First Cup of Coffee - February 17, 2025

On professional jealousy (yes, it's real), that one guy who *has* to say something, and print runs in traditional publishing. What we do and don't know, the effect of print on demand, and other forms of black magic, smoke & mirrors.

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Transcript

00:01.02
Jeffe Kennedy
Good morning, everyone. This is Jeffe Kennedy, author of Epic Fantasy Romance. I'm here with my first cup of coffee.

00:12.34
Jeffe Kennedy
Ah, delicious. Today is Monday, February 17th, President's Day here in the US. Who knows how long that will last for which presidents? ah Hard to say.

00:30.60
Jeffe Kennedy
Tickets for Washington and Lincoln both having their birthdays in this month, but federal things changing very rapidly.

00:42.47
Jeffe Kennedy
oh Hope you all had a wonderful weekend. I had a very nice weekend. Got a lot done. Had my taxes almost done for 2024, which I'm feeling proud of myself, but it's already halfway into February and I want it done by then. and Soon I have to do first quarter of 2025. I feel like I have a number of deadlines hanging on me. I guess I do. ah Trying to finish Strange Familiar by the end of um February. ah I've already forgotten what month this is. But last week I had my best word count week of the entire year.

01:24.26
Jeffe Kennedy
and maybe even longer than that. But it was so really great. I hit almost, yeah, I was a little shy of 13,000 words for the week. So that's great. um My monthly word count is looking good. um Making good progress on the book. Just about 23,000 words to go on it. So I am hopeful. Could you hear that kitten yelling outside the door? Ah, hold on.

01:56.87
Jeffe Kennedy
All right, he didn't want in. He wanted to go outside. So he's abandoned me. ah The birds are really singing this morning. I wonder if you can hear them. There's no construction yet.

02:10.67
Jeffe Kennedy
I'd be able to hear them. Yeah. Feels like spring is coming. That's great. And oh, I was talking about my deadlines. So yeah, two weeks to finish Strange Familiar and I'm stopping wherever I'm at on that.

02:27.43
Jeffe Kennedy
And then moving on to ah revising A Rose in the Mirror, which I think maybe I'm overestimating how well that will take me to revise it. Maybe it will take me a month. We shall find out. And if you all are listening in, you will find out. And then, of course, I have all of my tip-in sheets ah to finish doing. I am officially Do I know officially? I think I do. Yeah, I added in that last bunch. Saturday afternoon, it was a very blustery day, so I parked myself in front of a movie and sat there and did a whole lot of them. So I'm through 26 inches worth, which means I'm 40% of the way through. So I would be golden if they were not sending me 3,000 more.

03:20.18
Jeffe Kennedy
um But I think I'll still be fine. It's not that bad. All of the warnings about carpal tunnel have not manifested.

03:31.07
Jeffe Kennedy
Well, I spoke too soon. that The workers have arrived. Sounds like they're out there cleaning stuff out using a leaf blower. We have a pretty good storm over the weekend. We got good precipitation. Oops. I was um joking with a friend of mine that I can always tell if it's a decent amount of precipitation if our roof leaks. And they were like, oh no. And it's like, you know, flat roofs, they leak a little bit.

03:56.39
Jeffe Kennedy
all the time and it doesn't bother me. But it was kind of funny because I went out to look at the casita and was walking through there. And even though they have the roof, I'm going to put that in air quotes, the roof on, it was dripping all over the place. And I nearly ah texted my contractor just to be a smart ass to tell her, hey, the roof isn't any good, it's leaking. But I didn't know. She probably would have thought it was funny, but I didn't do it.

04:28.20
Jeffe Kennedy
Oh, so anyway, sorry, I keep getting interrupted. Um, I feel like it's all doable, you know, it's, um, these things don't necessarily overlap, but it's kind of weird that like, like editor Ali put down for the revision that she would expect it on March 17th, but the deadline was April 1st. Um,

04:54.03
Jeffe Kennedy
So, you know, we'll see on that. But then March 17th is also the date to pick up the tip-in sheets and end at St. Patrick's Day, which is the day that I also plant my sweet peas. So there's I feel like there's a lot of things coalescing around March 17th. So other than that, I'm trying to think of what do I have to tell you all today? um

05:21.00
Jeffe Kennedy
yeah I feel like I don't have a whole lot to say at this point. I've kind of got book brain. I was trying to explain to um a recent acquaintance of mine why I was suddenly like inarticulate, not being able to come up with words. It's a really funny thing. It's just, it's like all the words I have go into the book.

05:46.89
Jeffe Kennedy
One thing I was thinking about is this actually same new acquaintance was asking me questions about like what it's like being a writer. Genuine questions. I just redid my coffee and I don't think I put my Stevie on that, did I?

