If it was not winter, Eumenes of Pergamum, the early paper pioneer, stirred his calf pelts in a vat of fermented wheat for eight days; in January he stirred them twice as long. Then, having dehaired the skins, he stretched them over a wooden frame so that the fibers all ran parallel to the grain, and scraped them with a semi-lunar knife. He finished by rubbing the hides down with pumice. After they’d cured, Pergamum had vellum.

This was, until the 15th Century, how paper got made. Though Gutenberg printed many of his bibles on hemp, he issued a few on animal skins. Each volume consisted of 318 sheets, roughly 24 inches wide and 17.5 inches tall. The manufacturer of the parchment, assuming he stretched his calf well, may have produced three leaves from each hide. One of Gutenberg’s parchment bibles, therefore, required the pelts of more than 100 calves.

And yet people went to this cost and trouble for more than 1,700 years. They considered the product worthy of the effort. A bible was a tangible and permanent representation of the word of God. In the age of digital reproduction, however, even if words have retained much of their value, the vectors are myriad. The Bible on a website is not qualitatively different, textually, than the same Bible printed on gilded pages. The only reason you would pay a lot for a bible, now, would be to keep it as a centerpiece in your home. Keep this thought in mind. I’ll be returning to it.

Long after people began consuming novels (in addition to the Bible) and long before the internet, publishers were churning out low-quality paperbacks. I recently picked up a first printing of Henry Miller’s Plexus. The cover is green. The title is in black set in a white rectangle. I suppose that it’s almost elegant in its simplicity, but Grove Press didn’t print a newsprint, mass-market paperback with a two-color cover for aesthetic reasons. They did so for financial reasons. In 1965, the book cost $1.25 at stores. Grove printed it for much less than that, but after discounting it for their distributor, who discounted for the bookstore, they may have cleared $0.21 per copy after funneling 10 or 15% to Miller. With that sort of profit margin, the only viable way to make money was to sell a lot of books.

In fact, selling a lot of copies has been the business model for presses since the advent of commercial publishing. You print as many copies as possible, place them for sale in as many venues as possible, and if possible, sell hundreds of thousands. This may still be appropriate for Penguin and Random House (though I’ll present evidence later this week suggesting that even the giants are reconsidering their approach), but for smaller presses, the cost of printing 20,000 copies of a title is prohibitive. A smaller run, however, increases the unit cost, meaning that the profit margin becomes negligible if you’re trying to sell the book at a standard market price. To give you an example from Flatmancrooked’s recent history, our first book—First Winter—cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $5.50 per copy to print and market because we printed only 500-and in Minneapolis. The list price on the back cover was $20.00. By deduction, you might think we profited $14.50 per copy, but you would be quite wrong. When selling through our old distributor, we earned all of 32% of the list for each sale, which works out to $6.40. That’s a $0.90 profit per unit, and at 500 units, not enough to pay a salary in Mongolia.

What, then, are the potential solutions? If we can’t afford the capital outlay to print in sufficient volume to reduce unit costs, is there another approach we’re not considering? Perhaps the solution is to figure some way out to monetize digital sales. But we know how well that’s benefited the music industry. More people acquire music, and fewer people pay for it. Where once a performer toured to promote his record, now he records to promote his concert tour. There may be some lessons we can glean from that arrangement, but unless authors can start charging for their readings (already under-attended when they’re free, aren’t they?), I’m not sure what it is.

There may be a way, though, to use a free digital download to promote the sale of a big ticket item, if the item in question is of sufficient value. What if you could charge $700 for a book? Better yet, what if you could charge $7,000? Then, giving away a digital copy would seem less of sacrifice. This sounds ridiculous, I know, but on Thursday I’m going to discuss three publishers who are employing successfully a low-volume, high quality model. It sounds like reverse economics, I know. But the three examples I’ll give switch the paradigm in publishing from quantity to quality. If you sell 100 copies of something at $7,000, you gross the same as if you’d sold 100,00 at $7. Get ready, kids.

Read Part II

By Kaelan Smith