Are you looking for a traditional publisher?

 

The old-style traditional publishers

A traditional publisher is, or used to be, one that pays the author a small advance against the author’s income from the book. In the old days the authors income used to be 10% of the cover price.

 

So, for a book that cost £10 the money was shared thus;

Retailer   £3.30

Physical cost of producing the book (printing, typesetting, design etc) £3.30

Authors royalties £1.

Publisher  £2.40

 

So, if a book sold 10,000 copies the author got £10,000

The publisher got £24,000.

 

...and their mixed list

Most publishers would try to publish a variety of books, some that were sellers and some were not, they had a mixed list because they wanted to publish non-commerical stuff, but needed to get by somehow.

Now they are corporations that don’t want to just get by, they want to make millions. And they don’t bother with a mixed list any more, as any literary agent will confirm.

Therefore most books are not published by traditional publishers but are self-published.

But these days very few of the  books that get published sell many copies at all, because there aren’t any bookshops left, except the big chains, and they sell mainly bestsellers. They won't even stock books by unknown authors (unless perhaps when the authors take in the book themselves)

 

The decision to get the income from the authors themselves

Income from publishing cannot come, therefore, from book sales. Publishers have to decide,  either they are only going to publish bestsellers/commercial books, (which is indeed what almost all traditional publishers do decide) or they must get the income from the authors.

 

What people used to think of as traditional publishers, from Penguin downwards, are now  really just corporations run  by accountants- their old role in publishing of supporting a variety of sorts of books, both those that sell and those that don’t,  but deserve to be published anyway,  has gone. It is long gone. Most of those large publishers have abandoned that balanced list idea and  go only for commercial books.

 

Professional authors and others

This leaves a lot of authors, professional authors included, who cannot get their work published anymore. There are many people who might have had a chance before of finding a small publishers who might take a chance on their book, who now have more or less zero chance of that. And they stand along with the professional authors.

There are many huge self-publishing companies that cater for the very, very many people who have written books they would like to publish. And now of course that means that, in a way, ANYTHING can get published, whereas before it couldn’t.  It has gone full circle, from being difficult/selective, to impossible, then to meaningless, because people can simply pay to get it done. That wasn’t really possible before, now it is.

 

Self-publishing companies

It means there is a plethora of books. Self-published books. And if authors choose those big companies they can indeed get a book printed (although they tend to pay well over the odds for it)  and their book can join the millions of books that are printed in that way. And it is usually called self-publishing, do-it-yourself publishing, or pay-on-demand  printing. It won’t have a publishers name on it, and it will have the look of one of those self-published books done by a large corporation. That is adequate for some, they just want to hold the book in their hands, don’t want to have to think too much about it,  and they will have a few copies for friends. If it was half the price it would be a decent service.

 

Small, independent, publishers like ourselves

What we are is something more like an old-style traditional publisher, where aside from the fact that the author has paid some of the cost of producing the book, the experience for the author is more like being published by a publisher, like it used to be.

Authors make their submissions to us and we decide if we want to publish it or not, based on the quality of the writing.

The book will  look properly published, not self-published. It will  have the look of an Authors Library Press book.

Also like traditional publishers, we decide the design of the book and the cover, and our books have house style and a standard and quality that is common to all our books, as is the case usually with traditional publishers,  like it used to be.

Unlike with  traitional publishers, the author gets 100% of the proceeds from the sale of the book after the wholesaler's deduction, so roughly the author gets £6 per copy