Over the coming weeks, I’ll be cross-posting a series of short essays that I wrote at the NewMusicShelf about self-publishing and making good financial decisions as an artist.

When I’ve talked to other composers about self-publishing and selling their own works, one of the most consistent stumbling blocks is the issue of pricing. It can be very difficult to evaluate whether a given price is too high or too low.

The worry is that if a score is priced too high, no one will want to shell out the money because it’s too expensive, and consequently won’t buy it; but if it’s priced too low, people may think it must not be any good, and they still won’t buy it. Also, pricing a score on the lower end of the spectrum gives a smaller return to the composer, which may be undesirable because of all of the time and effort that went into composing the piece and engraving the score; but pricing on the higher end of the spectrum, while maybe “fairer” to the composer considering his efforts, may still turn people off, thus depriving him of any income at all.

It’s a difficult situation.

An element that adds to the confusion is what we might consider to be the pricing “standards” set by currently available scores that are published by the big music publishing houses. Let’s take for example two song cycles of roughly equal duration, difficulty, and quality. A major publisher will charge upwards of $20 where I would probably ask for $7. The major difference is that they have to charge that much because they have a much higher per-score production cost than I do – they have editors, engravers, marketing, art, and legal departments to pay; not to mention the costs of printing and materials. And while more publishers are doing print-on-demand, it’s much less efficient and cost-effective than printing a larger run of scores. So, like any business, they’re going to pass the added expense onto the consumer. Again, they have to charge more to stay in business.

I think that we shouldn’t be pricing our scores in a similar range as those that are traditionally published. I think, instead, that we should be competing – and you don’t compete by charging the same as your competitor. By which I don’t mean that we should adopt the Always-The-Lowest-Price, cut-throat, Wal-mart-style approach to slashing prices maniacally and attempting to drive out all other business. I mean instead that we aren’t burdened by anywhere near the overhead costs as traditional publishers, so we have the luxury of pricing accordingly. Plus, even when pricing my song cycle at $7, I can expect a much higher return than had it been sold at $20 by a traditional publisher (especially if I’m selling digital copies, where there are no printing or other overhead costs).

Personally, although I like buying new scores, I find most traditionally published scores to be prohibitively expensive. I just can’t afford them. Consequently, I take myself as a model customer. If I were looking for new material to perform, or at least to consider performing, what price range would I find most comfortable and inviting? Is that price range fair to the composer given the length and instrumentation of the piece?

Unlike the world of novels, where standardized pricing is the norm and sales expectations are much higher, we have a much tougher row to hoe, I think. One current argument in the book world is for ebooks to be priced at $2.99. Another argument is for a tiered method. We don’t have the luxury of such clear delineation of categories as is required by the tiered pricing method – we have to balance duration, instrumentation, and (potentially) difficulty in our pricing decisions. We also have the question of whether or not to sell parts bundled with a score or separately, and how to price those.

I like the sentiment behind the current arguments for ebook pricing: encourage sales and foster long-term growth through affordability. Simple, really. We certainly can’t expect the sheer number of sales that a successful novel can generate, but we can definitely encourage more performers to take a chance on our music by making it affordable. Affordable without underselling yourself.

I think it’s a much easier task when you stop trying to assign Monetary Worth to your works, and start thinking in terms of affordability, fairness, and long-term growth.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be cross-posting a series of short essays that I wrote at the NewMusicShelf about self-publishing and making good financial decisions as an artist.

Over the past few months, I’ve been doing a lot (a LOT) of reading about publishing and self-publishing, and it’s been particularly enlightening.

Pretty much all of my reading has been about publishing books. I haven’t bothered reading about music publishing for any number of reasons, not the least of which is the dearth of writings on the subject.

There is, however, a TON of writing available about self-publishing books. There’s a renaissance going on amongst our prose and poetry writing brethren that I find incredibly intriguing – more and more authors are “going indie” and publishing their own works. Some are established authors branching out into different genres and trying something outside of the Brand that they and their publishers have created for them; some are established authors who want to take control of their works and their profits; some are non-established authors who found no interest in their work from the big publishers; and some have never had any experience with major publishers at all. This shift that’s happening is really exciting to read about because everything is changing so rapidly for the industry, and people keep finding new and ingenious ways to get their work out there. What’s also interesting to read about is the vitriol being spewed at some of these authors by people in their own industry. Not heartening, surely, but interesting.

I’m really inspired by the writers who are doing so well at self-publishing, self-marketing, self-distributing, self-etc. – there are a lot of them, and many more are joining those ranks. I find it inspiring in large part because I know the phenomenon can be translated to the concert music world. We’ve actually already started on the path toward our own publishing renaissance, but I think we’ve stalled. Not out of any inherent laziness – although I think that we as composers have been trained to avoid self-promotion and any act that may make us seem as though we actually want to make a living at this career for which we’ve spent so much time and money educating and preparing ourselves (a conversation for another day). Our stalling has been due mostly, I think, to a lack of outlets for self-publishing composers to showcase their works. [Insert preaching-to-the-choir-style plug for NewMusicShelf here.]

I want to point out two blogs that I’ve found particularly interesting and motivational: author Joe Konrath’s blog and Zoe Winters’ posts over at IndieReader.com. They have a lot to say about their industry that I feel is pertinent to the discussion of self-publishing in music.