I’m curious what you would estimate the cost of producing the books to be. That is, how much would someone have to donate to pay for Lightcone to produce the books?
It’s historically been a couple months of salary time + a bunch of intermittent work over the course of the year. I think it’s at least $20k and plausibly like $40k. Plus the actual team time not being able to be spent on other things. (The books get sold at cost so this money is a cost to the org)
We tried hiring a bookmaker last year which didn’t work out. The hiring process was also pretty costly.
I think the actual cost is more like ‘do the headhunting to find someone who’d do a great job’.
The hardest part here is ensuring that whoever we hire can actually work self-directedly, without constant management. We’ve spent 3 years trying to make books efficiently and not succeeded yet, which I think is making us more risk-averse to trying again (although I do have some ideas on how to do it)
I think if someone who had previously made a particularly great HPMOR, SlatestarCodex or Sequences custom book, has good project-management skills, overall good aesthetic taste, and is proficient with both AI art and reworking essay diagrams that were low res to be printable resolution...
...I’d at least personally be pretty interested in hiring that person if they seemed to clearly demonstrate all the skills.
Briefly registering disagreement: my first thought was an order of magnitude higher than yours.
Brief sketch of my reasoning: Losing a staff member for 1-2 months really cuts out our ability to maintain the infrastructure we have responsibility for (like Lighthaven and Lightspeed grants and LW) while running at the organizational top priority — right now that’s dialogues — and we’re already stretched thin with only 2 people working on the top-priority full-time who don’t have any side commitments (plus 2 other people working on it as their main focus but with side commitments). I’ve not got a definite sense of how we’d rearrange, but I can see worlds where it would cut our focus on the top priority by as much as 30% during that period, and that’s not just the cost measured in the staff member’s time, but reduces the value of everyone’s time in a big way.
Oh yeah I’m pretty easily sold on “Actually it’s just more like $200k” for reasons you cite, although it gets into more intangibles that are harder to quantify. ($200k seems more likely to be “our Cheerful Price”, but I suspect if we got a a $40k donation we’d consider it more strongly anyway, in part because it was an indication someone thought it was that valuable)
(Expressing confusion here, not frustration or another “negative” emotion)
This number doesn’t seem to make any sense. You suggest making an ebook, and that should be most of the heavy effort handled if you can ever get to a point of reusing a previous year’s printing process. It’s not really clear to me how it can take that much time and/or effort.
I’m only bringing this up because the books were pretty cool and me buying a set actually convinced some non-LW-reading folks to buy some, so it seemed a pretty neat outreach opportunity, if we can ever find an HTML->ebook->book pipeline.
Also please please please don’t make a machine-read audiobook, it makes the writing look less valued than not making an audiobook at all.
Look, I also really thought this. And then we did it three times and each time it took hundreds (and sometimes over a thousand) hours. I also had my inside-view violated, but I updated towards the outside-view after trying this three times and each time finding it to be a quite massive endeavor with a lot of details.
Also please please please don’t make a machine-read audiobook, it makes the writing look less valued than not making an audiobook at all.
No worries, if we make an audiobook we would be collaborating with T3Audio on making a human narration.
Huh, I believe you did this and I believe you got the result, but I just have no model for what the heck is going on. It happens sometimes I guess, but damn I cannot grasp this.
I’m not certain entirely of the cause of it taking so much work. I will say that meeting the standard of “beautiful, professional book” requires all of the details to be okay. Here’s a quickly-generated list of possible details that can go wrong:
A resized image with blurry/unreadable text in it
Some misaligned text in the running header
Some misaligned text on the outer cover
Some of the font being the wrong shade of gray/black
Mis-spelling someone’s username
Having the text no longer quite accurately describe the new versions of the images (never mind the work involved in re-making all the images to fit the reduced-for-cost color-scheme of the printed book)
Image color coming out differently in print relative to its appearance in photoshop/indesign
Fixing critical typos
Figuring out how to deal with text that only makes sense if you can click on the hyperlink
Ensuring there’s no duplicated paragraphs or short amounts of text that hangs over on a bare page on its own
Added: Math/LaTex needs to not look horrendous. Perhaps you need to make an image for it, and ensure that it’s the same size font as the rest of the text.
A lot of stuff has to be re-checked every time you make a change (e.g. “We’ve reduced the margin between the text and the outside of the page by a quarter of an inch in order to reduce the total number of pages and decrease cost. This means we need to do another visual check of ~1000 pages to make sure nothing broke.”)
There’s a lot of low-level details that I need to get right so that it correctly fits in the category of ‘beautiful item made with love’ rather than ‘cheap amazon self-made book’. I think a book where we spent half the time on the details could end up being quite disappointing on net.
I’d like to express pretty large appreciation for the answer; this changes what things I, personally, was planning to do wrt the finished product. Thank you
If you’re selling them at unit cost you aren’t selling at cost, you’re straightforwardly selling at a loss. That’s definitely not what I’m thinking of when someone tells me they’re selling at cost.
(We’re not selling them at marginal/unit cost, we were selling them so that roughly a whole print run breaks even, including some budget for labor-time/opportunity-cost, but less than people’s full salaries for that period)
I’m curious what you would estimate the cost of producing the books to be. That is, how much would someone have to donate to pay for Lightcone to produce the books?
