It has turned out that since Musk took over Twitter we cannot, after all, post our own Calderonia Tweets at the bottom of the Subscribe, Categories, Comments etc column on the right of the home page — though we can, of course, send our own Tweets out into the great Ocean of Oblivion. You can read the text of our latest Tweet here.
What is this all about? Well, we are currently selling very few copies of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius a year, but we are not going to ‘remainder’ or ‘pulp’ the 104 copies left, because small publishers don’t do that. We are happy to bet that the book will sell out eventually, we know from experience that there might suddenly be a surge of interest in it for some unpredictable reason, and it’s beautifully produced by the best printers in Britain, so we can reasonably raise its price by £20 and be assured that when it has sold out, the whole imprint will be in the black. This strategy is only possible if you haven’t printed too many copies in the first place (459 was mercifully right, and some would say that the Russian phrase ‘bibliographic rarity’ is now appropriate).
This is the kind of flexibility small presses have to practise. There will be profits and losses and it’s no good going into this business thinking you’ll always be in pocket. You have to take the long investment view. In Russia, Sam&Sam sold 20,000 copies of the first edition (1993) of the book featured immediately below, and 30,000 of the second edition the year after. (Sam1’s Russian translation of Koulomzina’s 1973 book was smuggled out of Russia, corrected by her in the U.S., and the corrected text sent to me in Cambridge, where it sat with other samizdat until Sam1 was able to collect it in 1991 under Yeltsin.) Even the first book I published in the U.K., Berdiaev’s Aphorisms in 500 copies, sold like hot cakes when it was taken into Russia and if we had had free access to the Russian market then (1985, with the Soviet regime still in place) we could have sold tens of thousands. Successes fund your less popular works, whose publication you nevertheless passionately believe in.
Sofia Koulomzina, Our Church and Our Children, Moscow, Sam&Sam, 1993
Nikolai Berdiaev, Aphorisms, London, Sam&Sam, 1985
This year is the fiftieth anniversary of Sam&Sam’s founding by my Russian friend and me in Moscow. If asked, he and I would be blunt: it’s had seismic ups and downs, mainly owing to politics, but I’m glad to say we have ridden them out. You must be prepared for this bumpiness in small publishing before you even go into it. Take the present year. Sam1 and I can have mimimal contact because of the war and our dissident record. Since 1974 we have published over 30 titles, but some years we have had to lie low. Not to mention the fact that, understandably, no-one in the West wants to buy a book in Russian at the moment, however pure the publisher: I haven’t sold one here since February 2023! The western outlet, by the way, is https://www.samandsam.co.uk/.
I could rabbit on about what small publishing has taught me, but I will summarise it in a few lines. First, you have to put an enormous amount of time, and some hard cash, into advertising and marketing your books. Second, don’t for one moment listen to the people who tell you what to them is so obvious: that you can only produce your own books by not charging for your own time, so (according to such friends) you ‘can’t make any money out of it’ and they would never risk it. Third, if you believe in what you and your authors have written, and don’t want half a dozen paid so-called editors messing it up in commercial publishing, always bring it out yourself. Finally: go for the highest possible quality of typesetting, design, proofreading and printing. Such standards send their own message to the reader and posterity. You may be an outfit that operates on a shoe string and mathematically speaking brings you in only £0.12 an hour, but you are doing it all to prove something — that your books matter. Create a reputation for originality and top quality.
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Related
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
George Calderon c.1901
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Captain of the 11
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
George Calderon, 1912
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
50 years of ‘small publishing’: what has it taught me?
It has turned out that since Musk took over Twitter we cannot, after all, post our own Calderonia Tweets at the bottom of the Subscribe, Categories, Comments etc column on the right of the home page — though we can, of course, send our own Tweets out into the great Ocean of Oblivion. You can read the text of our latest Tweet here.
What is this all about? Well, we are currently selling very few copies of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius a year, but we are not going to ‘remainder’ or ‘pulp’ the 104 copies left, because small publishers don’t do that. We are happy to bet that the book will sell out eventually, we know from experience that there might suddenly be a surge of interest in it for some unpredictable reason, and it’s beautifully produced by the best printers in Britain, so we can reasonably raise its price by £20 and be assured that when it has sold out, the whole imprint will be in the black. This strategy is only possible if you haven’t printed too many copies in the first place (459 was mercifully right, and some would say that the Russian phrase ‘bibliographic rarity’ is now appropriate).
This is the kind of flexibility small presses have to practise. There will be profits and losses and it’s no good going into this business thinking you’ll always be in pocket. You have to take the long investment view. In Russia, Sam&Sam sold 20,000 copies of the first edition (1993) of the book featured immediately below, and 30,000 of the second edition the year after. (Sam1’s Russian translation of Koulomzina’s 1973 book was smuggled out of Russia, corrected by her in the U.S., and the corrected text sent to me in Cambridge, where it sat with other samizdat until Sam1 was able to collect it in 1991 under Yeltsin.) Even the first book I published in the U.K., Berdiaev’s Aphorisms in 500 copies, sold like hot cakes when it was taken into Russia and if we had had free access to the Russian market then (1985, with the Soviet regime still in place) we could have sold tens of thousands. Successes fund your less popular works, whose publication you nevertheless passionately believe in.
Sofia Koulomzina, Our Church and Our Children, Moscow, Sam&Sam, 1993
Nikolai Berdiaev, Aphorisms, London, Sam&Sam, 1985
This year is the fiftieth anniversary of Sam&Sam’s founding by my Russian friend and me in Moscow. If asked, he and I would be blunt: it’s had seismic ups and downs, mainly owing to politics, but I’m glad to say we have ridden them out. You must be prepared for this bumpiness in small publishing before you even go into it. Take the present year. Sam1 and I can have mimimal contact because of the war and our dissident record. Since 1974 we have published over 30 titles, but some years we have had to lie low. Not to mention the fact that, understandably, no-one in the West wants to buy a book in Russian at the moment, however pure the publisher: I haven’t sold one here since February 2023! The western outlet, by the way, is https://www.samandsam.co.uk/.
I could rabbit on about what small publishing has taught me, but I will summarise it in a few lines. First, you have to put an enormous amount of time, and some hard cash, into advertising and marketing your books. Second, don’t for one moment listen to the people who tell you what to them is so obvious: that you can only produce your own books by not charging for your own time, so (according to such friends) you ‘can’t make any money out of it’ and they would never risk it. Third, if you believe in what you and your authors have written, and don’t want half a dozen paid so-called editors messing it up in commercial publishing, always bring it out yourself. Finally: go for the highest possible quality of typesetting, design, proofreading and printing. Such standards send their own message to the reader and posterity. You may be an outfit that operates on a shoe string and mathematically speaking brings you in only £0.12 an hour, but you are doing it all to prove something — that your books matter. Create a reputation for originality and top quality.
ADVERTISEMENT
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
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