Pagination And The Royal Mail

They say the recession is coming to an end, and I hope they're right (though with the country borrowing hundreds of billions of pounds, I fear they may not be).

Either way, unless they have Stephen Fry twittering about their books, lots of publishers are having to think very hard about what they publish and how they publish it.

We're no different - things like pagination, the cost of cover imagery and print runs, which two years ago seemed relatively minor issues, are assuming ever more importance.

We're just about to print three titles.

One is a reprint of Frank Chalk's It's Your Time You're Wasting.

The second is Eddy Nugent and the Map of Africa (the sequel to Picking Up The Brass).

I'll post up some thoughts about those next week, but here's a mildly interesting insight into the third.

Called Second Opinion, it's the second Theodore Dalrymple title we're bringing out this year, after Not With A Bang But A Whimper.

It's a collection of funny, maddening and terrifying short pieces he wrote for The Spectator between 1995 and 2009. They concern his working life as a doctor and psychiatrist in a hospital and prison in a British inner-city.

Unlike the other two, it's a hardback. This means it costs about twice as much to produce, but you also make more than twice as much on it. (If it sells, that is - returns also hit you harder.)

As is often the case with our titles, it's slightly late. (Sometimes this is our fault, sometimes it's an unavoidable consequence of running a small independent publisher with not many hands to the pump; in this case, it's because The Spectator took quite a long while to confirm that Dalrymple owned the copyright in his pieces.)

We spent a month or so compiling and editing the Speccie pieces and then sent them to our typesetter. He came back with the news that it was 436 pages long.

That's a lot of (sustainably grown) paper, and obviously the longer a book the more it costs. An even more pressing concern for us, though, is the post.

Postal charges work on size, initially. If you've used a post office you'll know that they now come equipped with a plastic square in which there are two slots: one through which an ordinary letter (a 'standard letter') can pass, and a deeper 25mm 'large letter' slot.

If a packaged-up book passes through the large letter slot, weight is then an issue.

If it weighs between 101g and 250g, the cost of first class mail (we send all books first class) is 90p.

If it weighs between 251g and 500g it's £1.24.

If it doesn't fit through the 25mm slot, it is defined as a 'packet', and then the costs are greater: between 101g and 250g, £1.62, and between 251g and 500g, £2.14.

Thus, there is £1.24-worth of difference between a book which, once packaged, is 24mm deep and weighs 249g, and one which 26mm deep and weighs 251g.

On some books sold in stores and online, this is half your profit - so it is important.

If, as we do, you sell a lot of books direct to regular customers, it's obviously something worth thinking about; it runs into thousands of pounds.

The original Wasting Police Time was well over 300 pages long and would now cost £2.14 to post out. The current edition has the same number of words, but a slightly smaller font size and fewer pages. It costs 90p.

So now we're trying to work out how to get Second Opinion under the size and weight limits without taking out too much or sending every reader a free magnifying glass.

Posted by Dan