I am discovering your articles here on publishing alternatives and find the whole very interesting, and complementary to what I have been doing from my side.

I have recently created Interzone Editions http://www.inter-zone.org/editions.htm to publish officially my own books and some of other Zoners : I aske for a ISBN number, which is free, and sent a copy to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France for the “dépôt légal”, and then I can sell them legally.

The difference with formal publisher is that I do not invest money here : I print each book myself and only on request : when someone wants to buy it, he sends me a mail, so I print the book; once it’s ready he sends the money, and I send the book on the same day. So I do not need money in advance to make it, and sell a book when I am sure I can sell it. No intermediary of any kind.

For the public price, it includes the part of the expenses : papier, ink, cover, and a benefit. For the books made by other Zoners, we share the benefit.

For a comix as the Taxidermist http://www.geocities.com/the_taxidermist_on_line/ , it is made on bristol, and is rather expensive in ink, as there is a lot of black images to print. The result at the end is:

for the Taxidermist :
- public price : 22€
- cost of the making: 8,60 €
- benefit: 13,40 €
shared in three persons : 2 authors + the editor (me) = 4,46 € per person.

This is higher than the authors could get here from a formal publisher who generally gives the author 10 % of the price of the sales, so here, he gets 20 % of the price.

For one of my books of 130 pages :
paper : 2 €
cover : 0,50 €
ink : 2,50 € = 5 €

Selling price : 25 € = benefit for me : 20 €

So I do not include my time for the making in the cost, just what it costs me to make it. So I get gor the Taxidermist about 2 hours work : 4,46 €, which is very few, but on my books, the 20 € I get for the book of 130 pages brings me more.

If I make 4 books of mine a day, then they will bring me 20 x 4 = 80 € a day, which is enough to me, so this is ok.

Of course this system is ok when you do not sell many books, because I cannot print a thousand copies for each book this way. Though, in case I would need to sell much more, then I’d have them made, through Lulu for instance, but then I’d be sure to sell.

Hope this will be useful.

I am going to make an English version of the site Interzone Editions, as for the moment, it only is in French.

Cheers.

Izzy

I think ABNA could be more powerful if it started to encourage communication between authors and the other players in book publishing: publishers, editors, marketing staff, POD facilitators. Networking within your own micro-community is Step One. Creating a conversation that blurs the edges between the various communities involved in the whole process can generate far more interesting avenues.

Great article. Wondering what you think of a networking site like http://www.ABNABooks.com

The online marketplace, showcase, and networking site for writers was created after writers met on the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award forum.

Open Access is obviously a rapidly growing movement - I don’t have the references to hand, but I seem to remember some major research universities (Harvard, maybe?) are starting to demand that all research they do is published under open access, and I think any EU-funded research must be published freely (again, I can’t remember exactly - I’m sure you’d have a better recollection than me!).

I take your point that Libraries are paying for the value-added search tools: this is where academic journal publishers need to concentrate their efforts if they are to continue be part of the business model - if the content itself is free then the academic publishers need to provide a very impressive and valuable framework around the content and sell that instead. The potential features and functionality of such a framework would fill another article like this!

I think reputation does come into it - the reputation of the journal is one of the factors assuring the reliability of the research (hand-in-hand with peer review etc). University libraries need to be able to have “the right type” of content, and if they were providing access to repositories of unreliable research then they’d be doing a major disservice to the researchers, professors and students.

And yes, these are very fascinating times!

Ironically, as a librarian I was very supportive of free information, particularly since my salary (and that of the faculty that produce the actual articles) were covered by the university. Now that I’m producing my own content and also working directly with authors and publishers on book design, I’ve developed a different perspective. Of course, even academic publishers supporting open access need to figure out some type of cost-recovery revenue source since parent institutions always have competing demands for resources.

Regardless, these are fascinating times for publishing and libraries.

As you say, there are always added-value business models that allow for charges to be made (for example, by providing up-to-the-minute customised/specialised content streamed to subscribers - although I would probably argue that technically it’s just the immediate delivery of that customised content that is being charged for, rather than the content itself).

Similarly university libraries and other researchers may still continue to pay to subscribe to digital content repositories—online academic journals etc.—because what they’re actually paying for is the reliability of the information (assured by the peer review process & the reputation of the publisher).