More on Changes to Print Editions (Plus an Expanded ROI chart with a nicer legend)

I’m moving ahead with discontinuing the 4.25×7 trim size (And I genuinely apologize to the 10-15 of you who were buying that size over the period of a year; I wish I could keep maintaining the trim size, but the reality is, with the price hikes, the 10-15 has dwindled closer to 5-10, and 5-10 purchases simply don’t cover expenses.)

To make limit the risk of people continuing to purchase that trim size (for significantly higher expense) than the 6×9, I’ve put in a distribution removal order with Ingram. (While this won’t completely remove those books from the used market, it will stop new orders.)

The transition process will be to 6×9, which will be available at all major retailers starting roughly in July. (I have booked a date with my designer to adjust the trade editions from the kickstarter to streamline this process; we have to adjust all the barcodes so they can be sold to retail; this is not a big problem, it just has to be done. (It’s a 5-10 minute adjustment per cover and minimal expense.)

This will allow me to keep working with. libraries, which is a huge reason I was distributing through Ingram in the first place. (I love libraries.) This will also make the books cheaper for libraries to acquire, as well. A win-win!

Ingram sourced books (Barnes and Noble, etc) will still be higher expense than the Amazon copies, but you can view the differences as “better quality paper, better quality covers” and generally better binding, so the print editions from Ingram tend to last a little longer.

That leads me to the hardback editions.

Assuming I can find a POD printer that will do foil and color printing on cream, there will be two editions of the special hardbacks I do. The Ingram edition will be black and white and available at all major retailers, including on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and so on. The specialty POD printer will have the fancy foiled edges, fancy cover effects, and cost a fucking fortune. (On the design front, my designer can handle doing both editions at one time, so it’s not an issue/large extra expense, as she’d just modify the Ingram cover to fit the POD printer requests.)

No, I will not be doing another kickstarter. The last one blew up well beyond my sanity to readily manage, and I fear what would happen if I did a specialty hardback edition. I would be unholy stressed. So, I am going to eat all the costs of the specialty print edition, and you can acquire them at the higher expense because I’m not doing a print run. I don’t have a warehouse, I can’t afford a warehouse, and I have no interest in doing inventory.

Sorry. I’m a writer, not a warehouse manager/shipper. (And warehousing and shipping is a huge source of stress for me.)

The first few books I will be doing as specialty hardbacks are as follows:

• Cindercorn Trilogy (Playing with Fire, Burn, Baby, Burn, and The Flame Game.) Price point: Expect $74.99 for the Ingram edition, $125+ for the foil etc edition. (Possibly higher.)
• Dead Weight
• Partner in Crime
• Life-Debt
• Experimental Voyage

Some of these books already have basic hardback editions; in those cases, the specialty edition will only be doe at the specialty printer.

The first major hardback project will be bringing the Magical Romantic Comedy series back to standard hardback. We will be sprucing up the flaps and the spine, including which number in the series the book is in, and things like that. Hardbacks will be done in the largest font size possible for the printer restrictions. (The Cindercorn Trilogy, due to length, will have a smaller font size due to page restrictions.) To make up for the smaller font size, there will be a few bonus items, including art pieces, possibly an exclusive short story depending on my time and energy levels, etc. Note: I will be doing a digital version of the Cindercorn Trilogy for those who have been begging for that to be a thing.

It will be priced at $9.99, as the books are all older and there will be minimal expenses to add the bonus material.

Please note that because print editions are not a major part of my business plan, this will be done as I have time. Currently, the trade transition is going to take me into July. I’ll see about the others.

Purple Stained Sky, Year of the Dragon, and the other new play project pieces will have specialty hardback editions because I really just like those books. Whispers (GP Robbins) will also have a specialty hardback edition.

If more books get specialty hardback editions will be fully dependent on if I earn back all my costs from the first wave of specialty hardback editions. (I am willing to throw some money away on fun things, but not a huge amount of money, which is the exact reason the mass market size is going extinct; it got to the point where the losses were simply too high for very, very few people. (Once again, I’m sorry to the 5-10 people who were currently purchasing the mass market sizing, it just wasn’t sustainable.))

And, because people were asking, here is the complete chart for the word counts/productivity of other series. To make things extra clear, I’ve added a new color so you can get a better visual:

Legend:

Note: most young books (less than two years of age) tend to be in the 50-80% ROI category.

Anything green is considered healthy in my viewpoint. At the 80% ROI mark, I’m happy to consider more books, do long-term planning, etc. In very young series (less than a year old), if it hits the 35-50% ROI mark, it’s doing really well. G.P. Robbins, for its age, is doing very well. Yes, I account age into the calculations of what gets continued and what doesn’t. However, both Dead Weight and Partner in Crime need some time to mature and be discovered on the market place, which is why Game On did not get a November slot this year and Grave Intentions got October. Grave Affairs is a lower percentage than Dead Weight but there is only one book, so I’m giving the series a fair chance.

If both books pull into the yellow 50-80 percent category a year after Grave Intentions releases, I may change my mind regarding the series being continued. (I would still use the same rough methodology, but I’d work in duets rather than singlets, much like Grave Intentions / Grave Affairs was a duet.)

Reminder: Not all books I have written are on this list for personal reasons.

And just as a fun aside… yes, mentally, I limit the luxury money each book can potentially earn because I would absolutely go on a permanent vacation and forget I should work.

(In reality, I don’t keep all that much for luxuries and tend to heavily reinvest back into my writing business so I can keep writing. Moving forward, I’d like to be able to have more for luxuries, but it is what it is.)

I hope the expansion of the colors help show a bit more about the scale!