Cost-vs-quality trade-offs in book publishing
Arthur Attwell
Helping organisations publish better, more effective books ? Host of How Books Are Made
This is the third article in our series on budgeting for book-publishing projects. The previous articles were ‘What is your book’s job?’ and ‘The four quarters of every book-publishing budget’.
As you manage your publishing budget, you’ll have to make trade-offs between quality and costs. In this article, I’ll give you four matrices to help you understand key trade-offs, plan better, and brief your team appropriately.
‘Quality’ is not always necessary for a book to be successful. A successful book is one that does its job for the lowest possible cost.
So, in order to make good cost-vs-quality trade-offs, you must first answer the question: ‘What is this book’s job?’
Before starting any book project, you should answer it with complete honesty, and write it down for everyone on the project. Then you can figure out how your book will do that job, while keeping costs to a minimum.
You’ll make your biggest trade-offs in these four areas:
We can weigh up the key trade-offs for each area in a four-quadrant matrix:
In each matrix, the cheapest, minimum-quality option is the bottom left quadrant. For each step up or right, your costs roughly double. So the top-right quadrant is high-quality in every respect, and the most expensive.
You will, of course, want to do everything in the top-right quadrant! That will make for the best book, right? The reality is that you are very unlikely to have the money. You will have to compromise on something, so you might as well do it consciously and deliberately, as part of your strategy and planning.
Content
For content, the key cost-vs-quality factors are story and fidelity.
No matter what you’re publishing, every book has a story – that’s the journey your reader will go on as they engage with the book. Even dictionaries take the reader on a story-like journey every time they look up a word. To get to a great story, you might need great reviewers, writers, and development editors. For picture books, you need a top-notch illustrator with real story-telling talent. A great story costs money.
Fidelity is about accuracy and fine detail. You increase fidelity with good editors, fact checkers, proofreaders, software testers, and detail-oriented illustrators. Fidelity also costs money.
Will you maximize both story and fidelity, or can your book do its job with less?
These trade-offs inform your creative and editorial team and their brief.
Design
There are two sides to any book’s design: the template and variation.
领英推荐
The template defines the overarching rules for layout and typography: things like margins, grids, type sizes, brand colours, and so on.
Design variation refers to how much each page or spread differs from the next.
For example, a novel has very low variation, but a high-end print magazine has very high variation – each page looks totally different, even though there is an underlying template that holds the brand identity together.
These trade-offs inform your design team, tools, and workflow.
Distribution
Distribution costs are affected by your formats and whether they are optimized.
Your distribution costs depend on how many formats you publish in, and whether you optimize each of those formats for maximum impact. For example, you could just publish a printed book or a PDF ebook. Or you could publish both, along with a reflowable ebook, a web book, an audiobook, a video book, a large-print edition, a teacher’s edition, an API, an online course, an AI chatbot, and more.
For each of those formats, you could produce a version that’s just good enough to be viable, or a cutting-edge, optimized version. An optimized version makes the most of everything that that format has to offer.
These trade-offs inform your design team, tools, and workflow, as well as your promotion work.
Promotion
Promotion costs depend on your community and your skills.
All promotional work is essentially community building. If you don’t already have a community of fans and champions, you will need to invest a lot of time and, therefore, money in building one.
Communities grow best around authors who inspire their fans, but not all authors have innate community-building skills. If your authors don’t have those skills and capacity, you’ll have to spend much more to contract expertise in promotional strategy and execution.
Managing expectations
When you plan your project, write your choices for each matrix into your plans. Don’t be tempted to choose top-quality in every one, unless you have an unlimited budget.
If you include these matrices in your planning docs, with a brief description of your book’s job, you’ll better manage everyone’s expectations. And if everyone involved has similar expectations, it’s much easier to manage project costs, and to make the most of your available resources.
This article was first published on electricbookworks.com.