Casperian Books Blog

There’s an interview with Curtis Smith, author of the soon-to-be-released Sound + Noise up at What to Wear During an Orange Alert.

Unrelatedly, today is my birthday, and since the celebrations for that sort of thing usually entail gifts, we’re running a special, one-day-only promotion: Buy any Casperian Books title through our website today, August 22nd, and we will throw an extra completely free book into the shipping envelope with it!

While from a sales perspective, this time of year is what in German one would call “Saure Gurken Zeit” (lit. pickle time–the black hole during the summer when absolutely nothing is happening), we’re starting to ramp up for fall.

So far, three fall release dates are confirmed and another is pending:
Curtis Smith’s Sound + Noise will be released September 2nd, 2008, followed in October by Manna Francis’ Games & Players, the third book in the Administration Series, and an anthology with stories by many of our authors titled And Now for a Story… in November.

Side note on And Now for A Story: the cover (which doesn’t render nearly as well electronically as it does on the printed page, (hopefully) says the conceptual equivalent of “Once upon a time” in as many different languages as we could fit on there. I can only actually vouch for this being spelled correctly in about 1/4 of them and was relying heavily on Wikipedia and various acquaintances for the rest. Let’s just say that doing a visual match in Arabic turned out to be so difficult, that during a dinner party, I pushed the MacBook into the hands of one of my unsuspecting guests and, said “Please type ‘Kan ma Kan…’ out for me!”

On to author news: William Walsh has a new short story titled Dr. Maroon up at Flatmancrooked, fellow Sacramentan publishers. The first chapter of Curtis Smith’s Sound + Noise has just been published in Straightjackets Magazine, and the first two reviews for the novel are in as well. This one at Small Press Reviews, and this one at The Adirondack Review.

Finally, since we do not have merchandising rights for the cover image of Sound + Noise, we’ve updated the Cafepress Store with Games & Players merchandise.

Without Wax has a very nice review in the Boston Phoenix here, and there’s a feature with an author interview of William Walsh in the Providence Phoenix here.

There’s a new review of Without Wax at Gently Read Literature, and Jeff Vande Zande has written a review of End Credits.

In other news, while I have been sitting on the SO’s couch here in South London, banging away at Casperian Books business and making a serious dent in the to-do list (two books uploaded to the printer’s in the last couple of days, a manuscript half edited, another half read), we decided that this whole transatlantic commuting business is getting kind of old after seven years, so we’re going to get hitched and the SO’s going to move to Sacramento at some point over the next few months–we’ll obviously have to arrange it around release dates :-)

One of the things my Dad told me to blog about when we were happily sitting next to each other on my mother’s couch last weekend, both working on Casperian business on separate laptops, was how net receipts are calculated.

That’s not quite as easy as it sounds, because there are a lot of variables to consider. Generally speaking, what gets deducted from the total retail price of a book is the following: the book’s printing cost, the printer’s shipping cost, our packaging cost, our net shipping cost, and the Paypal fees.

The book’s printing cost is easy. Usually it’s (page count x $0.015) +$0.90, but sometimes it’s less due to volume discounts for larger orders. All other costs are variable. The printer’s shipping cost, for example, depends on quantity and weight of books shipped, and UPS’ current shipping rates (which are fuel dependent). Generally, that works out at around $0.80-$1.25 per book at the moment. The packaging cost currently is $0.60, which covers boxes/packing tape/shipping labels, etc. This gets adjusted on an as-needed basis and is charged per retail order shipment (i.e. if a customer orders three books in the same shipment, there is only one $0.60 packaging charge divided between all three books). Our net shipping cost is also variable depending on weight, shipping method, and ship-to location. For instance, media mail shipments in the US for a book of less than 1 lb incur a shipping charge of $2.41; international shipments to anywhere except Canada a shipping charge of $2.85 after deduction of the amount charged to the end customer. Paypal fees for payments received from domestic customers are 2.9% of transaction value + $0.30 (3.9% +$0.30 for international), so for a $15 book with media mail shipping in the US, the Paypal fee is $0.74.

So, for instance, for a copy of The Tea House that sells through our website for $13.50 with media mail shipping, today’s net receipts would be $13.50 - ($3.48+$0.93+$0.60+$2.41+$0.74) = $5.34. For a copy of Mind Fuck that gets shipped to England, today’s net receipts would be $15 - ($4.86+$1.23+$0.60+($11.35-$8.50)+$1.22) = $4.24.

