Hitchhiker's guide to printing one's scores (this time for real!)

Printing, binding, promotion and the business side of engraving.
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NeeraWM
Posts: 185
Joined: 30 Nov 2021, 12:11

Hitchhiker's guide to printing one's scores (this time for real!)

Post by NeeraWM »

Dear all,

I have been publishing my own scores for almost four years but, so far, I have kept my distances from the printing and distribution side, due to how menacing it all looked to me. My experience as an engraver for publishing houses gave me the impression that you needed to have a print run of 400+ copies for each score to make it viable. After that you needed to store them, plus organise shipping and distribution worldwide. Knowing how impossibly expensive is shipping anything in from Italy (even within it), I simply abandoned the idea. Moreover, in Italy one would need to open a publishing house business (my engraving one wouldn’t suffice), then have a web store, add a system for electronic invoicing emission, and, finally, set up a way to handle returns. In short, too complicated for the volumes I was seeing.

Reading OCTO’s two excellent posts (here: viewtopic.php?f=13&p=10057#p10057 and here: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=482) I understood that, after all, there was a way (said with Mandalorian voice tone)!
Since I am now pretty serious in going to the bottom of this, I will write here a few questions & reflections about the process, hoping that someone with more knowledge or that simply has gone through it would agree to help me set this up. I have tried to contact OCTO directly via the private message feature of the forum (as he encourages us to do in the first article), but, so far, he has not opened the message.

POINT ONE: Hiring vs Selling
I am not sure I understand how this works. If one sets up a print-on-demand service, how does one offer scores for hire? I guess one prints them the first time and ship them to the first customer. Then, where do they send this back? To them or to the printer? If to them, the storing issue would come back; if to the printer, will they charge me for storing that?

POINT TWO: Channels for printing and distribution
This is what I had tried to contact OCTO about, but it seems that Halstan is a good starting point. I wonder how they handle renting, though. Has anyone here had any experience with them? How would you suggest one approached them?
I have about 30 scores in my catalogue so far and, to see how things go, I would prepare them one at a time. I have InDesign files for most of them. Will the printer give me specifications? The product I envision is a book with harder cover (300gsm?) and 9x12in paper with stitch binding (what Barenreiter, Henle, etc, do). That would work with the score, but then I would like to have parts inside as separate items, again, what we usually see in the professional world. How should I phrase this request so that it is crystal clear?
Now, which one to choose: Halstan seems to offer the hiring service but shipping must be handled “manually”, plus promotion etc… Lightining Source, instead, seems to lack in hiring, but directly connects you to the online shops worldwide, is that correct? Has anyone tried this? LS seems to be the poorer choice for binding in the way we are used for chamber music scores. Also, is 9x12 an accepted format? I use that for my scores. I can resize the PDF to Letter, similar proportion, but I’d rather scale up than scale down.

POINT THREE: Where is the industry going?
OCTO’s first article was back in 2019. Is this still the case that non-digital sheet will remain the dominant slice of the market? I understand the piracy point but:
a) now almost all big publishers offer digital as well (see Schott, for example)
b) when I was a student teachers were encouraging us to go to the Conservatory library to scan music, not to buy it. I still bought plenty of it if I could afford it, but that was the drill, and I guess still is. From my contacts in Eastern Europe, close to no musician has original scores, just copies.
I am also uploading my scores as EPUBs to Apple Books with DRM protection, but that is not really selling much.

POINT FOUR: Requirements
Are ISMN / ISBN a must? If so, why and how should one work towards obtaining them? I have once stumbled upon a website selling them, but they were quite expensive, so I’m not sure where to start with this.

PART FIVE: Pricing
Starting from my sell price for the digital copy, I would add printing & shipping cost for the final price, but how do you manage this on your website? Standard and Express shipping would have two different prices, as would different destinations. OCTO mentioned flat rate, but that’s very risky for products which have a generally low price.
Also, I see some publishers offering digital and physical scores at the same price, the only differencebeing shipping. I guess they do it to give the same value to both, but what do you think?
I use Gumroad for digital copies, where they also seem to handle physical products, but I have not yet looked into it. When I know more I will just update this part of the post.
I could create a webstore on my website but with all the VAT / shipping handling I would like to get access to some good tutorials about that before creating issues. Again, the electronic invoicing issue is a real pain, so I need to thread carefully there.
For webshop I could just use a wordpress.org blog-site, but is there anything else/better/suggested?

