So the only way to turn a profit is to minimize these costs in every way available to you.

Let’s focus for now on the expenses associated directly with getting a piece of music into a customer’s hands. I’ve concluded that all such costs fall into two broad categories: production and distribution.

Production is the process of transforming a finished composition into a format that can be used by a performer. As I write, it is generally still very much necessary for it to be printed on paper… eventually.

Aside from production, you also have to get the music to the musician somehow. And shipping is deadly expensive.

Computers (and the internet) offer an appropriate solution to both problems for small independents. There is no reason that the printing itself can’t be done by the user, if he or she has the legal permission of the owner—so by making computer files of the music, you can leave this step to them. Distribution can then take the form of a single CD-ROM, an email attachment, or a download.

Thus you use other resources to decrease the cost of each unit.

Traditionally in business, costs that can’t be reduced any further are passed on to the customer. This makes perfect sense: the final price must be higher than the cost of goods sold if there is to be any profit.

For the same reason, the virtual elimination of something like distribution expenses allows you to reduce your price and increase the chances of selling more copies. And if you are handing off physical production directly to your customer, you owe it to them to lower the price even more. They will undoubtedly notice the increased cost to them.

There are numerous considerations to explore in detail in future posts. For now, the crucial point is to remember that you have to deal with some costs no matter what; the best strategy is to anticipate them and build them into the overall business plan.

• There is very little control. Instead of making it possible only to print directly from a website, perhaps with a cap on the number of copies, a PDF can always be downloaded onto the user’s computer and then printed at will. (Then again, no matter how people get their music, they will have access to a photocopier.)
• What You See Is Usually What You Get. Almost always, I’d say. However, when taking “finished” PDF versions to FedEx Kinko’s to print large scores and booklet formats, I was occasionally irritated by an error in one of the percussion articulations (the center slash of a roll marking was hollow).* This was the one anomalous case I ever noticed that was specific to PDF, but there’s the chance of other bugs.
• The purchaser cannot transpose, etc. If you are writing vocal songs or works for unspecified solo instrument, programs like Sibelius/Scorch can allow people an important degree of customization. A PDF reader just can’t.
• There is no playback. Definitely a liability with music, and it needs to be addressed by other means.
• They look really bad on the screen. Just… print it. It’ll be better then. 600 dpi seems to work well as a print resolution. I used to include warnings about this problem in every email.

Other production techniques overcome many of these issues—to be considered later—but they always mean a substantial increase in cost, which it is crucial to minimize wherever possible in self-publishing.

*MakeMusic has since owned up to the problem and released a patch that, among other things, “updates the Maestro font’s unmeasured tremolo character so that it displays correctly when printed with a PostScript printer.” The same fix was also bundled into the Finale 2007c Updater. It took a fair bit of digging to verify, but this correction corresponds time-wise to a post that describes my problem precisely, here.

Here are just a handful of advantages:

• The format is standardized. Literally, “portable”—virtually every computer setup will have a PDF reader these days, and if they don’t, the user will constantly encounter content that urges them to install the latest one. No proprietary music software viewers are required.
• Results are predictable. Next to paper, it is the best option I know of for ensuring that the recipient sees what you sent them. Usually even better than in Finale NotePad or Scorch.
• They are cheap. Or free. A widely-used freeware application called PDFCreator seems to work fine (but if you install it, be sure to disallow the toolbar, or the license says you are agreeing to let it take over your web searches in any browser!). I need a bit more power, and a better-developed interface is nice for making PDFs of lots of parts at a time, so I use Tracker Software’s PDF-XChange. The Pro version has some handy extras, but even the Lite would allow distribution to dozens of clients for just pennies a page.
• Creating them is easy. A PDF generator acts just like a printer in your system. All you have to do is run the “print” command (from any program) and select it as your printer.
• File sizes are small. At least they are if you use a software-based method, as above; then musical scores are comparable to word-processed documents with embedded fonts and limited images. If you scan printouts into a PDF, you lose this benefit, as pure graphic files are always large.

