The Blog of Xangis

I spent some time today browsing small-press book and anthology publishers trying to get more information about how they run and the way they do business.

The reason I’m doing this research is because I’ve discovered that there is a serious lack of markets for fantasy and science fiction in the Novelette to Novella range, i.e. over 10,000 words. Since All Possible Worlds stops at 6,000 words it closes itself off to a lot of good stories that are just too long.

I’ve been thinking about the idea of creating a pair of books that are not-quite-an-anthology-but-not-quite-a-magazine. They would focus on longer stories of the 6,000 to 20,000 word variety with one book for fantasy and one for sci-fi. Lengths would be about double what APW is and would most likely be 256 pages. If stories were somewhere in the midpoint on average, each book would have about 6 stories.

I haven’t given too much thought to how often they would be published, but I think it would be somewhere between yearly and “whenever I can get one finished”, which would be more frequent.

In comparing the different business models, pricing ranges, and author payment schemes (which are mainly flat fee, advance plus royalties, or pure royalties) I’ve come up with some reasonable idea of what would be involved in making a profit.

Although most of the ideas I’ve toyed with cross over into profitablility around the 1000-copy mark with the assumptions I’ve used, a pure-royalty model that is ordered direct from the website (without the fees and discounts a distributor would charge) could conceivably turn a tiny profit with only about 100 copies printed. The author pay would be abysmal, though.

Provided I can find a fairly reliable method of selling more than a thousand copies of a book it would make sense for me to start the project. This means I’d have to figure out how to get distribution for books (it’s a bit different than magazines) and how to use advertising to full effectiveness. If I were to find a way to sell 10,000 copies of something, regardless of the pricing model and/or distribution methods I’d be able to cover my living expenses for a year and pay the authors quite well. 10,000 is a lot of work.