BTW
Stan told me that most retailer margins would be to high and make it un-viable fort him. (Even his own brothers shop!) so he is selling it mostly direct.
There has always been a major problem with making small run ‘specialist-interest titles profitable. The big retailers demand terms that are totally impossible to provide. One UK national store demands 60% discount, 120 days sale or return and THEN a 90 invoice on top of that! Other problems are that some of the specialist outlets take so long to pay up.
Research is not cheap, even one of our Airfield Focus titles can take six months to put together – large hardbacks can take a year or more. Some specialist publishers – like myself, Cliff and Stan Bishop and a few others would far prefer to put out ‘new information’ than crank out re-hashed pot-boilers like ‘yet another Lancaster book’ or here is ‘another Spitfire title’… but these take time and investment. Paper costs are going through the roof, and whereas a few years ago we could get better payment terms with the printer/binders things have really tightened up.
There are new techniques being used – especially print-on-demand – which is something we have pioneered with the Airfield Focus series that helps with two things at the same time – putting titles into print to make available to those interested with ‘new information’ that maybe would not otherwise appear, and in keeping the costs down.
Stan and Cliff are also doing the same thing. I helped out Stan in the early days and know something of how it has evolved – and believe me, the profit margins such as they are really very small.
That also does not take into account shipping costs – mailing charges are bad enough just within the UK… but to use Royal Mail to ship hardback books overseas is completely prohibitive. My Memphis Belle book costs £60 – to ship to the USA by air mail costs about £40 without packing costs. Customers are, understandably just not prepared to pay that – it took us a year, but we came up with a much cheaper, if slightly longer service if we use TNT Spring Global Mail… then of course we get complaints it takes too long to arrive!
Some ‘customers’ have a totally unrealistic view on pricing – they seem to think that everyone is making piles of money out of them – and also expect new books to be ‘remaindered’ within three months of publication and then blame us, the publishers, when they are not! And God help us if we DARE to sell out before they get a copy! We had one guy at Old Warden a while back who at every show, would come by our stand, stand and look at one title for 10 minutes or so… say, ‘nice book, but too expensive’ and walk off…. he did this for one whole season. Next year, first show… he was back, same routine with the additional.. ‘oh, you have not remaindered it yet!’ I dropped into Del-Boy mode... ‘I tell ya what… just for you… special price… not 80 quid… not 70, not 60… not even 50… JUST for you…. a one off price… not available to ANYONE else not even 40 quid…. buy it right now and it’s just 30 quid.’ No he said… still too expensive. I lost it. See that gate there?… sez I, pointing to the main gate… go through it and stop wasting my ****ing time! You cannot talk to me like that! he said indignantly… ‘I’m a customer” Customers… I replied EARN that right by BUYING things!
Rant Over
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