Paul Elwork is going to make a guest appearance on The Odd Mind, a show on Blog Talk Radio on Tuesday, July 29th, at 9 p.m. Eastern Time.

This just in: William Walsh will be reading at Timothy Gager’s Dire Literary Series at The Out of the Blue Art Gallery, 106 Prospect Street, Cambridge, MA, on August 1, 2008. Featured readers begin at 9PM; open mic reading program starts at 8PM. Full details are here.

And don’t forget William’s reading at Ada Books in Providence, RI, the next night! Details here.

There are some interesting publishing statistics over at Para Publishing for anyone interested.

But that’s not really what I want to post about today. I want to post about lead time.

My daytime job involves lead times of about one to two years for the larger components and I’m currently living in roundabout 2010-2012 as far as that’s concerned. Publishing is slightly better, but that’s probably because we don’t have to worry about steel allocations…

That said, depending a little on the time of year when a manuscript is initially read by us, the lead time between signing a publishing agreement and a book hitting the shelves is usually 12-18 months. (We’ve done some titles a lot quicker–The Tea House was done in about eight months and the books in the Administration series are on a 9-month cycle, but that’s author-specific and shouldn’t be interpreted as the norm.) How do we come up with these numbers? Here’s how it works:

We have two release seasons, spring and fall. This is standard for the industry, and actually makes a lot of sense, since booksales drop off dramatically in the summer and around the holidays, when people have better things to do than to buy books. In each season, we have a limited number of publication slots. Once those slots are filled, any new titles roll to the next season. Now, ideally, a book should be completely finished at least 4 months before the “street date” (the date the book becomes available for sale), so that it can be sent out for review–which really means that four of those months don’t count.

So let’s work backwards. Best-case scenario, a good schedule without any shortcuts would look like this:

• September 15th - Street date

• May 15th - Review copies are sent out (-4 months)
• April 15th - Book gets set up with the printer (10 days), a printer’s proof is generated and approved (10 days), and review copies are ordered (10 days) (-5 months)
• March 1st-15th - Galleys are sent to the author. Per contract author has 30 days to submit corrections, and then those corrections have to be implemented. (-6.5 months)
• February - Book block and cover are designed/generated (-7.5 months)
• January - Final copyedit of manuscript and author’s approval of copyedits (-8.5 months)
• November - December - Edits going back and forth between author and publisher (-10.5 months)
• November 1st - Author submits final manuscript revised according to publisher’s comments (-10.5 months)
• September 1st - Contract is signed and author receives comments/suggestions for revising manuscript draft (-12.5 months)

That would be the 12-month schedule. But what if the contract is signed in June (thus making the 12-month mark fall in the middle of summer when we don’t release any new titles)? What if half the fall list is already full? What if the manuscript requires 4 instead of 2 rounds of edits? What if the author misses the original manuscript submission deadline? What about crises with the eight to ten other future books being juggled at any given time? There are a bunch of other factors that play into that schedule.

Our contracts include very standard clauses that specify a date by which the author is supposed to deliver a final draft of the manuscript, as well as the number of months we have after that designated manuscript delivery date to publish the book before the author is released from his/her contract, both of which can be changed by mutual agreement if necessary. Those dates are based on a schedule such as the above, our internal publication schedule (first available empty slot), and some basic assumptions about the amount of work a manuscript requires.

For instance, in the case of Tea House, the author is a professional editor, and as such, the manuscript we initially read was one of the cleanest we had ever seen. That made us fairly confident that once a few niggling problems we had with the timeline of the story were fixed, the manuscript wouldn’t require much more than a light copyedit before moving to pre-press, which made it possible to get the book out the door in eight months, but those were a pretty stressful eight months for us and Paul alike, because it really didn’t leave any margin for error (and no, we didn’t get the full four months for reviews either).

Other publishers, by the way, operate on similar schedules (in total lead time, if not details). Of our current roster of authors, William Walsh has a collection forthcoming from Keyhole Press in 2009, Curtis Smith has a a release lined up for spring 2009, and another collection that was just accepted for publication in 2010, and Chris Owen is pretty solidly booked through, er, at least the next year. Other authors of our acquaintance see similar turnaround times, even when signed to larger and/or academic presses.