PART SIX: Promotion
OCTO suggests “internet forums, libraries, institutions (flyers), cooperation with Musicroom, di-Arezzo and similar.”
Internet forums: that’s not different from what I already do now. Checked.
Libraries & Institutions: should one make flyers and ship them? Any suggestion on this point?
Cooperation: how would this work in practice? Would also contacting sheet music shops count? E.g.: La Flute de Pan in Paris. What would be the pricing scheme for this? That is: if a score costs 20+shipping, what would the shop pay? Will the printer/distributor make a better price for shipping a bulk of scores to the same recipient?
I have a friend in Torino who owns a sheet music shop, I will ask him what’s the price scheme and report back.
Are there any pro-forma contracts to regulate this available? Or how would you structure one?

PART SEVEN: Shipping
For shipping: will the printer handle tracking?
If the order is from my website, it should be easy to add a tracking code to the order, but what if the order comes from an online shop, e.g. Musicroom?

I think that’s it for now.
I am sure I will edit this post many times with all the discoveries I make along the way, and with your suggestions.
If you think I should arrange this post differently, please let me know.

Thank you so much everyone for chiming in.
benwiggy
Posts: 835
Joined: 11 Apr 2016, 19:42

Re: Hitchhiker's guide to printing one's scores (this time for real!)

Post by benwiggy »

I don't think a printer will warehouse copies for hire -- not without cost. If you hire scores and parts, you'll have to store them yourself.

Hire Libraries are a product of the days when printing was expensive, and when there was considerable value tied up in the physical pages. 'Owning' them was also the chief means of copyright control. Libraries could charge high sums of money, because if you wanted to perform a Mozart Symphony, there was very little, if any, choice in where you could get the parts.

Arguably, digital print processes have changed all that. From DTP software, PDFs, pre-press technology and presses with much lower running costs, printing is much cheaper. The availability of autograph manuscripts, first editions and other source material online means that for a considerable amount of music, the publishers' monopoly is broken.

ISMNs are much cheaper than ISBNs. I wouldn't bother getting the latter. The former can be useful if you have a third-party distributor.

Traditionally, bookshops want to take a part of the listed selling price. E.g. so your price is €10; they charge the customer €10 plus shipping; they take €3.5 and send th rest to you. For a while, I was getting a lot of business from musicshops, so I 'made it up in volume', but it was a lot of effort.

Ironically, the same technologies that make publishing much easier and cheaper also make it very difficult to get people to pay! Do you have a 'unique selling point'?
NeeraWM
Posts: 185
Joined: 30 Nov 2021, 12:11

Re: Hitchhiker's guide to printing one's scores (this time for real!)

Post by NeeraWM »

Re Hire: this would mean that, from the second hire onward one would lose access to the favourable international shipping rates. I know many publishers still do that, but they are big and have offices around the world, and thus, are deeply connected to favourable shipping networks.
I think I will open a new topic to talk about Scodo and the why and what this is bringing forward ...

RE ISMN: should I use them for the digital copies of my publications as well? Any suggestions on where best to acquire them?

Yes, I guess the effort of keeping up with e-mails and orders from several music shops could become cumbersome, especially if you are not yet at the business point where you can hire an assistant for that.
Why do you say that it is very difficult to get people to pay? Because now they are just flooded with choices? I agree that the sheet music market has exploded, especially with scammers selling IMSLP PDFs ...

If I had to choose a unique selling point it would be that I'm curating the Opera Omnia of two unpublished composers of the cello repertoire.
Other publications try to be unpublished or previously unavailable or out-of-print-since-forever works.
For titles already available elsewhere, I add the editorial contribution of a big name, such as a professor from the CNSM, or a competition prizewinner.
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