As part of our continued effort to be as open as possible about the business of making books, we’d like to share a list of things we spend our money on at Dagan Books. This is outside of what we pay our authors, artists, and guest editors. (Our Publisher continues to volunteer all of her time as an editor, artist, and administrator, and is not paid.) As we grow we expect to incur additional expenses, especially related to publicity and to a larger presence at professional conventions, but most of what’s posted below has been part of our operating costs since the beginning.
- Annual fees for websites (we currently have six sites we manage), including domain registration and hosting.
- Monthly fees for the service that hosts our ebook sales via our website, and for our submissions portal.
- Twice a year payment for our PO Box.
- Copies of our books – all of our artists, authors, and editors get both print and digital copies of the books their work appears in. In addition, our volunteer staff also get copies of our titles. We also send review copies in either print or ebook formats, depending on the reviewers’ preferences. Plus we host giveaways of our latest releases on Goodreads and in other places.
- Shipping – domestic and international shipping of contributor and review copies, giveaways, promotional items, and more. This includes media rate where applicable, priority mail where necessary, package tracking, and other shipping fees. This also includes the cost of mailing and packaging materials like the bubble mailers we ship all of our books in.
- Promotional items such as postcards advertising upcoming books, and Kickstarter rewards.
- Advertising; includes digital ads like the one we placed at Innsmouth Free Press for Cthulhurotica, and print ads like the one which will appear in the 2012 WFC program.
- Space rental for readings (WFC 2012, for example, charges $100 for a small room, and more for larger rooms or evening time slots).
- Office supplies, one-shot printing (for example, to print a copy of a title in progress at Staples), and other miscellaneous small expenses.
- Convention expenses have included memberships, room rental, food, and travel, but is still largely paid for out of pocket by the staff who attend.
Our biggest single cost has to be the contributor & review copies. We’re going to send out hundreds of books this year: to dozens of reviewers (for each title); to the 15 contributors of IN SITU, the 35 contributors to FISH, and the 20 authors in Bibliotheca Fantastica; to our individual novel and collection authors (who get more books than anthology contributors but are expected to help more with promoting their titles); to our guest editors; to the winners of our contests and to the backers of our Kickstarter. Add the cost of buying the books and shipping them to us, then getting them signed (wherever possible), then buying the packaging materials to ship the books, and finally sending them all over the world (to ship one copy of IN SITU to a single non-US contributor costs us about $20).
We understand why so many small presses don’t send out contributor copies, or don’t send print copies, or don’t allow submissions from international authors, but getting to hold – in your hands – a print copy of a book with your words, your story, is a beautiful thing, and we’d never want to take that away from our contributors. And choosing not to send out print copies to reviewers may save time, but you lose even more in terms of publicity and a chance to meet new readers. Lastly, we could choose to close submissions to non-US authors, thus saving ourselves the international shipping charges, but we’d lose so much in terms of new voices, new perspectives on fiction, that we never considered it.
Dagan Books, Ltd. 