The [Name TBD] Bookstore: Let's Figure Out the Capitalist Side of This Thing, Y'all · 4:45pm Apr 7th, 2019
I used to do this when I was a kid on FFN too, y'know. Say something like "new chapter next week!" after publishing one, and then go off and do some silly thing like get a bunch of work to do and go several weeks before actually doing anything conclusive. Guess the pattern still holds as a grown-up.
Anyway, it's survey time again, and this one's the real deal. Which, contextualized, means if you either confirm in the first section that your answer to the general interest survey I sent out before is still accurate, or if you pass along the same information in the relevant section here, I'm going to work under the assumption that you're participating in the Bookstore and will have books ready to sell at the con. (Also, if you answered the first one but don't answer this one, I'm gonna make the same assumption, just to be safe.)
What this survey will also hopefully answer is a question quite a few have asked: namely, what are we going to charge for the books we sell, and what will we do with whatever profit we make? The latter half of the survey contains a few questions to help get a bead on everyone's expectations and desires, which after a week or two I'll publish here (as well as through an email to everyone signed up) with an explanation of which strategy I'll be going with based on community consensus.
On that note, here's an important deadline: in order to ensure everyone has their books printed and ready to rock by August 1st (the first day of the con), I'll need everyone participating to submit three things to the email address bronybookstore@gmail.com by July 4th at the absolute latest:
- Your FIMFiction username (again)
- A PDF copy of the manuscript(s) you intend to publish (just so I can glance at it and ensure they exist)
- A screenshot of a confirmation email/receipt (with personal info redacted) showing that you've placed a print order for your books
Four weeks prior to the con should be plenty of time to make sure that print orders arrive as they need to, but please let me know if that becomes impractical. Also, if you don't think you'll be able to transport your books from your home to the con after ordering them, either PM me or email the aforementioned address, and we can potentially arrange having your books delivered to my apartment instead. I live less than an hour's drive from Baltimore, so I could probably take a few orders with me and, worst case, make more than one trip.
Oh, and before I forget:
TAXES
[disembodied screaming]
Actually, it's not as bad as you might think, but I wanted to confirm my plans for that publicly just to make sure everyone's cool with it. Tl;dr to sell stuff at a convention in Maryland, you need to have a Maryland Sales Tax License as the seller. For simplicity's sake (since we technically have a ton of sellers at one booth), I've applied for a single license and will plan to cover the sales tax for all sales we make as a lump sum taken from the booth's total gross profit. Once that's taken care of, I'll divvy up net profit based on the pricing strategy we decide on.
On a related note, I fully understand anyone being leery about all this money being in one person's hands at any point during this process. I've looked somewhat into drafting a partnership agreement to make it legally binding that I pass along everyone's money within a reasonable amount of time, and I could continue with that process if it's something that would make people more comfortable. Just figured I'd throw that out there.
P.S. If you're wondering about the blog title, it turns out (somewhat predictably) that we can't actually have "BronyCon" in the Bookstore's name since we're not actually associated with the con itself. There's a place at the end of the survey to vote on a few alternate titles or suggest your own.
Like this comment if you think the store name should be “Golden Oak Library”.
5040380 Hm. Too close to copyright, and we don't lend? How about Golden Oak Bookstore?
(Technically, I'm about 95% done with getting the third compendium book set up, first book is ready, and second book is getting a proof copy sent to me. Fourth book (Lazy Dragon) may be my most difficult, but I've got the Lulu template downloaded (landscape, not portrait) and I'm 'framing' it this week.)
I love you for doing this.
I will try to participate despite the crippling depression that has made everything impossible. I really want to be a part of this and share my horsewords with a wider audience.
5040397
5040380
It's at Bronycon so it shouldn't be a problem to use the term if it isn't also used outside of Bronycon. Bronycon pays a fee to Hasbro to allow ponies to sell derivative works and that should fall under the same license, I'd think.
The question about markup is unclear to me -- is the amount in parentheses the total cost for a book, or the amount of markup being added to each book?
Assuming the parenthetical values are the markup amounts, I want to vote for something in between your "at-cost" and "small," with the profit contributing to non-printing costs (S&H, booth fees, etc). Most of the titles I'm affiliated with will have a printing cost of under $20 and will be offered at cost online after the con; charging double or more their production cost just for the privilege of being allowed to purchase them IRL feels like highway robbery. If a book costs, say, $17.34 to print, then "rounding up" to a nice "clean" $25 even feels right to me.
I was wondering if it was too late to submit a potential third book. So far I have TD the Alicorn Princess (which I've already sold as a print book, so no real issues there) and The Anthology of Madness, which is, as the title suggests, an anthology of my best/better short stories which just needs another round of editing and formatting before it's good to go. The third book would be a print copy of The Secret Life of Rarity which people have been begging for for years. Is it too late to add that? If so that's fine.
5040608
Not too late at all! The only hard deadline is July 4th, by which date I’ll need confirmation that any books we’re going to stock are at least ordered for printing.
5040589
The amount in parentheses is how much each volume’s total cost would be. I was assuming pure production costs would be $15-20 per volume.
5040625
Cool!
Is there going to be any kind of guidance or requirements/minimums for inventory, i.e. "each title must have at least X copies there"?
Submitted
5040679
Wasn't planning on anything specific since I didn't want to make anyone spend a certain amount of money to get in, but I suppose fewer printed copies might mean fewer total sales. If we run out of merch totally we could always figure out a way to set up preorders in an Excel sheet or something.
5040735
I'm definitely in favor of understocking rather than overstocking, so authors aren't floating a lot of cash on an untried thing and then stuck with unwanted inventory to transport home.
