This week I’m going to talk about book production. The next blog will be on Marketing and Distribution, but you might find a bit of that in here too.

ISBN Numbers

We allocate a book its ISBN number just before it goes to print, so that’s why I include it here.

Some people don’t think that a book is a real book unless it has an ISBN Number; but, is it really worth having one? An ISBN Number, put simply, is a reference number used by libraries, book shops, and by distributors in America and the UK. It is not widely used in Europe or the rest of the World. Indeed, if you want to sell a book in Europe, you have to register it with a different agency and get an EAN 13 -- which is free, but difficult.

The ISBN agency are so keen to get a foothold on the Continent that they offer ISBN Numbers for free there. This is not the case in Britain, where they cost about £11 each to a new publisher, and about £1.50 to an established publisher that buys them in batches of 100. The smallest batch you can buy is ten. Amazon offer their own system of AISN Numbers, which are free and just as useful for a small poetry publisher.  If you can work out how to use the insanely complex Nielsen website you can get further information on ISBN numbers here:

http://www.isbn.nielsenbook.co.uk/controller.phppage=158.

Birtrams are the easiest distributor to deal with when trying to get a European Reference Number, or EAN 13. If your distributor is Gardners you’ll have to make about six phone calls.

Printing

As you are probably aware, we publish chapbooks and perfect-bound collections -- which we manufacture in-house. The advantage of this is that we never have capital tied up in stock, which means we can always afford to invest in new poets and take risks in extraordinary work. This business practice is based on Taiichi Ohno’s philosophies of Lean-Manufacturing, which I think anyone who is contemplating setting up a publishing house should read.

The technology required for producing short runs of chapbooks and perfect bound books in your shed has only been around since January 2010. It is now possible to set up a print shop in your own garage for a little under £10,000. Obviously, not everyone can afford this set up cost, but it is worth being aware that many large-scale printers have downsized their operations and are now running their businesses from home, with a greatly reduced workforce. It is these people that you should seek out if you need any books making. It is also worth knowing that large printers are currently letting equipment worth £1,300 go for a tank of diesel for their delivery vans, because they can’t raise credit.

Chapbooks often cost more to get printed than perfect bound books. A perfect bound will cost between £1.75 and £5.00, whilst a chapbook will generally cost £2.50-£5.00. This is because the larger printers use machines that can only do a minimum run of 500 and it’s not economically viable to set up the machines to do a run of 40. So, they farm the work out to a bloke in a shed with smaller machines, and then make a mark up of 100%-300%. This means that you get ripped off, and delivery takes longer.

The best thing to do is go straight to the man in the shed. Sherman & Sons will print chapbooks in black and white on 120gsm paper with a full colour cover on 300gsm card for between £1 and £1.50 depending on quantity. You can talk to Mark Sherman on 01925 596 596.

Chapbooks are also very easy to produce yourself. I started off with a £50 Canon Ink-jet printer and a £15 long reach stapler. But, you can spend as much as you like really.

My best piece of advice is: to make the enterprise economically viable, only print black and white pages on a mono-laser printer. If you use a colour laser-jet printer, you will use all the toners at once and it will cost you between 8p and 20p to print one side of A4, based on 5% coverage. A mono laser printer should only cost 1p a sheet. You can either buy one printer for your innards and another for your covers, or outsource the covers -- which shouldn’t cost more than 20p each. When you are deciding which printer to buy, always look at the cost of the consumables, rather than the price of the printer. There are a lot of cash-back deals to be had at the moment, which come with a free gift of a laptop. So, you can get a £1,200 printer for £200 with a free laptop, as long as you sign an agreement to buy a certain brand of toner and image drums. However, you might find that every time your £200 printer needs new toner and image drums you have to stump up £1,500 (this occurs every month). You may think you can get away with just buying another printer, but you’ll find it’s gone back up to £1,200. Another option is to rent your printer and pay for your consumables in the same way you pay for gas or electric.

There are several options for finishing your chapbooks: staple binding; wire stitching (a machine that makes staples to fit the thickness of the book); saddle stitching (which uses thread and looks very handsome); and perfect binding. Staple binding involves folding everything by hand and then stapling it by hand. This is time consuming, it gives you agonising pains that run from the tip of your thumb to your elbow, but it is cheap. You can now get a machine that does both saddle stitching and stapling.  It can do a job of 2,400 in less than an hour whilst you get on with other things, because it collates the books with the covers, folds them and binds them, and chucks out neat guillotined books at the end. The Duplo DBM 120 Booklet Maker is a steal at £7,364.00. You can find it at http://www.thefinishingpoint.co.uk/p/Booklet-Making_1/Duplo-DBM-120-Booklet-Maker.html.