06:11.24
Jeffe Kennedy
We'll be right back. So anyway, I was telling this new friend, she was asking like, what's right to be with, her to be a writer and this sort of thing. um Asking from an honest place, not this, I don't know what I think, what I call tail sniffing, which people seem to find very funny. And I've been calling it that for, I feel like 30 or 40 years now, but for some reason it's coming as a surprise to people now.

06:42.73
Jeffe Kennedy
But a whole lot of being a writer, especially like literary type gatherings, is there's tail sniffing, right? Where everybody wants to figure out who the alpha dog is. And they do that by asking you, you know, like, do you have an agent? Are you published? And then, you know, like, how well are you published? Are you with a disreputable press or that great editor or this kind of thing? um And it's, so It's obnoxious. It's as as obnoxious as it sounds. I remember one time when I was, when my very first book came out, ah my essay collection, Wyoming Trucks, True Love, and The Weather Channel, which was with University of New Mexico Press, before I lived in New Mexico. That was a coincidence. Some of you have heard that story before. But anyway, I mean, it's University Press. And I was thrilled, thrilled to get my book published.

07:44.15
Jeffe Kennedy
And I had sort of this network of friends, right? Because I'm always telling you all to make friends. And that's what that you know that's what networking really is. And I traveled a lot for the day job. So I was traveling somewhere, it was like North Carolina. And I had a friend there and she asked me to come speak to her writers group, which was a fairly large writers group of like 20 or 30 people. And I said, sure. You know, so I came and talked to the writers group and, um you know, sort of participated in their stuff. They, you know, have critiques and they encouraged me to participate in the critique part. Otherwise I wouldn't, you know, it was like where they would read it out loud. and But at the end of the

08:37.09
Jeffe Kennedy
the whole time, you know, like that we socialized and everything. But this guy comes up to me and people, it's always some guy. Why is it always some guy, right? This guy comes up to me and he asks me what my print run was for that book. Now, I was reminded of this story last week because ah this new friend asked me what my print run was for Never the Roses. And I said, I don't know.

09:07.34
Jeffe Kennedy
And she said, well, is that usual for you not to know? And I said, yes. And so it's probably a good thing for me to share here as well, ah because I feel like I've frozen. Everything's frozen.

09:27.37
Jeffe Kennedy
There we go. Zencaster totally froze for a while there. um So I said, yes, almost never do authors know what the print run for a book is going to be because the traditional publishers hold that very close to the best. um It's part of their smoke and mirrors. ah I was trying to explain why this is.

09:53.38
Jeffe Kennedy
um It's partly because they do want to control the illusion of supply and demand. So they don't necessarily want to tip their hand on how many books they have published. um And that's because they're doing this through a ah printing press, right? This is print copies, print run. ah With the advent of POD, that has changed somewhat. But what has changed mainly is that our publishers now They do a print run. They might do a second printing. They might do extras when you hear that something's gone into a third printing or so forth.

10:31.24
Jeffe Kennedy
That's why it's kind of exciting because the publisher kind of banks on this strategy, right? They do this thing where they try to predict how many copies are they going to sell and because it costs them money, right? To run the printing press to buy, you know, essentially contract out that work to the printing press. And they don't want to have,

10:56.15
Jeffe Kennedy
too many extra copies on hand, right? Because extra stock on hand actually costs you money. You're taxed on the inventory that you keep on hand. ah And then also it like fills up a warehouse and takes up space and if nobody's buying the books. That's not good. But you also want to have plenty.

11:18.56
Jeffe Kennedy
ah They don't necessarily love going into extra print runs. In some ways it's good because it means a book is selling better than they predicted, which is always nice. But then sometimes it costs them more because prices have gone up or they're doing it in a hurry, that kind of thing. So it's kind of a gamble.

11:41.71
Jeffe Kennedy
but it's one reason why traditional publishing still has it over self publishers in that self publishers, I don't know if there's anybody doing that, um actually printing books through a press. ah People are doing special editions like through presses in China and that kind of thing, but actually doing a print run of the initial book. I don't know if anybody's doing that. it's It's, like I said, it's expensive. It's an investment. ah So sometimes agents will try to figure out what a prep run is, but most of the time the publishers will not tell you. The other reason that they don't want to tell you is to keep authors from

12:35.83
Jeffe Kennedy
getting mad, it essentially, because you have friends who are authors with the same editor at the same publishing house. So Sarah Beth Durst, I'll give her a little plug again, because I have been reading The Enchanted Greenhouse, and it is enchanting indeed. And we have the same editor at tour. And I love the spell shop.

