band Association. I recall only one mixup which was by an advertising agency which should have known better.

Consideration of potential confusion is more important than registration as you do need to make sure you cannot be accused of "passing off" your publication as one owned by someone else. Also, many titles are generic descriptions of the field and would be unlikely to be allowed for registration -- but may still be an ideal publication title.

Still room for print in magazines

There's still room for new print magazines. Design students in Amsterdam have just published a new print magazine, Odd. The beginning of 2010 saw 56 new magazines on US newsstands and if you think that's just a chance number, the figure for June, the latest given on the Mr Magazine website is 77.

In 1986, Samir Husni published his first Guide to New Magazines listing the 234 new magazines that I was able to find and document in 1985. The 25th Anniversary edition of the Guide will be out soon listing 704 new magazines that were first launched in 2009.

If you subscribe to the Magazine Launch feed from http://www.magazinelaunch.com run by the Magazine Publishers of America (MPA) you'll get their regular notifications -- and they are only the publications that make use of their service.

Among the most recent titles scrawere: Honor Student, Wine Press, Vintage Magazine, ChopChop (a food mag for 5 to 12 year olds!), Livestrong Quarterly (for cancer survivors and supporters), Parents of Color, and a number of regional magazines. The latter seem part of a strong trend in publishing.

All of these are in print, though all seem to have strong websites and, often, web editions. One innovation which cannot be duplicated online is the scratch-and-smell cover. 

So, while much effort goes in to finding a profitable means of having an online publication, it seems the most popular and successful way is still with a "dead tree" publication backed up by online extras and promotion.

One problem for publications which would like to be online is that a high quality file is still massive if you are to compete with printed graphics. Even publications which cater for the graphics industry find it necessary to resort to slimmed down versions for those without really fast broadband connections.

And I wonder how many other people have the same problem that I do? I subscribe to a top quality online magazine, and download it the instant I get the email advising that it is available. But often I do not even get to glancing through the PDF. It sits there on my desktop until a week or sometimes two later I will print out a sad looking grayscale version on my laser printer. 

A print magazine goes to our lougeroom where it will be read during rest periods or while watching TV. Sure, I can take a wirelessly connected laptop there too, but I seldom do. Reading on screen is not a relaxing exercise, reading a print magazine is.

Do how much of it yourself?

As a small scale publisher, what should you do for yourself and what should you pay someone else to do?

That is a common question, and someone on a publishing email list rightly commented that it always seemed that the "experts" were saying that the newbie should get everything done (at a fee) by someone in the industry.

There is nothing wrong with anyone learning to do everything for themselves -- I even did a course in paper making because I thought it might help me understand the most basic of the raw materials we deal with, and it did.

The problem is that too many people are misled by the promises of people that everything is easy.

If someone...

• studies the book market,
• spends time not only reading the books on the subject (and most can be found in public libraries so you need only to eventually buy the ones which are going to be essential to you),
• talks to everyone in the industry (I've learned a lot from a bloke whose house I walk past into town who is a forklift driver for a major printer who seems similarly interested in learning more about the products he hauls around),
• is prepared to do the job (for example the layout) and then to look at it critically and do it again (I nearly sent a printing business broke when I looked at a book we'd produced as I handed the first copies to the customer, and then said "it's not good enough, is it" and we did it again, but we grew into a much stronger company),

then that someone can match everything the experts can do. It's not brain surgery -- you can practice without doing too much harm to anyone but yourself.

BUT, someone who says, I've never done a book before but I have Word (or I've just bought InDesign) and then, with a printed copy in hand, looks at finding a distributor or for someone who will tell how to get publicity for it.

I'm all for people doing things for themselves. I tend to run a mile from anyone who adopts the description of "consultant", and I like the description of expert as "ex", a has-been, and "spurt", a drip under pressure.

Jack's an artist. That's what we need for the layout

It is a common question: The illustrator for my book is a talented artist, but should I ask him (or her) about doing the book layout?

It may also be suggested with magazine layout: he's a good artist, we should ask him to do our newsletter.

The real question should be to ask whether he has any experience and whether he wants to do the work. Then the publisher, or self-publisher, should ask himself or herself if they have time to cope with problems.

In a recent case the artist was being honest, and would have been prepared to put the time in (at his cost) to find out all the technical information he needed to know. However, there should be at least one person who has the professional knowledge of what makes a good book or magazine layout in the team.

