… as opposed to a publisher of edgy fiction, just in case you thought that was a bleary saturday morning typo. (Though I was up late trying to catch a fish for breakfast and failing). Because these are edgy times. It was originally verboten to talk about the tough times for TRP – because what got us projected into some of the places you wouldn’t expect to find such a small, new publisher was the boundless joy and enthusiasm we have for the books. People found it infectious. Two publishers who aren’t looking glum and serious in the book trade! But on the other hand a blog has no balls if it doesn’t do the downs with the ups. So, a week where we struck up a new ‘personal best’ at the post office (£103.58 postage costs at a single sitting) – which I mention not just for the bathos but because one of the things we said we’d do on the blog was give a feel for the nuts and bolts of being a publisher. Of that £103 about £90 was sending out either compulsory free copies to the ‘national bodies’, free copies to anthology authors or review copies. We do our own packing and buy the jiffy bags in bulk so that keeps the cost down. But even so there’s about £100 off the bottom line without paying ourselves a bean. Then we get another big hit from returns. Not as bad as it might have been – we did sell some hundreds of copies of Auschwitz out on the tables with the celebrity bios and the ‘hollywood’ novels (but just don’t ask what the profit per copy was). And you do have to say – that is a priceless thing to have done. But overall, and with the echoing blather in the press about who got £60K from what arts budget for doing whatever… yep, these are edgy, edgy times. Are we moaning? – hell no! Going right back to the crazy mission statement we posted at the beginning – “This is not a game. This is the Alamo.” And anyway – we now have enough goslings (12) to fund a medium-sized print run.
ATB
David