All of which adds up to: if you want instant gratification and publication, we are not the right place to query. We’re pretty damn proud of the quality of our titles–we won’t let a book hit the shelves unless we’re absolutely certain it’s the best book we can possibly make it–and producing a book of that quality takes time. If an author doesn’t share that same goal, we’re probably not a good match.

And in case you’re wondering: we’re currently reading for the last few fall 2009 slots and beyond.

There’s a rather excellent critical essay about Curtis Smith’s Sound + Noise, which is being released in September, at Prick of the Spindle.

In other news, Friday’s e-mail from Dad (who’s taken over doing a lot of the link gathering and other web-based stuff): “In other news, slack US paperback sales are attributed to a lack of romances. I infer that every book of yours is a romance (with the dead, with death…)”

He has always had a strange sense of humor, but he’s sort of right. Let’s see how this would play out.

• Mouth of the Lion is a romance with the dead, death, addiction, mental illness, and family–roughly in that order.

• Adagio is actually a romance, but not only a romance between the two protagonists, it’s also a romance with Australia.
• Motor City Blues is a romance with the city of Detroit.
• The Tea House is a romance with ghost stories and the dead.
• Mind Fuck does actually have a romance running through it, in a very twisted and wrong way.
• Without Wax is a romance with the adult entertainment industry.
• End Credits is a romance with the absurd.
• Quid Pro Quo, the sequel to Mind Fuck, continues that thread of very wrong and twisted romance between its protagonists.
• Sound + Noise, again, is actually a romance.

In yet more absurd news, I did not check the premiership fixtures table on the ESPN website to plan Tenant B and my football schedule for the fall. Not at all.

The Philadelphia City Paper did a very nice write-up of The Tea House, in preparation for Paul’s reading at Port Richmond Books in Philadelphia, this coming Saturday at 2 p.m. (full details).

William Walsh’s next reading will be at Ada Books in Providence, RI, on August 2nd. Details here.

And getting back to the football (it’s almost over, don’t worry!):
Germany’s through to the final two (not necessarily deservedly by how they were playing), and even my 86-year-old grandmother was screaming by the end of that semifinal. That means I will be hosting a Euro 2008 Finale party on Sunday, which I imagine will be somewhat like a Superbowl party (I’ve never been to one of those, so I can’t say for sure). There will be tons of Greek food, beer, football on the 45″ flat-screen TV, and a bunch of German-speakers yelling at the TV. Should be fun!

Cody’s in Berkeley closes. I loved that store (the one on Telegraph). We used to spend hours in there and then go up the block to Moe’s and spend some more hours in there. Years ago, my partner-in-crime Casper was actually banned from ever using the Cody’s bathroom again because of an incident. Anyway, the article is kind of interesting because it puts some numbers to what’s been happening to independent booksellers over the past few decades. Guess I better not give up my day job, huh?

In football-related news: my nerves are going to be totally shot by the time Euro 2008 is over–that is, if I don’t stroke out before then.

Here are my predictions for the rest of the competition:

• Berlin will burn on Wednesday, no matter who wins, but that would be a sucker bet at this point (actually, during the Croatia : Turkey match, we were trying to convince everybody to root for Croatia purely in the interests of world peace…)

• And in keeping with the complete unpredictability of all matches so far and the elimination of favorites left, right, and center, I’ll go out on a limb and say the final’s going to be played between Turkey and Russia (because that would be really, really funny in a tragic sort of way)

This one’s actually even book-related… There’s a not-so-stellar-review of The Tea House at GUD Magazine–though rather interestingly they give the book three out of five stars on their goodreads. I guess the reviewer in this case hated everything we really liked. Oh well, win some, lose some.

(And yes, bad reviews are good when they’re very specific about what the reader didn’t like. Like that review of Quid Pro Quo the other day, where the reviewer was very specific about not caring for plot but wanting porn–rather excellent review. Anybody who likes plot is sure to want to read it now, right? Same difference here.)

Actually, in a valiant attempt to continue working while at the same time watching as many matches as possible, Tenant B and I tried to set up the old TV currently gathering dust in the garage in the office this weekend, after discovering what looked like a cable connection behind my desk. We rearranged the whole office to make space for the idiot box, only to discover after desperately trying to tune in ESPN2 and getting a whole lot of nothing, that that was one of the cables we severed outside when we rewired for the other TVs in the house… anyway, the upshot of all of that was that we’d already cleaned half of my desk to move the printer over from the changing table (long story: suffice it to say that I’ve never seen a piece of IKEA furniture that’s actually used for the purpose it was intended), so it seemed sensible to clean the rest of my desk before the horrible, soul-destroying Greece match started. And, why yes, I can shout “Shoot the goalkeeper” in perfect, if according to the SO endearingly accented, Greek.

