> Truer words were never written :-) I have to watch my back around some of > my friends who know the books will be offered to them first when they carry > me out of my house.
Unless I predecease my husband and he wants to sell my books, I'm going to find a university library willing to house my collection (rather than selling it for general funding), and leave it to them. I would like this to be a library that does not already have a large collection of such books. My husband and I do not have wills and I suppose we ought to, though neither of us is expecting to die for some decades. Then there are the ones who complacently watch my > fabric stash grow to huge proportions (live near two Pendleton Woolen Mills > seconds stores and come from Pendleton. At $3.99 a yard Pendleton wool can > be cheaper than either dead dinosaur or cotton!). Certainly I have more > than I'm likely to use in the next 20 years or so. I've never gone in for wool. I'm not technically allergic to it (when I was weaving a lot I got an allergy test), but it irritates my skin. I think mohair is a nightmare. Cashmere is perfectly fine. The softer woolens (from sheep) are OK if I wear them with enough layers of clothing under them, but I don't want to handle them enough to sew with them. So I sew with cottons, linens, silks, and a few rayons. There are a few polyester brocades and embroidered fabrics that looked so great to me I have ignored their fiber content, especially if it was partly a natural fiber/blend. > > Fancy sewing machines mean the "new" 1911 Singer Treadle I just got from > Good Will with every attachment ever made to that time plus the original > manual. I learned to sew on a treadle when I was a kid, and later I had an early electric tabletop Singer with a bentwood case. Both had a great straight stitch, were incredibly sturdy and ran very smoothly after my father restored them. But these days I like a higher-tech machine, and I don't want to buy another old machine just to get a perfect straight stitch. I don't want to collect sewing machines, I have way too much other stuff in the house. > I actually think that the fact that the SCA and it's offshoots in the > re-enactment and Renn Faire arenas are the reason why many books see > publication at all. Dress in the Court of Henry VIII was eagerly welcomed > by David Brown/Oxbow books when Maney Publishing came up with the idea. > They knew it would sell like gangbusters, and it has. And do you have the sales figures on (a) what "gangbusters" consists of in terms of both units sold and profits realized, and (b) how many of these copies were actually sold to SCA members? Even the larger reenactor markets are not great sales markets. I find theatrical costumers to be a much larger, more profitable, and more reliable market. They will usually buy a book if they think it will facilitate their work; in other words, if they have a real professional need for it. Hobbyists usually pay less and are less likely to buy rather than borrow, or to not read the book at all. Maney publishing is > eager to hear from the book buying public about what we would like to see > and spend money on. Every publisher with any sense does marketing research (especially if they don't have to pay for a survey) and is delighted to find additional markets, no matter how secondary. Many successful books, particularly those without an inherently large audience--which includes most scholarly books--have several markets. That does not mean that the SCA is the only or main market of Maney Publishing, or anyone else outside the SCA community. I've lost track of how many members the SCA has, but last time I checked it was a few thousand. By publishing standards, that's tiny, considering that something like one to five percent of people in a target market actually buy. Compare a small percentage of the SCA membership against the (widely trumpted) sales for something like the Harry Potter books, and you'll have some idea how sales for a very-narrow-niche book might compare to sales for a mainstream book, that is a book that could potentially sell to anyone. > >The answer is that SCA members and those who have fallen > under their spell would. Let's put it this way: I publish and sell narrow-niche books, and the SCA-only market is not large enough to make me all that interested in it. For costume books with patterns, there is a solid if niche bread-and-butter market of professional costumers who will buy them because they need them, and that's what we really rely on. > > Any market is better than no market No, it is not. Unless a market is a certain size compared to the costs of book publication, the book is not worth publishing. Unless a publisher is subsidized by a nonprofit, they simply cannot lose money and still stay in business. Publishers do not generally publish a book and then find a market for it. That is much too risky and expensive. They do considerable research to find out how many members of a target market or markets there are, where to locate them, and so on, before even beginning work on a book. An author submitting a book proposal has to do a lot of this work before the publisher will even consider the proposal. And a great many books are sold on the basis of proposals. The chance of rejection everywhere/nonpublication is often pretty high; so the author just writes an outline, a chapter or two, and does that all-important marketing research to try and get a contract, before even writing the book. Before offering a contract to the author, the publisher does more research, extrapolates from the sales volume of their other books, and so on. It has to look like the economics will work out from the very beginning. Granted, some books are financial failures even given extensive marketing research, but not doing the marketing research is usually a recipe for a real disaster. And granted, there are some books that do not have to be profitable because their publication is subsidized by museums or other nonprofit organizations. There are many books that would probably be valuable cultural contributions that will never be published either because the market for them is not large enough, or because their authors did not do enough marketing research to convince the publisher of it. and a new generation is growing up that > will never think to thank us for creating it. They will think that it's > obvious that someone would be interested in the grave finds on the Isle of > Man, or the cut and construction of Spanish clothing in 1578. As I said, I really doubt the SCA is solely responsible or even mainly responsible for supporting most scholarly books on the SCA period. Fran Lavolta Press http://www.lavoltapress.com _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