I was considering an approach for PFP titles that might be worth floating for any other Bookstore titles that are available online as well: if you sell all but one copy of each book, customers would still be able to check them out, but can be directed to wherever they're available online to actually purchase them. In other words, if everything sells out, the bookstore would still have a useful function, acting as a showcase for what's available. I'm planning on printing up bookmarks advertising ponyfeatherpublishing.com to distribute with PFP purchases, so people know they can get free ebooks and other physical books, but also to hand out to anyone who's interested but can't/won't purchase at the con.
At some point there was a reference guide that someone posted about how to prep a book for printing.
Anyone know where that is? Or have another one? I can't seem to find it now...
5040914
https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/834464/bronycon-bookstore-the-basics-of-horsebooking
5040978
Many thanks!
Hmm. I still wish for a way to get some of these books without having to go all the way to BronyCon (way too expensive for me) but knowing something like this exists warms my heart.
5040380
5040397
5040559
This is a couple weeks out of date, but any fanwork sold at BronyCon is definitely well within Hasbro's right to shut down, aka there is no license in place. That said, Hasbro largely turns a blind eye to things because they don't really care about fans selling fanwork unless it gets so big that if they don't C&D it, it could lead to trademark dilution.
Basically, every con vendor, Hasbro can go 'We weren't aware of this specific individual' or something of the sort.
That said I am aware of one person who states they've gotten a license from Hasbro directly, but that's entirely different and were 1 on 1 deals between individuals and the company.
5040380 5040397 Copyright does not protect names or phrases. Trademarks do. I just searched the US Patent & Trademark Office's database of live trademarks, and "Golden Oak Library" is not trademarked.
5041038 I believe that all the books RBDash47 is publishing (Ponyfeather Press) will be on Lulu, which means you'll be able to order a copy online.
Been thinking about the pricing thing, and -- wouldn't the simplest process be:
1. Each participant prices their title(s) however they want.
2. The bookstore collects the purchase price of each book (plus sales tax).
3. The bookstore remits the collected purchase price back to the participant.
It's not even like you'd need to keep a separate envelope of cash for each title or something; you'll know how many of each title are sold, and you can send each participant $[title purchase price x quantity sold].
Not only is there little room for confusion or error, but you also don't have to get dozens(?) of participants to all agree on a standardized pricing scheme.
Regardless, we need to know pretty soon how pricing works, because that's going to affect how much inventory we order.
5041038
5054357 is correct that all Ponyfeather Publishing titles will be available in paperback and hardback direct from Lulu after the con!
5054384
Yeah, I’ve been putting a lot of thought into that as well along similar lines (when work hasn’t been insane). Final call is being drafted tonight.
5050952
There's another good reason companies don't usually sue fan works unless they're Disney--they have a better chance of maintaining control over such things if their case is never put to the test. Copyright law as I read it doesn't give Hasbro the right to suppress fan fiction, because it covers the expressions of ideas, not the ideas themselves. You can copyright a picture, or a text, but you can't copyright a concept, and a characterization (rather than a character image) is a concept. Someone telling a different story in text with the same characters isn't technically violating copyright AFAIK.
Think of it this way: Each episode is copyrighted. If copyright covered characters, they'd only have to copyright one episode. Copyright covers a "tangible expression", such as a story told via animation. A copyright on an episode of MLP protects the story (so you can't publish a novelization of it) and any large excerpt of it (so you can't publish a parody using the same video, or a book using stills from the episode as illustrations, or use long audio clips from it), but I know of nothing in copyright law that would prevent a fan from writing a textual story using the same characters. A graphic novel would be iffier, because image copyright and design trademark then enters into it.
In at least two cases, one being Disney and the other Dr. Seuss, a company has successfully sued for telling a different story with their characters--but in both cases, they were comic books.
In the Disney case, though, the ruling was justified not by copyright infringement, IIRC, but something like trademark degradation, for people who were selling Mickey & Minnie porn. In the Seuss case, the problem was that the defendant didn't argue that copyright law was inapplicable, but argued that it was a parody and thus fair use, and the judge ruled that it wasn't a parody because it was making fun of something else using Seuss characters.
Parodies of copyrighted works are definitely legal. But beware that "comedy" and "crackfic" aren't necessarily "parody". Parodies usually change the names; there might be a trademark issue. I don't know how trademark applies to names of characters in works of fiction. It was originally just a mark (a brand indicator) in a specific trade, like the Coca-Cola font or the Pepsi blue+red yin-yang.
The second issue is that there's a new category of fair use, established in 1994: "Transformative works". A work isn't a copyright violation if it's transformative. Exactly what counts as transformative is unclear. A work posted on fimfic would probably be transformative, if only because it enables social-network interaction, which is a new function of the work.
My take on the whole issue is that, in a fair fight, the odds are low that any fan-fiction (other than a "no, that episode should have gone like THIS" fic) could be successfully sued for copyright infringement, what with the 3 outs of
Companies are at present much better off not testing the matter in court. They have little to gain and a lot to lose.
Re. the survey, I found the range of markups very strange--with "$20-$30" being called a "small markup".
I'm looking at $12 softcover; that would be a 160% markup.
Typical industry rates for the author are 10-15% for hardcover, 5-10% for softcover, and that's before the agent gets 10%.
So I was expecting a markup, if any, to be in the range 5% (small) to 25% (very large).
Charging very high prices would mean I'd only expect to sell 0 to 3 copies, at which point it wouldn't be worth the effort going into preparing this book (weeks of writing & revision, plus RBD's production work).
I don't think we need to agree on prices or how to split any profits. Just take each person's books, and then after the con, give each person back money collected for their books plus unsold books. You wouldn't have to keep track of anything other than how many books they gave you.