Fair’s fair, so next week I will confess to a few of the disadvantages to be aware of.

And this is its second post.

I made myself prepare two other posts for the next two weeks before adding this one. They are already scheduled, so at least I am guaranteed to do 3 times as well as before. How often can you see 200% improvement in performance?

It has been a phenomenally chaotic year, including my wife’s and my eighth move since 2000, two substantial temporary assignments, a long period of unemployment and mild depression, and the time-consuming retrieval of some things from storage that needed to be transported from Rochester, New York to England.

I haven’t written much music lately, I find it difficult to focus on composing when I sit down to it, and I have an awful time fighting off countless distractions, not least including the necessity of bringing in a reasonable income. A brief on-topic observation here would be: if you want to be a self-published composer, you will need to fund this vocation externally. And your non-musical pursuits will show an insatiable appetite for your time. This is a battle that must be fought, which I’ve been losing a lot lately. (I’ve indulged in ranting about it today on my dark-side “mean reds” blog, if you’re interested.)

But despite everything, I still feel drawn most strongly to music; I am determined to find my way back. And I still believe in this project.

You can see that mine is not exactly an archetypal success story. I am not beaming down directives from an enlightened height; all I can do is spur others on and hope for encouragement in return.

If you want to see a genuine rags-to-riches music self-publishing saga, try Stephen Melillo’s STORMWORKS®. But brace yourself. As popular as he has become, I somehow find the whole STORMWORKS® deal ever so slightly sinister… dare I say “fascist”? And, well, not a lot of it is targeted to composers.

Anyway, Mr. Melillo’s efforts ought to be able to shed some light on effective strategies for the rest of us, and I am certain that one of his pivotal infrastructure choices has been the use of PDFs for distribution. So next week, I will explore some of the things that make this format so great.

Promise.

Admittedly, I know what these questioners probably mean: sending a composition off to a specialist sheet music publishing house; persuading them to add it to their catalogue; selling my rights to them; standing back while they print, market, and hopefully sell hundreds of copies; and collecting a small percentage of the sales as a royalty.

Of course this is exactly what music publishing has been for most of the past two centuries. But these days, individual composers have many other options for presenting their music directly to performers and trying to interest them in obtaining copies, rather than waiting for the entire traditional method of publishing to run its course. This is what gives numerous composers (including me) the option of saying, “I am self-published.”

I think this topic deserves to be discussed publicly because until very recently, these seems to have been an idea that music needs to be accepted by a publisher in order to be worthy of presentation to people outside the local community. In other words, the music derives its worth from the approval of the publisher. This belief is completely untrue—it confuses opinion with fact—yet various forces continue to impose it on composers and performers as the norm.

My own crisis point in all of this occurred shortly after the start of my career while I was working tirelessly to get my concert band works into the hands of editors. I would do some small-scale marketing in an attempt to build interest (“X number of performers like it already, so you should like it too, and buy it from me”), and I began to realize that direct contact with performers was actually far more rewarding on the whole than the dialogue with publishers.

However, since this approach has not translated into commercially successful self-publishing (the music does not yet earn its own keep), I am now a bit confused about how to proceed. I thought it might be helpful to get my thoughts into the open and take a good look at them. And a second motivation for this blog is the fact that many obstacles have been beyond my individual control, but if enough people are aware of them and challenge them, it might be possible to make a difference that benefits all composers.

Please understand that I have no intention of alienating traditional publishing houses through my work. I believe they still play a vital role in the music industry, and I will be sure to explain more about my ambivalence later.

For now, all I want is to start persuading composers and performers alike that the palette has expanded. Composers can obtain some compensation for their hard work, or at least understand how to distribute their own music while waiting to hear back from big publishers. Performers can still get bread-and-butter repertoire from vendors they know and trust, and thanks to the internet, they can also try new things more readily than ever before. They might even find they really like some of it.

I believe more and more that it is justified to tell people my music is published, and I am absolutely sure there is a great deal more out there—good music, published by other composers, that likewise has not yet received the recognition it deserves.

Let’s see what we can do about that.