The danger lies in the fact that publication layout and file preparation for printing is detailed, systematic work, and the skills for that are seldom those needed to be an artist and illustrator.

There are a few who manage to combine both skills but they are a minority and deserve every cent they can command. They will, for example, know that the uses of a book cover for thumbnails on the web or in catalogues and ads and possibly for posters as well as for the cover itself, puts severe restrictions on artistic talent.

More common are those designers and layout people who can take other people's illustrations and turn them into good looking and good working covers and pages and produce files which will print without problems. The person who creates good publication files and the illustrator and graphic artist may use much of the same software, but they tend to use it in vastly different ways.

The kind of questions one could ask someone who may be able to do this work could be whether he or she knows the common standards for relative margin widths, on the differences in specifications for different binding methods, and, for example if this includes, as is most likely, an all color cover, the maximum ink levels according to the printing process and paper stock.

He or she may not know the detailed answers but should know what you are talking about (even if you do not). Then (especially if there is time to go elsewhere if necessary), by all means give him or her a go.

Make sure you get paid on time

Being successful in a small business is not just reliant on making a profit on whatever you sell, whether it is goods or services. It relies also, and perhaps more importantly on getting paid for those goods or services.

I was surprised yet again this month to come across a small business owner, in this case a freelance designer, who had not thought to set out clearly just when he expected to get paid and ensuring that was understood by his clients.

He wondered whether he should offer a discount for payment at 10 days or 30 days. That, I suggested, would just mean he would be giving a discount to his current prompt payers and encouraging others by suggesting he was prepared to finance their debts to the extent of 30 days which could be attractive compared to bank overdraft costs. He also needed to make sure that he got invoices out immediately a job was done, and certainly not wait until the end of the month (and sometimes into the next month) as he had been doing.

Long ago I established a simple system with my clients: no job would be started until the previous one had been paid for. I did have a couple of exceptions for weekly jobs but on those there was a date for payment each month which I had got from the client and no future job would be started if that date went past without payment.

When you have your own debts it may seem hard to seemingly pass up the chance of more work, but if you are offering fair value in what you do you will find that clients will keep to agreed terms when it is in their interest. Those who do not may not be worth working for; it is no good doing work for which you will never be paid, or paid so slowly that extra costs in chasing payment eat away at all the profit and do not return your own expenses in doing the job.

Part payment should be normal in advance on first orders. In my experience as a publisher, most book printers now work on half payment in advance and the rest before the finished job is despatched. One large printer told me recently that is what saved them in the recent global difficulties.

Faced with such payment terms from printers I can understand that some publishers will be trying to delay payments to other suppliers ... will you be one of those?

Adobe v Apple: It's happened before

On the AppleInsider blog, Daniel Eran Dilger gives the background to the current Flash war with the comment "This all happened before".

His story and timeline of PostScript, the Laserwriter, TrueType, Aldus PageMaker, Macromedia's Freehand is almost all as I recall it and heard at the time from mainly Adobe insiders. The only statement I see which is a bit questionable is his assertion that Adobe did not realise when buying Aldus that the rights to Freehand did not come with the sale since they still belonged to the originators. Not until they bought Macromedia 10 years later did Freehand enter Adobe's fold.

However, if you think that lack of foresight (or what is now called "due dilligence" is impossible I can quote a tale from Australian media history. Our main TV weekly program guide which once sold a million copies a week was part of a publishing company sold off by News Ltd (which many years previously had been in the free-to-air TV business here) and ultimately sold to one of our major TV channels. After the final sale, the other leading TV company "revealed" that they owned 50% of the title. Within a week the magazine was being published by that company's publishing arm, from another city, with an entirely new staff.

Quite a blow for the other TV channel -- but I worked for that magazine several years earlier and as a fairly junior player I knew that the magazine was only half owned by the company publishing it. So I question how the money/management people did not know that essential fact when talking of multi-million deals. Could Adobe have not known about Freehand in 1994? Maybe.

It does not seem long ago that there were continuing email list discussions on the relative merits of true PostScript and the clones built in to printers. It dawned on most of us very slowly that the future lay in postscript interpreters resident on the computer, so slowly for me that the PostScript 2 laser printer I paid $5000 for (and $500 for each cartridge) we were unable to give away. It recently ended at the tip despite still being in working order.

