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. In the meantime, Claire is doing some initial fundraising via GoFundMe–see the link at Brave Old World. Contributions here, which will go especially toward development of the project website, are straight donations without expectation of any financial return. 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.