How to make money in publishing

Sometimes, you know, publishers just get it right.

(And, I should say up top, this email has nothing useful to say. Contrary to my subject line, this email will not tell you how to make money in publishing. The fact is: this email is perfectly useless. If you’d rather just get on with your life, then please – direct your feet to the sunny side of the street. No offence, and I’ll see you next week.)

So.

Shakespeare.

In his lifetime, he was widely published, given the age. Much of his poetry had been through several editions. Roughly alf his plays had been published in some form.

But that still left out an awful lot. Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth, The Tempest, The Comedy of Errors – these and many others had never been published. The plays which had been published had often been come out in quarto form. To make a cheap quarto book, you took a large sheet of paper and folding it twice, to get four pages / eight sides. Binding was expensive, so was often omitted. An unbound quarto book would have cost about sixpence, or, in modern terms, a bit less than a contemporary paperback.

Now, another name for an unbound quarto is ‘pile of paper’ and, back when paper was valuable and not abundant, unbound books soon found themselves being used for other things. One ditty of the time said, ‘Publish me in the smallest size / lest I be eaten under Pippin-Pies [Apple pies] / Or in an apothecary’s shop be seen / to wrap drugs or to dry tobacco in.’

In short, the situation at the time of Shakespeare’s death in 1616, was dire. Half his plays, including some of his most important, were wholly unpublished. The rest had been published but in editions so impermanent that many of those too would disappear. The idea that this playwright would be seen as probably the most important author ever would have been just nuts. His star was fading by the day.

And then – 

Between 1622 and 1623 – four hundred years ago – a team of people banded together to produce the First Folio, or to give it its proper title: Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. A folio was the largest, most impressive printing format of the age, and the most expensive. The team needed the capacity of one of London’s major printing shops. Paper had to be imported from France. And the texts? These were gathered with surprising resourcefulness. Where there had been decent printed copies, those were used. Sometimes, they used Shakespeare’s own ‘foul papers’ or working texts. Other times, they used the prompt copies kept by theatre companies to nudge actors on their lines.

There were difficult squabbles over publication rights. Troilus and Cressida was originally intended to follow Romeo and Juliet, but was kept out, probably because of a rights issue, then inserted later. It never made it into the Table of Contents.

The publishing plan was bold, high-investment – and successful. The team printed and sold about 750 copies. Each copy sold for between fifteen and twenty shillings – let’s say £150-200 in modern terms, or $200-250. The cheaper copies were unbound. The posher copies were bound in calfskin and sold for more.

That book saved Shakespeare. Literally. It kept (almost all) his dramatic work alive. There are still about 250 copies of that book in existence today. It’s because of that book that we know Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra and the rest. It’s because of that book that Shakespeare has the reputation he has. There were subsequent folios and subsequent textual revisions and arguments, but that single book stands alone in its importance for British (and arguably world) literature.

The story reminds you of the essential strange duality at the heart of any publishing company. Yes, it’s about money. And yes, it’s about art. A company only focused on the art would not have had the funds to do as that First Folio team did: to gather the texts, to refine them, to set them, to buy the paper, to hire the print shop, to do the marketing. And a company only focused on the cash would not have done as much to gather every text they could, to take as much care over each line.

Art and money, money and art.

Publishers don’t always get things right, but when they do, they make one hell of a difference.

Til soon.

Harry