It’s historically been a couple months of salary time + a bunch of intermittent work over the course of the year. I think it’s at least $20k and plausibly like $40k. Plus the actual team time not being able to be spent on other things. (The books get sold at cost so this money is a cost to the org)
We tried hiring a bookmaker last year which didn’t work out. The hiring process was also pretty costly.
I think the actual cost is more like ‘do the headhunting to find someone who’d do a great job’.
The hardest part here is ensuring that whoever we hire can actually work self-directedly, without constant management. We’ve spent 3 years trying to make books efficiently and not succeeded yet, which I think is making us more risk-averse to trying again (although I do have some ideas on how to do it)
I think if someone who had previously made a particularly great HPMOR, SlatestarCodex or Sequences custom book, has good project-management skills, overall good aesthetic taste, and is proficient with both AI art and reworking essay diagrams that were low res to be printable resolution...
...I’d at least personally be pretty interested in hiring that person if they seemed to clearly demonstrate all the skills.
Briefly registering disagreement: my first thought was an order of magnitude higher than yours.
Brief sketch of my reasoning: Losing a staff member for 1-2 months really cuts out our ability to maintain the infrastructure we have responsibility for (like Lighthaven and Lightspeed grants and LW) while running at the organizational top priority — right now that’s dialogues — and we’re already stretched thin with only 2 people working on the top-priority full-time who don’t have any side commitments (plus 2 other people working on it as their main focus but with side commitments). I’ve not got a definite sense of how we’d rearrange, but I can see worlds where it would cut our focus on the top priority by as much as 30% during that period, and that’s not just the cost measured in the staff member’s time, but reduces the value of everyone’s time in a big way.
Oh yeah I’m pretty easily sold on “Actually it’s just more like $200k” for reasons you cite, although it gets into more intangibles that are harder to quantify. ($200k seems more likely to be “our Cheerful Price”, but I suspect if we got a a $40k donation we’d consider it more strongly anyway, in part because it was an indication someone thought it was that valuable)
(Expressing confusion here, not frustration or another “negative” emotion)
This number doesn’t seem to make any sense. You suggest making an ebook, and that should be most of the heavy effort handled if you can ever get to a point of reusing a previous year’s printing process. It’s not really clear to me how it can take that much time and/or effort.
I’m only bringing this up because the books were pretty cool and me buying a set actually convinced some non-LW-reading folks to buy some, so it seemed a pretty neat outreach opportunity, if we can ever find an HTML->ebook->book pipeline.
Also please please please don’t make a machine-read audiobook, it makes the writing look less valued than not making an audiobook at all.
Look, I also really thought this. And then we did it three times and each time it took hundreds (and sometimes over a thousand) hours. I also had my inside-view violated, but I updated towards the outside-view after trying this three times and each time finding it to be a quite massive endeavor with a lot of details.
No worries, if we make an audiobook we would be collaborating with T3Audio on making a human narration.
Huh, I believe you did this and I believe you got the result, but I just have no model for what the heck is going on. It happens sometimes I guess, but damn I cannot grasp this.
I’m not certain entirely of the cause of it taking so much work. I will say that meeting the standard of “beautiful, professional book” requires all of the details to be okay. Here’s a quickly-generated list of possible details that can go wrong:
A resized image with blurry/unreadable text in it
Some misaligned text in the running header
Some misaligned text on the outer cover
Some of the font being the wrong shade of gray/black
Mis-spelling someone’s username
Having the text no longer quite accurately describe the new versions of the images (never mind the work involved in re-making all the images to fit the reduced-for-cost color-scheme of the printed book)
Image color coming out differently in print relative to its appearance in photoshop/indesign
Fixing critical typos
Figuring out how to deal with text that only makes sense if you can click on the hyperlink
Ensuring there’s no duplicated paragraphs or short amounts of text that hangs over on a bare page on its own
Added: Math/LaTex needs to not look horrendous. Perhaps you need to make an image for it, and ensure that it’s the same size font as the rest of the text.
A lot of stuff has to be re-checked every time you make a change (e.g. “We’ve reduced the margin between the text and the outside of the page by a quarter of an inch in order to reduce the total number of pages and decrease cost. This means we need to do another visual check of ~1000 pages to make sure nothing broke.”)
There’s a lot of low-level details that I need to get right so that it correctly fits in the category of ‘beautiful item made with love’ rather than ‘cheap amazon self-made book’. I think a book where we spent half the time on the details could end up being quite disappointing on net.
I’d like to express pretty large appreciation for the answer; this changes what things I, personally, was planning to do wrt the finished product. Thank you
You’re quite welcome.
I am curious what this refers to?
I was waiting to see what you guys turned out as an ebook or sequence and trying to see if I could take it to a printer for a personal copy.|
Now I understand that the difficulty is a layer earlier and it’s worth figuring out how to “make an ebook for printing ”, not “print an ebook”
I’m guessing that the sales numbers aren’t high enough to make $200k if sold at plausible markups?
The sales are at cost and don’t make money on net.
Well, there’s your problem!
(It’s hard to price 4-book sets at this scale of printing at a price that makes sense)
If you’re selling them at unit cost you aren’t selling at cost, you’re straightforwardly selling at a loss. That’s definitely not what I’m thinking of when someone tells me they’re selling at cost.
(We’re not selling them at marginal/unit cost, we were selling them so that roughly a whole print run breaks even, including some budget for labor-time/opportunity-cost, but less than people’s full salaries for that period)
Ah, gotcha. I had gotten the other impression from the thread in aggregate.