"We send Science around the world"
It almost sounds too good to be true. With one step, you can gain financial control of your organization. You can have better editorial control and flexibility. You may be able to lower the price of your publication and still increase revenues.
How? By self-publishing!
If you are currently working with a commercial publisher, you have an opportunity to do everything listed above and more. Self-publishing puts you in control. You determine the prices libraries and members pay for your journal; you decide whether selling advertising makes sense; you establish strategies to penetrate untapped markets. You don't have to do it alone. Allen Press will help you be a successful self-publisher. We have the experience to help you move from your commercial publisher to self-publishing. Our copyediting and managing editing services save time for your editor and money for your organization. Our business managers handle all of your membership and institutional subscription needs, including a comprehensive renewals campaign. Our marketing department helps you find new members and subscribers. Our advertising staff can increase revenues through advertising sales.
Additionally, we offer the highest quality printing and production services available. I mentioned this to assure you that with Allen Press many self-publishing risks are eliminated. Allen Press has been working with nonprofit scientific and scholarly societies for more than 40 years. During that time, we've created new services based on our customers' needs. Many commercial publishers greatly benefit from nonprofit organization publications. Our response is to offer self-publishing to benefit the nonprofit organization.
Ask yourself:
If the answer is no, then Allen Press is here to support your move to self-publication. If you already self-publish but need help with publishing or association management services, we are happy to provide you with information about how we can help. Please call Guy Dresser or me at 1-800-627-0326.
Rand Allen
CEO
rallen@allenpress.com
by
Robert F. Kidd, Ph. D.
Director of Development
Allen Press, Inc.
For many nonprofit scientific, medical and scholarly societies, the journals they produce represent major financial assets. Periodical publications are a substantial part of non-dues income to membership organizations. The journal's revenues are used not only to offset the direct expenses of its own publication, but in some cases, to subsidize other programs and initiatives. Maximizing the financial return of a journal publishing program is therefore a worthy goal for any nonprofit society.
This newsletter offers a strategy for strengthening the financial foundation of your journal publishing program. The strategy, referred to as "self-publishing," pertains to those nonprofit societies that currently have a journal published or managed by a commercial or for-profit publisher.
The tasks of managing a journal are so varied and burdensome that it is no surprise that societies might want others to do them. On the other hand, the notion of self-publishing, or "do it yourself" publishing, holds great promise and substantial financial reward to those societies who take over management and control of their own publications.
In 1987, Duncan Patten, then with the Ecological Society of America, wrote that there are three fundamental reasons for managing your own journal business office and publisher. These reasons are based on common sense and sound business.
The most obvious reason is savings. For example, overhead can be reduced. Instead of paying the publisher's high overhead, who in turn pays a printer overhead, why not work directly with the printer? Second, publishing independence gives the society better management control by not having to share decision-making responsibilities with a publisher. The society becomes the sole publisher of record and the sole decision-maker in all aspects of publication. A third reason is incentive. With self-publication the people who have close input into the journal's editorial contents can potentially have a closer influence on the marketing aspects.
To underscore the fundamental financial differences between society self-publication and publishing arrangements offered by commercial journal publishers, we will use an extended metaphor—the commercial publisher as a bank.
* Excerpted from "Self-Publish or Go Commercial: Critical Issues for Boards and Managers," by Walter Ludwig. Used by permission. Mr. Ludwig is principal of ASPO, a Washington, DC-based consultancy specializing in association and scholarly publishing. He can be reached at 301-589-4243, or by e-mail at aspo@delphi.com.
Suppose you had a credit card and it offered what the bank called a "telepathic" shopping service. For a fee, the bank would do all your shopping and remembering and make all your payments for you—house, clothes, food, transportation, everything—everything would be delivered to your house. No trips to the mall. No remembering in August that school's going to start in a week, and you have to buy crayons and book bags. This credit card requires no payments, there are no monthly statements, no nagging balance.
But the bank gets your whole annual paycheck, directly, at the beginning of the year. Also, the money that your mother pays you to do her taxes, and the Christmas bonus, and the kid's lawn-mowing—everything goes straight to the bank.
Certainly an uncomplicated financial situation. The bank takes all your income, but they do all the shopping and pay for everything, all just for a "fee."
If the "bank" is a commercial publisher, that fee is going to be around 65% on top of the real price of the goods and services. A typical commercial publishing contract provides for an extra "overhead" fee of 65 dollars for every hundred dollars of actual purchases.
In the terms of that "magic" credit card, your $1,000 house payment turns into $1,650, your food is $250 a week instead of $150, the car costs around $6,000 a year, not $3,500.
But you worked hard all year, and, heck, you make a lot of money. Even with these fees, surely there's something left from all those paychecks, all those lawn-mowing fees, all the money.
But the fine print says that the "bank" gets to keep most of the money left over after all the bills are paid. Typically, commercial publishing deals split "profits"—money left over after expenses (plus "overhead")—60% to the publisher, the balance to the sponsoring society.
This typical structure of a deal between a commercial publishing company and a society can have dramatic effects on the finances of even a modest journal, as you will see in the example below. This example shows the actual financial analysis of a real journal we have worked with, whose name has been fictionalized to The Journal of Elbow Reconstruction.
| Subscriber/Revenue Base | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Subscribers | Rate | Revenues | |
| US Institutional | 1,971 | $75.00 | $147,825 |
| US Individual | 1,071 | $46.00 | $ 49,266 |
| US Student | 297 | $24.00 | $ 7,128 |
| All Foreign | 997 | $75.00 | $ 74,775 |
| Totals | 4,336 | $278,994 | |
Advertising
36 pages per year at $350 each = $12,600
Supplements
Two 125-page supplements annually, at $200 per page = $50,000
Total Annual Revenue =
$341,594
With revenues of nearly $350,000, this journal should be profitable to the society. But the following numbers for the commercial publishing deal previously agreed to by the society paint a different picture:Under this arrangement, the sponsoring society actually lost money on their own journal, when editorial costs were included, while the publisher had revenues above direct expenses of over $150,000.