13:00.88
Jeffe Kennedy
she did the endorsement quote for me for Never the Roses. And so there is a certain camaraderie there. And if I were a less sterling human being than I am, because I want you all to know that ah i I really do battle. I mean, professional jealousy is a real thing.

13:23.94
Jeffe Kennedy
But it's, I think, very, very important for us to do everything we can to disallow it from our lives because it only poisons yourself, right? ah But let's say I found out that Sarah Beth Durst in, we're kind of semi-overlapping genres. She's much cozier than I am.

13:46.73
Jeffe Kennedy
But same editors, ah basically, money is coming out of the same pot, right? That my editor has a certain fund that she can spend on books. And let's say I find out that they gave Sarah Beth Durst a print run of 100,000 copies. And they gave me a print run of 1,500 copies. Oh, I didn't finish telling that story. Sorry, I'm like, I've got book rain. I will finish.

14:16.98
Jeffe Kennedy
Um, and then maybe I get mad, right? And then I call up my editor and I bitch at her and I'm like, why did you give Sarah Beth Durst a hundred thousand copy print run? And I only got 1500 when the truth is, is it's because they don't think they could sell that many copies of my book. But for some authors, this is not something you can tell. So what this guy said to me, sorry, I don't know how I lost that in there. I happen to know.

14:46.09
Jeffe Kennedy
that it was a print run of 1,500 copies from a university press. And he says, well, I hope you know that's not exactly an encouraging sign. They they don't have a great deal of confidence in this book.

15:03.73
Jeffe Kennedy
And I have wished ever since people I have wished that I said to him, and what is the print run on your book? Because I had just done a print session with this guy, and I knew that he was not yet published. right So he had to come up and tell me how my print run of 1,500 copies was not a rousing endorsement, and they weren't demonstrating much confidence in my book oh when he hadn't even published anything.

15:40.61
Jeffe Kennedy
Cheers.

15:44.46
Jeffe Kennedy
So anyway, um that's sort of like the whole thing. There's a lot about traditional publishing that is a little bit of black and magic, a little bit of smoke and mirrors, how they get books onto the best seller list.

15:59.90
Jeffe Kennedy
um I mean, there's definitely some wheeling and dealing where they decide certain books. They really want to appear on the list and they um work with booksellers to get those fancy end cap displays. I remember my mom. Hi, mom.

16:18.50
Jeffe Kennedy
Went to send me a beautiful end cap display of I think it was maybe Sarah J Moss It was certainly an author like that a fantasy author with her beautiful covers and they had one of those You know cardboard displays at the end of the aisle that's called an end cap and my mom said how come they're not doing this for your book? It's like because I'm not Sarah J. Moss and because they don't have that confidence in my book. And many people complain that this is a catch-22, right? That it's a self-dependent cycle because the big end cap display with the beautiful expensive cover ah sells more books.

17:07.00
Jeffe Kennedy
But because they think they can sell more books, they do the expensive cover with the beautiful end cap display. And I mean, I've had books, little forgotten empires, my forgotten empires trilogy.

17:21.17
Jeffe Kennedy
didn't get launched quite the way I wanted it to. And I think there's another forgotten another thought I forgot to circle back on, which is that the way traditional publishing works now is once they run out of your print run, they make a decision that either they're going to do another print run, which remember, it's expensive and an investment, or they will go to print on demand, POD.

17:47.31
Jeffe Kennedy
And so like with my forgotten empire's trilogy, I'm looking at my big stack of books over here, which came out like right at the beginning of pandemic. It was terrible timing, but also they kind of didn't nail the marketing on that book. oh They ended up doing a less expensive cover than we thought they were going to do because somebody decided that they thought this book wasn't going to sell and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

18:16.68
Jeffe Kennedy
It's all fine. I've earned out my advance on all three copies, all three copies. That would be funny. On all three books, which is fantastic because now that money is just gravy for me. And maybe they'll reissue it under new covers. That would be nice. But they're all, I got an email like a year ago that they are all now print on demand, right? Which means they're not investing in that print run anymore. Now what we hope,

18:45.94
Jeffe Kennedy
is that they will instead invest in a print run with sexy newcomers. But we don't know, and it's up to them. So um yeah, that's my sort of long rambling story about print runs and how all of that works. ah Indie authors, self-publishers, are naturally always print on demand. Our print copies are, unless someone does like a special edition run in China or something like that,

19:15.62
Jeffe Kennedy
ah It's all print on demand, which is great that we have that option. So I think I'll get to work. Hopefully my brain will work this week and I will talk to you all on Friday. I hope you all have a wonderful week. You all take care. Bye bye.