Chicken Scratchings

Posts Tagged ‘Employee’

Your current printer may not tell you these things, but I will.

In my day job I am a printing broker. I on December 3, 2009 I marked off 20 years of self-employment. Beyond that I have nearly 20 more years of other experience in the printing business, some of it on press, but mostly in sales. I’ve been there, done that, so you can trust that I know what I’m talking about.

Printing is a very competitive business. To grow and stay viable printers must buy expensive equipment. It isn’t unusual to find a small company with a million dollar investment on the floor. New multi-color presses can easily run between one million to three million dollars. The only way to make this kind of investment payoff is by keeping the presses running. Having an idle press is like making a bonfire out of hundred dollar bills.That’s not something they want to do–would you?

What secrets do I know that you may not know?

1. You are the printer’s greatest asset. Without you the printer will have to close-up shop. Imagine being in their shoes, they are saddled with huge debts and the only way to pay back the banks is to keep their customers happy so they will continue bringing in work to keep those expensive presses running. They want you to be satisfied and will do almost anything to make sure they keep you. Try not to take too much advantage of this knowledge though. If you hold their feet to the fire too often, they won’t have a leg to stand on.
2. Every print shop is equipped differently. What difference does that make? Plenty. Printers buy equipment to meet the needs of their market. If your project is outside of their sweet spot it won’t be as efficient for them and cost you more. Suppose you’ve done a thousand jobs with them and everything was great, but your 1001 job is a little different, do you know when to change?
3. The printer’s employees have different levels of experience. I had this conversation with the owner of a successful printing company in my area, he said, “What would you rather have, a shop with the state-of-the-art equipment and people to run it that were less experienced, or equipment that was a little dated and operators that were the best in the industry?” He opted for the state-of-the-art equipment. It worked out well for him, but they had more rejections than a printer with more experienced personnel. Choose a printer based on your needs and expectations. If the price is good, but they make a lot of mistakes, is it worth it to you? Or, if there are few errors, but the cost is higher are you willing to pay the price? Don’t you think it is important that you know if the printer shares your same philosophy?
4. Much of the profit comes from buyouts. The printer’s markups on paper and other services like die-cutting, foil stamping and the like usually run around 40%. If you provide your own paper, or arrange for other services you can cut your printing bill substantially. WARNING–things happen on press that are not the printer’s fault. Just because a certain amount of paper is budgeted for the job doesn’t mean there won’t be a jam up, or other press problem that could eat your stock. If you provide paper and end up short on the order it will be your problem–not theirs.
5. Small substitutions can make a big difference in price. You don’t necessarily have to change printers or beat them up for a better price. Ask the printer if a small change in the size, or a different paper, or binding on another side would make a difference. You’d be surprised how much money you could save. That doesn’t mean that your printer was gouging you, they may not have focused on the alternatives until you asked. They may have assumed that your specifications were set in stone. Let them know where you are willing to make changes and you both benefit.
6. Quantity is the greatest factor in unit cost. With offset printing particularly, the longer you run the smaller the unit cost gets. That is because the printing estimate is created using two basic components, fixed costs and variable costs. Fixed costs include things like overhead, pre-press, and press set-up. They are the upfront expenses every printer must bear. Variable  costs are paper, ink, and press-time. Variable costs are determined by how much time or materials you use. Fixed costs are set, so the longer the press runs the fixed expenses are amortized. The total cost, however, goes up, but the unit cost goes down. Why does this matter? It matters because of point No.2, your current printer may not be as cost effective at larger quantities.

If you’ve printed a book and need help selling it, you can learn the fundamentals of network marketing with THE AUTHOR PLATFORM. It is an exellent educational tool that will jumpstart your bookselling. After all, what good is a book if no one reads it, and who will read it if they don’t have it? How do they get it–they buy it, of course.

Bite your Tongue.

Those who decide to self-publish can hold their heads high, because they are counted among some of greatest authors in history. Below is but a partial list of authors who have chosen to self-publish at sometime in their career.