Oh well, one team out, two to go.

Also, the fall list. It’s getting there. Really.

Jeff Vande Zande, the author mentioned in our last post, has just written a very complimentary review of The Tea House as well.

Other than that, we here at Casperian Books are incredibly busy juggling the fall list with Euro 2008, where three teams I have some sort of national allegiance to have qualified this time around. As a result, Tenant B and I are spending quite a bit of time yelling at the TV, sometimes with my mom on speaker phone, which is fun, but also affects our Casperian Books output. For instance, I almost accidentally inserted the Croatian flag instead of our logo into a book block the other day, and Manna, if one of your character suddenly starts yelling “Goal!” in the galley, that would be why.

There’s a fan review of Quid Pro Quo up at the Uniquely Pleasurable website.

Then check out this author. Instead of blasting us with several pages worth of capslocked abuse after we declined to review his novel (I kid you not, that does really happen!), he wrote a very nice review of Motor City Blues. For the record, we actually really liked Jeff’s writing in the sample he submitted, and declined reviewing the rest of the manuscript primarily because the plot of the novel was very, very similar to a novel we have already slated for publication.

We’re pleased to announce the release of Manna Francis’ new novel Quid Pro Quo, the second book in the Administration series, which continues the story arc surrounding the near future dystopia of New London, professional investigator and interrogator Val Toreth, and technical genius turned corporate Keir Warrick, and which will start shipping on Tuesday, May 27th.

When he agrees to do a favor for his old friend Liz Carey in Corporate Fraud, Para-investigator Val Toreth is hoping for a simple case. After all, kidnapping and dismemberment are all in a day’s work for the Investigation and Interrogation Division. But in the European Administration, simplicity is often a dangerous illusion, and anyone who goes looking for trouble in the corporate world is certain to find more than they bargained for. Fraud, sabotage, espionage, blackmail, decades-long vendettas, and murder–the more powerful the corporations, the darker their secrets. Corporate insiders and innocent bystanders alike are all too easily caught up in the conflicts, but when suspects can hide behind money and power, what chance is there of any justice?

And on top of everything else, Toreth also has to deal with Keir Warrick. But that’s easy. That’s just sex.

To read an extract from the Quid Pro Quo, or to place an order, please visit the book’s product page.

As with all of Manna’s books, reader discretion is advised. Caveat lector.

In addition, Quid Pro Quo merchandise is now available at the Cafepress store, and we’re holding a sales on some older titles: Mouth of the Lion, Adagio, and Motor City Blues are all currently marked down to $10.00 each (different shipping rates may apply for sales titles).

Happy summer reading!

Having successfully managed to drag my mother away from the nickel slots (curiously, the air conditioning in Harrah’s did not bother her), we returned to an overflowing e-mail inbox, which included an e-mail from A.F. Rützy letting us know that an extract from End Credits is now available online in the current issue of The Cynic Online Magazine. Check it out here.

Certain parties (I’m looking at you MMWD, with utmost love and respect, of course) are starting to make grabby hands for Quid Pro Quo by Manna Francis. Since our first print run just arrived, we’re having a supersecret pre-sale, letting our customers order Quid Pro Quo early as part of a two-book package. Full details and the order form can be found here.

All orders received by 6 p.m. Sunday night will ship first thing Monday morning. All orders within the US will automatically ship via priority mail, international orders will ship via international priority mail.

If you already own all our titles, fear not, Quid Pro Quo by itself will go on sales some time over the Memorial Day Weekend to start shipping punctually on the morning of May 27th, 2008.

Now I’m off to Tahoe until Sunday afternoon, since today’s forecast calls for temperatures here in Sacramento of 104° F (that’s 40° C) and my visiting mother won’t let me turn on the air conditioning since it’s a new-fangled American thing she doesn’t trust :)

Looking forward to processing orders on upon my return on Sunday!

End Credits by A. F. Rützy has a very, very nice review up at Small Press Reviews.

By the way, did we mention that Without Wax is in stock at Powell’s Books (Burnside)? If you’re in the general Portland vicinity, why not head down there, admire the book, and maybe even purchase it? You’d be supporting both us and a wonderful independent bookseller.