It may seem like a stupid idea to lay out all this cash for a publishing house if you only do 40 chapbooks a year. However, subcontract work for other presses can generate  a lot of capital for your own. Without the work I do for other publishers KF&S would not be viable.

It is cheaper than ever to produce perfect bound collections. DUPLO introduced a desk-top book binder costing just £6,000 in January 2010, and several other Chinese manufacturers have followed suit. This means that you can knock out paperbacks of a higher quality than most POD printers in your own home. The machines are built for the Chinese and Korean Market, and then exported to the UK, where safety equipment is added. These machines will make 200 books an hour, and, after the initial outlay, it is the cheapest method of binding books.

Don’t worry if you don’t have £6,000 to spare, because these days, you can simply email a word document to India. They will typeset your documents into galleys for £50, and then email that to China or Korea, where it is printed and bound in conditions worthy of a Channel 4 documentary. They use an oil derived glue in China and Korea, which destroys the lungs, and the equipment doesn’t have safety guards.  This is a cheap way of producing books, but you must be aware of the human cost.

If you intend to do them yourself, you will also need a guillotine to finish them off. These range from £400 to £1,300. Outsourcing is probably the most sensible option. I know of several printers, and I shall review them here:

Lulu www.lulu.com will supply you with an ISBN Number and outsource the printing for you. With this convenience comes cost. A book can cost between £4 and £8, and they look ghastly. A friend of mine recently used them and they didn’t even bother guillotining the bottom edge of his books.

Lighting Source http://www.lightningsource.com/ are the best printer to use if you have a book you want to distribute in the USA. They are in bed with Amazon, and if a customer orders a book from Amazon USA they print it, dispatch it to the customer and pay you a bit of the mark up. However, their printing and finishing technology is ancient, and the laminate they use causes the cover to curl in damp air. Also, their paper-stock is very thin. They charge between £1.78 and £4 a book. This is entirely dependent upon your haggling skills. The trick with them is to bypass the sales department and talk directly to a technician. Tell the Tech Guy that you will send galleys that they can just print off, and they will only charge you £1.78 a book. You can get the book typeset for £50 if you can’t do it yourself. Try www.hopeservices.co.uk, www.quadrantindia.com, www.vpublish.net.  I’ve never used any of them, so I can’t say if they are any good or not.

Biddles www.biddles.co.uk make amazing hardbacks, but their paperbacks are like Lighting Source’s. Again, they demand perfectly typeset galleys, but they are a little easier to negotiate with than Lighting Source. A paperback will cost £2.00, but I have no idea what they charge for hardbacks. They will give you a free quote.  Hardback books are the only books where animal glue is used in the production process.  So, take this into consideration if you are a vegan.

Antony Rowe http://uk.cpibooks.com/manufacturing-locations/our-manufacturers-in-the-uk/antony-rowe/ are the best by far.  They can’t provide you with ISBN numbers or distribution, but they have invested heavily in cutting-edge equipment. Providing your galleys are as tight as a drum, they will make a paperback worthy of Tesco’s for £2.00. Their print quality is amazingly sharp; they use a laminate like Gortex, which allows the cover to breathe to prevent curling; they use a nice, heavy paper-stock; and they cut their books crisply. They also do specialist jobs, such as leather effect hardbacks.

Sherman & Sons will do a paperback with an environmentally friendly cover (no plastic) for about £3.00. They will use 120gsm paper and lay up the galleys for you.  Full colour paperbacks start at about £6.  Tel. 01925596596.

So, that’s that. Now for the interviews.

Marcus Slease has a reading coming up at the Curzon in Soho at the end of the month (see our events page or details).  It has been organised by Steven Fowler and should be a cracking night.  We have just published Hello Tiny Bird Brain (£7, 62pp), and this is what he has to say about the ordeal of being a KF&S poet.

Marcus, this is your second collection. Do you feel you’ve developed since your first major collection with Blazevox?

