A Publishers Thoughts on Ripping off Authors.

As a small publisher with a fairly successful range of local books, authors often come to me either for advice on getting a book they have written published or asking me to publish it for them.

I only publish books that relate to East Kent, this is partly because of the limited amount of time I have and partly because I have neither the distribution nor the promotional facilities to deal with a national title.

Although I have to admit that recently I have been considering setting up a publishing business to produce books for a wider area, geared up to selling through the big national chains.

Anyway that aside and coming back to my existing publishing business, let us say that you write a book about some aspect of Thanet’s history and bring it to me for publication, what happens essentially is that I pay you money in the form of royalties not the other way around.

The normal deal is that I pay the authors who write the books I produce 10% of the cover price of the books I sell.

For example let us say that you write a book about Ramsgate Railways as Dave Richards did, now Dave isn’t computer savvy, so he came along with pictures of various aspects of our railways attached to sheets of text that he had typed out. This produced most of the makings of the book “Ramsgate all Change”, I then did the publishers bit, this varies from book to book, in this case it involved scanning the pictures into the computer, and finding some more to add to the ones he had already got, typing out the text into the computer, adding to some of it and rewriting some of it, taking a photograph of Ramsgate Station for the cover and putting the whole thing together in a form that my printers could turn into a book.

After various stages of proof reading by Dave me and several other people that happened along at the time the book was born.

The price of the book relates mostly to the cost of the materials, although I tend to make it a bit more expensive if I think a large proportion of the copies will be sold by post rather than in the shop. What came out was an 88 page A4 monochrome book with coloured cover selling for £7.99.

So if I sell 100 copies this means a combined selling price of about £800 this means I pay Dave £80 it’s not really rocket science and if you print 88 pages of A4 and an A3 coloured card wrap around cover and tot up the price of the materials, you will appreciate that there is no fortune to be made for anyone in this arrangement.

So where does the ripping off of the author come in you may wonder? This is when the author tells me that he has found a publisher that will publish his or her book for a price. By this I mean the author pays the publisher money and the publisher publishes the book, normally the book will be the authors first novel, by now my alarm bells are ringing.

I always tell the author concerned to go to a big chain bookshop like Watersones and look amongst their fiction for sale and see how many books published by the publisher concerned are actually for sale on their shelves, invariabley the answer is none.

Although there is nothing new in vanity publishing this is something altogether else where the publisher is giving the impression that that they can sell books, when on investigation they have nowhere where the would be likely in practice to sell them.

Ramsgate All Change

Plenty of comment on the other blogs about Ramsgate’s latest railway project so here is some from me and Dave Richards. HSBC Rail (UK) Ltd have constructed a £34,000,000 maintenance facility on the existing Ramsgate Traincare Depot site. This will provide a modern, light maintenance facility complete with bogie drop, trainwash, controlled emissions tanking, and stabling for the existing Kent railway stock. Overnight stabling and servicing facilities will also be provided for some of the new Hitachi class 395 trains. Works comprised of the demolition of existing heavy lift shop and removal of eight existing sidings. The construction is an 8,000 square meter, five road maintenance shed with attached three storey office, stores and workshop.

The new main shed area is capable of accommodating thirty-six cars and incorporates two heavy lift roads, including a bogie drop facility. The remaining roads within the shed are located within a ‘swimming pool’ type area with the track on stools allowing under-train inspection and maintenance work. Outside, seven new sidings, with a six car train wash to accommodate 66 cars are being constructed. Work included the diversion of Ramsgate’s drinking water ring main which ran under the proposed new facility. The depot is sited above a major drinking water aquifer.

The Hitachi-built class 395 will cut at least 20 minutes off the journey time from Ramsgate to London via Canterbury West. The Javelins are capable of 140 miles per hour.

Dave Richards has taken some pictures of the construction work in progress for anyone who missed it click here to look at them.

Click here for sample pages of his book about the history of railways in Ramsgate

Click here for Southeastern Railways website about the new fast train service.

Railway truck bus and tram books

This is about our stock of ordinary railway books on the shelf in the shop photographed this morning. Most of these are not listed on the internet book selling sites that I use, primarily because if I listed them we wouldn’t have a good range of railway books in the shop click here to view the books

When we set up our ebay shop see http://stores.ebay.co.uk/thanet-books to sell the local books I publish there, we wanted to start with some feedback so we put some railway books for sale there, what became abundantly clear was that if we put the whole railway section in an ebay auction most of it would sell for more than it was priced at on the shelves.

The local books that I publish obviously as I manufacture them in the bookshop there is no supply problem, so I market them everywhere I can on the web mainly at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/ which is the cheapest place to buy them online.

Anyway coming back to the railway books, deliberately not selling them online and why I am putting up the photographs, mainly as it’s mostly local people who look at this blog and the mostly tend to come to the shop to buy books that they see. You have to appreciate that the customers that come in the shop, unlike internet customers, generate abut us much good stock as they take away, by using our exchange voucher scheme or selling us their books I the need some ready cash.

Funny really back in 1999 when I first made forays into internet bookselling, I rather assumed that I could just take pictures of the books on the shelves and people would browse the shop on the internet and email me for anything they were interested in.
How little I knew at the time, however now I have come full circle and this very primitive method is actually working.

Ramsgate All Change

My latest publication Ramsgate All Change; Railway in the News at Ramsgate by David Richards is published today. Its mostly about the railway building and accidents that have occurred in the town.

Steam played a major part in the development of Ramsgate, prior to 1816 the journey from London to Ramsgate was a difficult and arduous one, either by horse drawn coach or sailing hoy.

In June 1816 the first paddle steamer, The Duke of Argyle, arrived at Margate and by 1826 a regular and reliable service had been established to Ramsgate.

Ramsgate was an ideal destination for wealthy London families that came here for the summer season; initially they rented the houses that had been built for the officers that were stationed here during the Napoleonic wars. However soon the demand for accommodation was such that many fine Georgian and regency houses were built.

On April 13th 1846 Ramsgate was the first of the Thanet towns to be connected to the main Kent railway network, a branch line continued on to Margate opening on December 1st 1846.

Ramsgate’s prosperity has been directly related to the time that the journey from London takes and it is hoped that the introduction of the Javelin class trains will considerably reduce this time and herald a new period of prosperity.

Click here to look at some of the text and pictures from the book