The Fankle

From Sally Hinchcliffe
Dear All
Apologies for a bit of a gap in communications - a number of you have
asked for some costs for printing and running the Fankle. I've been
doing some looking around and here's the situation as it is at the
moment:
We're currently printing 150 copies of the Fankle at £50 a pop. This
works out at 33p a copy. As we sell it with a cover price of 50p,
theoretically we could make a profit of £25 per issue, however we sell
many copies through retailers at a (below cost - oops) price of 30p a
copy, and others are sent free to contributors, who do after all
submit their work for free so that is fair enough. We have a number of
outlets around the region and the main library has just agreed to
distribute the Fankle centrally to all of their branches on a sale or
return basis (cost price 35p) so that should help to boost sales. If
we print more copies, the price goes down - we could probably get 250
printed for £60 (24p a copy) or 350 for £75 (21p a copy) although
getting the folding done may start to be an issue. I think we should
aim for a steady print run of 250 as a reasonable target. This would
mean that if we sold out at 30p a copy we'd make £25 profit per issue,
and we'd need to sell 200 per issue (or 170 at the cost price of 35p)
to break even.

We currently do 6 issues a year, or we could look at going quarterly
if people feel that is more reasonable. So the total cost, assuming
the worst case (and extremely unlikely) scenario of selling no copies
at all would be £360 a year, (£240 for a quarterly publication)
divided between the groups who join in (smaller groups could
contribute less to make it more practical for them to be included). In
comparison to some arts projects this is a tiny amount, although I
appreciate that for many writing groups it's quite large. We could
possibly get a small grant as well, to cover some of the printing
costs. Alternatively, groups with no financial resources could help
with folding and sales - the more widely we can sell it, the better.


If anyone is interested in taking this further, I'd like to suggest
that we meet some time within the next few weeks, to discuss in more
detail.


Sally