I'm currently going back and forth with System Pro, the print shop near Seoul National University. The lady keeps texting about how this or that needs to be adjusted on my back-cover graphic (it was all originally formatted for B5 paper, including bleed-to-the-edge considerations, so no adjustments should be necessary), and how the front-cover graphic will look strange if we do a bleed-to-the-edge for the image. She asked me to send pics of the previous version of the book from 2022, so I sent some photos over since I no longer have the original files (died with my laptop). She seemed to have no trouble, last time, with making her own tweaks before printing. I don't know what the problem is this time. Oh, yeah: her projected cost to print one copy of the book is W11,800, so it'll be almost W240,000 for twenty copies. I had set the ISBN and cover price at $11.99, which comes out to almost exactly W17,000 as of today, so I'd be making barely W5,000 per copy—about $3.50. Yay, me.
People had better buy the print-on-demand paperback version, which costs me nothing to print. One person has already purchased a copy. That's nice. A cool $4.32 in my pocketses. If I could convince 500,000 parents to buy the book, that'd be $2,160,000 before taxes, and I imagine the taxes would come close to 50% for that amount of money.
Once System Pro prints my books, the next thing I'll do is contact that publishing house in Daegu—the one whose ad I'd seen on my walk. If they're a real publishing house and not just a vanity publisher/printer, they could help with marketing, with getting my book into stores, etc. (assuming anyone outside of old-school academics buys dead-tree books anymore!).
Meanwhile, I'm still generating questions for my Do You Deserve to Vote? app. The logic problem I'd put up earlier is part of the section called "Can You Think Logically?" Once I've got everything vibe-coded and up on my quiz/test website, I'll invite some curmudgeons to use the app and suggest improvements, then eventually put the app up for sale at the Apple App store and the Google Play Store. There are also other, slightly more niche places where apps can be sold, like Flippa. I'm still learning the ropes about all of this, so bear with my clumsiness (or Pardon Our Dust, as they say).
This might be the kind of dumb question that people who will fail your soon-to-be-released app would ask, but why not let the Daegu publishers handle the whole to-store process, including printing? Is your purpose to demonstrate your book's viability to them as a product first..?
ReplyDeleteNo, that's a good question, and it's precisely the thing I need to find out: just how much of a publishing company is this publishing company? Will they handle the to-store process? How about marketing and other things needed to sell books? Can they provide an agent? Once I get the locally printed copies of my book, I'll give them an email in which I'll be asking them a slew of questions.
DeleteAnd a really important question for persnickety people like me: how much can I trust them not to fuck up my manuscript by introducing typos and other misprints? I was recently looking through this beautifully put-together book I'd bought years ago called Empty House, which is a prose-and-photo essay about Zen monasteries and Zen masters in Korea. While the book itself looks good, the prose inside the book is terrible—a mess of bad editing, typos, and questionable romanization. All in all, a very poor effort. If that's the quality I can expect from a Korean publisher, I'd rather find other methods for getting my material out there.
DeleteUndoubtedly there would be some sort of in-house (hypen necessary?) editing process. But you'd probably be offsetting its scope by presenting them with what is a finished product. More likely is that they ask you to rewrite or add whole sections. In other words, consider factors that might effect its reception by Korean parents. Those factors are sure, in part, to be different to those pertinent to American parents, most of whom subsist in a cultural madhouse.
ReplyDeleteGood to know. Thanks. Luckily for me, I'm still only in the questioning/exploratory phase. Fingers crossed.
DeleteOh, and yes about the hyphen. It's a phrasal adjective preceding the noun it modifies. Like
Deletethe twelve-inch throbbing wonder
her wide-eyed astonishment
a three-minute orgasm
some post-coital cuddling
etc.