Five books already sell. The question is who publishes the next twenty.
Five Diddly Squat books from Penguin, a pub cookbook, and two Sunday Times bestsellers from the farm manager. An imprint is the proposal that the next list is published rather than licensed — which trades a reliable royalty for a larger share and a great deal more work.
Licensed to a publisher, or published in-house.
| The current arrangement | An own imprint | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Who takes the risk | The publisher | The estate | |
| Author share | Typically 7.5–15% of RRP | 40–60% of net receipts, after costs | |
| Who does the work | Editorial, design, sales, distribution, publicity | All of it, or all of it bought in | |
| Retail access | Excellent. It is what a publisher is for | Difficult. Supermarkets and chains buy from people they already buy from | |
| Capital required | None | £150,000–400,000 for a first list of four titles | |
| Risk of a flop | Theirs | Yours, and a remaindered print run is a specific and expensive kind of failure | |
| Best for | A book that needs a supermarket | A book with a defined audience that already reads this site |
What an own imprint could publish that a trade publisher would not.
| Title | Why a publisher would decline it | Why it works here |
|---|---|---|
| The Field Guide, expanded | Thirty pages is not a book and the audience is small | It is already the most-read thing on this site, and the audience is measurable |
| The Failure Archive | Sponsors and retailers dislike failure | It is the single most useful thing this estate publishes |
| A proper agronomy primer for beginners | The market is served by textbooks | The textbooks teach agronomy and not accounts, which is the actual gap |
| The accounts, annotated | Nobody buys a book of accounts | They might buy one that explains why a thousand acres made £144 |
| A parish handbook | Too small, too regional | Twelve parishes with named organisers who would use it |
| The naming grammar | Nobody buys a book about naming things | People genuinely ask about it, repeatedly, which is a market of some size |
Why not simply keep licensing to Penguin.
Mostly, you should. A large publisher does editorial, design, sales, distribution and publicity, and is very substantially better at all five than a farm office would be. The existing books work because a competent publisher published them.
The argument for an imprint is not economics. It is that a list controlled by somebody else is a list shaped by what will sell in a supermarket, and several of the most useful things this estate could publish will never sell in a supermarket.
So the sensible version is both: the commercial titles stay where they are, and an imprint exists for the six or eight books that would otherwise not be published at all. That is a smaller business and a considerably more defensible one.
What a first list would take.
An editor
One, experienced, and the single most important hire. Everything else can be bought in.
A distributor
Bought in. Warehousing, fulfilment and trade terms are not a thing to learn on the job.
Four titles
A first list of one is a hobby. Four is enough for a distributor to take seriously.
£150,000 to £400,000
Advances, production, print and the first year of the editor. Mostly print.
A direct channel that already works
Which this estate has, and which is the only reason the arithmetic is not hopeless.
None of this exists
The books that exist are published by Penguin and by other publishers, and belong to their authors and publishers. There is no imprint, no list and no editor. This page describes a business that has not been started by anybody.
The imprint, questioned.
Per copy, substantially. In total, probably not, because a trade publisher sells many more copies. The argument for an imprint is control of the list rather than margin.
The expanded field guide, because it is already the most-read thing on this site and the audience is measurable rather than hoped for.
Because a print run is paid for before a single copy is sold, and a remaindered run is the specific way small publishers fail.
And a magazine, which is harder still.
A quarterly people keep, and a website that pays for it.
