Pre-Order The Rules of Poker – the definitive new rule book for the world’s favourite card game. The International Federation of Poker has studied existing rule books, including those of the Tournament Directors Association, World Series of Poker, European Poker Tour, Brazilian Series of Poker, Austrian Pokersport Association and the Federation Internationale de Poker Association to create the most comprehensive and authoritative rule book available.
The book will be published on 23 August 2012 as a hardback priced at £12.99. Order now for £8 plus p&p – a discount of just under 40%.
If ordering from the UK click here to order for £11 (includes £3 p&p)
If ordering from the EU click here to order for £12 (includes £4 p&p)
If ordering from outside the EU click here to order for £13 (includes £5 p&p)
Pieces of Glass
She moves her hand and says,
‘Throw it in there.’
The intimacy of her handbag lost
In the loneliness of pubs,
Screwtop wine and Premiership football.
To interrupt the silence she takes his glasses.
The horizontal metal frame complementing the angles
Of her cheek and jaw.
‘How do I look?’
‘You look like a teacher.’
‘I can see you clearly now.’
‘How did you see me before?’
She pauses. The thin mettle of her lips closing,
As she reaches for balm.
‘I wear glass to flatten my eyes.’
‘Severe astigmatism,’ she explains.
She can see as far as the door, but not
To the street outside where the red of taillights are met
By the passing blue of ambulances.
‘I see just as far as I need to. Nothing more.’
‘Like a shield that no man sees,’ he comments,
As she refuses a touch.
He can see to the bus stop, where they will wait
For her to go home.
To flowers and red wine,
And walks along the river.
The lamp in his bedroom,
Placed on the floor,
Her head in his hands, caressed by kisses,
The flex of her torso, as she dresses in haste.
The books and the papers strewn on his desk.
Pulled fingerprints through dust
On the top of picture frames.
‘Arsenal have just scored,’ she says and
Takes off his glasses. The blue in her
Eyes reminding him of the pit of a volcano.
For a long time I tried to figure out why publishers publish so many books. It’s not the most logical step to increase output without necessarily increasing staff and resources. Having published 8 titles in two years, for me the answer lies in the financial processes locked into the heart of book publishing, namely the sale or return model.
At a micro level I have noticed quite a lot, most of which has depressed me. Today, in my first blog post in eight months, I will focus on returns and what it means for financial planning.
What goes out, also comes back
So this is how it rolls: retailers place orders in the months leading up to the launch of a new title. The stock goes out, sits on shelves, then comes back three to six months later. The hard thing for me is to know how many will come back, over 12 months, it’s about 40% of stock, with more dribbling in month by month. The cost of the returns is refunded back to the retailer. The publisher gets charged twice for distribution costs, stock going out, then coming back. What’s worse is that the distributor has to cover its losses and deduct the money refunded to the retailer from the money due to come to the publisher. This has been the hardest thing to manage, as I usually know how much money I’ll be getting three months in advance, but money for returns is deducted with less than one month’s notice. The answer to this conundrum is to deduct a set percentage of expected revenue to account for returns, i.e. 40%.
At the core one has to accept that books don’t sell themselves, they never have. The misty-eyed notion that someone somewhere picks up a book randomly and decides to buy it there and then seems quite ridiculous. Instead what is required is engagement with networks, word of mouth, advertising, promotions, awards, publicity, events. Some of these things are beyond a small company with limited resources, but we do try our best with social media and events. Indeed in some months in 2011 we made more money from selling books at events than through the distribution we have to the entire UK and EU.
OK one approach, which seems to be the main one publishers seem to use, is to publish more books. More books going out each month, a percentage of them coming back, in this there exists a form of cash-flow, rather than the staccato pattern I have. The downside of course is that more titles mean more cost, and more time, which means less energy spent on trying to make the titles work. I don’t see this as a good answer to a difficult problem.
For me the more logical approach is to spend more time trying to understand how people buy books, and to give them more opportunity to do so directly from us. Returns are a form of wastage, like only eating half of a meal. The nature of content consumption has changed to on demand, which is why digital is streaming ahead. Sadly it makes more sense for people to buy things wherever and whenever they want them. But this does not mean that we can’t engage readers and work with them, and try to understand what they want.
I have no predictions for 2012, but I have made the difficult decision to only publish 2 new titles: Sophia Blackwell’s After My Own Heart, and our first collaboration with the International Federation of Poker: The Rules of Poker. Two titles will give me and Emily, Limehouse’s Executive Publisher, the time to focus on events, publicity and marketing to give these projects a better chance of success. It will also create space for us to move laterally to other initiatives to bring in more funds.
Two thousand and twelve will see a focus on Limehouse Academy, which is a separate company to Limehouse Books, and also Limehouse Tower, which will be a new imprint aimed at addressing book packaging from a totally unique angle.
The Academy is close to my heart, as it’s the project I wanted to do from the outset, two years ago. Before I registered Glass/Limehouse Books. I took some good advice from a lawyer who told me to learn how to run a business before starting anything non-profit or charity orientated. I’m still learning how to run a business, but I am more confident that I can manage both, and also understand that the key to building something is to reduce it to its smallest possible state, so changes can be made easily. In 2010 I made the mistake of publishing too many books, an effort that nearly killed the company. There’s a lot of work to come with the Academy before more details are released, we’re getting there.
Limehouse Tower is a completely different beast. A service project, which has come in response to being approached by budding authors on a monthly basis. I’m resolute not to take on any more projects as my capital is limited, however we can build books for others. Book packaging is nothing new, and if you scratch below the surface of a lot of small, independent publishers you’ll probably see that they make books for other businesses and individuals. The challenge is to do this in the inventive and creative methods I’ve tried to instil into Limehouse Books.
Watch this space.
Best wishes for 2012,
Bobby Nayyar