The column is at:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/05/14/adobe_apple_war_on_flash_reminiscent_of_postscript_struggle.html&page=1

Open letter to a publisher thinking of switching to online

Yet another magazine sent me a notification that it was going online. This time it was to be just a trial, but here is a slightly edited version of my reply:

While I can understand the desire of publishers to change to online provision of magazines, I would suggest that this is not as much in a reader’s interest. It is largely a transfer of costs from publisher to reader rather than a true saving in costs (and therefore in resources).

For example, I have a 10GB monthly download limit and while I usually stay within that, it means that on the occasions when I might not, it is quite likely that a magazine file will have to wait until the new month or be ignored altogether. My minimum cost to add an extra couple of GB of download is a one-off $20 payment or, alternatively, to increase by $10 every month to go to a higher limit which may not be used.

If I wish to show something to my wife or look at it more closely it means printing it out which again increases costs at my end, and though I’d often choose to print on my relatively ancient laser printer at a few cents a page, it might have coloured content that makes it more likely that I’d print on my inkjet at perhaps a dollar or more a time for a 2- or 3-page article.

The print edition will also normally be passed on to someone at the local computer club or U3A or community house (or even the local branch of the Australian Shareholders Association  (though that I no longer attend with any frequency). At any of those it may well attract further interest and possibly subscribers before being recycled (at least I can hope it is recycled). The online edition, if downloaded, will consume electricity and broadband fees before being deleted, i.e. gone for ever. Online for you it will continue to cost storage fees.

I can see a lot of sense in making some content available only online, especially the tables which have to be printed in such small type that they cannot be read by most people with my aged eyes. News too may be better online but most articles tend to be scanned much more quickly on screen than in print...and therefore not read as thoroughly.

So, unless you plan to also reduce article lengths and their number and interest, I’d suggest that at the very least you investigate a thinner, more cheaply printed edition with web links, preferably in a short form or linking to an index page online for more information.

I note your comments that the online version is just a trial but it does take several seconds to go from low to high resolution on a page and I note that links within pages are not live.

Lastly, it is a Flash file and I presume you have noted that the iPad does not accept Flash files and does seem to be the only real eReader suitable for viewing online magazines, at least until we see HP’s contender.

Get ready for the ISTC - a new book identifier

ISTC (International Standard Text Code) is likely to come into use in the book industry worldwide late this year or early 2011. Basically it goes beyond ISBNs (International Standard Book Numbers) to identify content rather than edition.

Different editions of a work, even from different publishers, should have the same ISTC.

It will look something like:

ISTC 0A9-2010-12B4A105-7

and may appear on the back cover but is more likely to be referenced just on the copyright page and will be listed in database information about the book.

In this way, you'll be able to tell instantly whether a trade paperback, a hardback, an audio book or an ebook have the same content. It should also help end the confusion on whether different presentations of the same book should have the same ISBN. They should not. They should have the same ISTC.

The issuers of ISTCs will almost certainly be the same as the issuers of ISBNs, in other words the biggest players will be Bowker and Nielsen under the supervision of the ISTC Agency and using a single, global XML database system.

Items covered are described as "creative works" such as prose, peotry. lyrics, original screenplays, audio and stage scripts. Photographs, although they can be part of such works, are not in themselves covered and while graphic novels would be, the registration would cover only the text elements of these.

The registration agency will run a computer test to check whether the content has already been registered.

Works can be registered by an author, publisher, agent, library, rights management or collection agency or distributor. It is not yet clear what the fee structure is likely to be. The present ISBN structure is commonly a price per code which reduces with quantity, although there are provisions is some countries for free issue of ISBNs, especially single registrations.

The ISTC identifier is a 16-character code (using numbers 0-9 and letters A-F, i.e. the hexadecimal system) in four sections to identify the registration agency, the year of registration, the identifier and a check digit.

It has no section for registrant, so the same content can be published by diffreent publishers but would have only one ISTC. That's a major difference to the ISBN which identifies primarily a publisher.

A work that is translated, abridged, annotated, a compilation, criticism, excerpt, expurgated, revised or adapted, will get a new ISTC but the metadata for that must state the original ISTC and just what its relationship is.

