Since starting Haywire Books in 2019, I occasionally receive emails looking for advice about how to start a small press. Everyone has different motivations for starting a press and brings a different set of skills and understanding of the industry, but I’ve put together a few general principles below that may point you in the right for getting a press off the ground.
Up front, I would say it can be a rewarding project. The supply of good writers far exceeds the capacity of existing publishers, and it feels great to bring a book into the world that otherwise might not exist. That said, running a small press is more demanding—and more expensive—than I think even the most clear-eyed entrepreneurs would expect. I’ve emphasized a few things I would strongly recommend to help keep your finances afloat.
Here are some of the key aspects of starting and running a small press:
Acquisition and Editorial
The first thing you need is books to publish. I presume that if you want to start a press, you have some sense of where to find books and the types of authors you want to publish. The only observation about acquisition I’ll offer is that if you can do a good job publishing 1-2 books (books with nice design, some respectable publicity, and a presence in the book market), you will soon receive a steady stream of pitches from authors looking for a publisher.
If you have time, you as the publisher likely will be the person reading and editing manuscripts. If you have a friend or partner in the business, you might divvy those duties up. If you stay in business long enough, it would likely be helpful to find an intern who can read the slush for you and maybe do a short write-up of manuscripts that come in. Reach out to area college writing professors or arts organizations to find an intern.
Finally, no matter how good of an editor you are, you’ll want someone else to proofread the manuscript once it’s laid out. Otherwise, you will miss something. For budget reasons, you’ll probably want to lean on a friend to do the proofreading, but if you want to hire someone, plan for $1000-$1500 for a professional.
Print and Distribution – Print on Demand (POD)
Unless you really know what you are doing, I would strongly recommend you use print on demand (POD) for your print and distribution. The best option right now seems to be to load the manuscript into Amazon’s KDP system for Amazon sales and into IngramSpark for all other sales. Both POD systems produce nice manuscripts that even major publishers are now using for their backlists.
The reason to use POD is because you will save several thousand dollars in up-front print costs, and you will avoid warehousing fees. With either system, you can order a box of copies for you to sell directly through your website (about $5/book including shipping). IngramSpark is part of the Ingram wholesale network, so your book will be available within the “book trade,” meaning independent booksellers can order it and it will be on the Barnes & Noble website.
Print and Distribution – Print Runs
If you don’t want to use POD, your other option is to find a printer and distributor. Again, I would strongly discourage this unless you are confident you will sell more than 1,000 copies of your book, which seems to be the break-even number.
If you are printing 1,000 copies, it will cost about $2 to $3 per book, and then you’ll need to store them somewhere—either your garage or a distribution warehouse. If you are researching distributors, you want to find someone who can sell to wholesalers, specifically Ingram.
A print run through a printer can give you a lower cost-per-copy and offers more flexibility than POD, but the fees really make it prohibitively expensive for new presses. More on this below, but in addition to the print costs, fees include monthly warehouse storage fees, warehouse picking/shipping fees, freight or postage, and return charges.
Book Design
Authors hate to hear this, but a book’s title, cover design and marketing blurbs are all about advertising the book to a target reader within a genre. Consider how most strangers will encounter the book: a photograph on Instagram, perhaps, or on the new releases table at a bookstore. The title and cover are what inspire a person to read the description copy and the first page, and the description and first page are what inspire a person to buy a copy.
If you don’t spend any other outside money, I would make sure to invest in a professional designer to make sure the book looks sharp. Plan on $500-$1,000 for this service. With a little know-how, you can lay out the interior yourself in In-Design or another software, but you need someone to design the cover in a way that will inspire the right reader to pick it up.
Book Marketing and Publicity
When it comes to marketing the book, you have a few options. You probably have a sense of which will be best for you, but the truth is you’ll probably need to leverage all three:
Direct sales through your network. You should set up an ecommerce website and social media pages so you can sell the book directly. You may need to attend trade shows, conferences or other events where you can build your brand as a publisher and introduce it to readers.
The book trade. I think most authors and publishers want their titles on physical bookstore shelves. To make that happen, you have to offer a wholesale discount (more on that below), build relationships with booksellers and other trade people, and build demand through traditional publicity. The cold truth here is that booksellers who know and like you might order your titles, but building excitement around a book is all on you.
Advertising. It’s tough to make Amazon, Facebook, Bookbub or other advertising pay for itself, but ads can help with a strong launch and may help build your newsletter list so you can better succeed with #1 and #2 above. If I were starting a press from scratch today, I would focus on books in a series. If you offer book 1 for free or $0.99, a certain number of readers will move onto books 2 and 3. Getting multiple book sales seems to be the best way for advertising to pay for itself. It’s tough to make a profit advertising a one-off unless you have a specific niche to target.
Essentially, the publicity job of the publisher is two-fold: Build your reach, and then build excitement around each title. This is a full-time job and, unfortunately, it can’t easily be outsourced to freelance publicists. Publicists can help with a piece of media or make introductions, but successful publishers tweet every day, publish weekly newsletters, make appearances at events, and/or run thousands of dollars in targeted advertising.
Small Press Finances
When I started Haywire Books, my accountant said running a small press is a great way to build a small fortune, provided you can start with a large fortune. I’ve hinted at some of the math above, but here is the harshest breakdown of book sales.
If you sell directly through your website, you can buy a box of books from KDP or IngramSpark for $5/copy. When you make a sale and ship it, it costs $3-4 for postage and packaging, leaving you the net of the rest (maybe $8-10 depending on your cover price).
The book trade is about middlemen. The standard retail (bookstore) discount is 40%, meaning booksellers almost certainly will not order your book unless they can purchase it for a 40% discount off the cover price. Booksellers primarily purchase through wholesalers (i.e., Ingram), which takes another 15%.
In other words, when you sell a book through the book trade, you are selling it at a 55% discount off the cover price. For a $20 book, here is the math of where the money goes for each sale if you do a print run and sell it through a traditional distributor:
$8 – Retailer 40%
$3 – Wholesaler 15%
$1 – Freight
$2.50 – Distribution fees (warehousing and fulfillment)
$2.50 – Print costs
$1.50 – Author royalty
$1.50 – Publisher profit
That $1.50 profit-per-copy has to pay for:
Website – $250/year
Software – $250/year
Office supplies – $250/year
Book design – $500
Copyediting – $1,000
ISBN – $10
Barcode – $25
Review copies – $300-$500
Marketing and publicity – $500 to $30,000
With some ingenuity and a willingness to beg and borrow services from friends, you could produce a book for $1,000 in upfront fees and marketing, in which case your break-even number is 600-700 copies. That’s do-able but, frankly, 500 sales from a small press without corporate sponsorship is doing very well.
Risks and Rewards
The money of running a press is ugly, no doubt about it. There are ways to make it a profit center, namely by tapping into coffee table books or a genre-book series that allows you to scale advertising. If you want to run it as a business, your world quickly will turn into one of boxes and discount codes. Not sexy.
That said, a small press as a hobby effort can be a great way to participate in the book community. The community needs as many volunteers as it can get to sustain it for the next generation. If you want to start and run a small press, I salute you and wish you well.
Feel free to contact me if I can answer more specific questions. And of course, consider subscribing to my monthly newsletter! It’s a short digest of bookish news, trends and recommendations.