• William Blake, Ken Blanchard, Robert Bly,Lord Byron, Willa Cather, Stephen Crane,
  
• e.e. cummings,  Alexander Dumas, T.S. Eliot,Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Benjamin Franklin,
  
• Zane Grey, Thomas Hardy, Nathaniel Hawthorne,Ernest Hemingway, Robinson Jeffers,
  
• Stephen King, Rudyard Kipling, Louis L’Amour, D.H. Lawrence, Anais Nin, Thomas Paine,
  
• Tom Peters, Edgar Allen Poe, Alexander Pope, Beatrix Potter, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust,
  
• Carl Sandburg, Robert Service, George Bernard Shaw, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Upton Sinclair,
  
• Gertrude Stein, William Strunk, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoi,
  
• Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman.

Note: The list was pulled from John Kremer’s Self-Publishing Hall of Fame

If you don’t find at least one of your heroes here I would be very surprised. Also you may have noticed that quite a few poets populate the list. Modern poets complain that publishers aren’t interested in their books. It’s said that poetry doesn’t sell. Compared to a fast paced pop-novel of sex, violence, and action they are probably right. I have to keep reminding myself that publishing isn’t primarily about getting the finest works into the public’s hands–it’s a profit generating business like a grocery store. If the stock isn’t turning it is costing money. I, like many others, tend to glamorize the traditional publishing houses and imbue them with a nobility they just don’t have. It’s a business. Poetry, on the other hand, is something else. Poetry is a work of passion, not business. Publishers probably weren’t any more anxious to publish poetry then than they are now and that is why so many poets had to resort to self-publishing.

The Old Man

One of my readers added this comment about self-publishers: “For me all I had to do was find out that Hemingway’s first book was “self-published,” to help me make my decision and after 32 years of “practice” I feel I did it just right. And then later this year when I found out about Mark Twain’s force of ten thousand book agents scattered across America selling his works and Ulysses S Grant’s Memoirs (also published by Twain’s company which was run by his young nephew Webster).” Miles Cobbett, Author the Alaskan book CHAMPION.

Miles followed up with this comment in another post: “One more tasty tidbit about Hemingway and his publisher, that I bet you already know is his lively discussions in letters between him and Charles Scribner about Royalty Payments. I was fascinated to read in copies of Hemingway’s “Letters” that CS only offered to pay Ernest Hemingway 10 % of the net. And Ernest wrote back in a lively letter that he wanted 15 % or a Minimum of 12.5 %…
This was fascinating to me, especially when I read in the other book I wrote to you about, (Birth of a Salesman), how Mark Twain offered and paid U. S. Grant and his widow, a whopping 70% of the profits from publishing Grant’s Memoirs.”

I have more sympathy for the traditional publishers than you might think from reading my posts. They have to have highly tuned crystal balls to foresee the future. If they choose to take a gamble on an author, and it tanks, what do they lose? Why the entire investment, of course. And what about credibility? What happens to the employee who stands behind a book bomb? Or two, or three? Can you say pink slip?

If you know your book will sell–you stand behind it. Raise the money to print and promote it. You might be like my friend Miles Corbbett whom I quoted above. His self-published book CHAMPION is selling well and he owes it all to word-of-mouth advertising. Miles has this to say about his success: “Getting the word out has been a fun & challenging journey, but it’s all been done so far without any help from a Madison Avenue super advertising blitz.”

If you are a self-publisher, considering self-publishing, or a supplier to self-publishers be sure to check out the manifesto for The Red Hen Association of Self-Publishing Authors, Inc. (click here).

Mark Twain had an army of ten-thousand salesmen peddling his books all over the country. He understood the principles of marketing as they applied to his time. Today’s marketing is different and requires an understanding of blogging, social networking, books on Amazon, etc. You can get that information from The Author Platform (TAP). It’s not free but almost click (here) for more information. If you can sell your book yourself you’ll earn 15 times more than if you traditionally publish.

—-

This article was republished with permission from the author’s blog Talking Through My Hat.