Print on demand pays off

When I founded Mensch Publishing, I determined to use the business to test out different ways of doing things. At an author level my terms involved zero advances, world rights all languages, and a relatively high net receipts royalty. Most of the books I have published are brilliantly supported by the Bloomsbury salesforce worldwide and by using their excellent production and rights departments.

But I wanted to try an experiment using print-on-demand technology for an out-and-out trade book with the author’s and agent’s permission. The book in question is Philip Norman’s wonderful memoir of Fleet Street high jinks and catastrophes, We Danced on Our Desks, which we are publishing in original paperback and e-book on 12th December.

The book came to me in May this year from the literary agent and all-round publisher Matthew Smith at Exprimez. The author he represented, Philip Norman, is not a famous celebrity on the scale of Michelle Obama or Prince Harry. He is more known for his brilliant rock music biographies which sell in their hundreds of thousands and earn him decent advances and royalties. However, lockdown has generated more memoirs than any market can possibly support and I was naturally concerned about how many we might be able to sell.

We agreed to use IngramSpark as our production and distribution partners. Editing and typesetting were not straightforward (are they ever?) but we were able to have the book and its cover up on the Ingram platform by the beginning of November. This meant that metadata was distributed worldwide from that moment, thus allowing retailers to add the book to their catalogues websites and begin collecting orders.

Mensch decides the trading terms and prices by territory. No books are produced without an order and production takes place in the relevant territory be it North America, India, Australia, and now from a hub in Sharjah in the Gulf. There can, by definition, be no overstocks as all copies are sold firm sale (much to the distress of some retailers, not least the admirable Bookshop.org, which finds it hard to reconcile its business model with firm sale).

The unit cost of each book is higher — but there are immense savings in freight and general distribution, not to mention CO² emissions and the destruction of unsold or returned copies

So how is the experiment panning out? It’s too early to say how many sales we shall make but at least whatever sales will actually be sales, not loans. The production quality is at least as good as traditional litho (I think it’s even better, but that is a subjective view). The unit cost of each book is higher, probably near double the cost of a, say, 3000-copy print run — but there are immense savings in freight and general distribution, not to mention CO² emissions and the destruction of unsold or returned copies. Support from the book trade has been close to zero, but when I look at subscription orders from the UK’s major retailers for traditionally published titles, I am not sure we are losing much. The schedule from submission to publication has been short, allowing us to publish before Christmas. We are also able to publish simultaneously worldwide without delaying overseas publication while ships trundle across oceans or even worse planes emit noxious gases and charge fortunes. I have been able to save on sending out review copies by offering PDFs, although sadly many media reviewers find it hard to read a book on screen (I empathise but reducing carbon emissions is pretty damn important and every little helps).

As with most experiments, the results are never as conclusive as one would like, but I do think this sustainable and speedy publishing system has much to offer both publishers and the climate. And a final shout-out to the team at Ingram who could not have been more helpful.