The business plan for my bookbinding and publishing services business, Editions Ballard, has gradually emerged over the last couple of years, since I moved to Sydney. A lot of my friends here are musicians and I began to notice that they’d sell and sign their CD’s at their shows. The CD’s were more like souvenir programmes than packaging. Maybe the music would be loaded into iTunes and the CD never played again. But the signed CD package was a keepsake. It started me thinking about creating publications especially for shows, with the music on iTunes. People would be issued a redemption code when they bought a program.
I’ve created a business model for making small runs of publications, cost effectively, with a reasonable margin, in a matter of days. And I’ve worked out a way — not entirely smoothly, but it’s a start — of issuing the redemption codes for iTunes. I operated the business in Los Angeles for ten years before coming back to Australia. I retrofitted documents I’d had bound at the Kinko’s in Los Feliz and mostly used materials from the hardware store in my neighbourhood. My clients were all local. I did very small runs, just one or two books mostly.
I’ve been trying to replicate that model here. I’ve found an excellent paper supplier, Dalton, which has the Japanese synthetic paper, Yupo, which feels incredibly beautiful, like some kind of alien cashmere. I’ve got a printer in North Sydney, Imatec. The only thing I want, which is probably going to take some time to figure out how to manufacture to work with the machines, is that I’d like brass staples in saddle stitched booklets rather than the plain steel ones.
My own publications are my R&D department. The publications exist mostly as samples, to give my clients a sense of different materials and styles and finishes. I’ll sell them over the internet, once I’ve set up a corporate website for Editions Ballard, and cross list them on Etsy, but I don’t plan to put them in any but one store, where they might be useful to the store, and where I can see how people respond to them.
My first couple of samples are music related: a booklet based around the current albums by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Robert Forster and new live recordings by the Laughing Clowns. And Toby Creswell has given me the transcripts for the interviews he did with Nick Cave, Robert Forster and Ed Kuepper for his Great Australian Albums television series, to put into the book. And a look back at The Power of Myth, the series of conversations between Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers that were shown on public television in America in 1988. I’ve pieced together a “conversation” between the deep sea ocean explorer, Dr Robert Ballard, who has reworked Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey” for the twenty first century and the writer Steven Johnson, whose perspective is the global view Joseph Campbell predicted would define the mythology of the twenty first century.
I’ve never watched much broadcast television but I began becoming intensely interested in television programmes, atemporally as William Gibson would say. My first two book samples are music related, but I had an aha! moment when I realised they’re also based on television series. The fascination was sealed at Christmas when I spent most of my time watching episodes of the new series of Doctor Who with Lewanna and Earl, the children of two of my two closet friends, who’d been given boxed sets of DVD’s of three of the series. And I further refined the concept a couple of months ago, when I bought my new Apple computer and I signed up for a membership at Video EZY in Potts Point. My old computer was stuck on the American format and I don’t have a DVD player. There’s a phenomenal collection of TV series and I’ve been immersed ever since, watching entire series, out of sequence.
TV guides just print blurbs and teasers. They don’t want to tell you what happens and ruin it for you. They need to make sure you’ll the next episode next week. I started looking for long essays, like good old fashioned film reviews, like Satyajit Ray used to write when he was watching films in Calcutta in and making books and writing music. “By the time the war ended I had taken out subscriptions to most of the film magazines in the English language and snapped up every film book I could lay my hands on,” he wrote. “One of my most valued acquisitions was a second-hand copy of the screen play of Rene Clair’s British film The Ghost Goes West. This was my first encounter with a film script, and it gave me the idea to start writing screenplays as a past time.” And Satyajit Ray and I have something in common: the movie we’d take to a desert island is the Marx Brothers’s A Night At The Opera.
