Claire Berlinski wants to write a sequel to her important book Menace in Europe, which I reviewed here.  She hopes to do this via a  self-publishing and investment model, under which people will make contributions toward the estimated $60,000 cost of the project and receive in return a percentage of the profits.
Obviously, it will take some work to structure a deal like this properly and in compliance with all relevant regulations. Â In the meantime, Claire is doing some initial fundraising via GoFundMe–see the link at Brave Old World. Â Contributions here, which will go especially toward development of the project website, are straight donations without expectation of any financial return. Â However, you do get the benefit, as Claire notes, of helping to replace the New York Times and similar publications as gatekeepers of the news.
I was hoping that our resident publisher, Sgt. Mom, would comment on this.
$60,000 is a pretty generous estimation of costs, although I am supposing that this will include a professional publicist and a large print run (well north of 5,000 copies), plus some personal travel by the author to do local media appearances, in addition to an editor, book-designer, and graphic designer for original artwork.
Mom: Are there people who can guide authors through the process on a fee for service basis?
The self publication process that is.
My history book cost about $20,000 to publish and the “expert” screwed up the cover and was little help other than the ISBN.
I paid my own editor (who did not catch many typos) and designer, The first run was 2,000 copies and I sold about 20,000 total. For medical history, that is pretty good. It still sells a few copies a month and I turned it over to Amazon several years ago for POD publishing.
The new book is Kindle only and I keep think about going to a hard copy version but that’s more work.
Hi, Robert – I don’t know about that. (Makes note to self; niche market left unserved) It all really depends on what is wanted by the author – establishing a Teeny Indy Publishing entity. The figure that Mike K gave, is — I think — about par, considering editing, doing an index and footnotes, and the cost of a cover. I pay my brother the graphic artist to do mine, and I budget about $250 for that, although it depends on if he can use my own photographs or not…
Getting a good and clean edit — that is huge. Something with a lot of footnotes, and and index – again, huge. The hours spent on that are … again, huge.I have a client who wanted indexing for his book. I spent about a week of work-time, going through the MS and tagging the items for index. Doing it through a word file still takes time. My late business partner used to do this by hand — that is, go through the MS and make notations on file cards, which cost a bomb since it would have taken even more time.
It’s one of the values for my own Teeny Bidness – that we are local and will be willing to meet personally in the local area, to sort out stuff. Some of our clients have made note of that – the benefit of meeting face to face. They are willing to pay a premium, over having to deal with a 1-800 number for god-knows-where.