I think the Blazevox collection reflected a certain mind state in Poland. My collection from BlazeVOX is called Godzenie which is a Polish word that means to reconcile. I was experiencing quite a bit of isolation and had very very little contact with spoken English. It was influenced quite a lot by so-called Language Poetics and theory. I was also perhaps going through a kind of quarter life crisis after a ten year marriage (married young). So I started traveling the world and teaching EFL. The last section of Godzenie picks up on a kind of documentary poetics. Recording what was around me without worrying about lyricism etc. Poetry and place. This opened up a more interesting space in which to work. From the outside/in.

Since returning to London in December 2010 everything has opened up. I have reconnected with spoken English. My mindfulness practice has allowed a lighter touch with space/time/memory. I have also reconnected with living breathing poetry communities. I fell in love. These three things (a poetry community, a loving companion and spoken everyday English) has allowed me to go back to that beginners mind. A fluidity. Endless possibilities. The best of all possible places to be.

Your manuscript originally included several play poems ,but I decided not to include them in the book. This is because I’ve never liked play poems, rather than a reflection upon their quality. How do you feel about this?

I enjoy using the structure of a play to open up more possibilities for poetry. However, I have of course had no problems with taste. What tickles the fancies and so on.

The collection is based around your travels. Can you tell us about these and how they tie in with the collection?

In 2005, I left North Carolina and went through a divorce. I decided to travel the world. I had some vague notions of writing a kind of nomadic poetics. After writing Godzenie, I wanted to return to Poland and see what I could write in less isolating circumstances and explore a different part of Poland. I ended up teaching EFL in a nice wee town in northern Poland. Not too far from the Baltic sea. A town full of Teutonic knight history. Nice red bricks. I lived in a rebuilt old town. There was a gothic column close by. A reminder of a Teutonic castle which was pulled down by Elblag residents in 1454. Gdansk was not far away. Nice green amber floating around and so on. So much history and lovely seagulls squawking in the mornings. Toy cows etc. I met some great folks.

I lived downstairs from another teacher who liked to play dominos. His name is Roger. We often played dominos and discussed various ideas about the nature of reality. His friendship allowed me to reconnect with American culture and see that part of myself. I was mostly able to reconcile my identity as Northern Irish (officially “British”) and North American (culturally) and Mormon (culturally). I was also watching a lot of episodes of the tv show Dexter on my laptop. The main character in that show wants to live in two worlds. One more adventuresome and another more conventional (family life etc.) I am sure many folks experience this tension. I was able to let go more in Poland this second time around. Just be a little more. None of these travels were adventure holidays in a romantic sense, however. I found myself constantly pulled with trying to establish a sense of home. A desire to root and yet also wanting to stay light. Keep living from my one suitcase. Keep all my belongings down to 15 kilos and stay minimal. There is still plenty of material at the ready from experiences / observations in Elblag.

After living in Elblag, I went to Turkey and taught academic writing at a university. It was an incredible experience but still very raw. That material seems to be coming out in poem plays.  After almost a year in Turkey I ended up in Trieste, Italy (the second section of Hello Tiny Bird Brain). I walked two dogs (one tiny pug and one large lovely Golden Retriever). I ate a shitload of cheese and various meats and lived with some fabulous Italians and my Turkish girlfriend at the time. This was a big transition time. I had no idea what I wanted but I was closer to accepting. I mean, allowing the contradictions rather than resisting them so much. My writing practice involved walking to the Piazza Unità (ahh the unity of all nations) and looking at the sea. Sometimes I wrote in one of the doggy parks. It was winter time. The bora winds were very fierce coming off the sea. I took my notebook and my ipod and observed and wrote almost every day.

I am still processing those experiences in foreign lands (especially South Korea, Italy, Turkey, and Poland). A selection of my newest project is included in the third section of Hello Tiny Bird Brain. I travel to various sites around London and jot down overheard conversations and collage them. The language of the social. I am also constantly writing poem plays which allows me to access memories with a lighter touch (Turkey, Milton Keynes, Portadown etc.)

What can you tell us about your poetic practice?

As we all know writing and reading are intimate companions. What I am reading gets into the writing. I am reading a lot from the collected works of Kenneth Koch, Philip Whalen, and Ted Berrigan. I carry various notebooks and record what I overhear and mishear. I regularly practice mindfulness. Writing is an extension of this mindfulness. I steal from Whalen, Koch, Berrigan and all the people around me. I steal from memories and re-create them. My poetics is also very much process based and impure.