But after the Journal was society-published, there was a dramatic difference, even after factoring in significant one-time costs:
| Society-Published | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Expense | Revenue | ||||
| Total Revenues | $341,594 | ||||
| Expenses | |||||
| Outsourced Services Procured on behalf of Society | |||||
| Production (redaction, pre-press, printing, binding) | $105,000 | ||||
| Mailing/Postage | $ 20,000 | ||||
| Marketing | $ 20,000 | ||||
| Renewal/List Maintenance | $ 12,500 | ||||
| Total for Services | $157,500 | ||||
| "Profit"/Net to Society | $184,094 | ||||
| Editorial Office Expenses (society-paid) | $ 78,000 | ||||
| One-Time Transition Costs | $ 25,000 | ||||
| Net Revenues to Society in First Year | $ 81,094 | ||||
| Net Revenues to Society in Subsequent Years (without one-time costs) | $106,094 | ||||
Over five years—the typical length of a contract with a commercial publisher—self-publishing the Journal of Elbow Reconstruction will positively affect the society's "bottom line" by over $732,000, even if circulation and subscription rates remain static. Most important, it will do so without increasing dues or decreasing member services.
Given the numbers like these, which are strongly typical, why do societies with clearly valuable publishing properties and defined audiences ever give them away to commercial publishers?
| Commercial Publishing Deal | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Expense | Revenue | ||||
| Total Revenues | $341,594 | ||||
| Expenses | |||||
| Services Procured by Publisher | |||||
| Production (redaction, pre-press, printing, binding) | $105,000 | ||||
| Mailing/Postage | $ 20,000 | ||||
| Marketing | $ 20,000 | ||||
| Renewal/List Maintenance | $ 12,500 | ||||
| Total for Services | $157,500 | ||||
| Publisher's Overhead Charge (65%of Total Expenses) | $102,375 | ||||
| "Profit" | $ 81,719 | ||||
| Publisher's Share (60%) | $ 49,031 | ||||
| Net to Society | $ 32,688 | ||||
| Editorial Office Expenses (society-paid) | $ 78,000 | ||||
| Net Revenues to Society | $ 45,312 | ||||
| Net Revenues to Publisher | $151,406 | ||||
The first step in self-publication is to review the current publisher's contract. The organization must determine who owns the title, copyright, the subscriber database as well as the expiration date of the current agreement. The provisions and timetable for terminating the contract should be thoroughly understood as well.
In some instances, the commercial publisher owns the title and/or the copyright to the publication. These instances are viewed by many societies as irreversible situations. The society may feel that abandoning the title will result in the loss of professional identity. These circumstances may add complexity to the decision to self-publish, but they are not insurmountable. The issues of title and copyright are suitable for negotiation.
If the commercial publisher owns the title and copyright and is unwilling to relinquish either to the organization, simply create a new title for the publication. Identify the new title as the "official publication" of the organization. Educating institutional subscribers about the new offical title for the membership organization may take some marketing effort, but the society's support plays an essential role.
If on the other hand, the society owns the title, copyright, and the subscriber database, it is in control. Self-publishing is an option that can be exercised at the society's discretion. More importantly, however, a "risk transfer" will occur here. Previously, the commercial publisher had carried the risks of publishing the journal. Under the self-publishing scenario, the organization will carry the risk. This shift is a main reason the society needs the full commitment of the executive board and strong leadership in the move to self-publish.
The self-publishing organization's financial risk approaches zero by finding the right company with which to partner. Instead of using multiple vendors for production, marketing, and the like, an organization may choose to work with one or two vendors. Companies such as Allen Press offer a full range of publishing services "under one roof." This approach ensures that communications are efficient and membership and subscriber needs are quickly satisfied.
Adding staff has been viewed as one of the major reservations to self-publishing. Our experience indicates that most societies successfully self-publish without adding staff to their offices. The society will be buying services on the "outside," just as the commercial publisher does. With the services comes the personnel to monitor, organize and orchestrate their delivery. The supervisory functions can be included as part of the self-publishing contract. This arrangement would insure that the society receives the necessary reports and statements about the journal.
Key to a self-publishing strategy is that the content of the publication and its validation by the community of scholars it represents is more important than who publishes it. As Walter Ludwig stated, "Content is King—the intrinsic value of an intellectual property is the information/content inside. No one says, 'Let's go see that new Paramount movie.' They say instead, 'Let's go see the new Stallone flick,' or 'I want to catch Woody Allen's new movie.' In its own way, the same is true for scholarly works. The society itself provides the brand name while its journals and books themselves provide the information value.
"More to the point, can you name the publisher of JAMA? Science? The New England Journal of Medicine? Whether you can or not, do you care? (By the way, all three are self-published.)"
REFERENCES
Ludwig, Walter (1995) "Self-Publish or Go Commercial: Critical Issues for Boards and Managers." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Council of Biology Editors, Kansas City, Missouri, May, 1995.
Patten, Duncan (1987) "Managing as Your Own Business Office and Publisher." Allen Press Journal Promotion Series, Lawrence, Kansas, July, 1987.