Bronwyn Mehan Encounters an Upside and Downside to POD and its Hand-selling [24.11.2011]
A month out from the launch of his first collection of short stories, The Rattler & other stories, author and St Kilda bookseller, Alec Patric, stood holding a freshly-minted copy. Co-worker and illustrator of the collection, Miles Allinson was there too. The stories were the result of years and years of inspiration and fine-tuning and the artwork had been created up against Miles’ PhD deadline. But here it was. The two stood, transfixed. The cover was a lush chocolate with burnt orange titles and felt like velvet. The interior leaves – high quality, crème. The font, curly and clear, Garamond. The pencil illustrations whispered of sketchbook. Spineless Wonders had come through.
But twenty-two pages in, the wonder turned sour. In one of the signature sentence-long paragraphs of ‘B O M B S’, there was a noun-verb disagreement. The hostess is contrasting the Hollywood movie portrayal of plane crashes of panicked passengers with the stillness that descends the cabin in those final moments. Alec’s choice of simile is perfect: the yellow masks bounces down from the overhead compartments to dangle like rubber chickens.
Alec picks up the phone and calls me. He is charming and buoyant as always. The cover, the paper, the illustrations. The font. And then he tells me about the mistake and in the silence that follows, I remember the dangling chickens sentence. It was one of the long list of errors found by the copyeditors and I was sure I’d corrected it. But clearly I hadn’t.
Alec’s silence told me the grammatical mistake was a blight on his story and on his book. There was only one thing to do. ‘I’ll fix it,’ I say. And unlike the passengers in the fated plane, Alec breathed again.
The single copy that was sent to Alec was a dummy run, in lieu of the traditional proof. Not only is this a faster and cheaper process than generating a proof, it also means that the actual book, bound and covered, can be checked before a print run. And correcting this ‘proof copy’ should not be a huge drama. All I had to do was re-open The Rattler’s InDesign file, delete the unnecessary ‘s’ and upload the revised file to Lightning Source. The revision would take forty-eight hours, the reprint four to five days. The books would be at the shop two and half weeks ahead of the launch. Not ideal, but do-able.
As it turned out, the revision was a huge drama. In my haste to correct the copy, I didn’t relink the illustrations with enough care and consequently the hundred copies which arrived at St Kilda’s Readings the following week had one illustration inadvertently repeated.
Another call from Alec. He didn’t have to ask. I fixed the problem, checked I hadn’t created any more problems, and submitted a second revised text file. Thanks to the lightning-fast print on demand, the books arrived in time to be processed by Readings St Kilda for the launch as well as sent to their other stores.
All of this left me with a good feeling about the quality standards of Spineless Wonders, a bill for one hundred misprinted books and two cartons of books not fit to sell at full price.
Light bulb moment. I purchased a labeller and stuck Sample Copy on the back cover of eighty misprinted copies, wrapped them in an order form and mailed them to bookshops. As I am the publicist and admin for Spineless Wonders, as well as editor and director, it took me about two weeks. By this time, The Rattler & other stories, had received great reviews in both the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age and Bookseller + Publisher ran both a review, and an interview with Alec.
On the strength of this publicity, I spent the best part of a week on the phone to bookshops. The results were fantastic. By Wednesday afternoon I had placed forty-five copies of The Rattler & other stories (as well as a handful of our first publication, Permission To Lie) in fourteen bookstores. The orders were for multiples of two, three, four or five copies and ranged from firm sale, sale or return and consignment.
Throughout the week I had many conversations with booksellers across the nation. I got knockbacks:
We can’t sell short stories, We’re too busy with our Christmas stock, This one is not for us …
At one well-known bookshop in Paddington, Sydney, the bookbuyer seems to always be out getting a coffee when I ring. Is it me or should I be worried about her caffeine addiction? A common refrain was: who is your distributor?
Andrew from Hill of Content, Melbourne said, ‘You’re really good at getting reviews. I’ll take five. Send me an invoice, you know the drill’. Michelle from Booktique in Merimbula was reading the sample copy, had seen the reviews and intended to call me. Matilda’s Books in Mount Waverley had an order from a U3A customer. I had terrific conversations and learnt lots about life from a booksellers’ point of view.
Misprinting one hundred books was an expensive mistake for me. Added to that was the cost of mailing the samples to eighty bookshops. But it did mean that the product got into the hands of booksellers. POD books have not had a good reputation (poorly proofed and self-published, printed on thick, whiter than white paper stock in miniscule print with narrow margins). When I began Spineless Wonders I set out to produce critically-acclaimed POD books, indistinguishable from those produced by larger publishers using offset printing. My printing error, and the experience of ‘hand-selling’ to bookshops, gave me a chance to assess if I had succeeded.
Bronwyn Mehan runs Spineless Wonders, a publishing company devoted to producing quality short Australian stories. Her print on demand publications are printed by Lightning Source Australia and it is hoped that its distribution channels, comprising some of Australia’s best known distributors, will be operating soon.
Subscribe to our RSS feed
Follow us on Twitter