Who are your major influences?

Philip Whalen, Tim Atkins, Joanne Kyger, Jeff Hilson, Ted Berrigan, Kenneth Koch, Cathy Wagner (impure in the best of all senses),  Bernadette Mayer (erotic translations and how she accesses the so-called personal especially). I also read a lot of contemporary North American poetry and poetry in translation. When I lived in North Carolina I was a fierce collector of Black Mountain, Beat, New York School, (generally that golden age that is often labelled New American poetry). Now that I am settling into London my love of reading and collecting books of poetry is returning.

J/J Hastain’s book, Verges and Vivisections (Currently reduced to £10 for 67 colour plates), is a stunning and thought provoking photographic Vispo collection.

I’m afraid I know very little about you, apart from the fact that your submission was outstanding. Are you a photographer and a poet?

I am a composer working with sound, image, feeling and words. I would say that my primary impetuses are not derived from any particular “school” of poetic or photographic thought or theory. I am most interested in making Neoteric, mystical balances—in integrating matter in ways that make different types of space. Space with new qualities in it. I believe in creating spaces that are inherently non-linear and ahistorical. Spaces that have never been patriarchally controlled and cannot be patriarchally controlled. It is my hope that in these spaces there will be room to experience contemporary moments of truth, eros, convergence, conjunction and profoundly new types and sensations of equity.

I’ve noticed some extraordinary work on the web where you photographed nudes covered in poetry. Is there any chance of something like this coming KF&S’s way?

Yes. Thank you for noticing that and for bringing it up here. What you mention is part of a project that I have been working on for some time now. My ultimate desire re this project is to have a collection of photographs of nudes all of whom have hand-written some of their language onto their bodies. Ephemeral tattoos. I am interested in the gestures that we make to keep ourselves here (planetary) and vital. I am interested in the many ways that there are to bind. Our bodies our bridges. This upcoming book is an exploration of those interests. An investigation into where bareness and ink collide and what comes from that collision. I mentioned to Alec (I have not yet shopped this particular vispo book around for a publisher) that I would be interested in publishing this book with KF&S in the future. The colors and print work KF&S did re    _verges and vivisections_ is so refined and wonderful! I think I could have that book together in about a year from now.

Awesome, I look forward to seeing that. What comes first: photograph or poem?

I am not sure that these are different--the “photograph” and the “poem”. For me the experience of collecting for composition (see collage) is a concurrent one rather than a linear one. Parts vibrate toward each other and I collect them in a satchel with intent to_______. Often I hear the sounds and words in conjunction with my interacting with the image. I am saying that they are there with me, offering themselves just as I am, to a potential aggregate. Oh this strummed and strumming chrysalis.

What can you tell us about your poetic practice?

Thank you for calling it a practice. It is very much a practice. Composition as thrum or deluge many times daily -- gesture as what continues the work. I do not wait. I am not interested in my work as reaction to exterior inspirations. I do not want the work to be dependent on anything but its own need for furthering. Yes -- the work as a somewhat autonomous entity that is threading itself into its future versions. Its primary commitments being to sustainment and multiplicitous enlivenments of awe.

What’s the scene like where you are?

I live in Lafayette, Co USA in the Rocky Mountains. There are some local writers here, but a lot of my communal activity happens worldwide via web conversations and collectives that I am a part of. I assume that this is what you are asking re “the scene” — however if we are speaking of what the scene of my work is -- the holding and/or doula for the work’s propagation -- I would say that it’s “scene”/scenic interest is in the brusque and brazen anatomies within a vast atonality that is constantly moving toward tonal structures which would support its many yet to be named qualities. In other words speak by tone.

Who are your major influences?

Perhaps here you are asking me about community. I am grateful for support, dialogue and exposure to the work of Brenda Iijima, Marthe Reed, Jonathan Penton, Bhanu Kapil, Renee Gladman, Melissa Buzzeo, Elizabeth Robinson, CAConrad, Julieanne Combest, Danielle Vogel, Lark Fox, Benjamin Winkler, Marie Darrieussecq, Selah Saterstrom, Marguerite Duras, Hyvrard, Kristeva, Alphonso Lingis, Donna Harraway, Berssenbrugge, Dusie Kollektiv, SLP and many others! I consider all of these my bent comrades.        

Next week there’ll be another blog, talking about more stuff and that.