After I watch an episode, I want to read something that sets it in context, and expands the themes, as Alex Ross’s incredible story about the making of John Adams’s opera, Doctor Atomic does. “J Robert Oppenheimer, the man who oversaw the building of the first atomic bombs, called the test site Trinity, in honour of John Donne’s sonnet ‘Batter my heart, three-person’d God. The poem contains the words ‘break, blow, burn, and make me new.’ Oppenheimer was made new by the explosion, or, at least, was not the same afterward. The terrain beneath the bomb – Ground Zero, it was called – also underwent a transformation, which scientists are still trying to understand. When Trinity personnel came back to inspect the site, they found a green, glassy substance covering the ground. The latest hypothesis is that this artificial mineral, which was named trinitrite, formed when soil, water, and organic matter were lifted off the ground and fused in the heat of the blast. Over the years, tourists have carried away much of the trinitrite in their pockets – the site is open to visitors twice a year – and most of the rest was buried beneath the soil. Looking down at the ground, you would never know that anything out of the ordinary had happened there. What happened at Trinity is the subject of Doctor Atomic, a new opera, with music by John Adams and a libretto by Peter Sellars.”
I started writing reviews for my own interest, as Satyajit Ray did, on one of the deck of blogs I have. I think of the blogs as scrapbooks, and notebooks rather than publishing mediums but the reviews started to be picked up by search engines, so I’ve spun them off onto their own site: 
. Then it occurred to me that maybe I could build this site up, get a whole lot of reviews, and if I could figure out a revenue stream I could hire an editor (I have the perfect one in mind) and he could farm out some freelance work. It might not be a lot, but this could perhaps be a self-sustaining sideline. There’s an Amazon.com program where I could be paid a percentage when people click through from my site to Amazon.com to buy the DVD’s. I haven’t checked into this but I think the problem is likely to be that the Australian and American DVD formats are different. But I’d rather send the sales to local businesses in Australia anyway. Maybe the person’s computer or iPhone finds a retailer in the reader’s neighbourhood to make the order through. Maybe I could have a world map of sales buttons: a local merchant finder in Australia, and Amazon for the international readers.
I’ve talked to the owner of Video EZY in Potts Point about putting a few of my television guide books into the store once they’re done. This will be my only retail outlet. I’m not thinking of this as a way to make sales. Firstly it’s a way of showing my gratitude for the help the store gives me: it’s an incredible resource for the reviews I’m writing. My second great resource is the City of Sydney Library at Kings Cross, which has a whole lot of television series on DVD that I’ve never heard of, that I can borrow for free. When this project is successful I’m going to talk to the Head Librarian to see if I can start a donation program, buying some television series DVD’s from Video EZY and donating them to the library.
When I started Editions Ballard in Los Angeles in 1996 I hadn’t planned on it being a business. I was making up notebooks and scrapbooks for myself at Kinko’s, gradually re-configuring them, taking out the plastic combs and finding something else to use, from materials I bought at the local hardware store. It was an experimental process and I relied on the knowledge of the guys who worked in the store: I was using wood, metal, wire, strong glues. What I do isn’t the craft of bookbinding, it’s what my friend Ken Goldberg calls “machine made by hand”. I didn’t go out looking for clients. Friends started asking me to make books, and they referred their friends to me.
This is the kind of business that a business plan template can’t value. I can do the kind of broad research that shows me I’m on the right track: find figures that show growth in sales of downloaded music but that when people buy an entire album they might buy the CD so they can have the artwork and liner notes. I can scrupulously cost the manufacturing process and work out the taxes and hidden costs, so that I can find a balance between making books that are cost effective for my clients and that earn me a small margin that’s worthwhile.
What I can’t gain from talking to suppliers and looking things up on the internet is the kind of front line research I’m gaining from my association with Video EZY. From observing the people I know I had a hunch that purchasing television series’ on DVD was becoming more popular and that people were interested in reading something more entertainingly in-depth about television shows than shallow celebrity profiles of actors and teaser episode guides. But I get access to deeper, more expansive patterns of sales and rentals, through the store, from more people than I can talk to on my own. And I live around the corner, so if I put my books in there for sale I can make sure the store is getting value from me: keep the inventory at a manageable level, replace store browsing copies before they start getting tatty, adjust both the retail and wholesale prices if necessary, based on what customers say and the margins the store needs to make it profitable for them.
The value of local businesses is that their perspective can be trusted, they’re part of the community and work best when they provide a real service for the community. The venture capitalist Fred Wilson said, about social media, but it applies to local businesses too: “I think you want some things you subscribe to, you want some things that you go search for and then everything else you kind of want to come at you through some filtered set of trusted sources.”