This will also be a problem for authors and publishers of non-fiction works which have frequent editions. New ISBN are usually adopted if there is anything but superficial changes but often there are substantial changes between editions, and all degrees inbetween. It seems it will still be a matter of opinion with the publisher making the decision whether to use the same ISTC or gain a new one with a reference to the original.

There will be internet search engines to identify works from the ISTC and for prospective publishers etc to search on title, author etc to establish whether a work has been registered. They will not link to ISBN data and it would be normal for a work to be registered for an ISTC well before it gains an ISBN, such as that an author might register it before submitting to an agent or publisher, or an agent might register a work before submitting it to publishers.

No one will own any single ISTC once it has been created and an ISTC will not imply any rights to the material. (To my mind, however, it may discourage plagiarism).

It may help in book searches, since once a particular example of a work has been found, that will provide the ISTC which is what is needed to identify the work in other formats, even if they have a different title. It may also help avoid duplication of axquisitions by libraries.

The usefulness of ISTC will increase with time, more rapidly if the registration agencies and especially those who already maintain databases used extensively by the book industry decide to start entering past works. There seems to have been some indications that this will happen though that may depend on what they see as possible financial benefits.

For an author or small publisher I would suggest that ITSC is not something they need to act on instantly, but they do need to watch what is happening. Once the codes start to appear for new works by major publishers in your genre then that will be the time to act.

In the meantime you may like to delve further:

ISTC: http://www.istc-international.org/ (see resources page for a link to the user manual)

Book Industry Study Group discussion paper:
http://www.bisg.org/contentweb/papers/the-international-standard-text-code-istc-a-work-in-progress/

A 2009 overview by Andy Weissberg, VP of Identifier Services at Bowker: http://www.myidentifiers.com/multimedia/pdfs/ISTC_overview_ISQv21no3.pdf

How to work out what to charge for ads

Magazines provide a fascinating problem for anyone interesting in the mathematics of costing production. That's because there are so many variables.

Think of this: you plan a new magazine and you follow the usual practice of giving discounts for larger advertisements. Or maybe you work it out the other way: $500 for a full page, $260 for a half, $150 for a quarter, $80 for an eighth-page. Now you reckon that most of your ads will be small sizes, but then in come the orders for full pages and someone asking what's your discount for a double page spread (a "truck" they may call it). Instead of celebrating you suddenly realize that instead of getting upwards of $650 a page, you are giving discounts below $500.

That truck is driving straight through all your cost estimates, accompanied by a dozen Humvees. You may save a little on the time of putting one ad on a page instead of placing 6 or 8 little ones, but you may also find that the advertisers or their agents are ultra critical on proofs and the quality of the final job. Then you realize that those full page advertisers placed orders for 3 or 6 or even 12 months and your revenue is disappearing fast. Your costs may be going down a little, but they'll still want to keep changing their copy.

Fortunately there is a calculator around to help. The Adrates calculator is not completely free - it comes as a free download with copies of How to Start and Produce a Magazine or Newsletter and is an Excel spreadsheet that lets you do all those what-of calculations before you start telling people what your rates are (or helps you work out what they will have to become if you already have a publication).

Enter your suggested full page rate and the percentage extra you will charge for smaller ads and the discount you will give for series ads. Guess the percentages you may get in series bookings (you can play around with all these figures as much as you like) and the spreadsheet will give you a guide to what your rate card might look like.

Then, and this is the clever part, it will tell you, based on what percentage of pages you intend to devote to ads, how many pages of ads you will need. Then you can enter all kinds of combinations of the sizes they might be. If you go over the total it will tell you and it will give a cumulative total as you enter the numbers of ads.

Finally it gives you the total income at full rates, and then, the really important figure: based on your previously entered proportions of repeat ads, it gives your likely revenue per issue. And that is the figure which may come as a shock.

Of course you can then work out what happens if you get an extra full page. Sure, the revenue will shoot up but there is the calculation this spreadsheet does not do for you: what effect does it have on your printing and other production costs (especially if it takes you into the next postage category and you have a lot of mail subscribers).

This isn't a magic solution, but it will help with calculations that every magazine and newsletter publisher has to do at some stage, even if it is on the back of an envelope.

The book is available from Worsley Press or from Amazon, at US$26.95 and there's a lot more help than just this spreadsheet.

But first, have a look at the Adrates file (Download Adrates) which shows how the spreadsheet works.