Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background in publishing?

I went into publishing straight from university. I worked on magazines for Hardie Grant Publishing (known as Quadrille in the UK) in their editorial department and then I moved on to design. I was there for five years or so and when I left, l freelanced for a long time. I then came back as design director for their books department, predominantly doing cookbooks.

I learned how to manage a team of freelancers as well as authors. I was a very active design manager, so I would meet with the authors to make sure that they were involved across all facets of the design rather than being an omnipotent creative director.

What inspired you to start Somekind Press?

When coronavirus hit, I was freelancing, doing design work for books. I found myself out-of-work pretty quickly, but I wasn't too worried about that; I was more worried about my friends in hospitality whose livelihoods were affected by the lockdowns. So, I thought, “Well, if there's one thing I know how to do, it’s cookbooks!”.

I called a friend of mine, Simon Davis, who is one third of Somekind Press. He's an editor and I've worked with him for a long time and on various books, including Aaron Turner’s Igni: A Restaurant’s First Year, which won a James Beard Award. So, we know how to make great cookbooks. We decided to create ‘micro-books', that is, small, standard format, 96-page paperbacks with black and white interiors, roughly the same size as a Penguin Classics edition.

We got in touch with two friends of mine who own venues in Geelong, the town I’m from, which is about an hour outside of Melbourne. We would make these little books, crowdfund them, and hopefully sell enough to keep the lights on for a couple of weeks. You know, any bit of money is going to help!

So, we started selling them, thinking we might sell 200-500 copies. But as soon as they were available for sale online, suddenly we were looking at numbers like 10,000. We were shocked, but in a good way! We raised over $200,000 (AUD) for venues in Australia in six months. During that time, we printed and distributed 16 books for some of the best, most award-winning restaurants in Australia. We've published other titles as well. We're doing a series with emerging writers and we’re also doing some art books called 20 by 4, which are 80 pages divided by four artists, with the proceeds split between them.

Besides supporting venues during lockdown we’re also helping out creatives because the way we work is entirely for profit-share. The usual split is that the venues take 50%, we take 10%, an editor takes 20%, and a designer takes 20%. And we don't budge on the venue or the author always taking the majority. So, you could say that we work in the opposite way to a traditional publisher!

Making crowdfunding work seems to depend on reaching a lot of people. How do you achieve that and what would you advise others considering this approach?

That's an interesting question, and I think the assumption that you have to reach a lot of people is wrong! You don't have to reach a lot of people to make this model work. We’ve had authors with over 100,000 Instagram followers, but we don't see any correlation between that and sales. We find that authors who are more plugged into, active in, and important to their community sell a lot of books. And I think it's because people care, and they want those venues to survive.

So, what we do, and this is where print-on-demand comes in, is that unlike traditional publishers, we don't invest in buying 10,000 of these books and then have to sell them. We just print whatever we've sold. Because it's crowdfunded and because we only print whatever we've sold, we don't have any waste and we don't have any risk. If we sell 100 copies, then we're pretty disappointed because that's not a huge amount of sales for us, but we still don't lose money. Using the print-on-demand model, and marrying it with crowdfunding, essentially removes the risk in making a book.

What made you choose print-on-demand, and how has working with Ingram helped build your business?

I don't think our business could run without print-on-demand, because we didn’t garner any investment as we didn’t want to do that at the beginning of our publishing business. When you marry print-on-demand with crowdfunding, you essentially eliminate risk. The only risk or output that you're doing is time, so you need to manage your time well and then obviously choose the right authors that you know are going to sell books.

Our philosophy is that smaller venues may not have the book in them that traditional publishers are looking for, but they still have a story and they still have fans who love that one dish that they do really well. So why can't that be a story?

We've created a book for a place called Ester, which is in Sydney and is a very well-known, high-end restaurant, and we've created a book for Geelong West Social Club, which is a tiny place in Geelong that does bagels. And we've done everything in between.

It's an interesting philosophy of work; instead of buying books in bulk and then trying to sell them with a large amount of risk and investment, if you're smart about what you do and you’re not greedy, I think print-on-demand is certainly the way forward for publishing.

What’s on the horizon for Somekind Press?

We're just about to release a new book series called Take Away Los Angeles. The book that we're launching with is for a restaurant called Kato, which was number one on the Los Angeles Times’ critics’ 101 Best Restaurants list for 2019. From what I know, they'd turned down traditional publishers because they didn't want to do that type of cookbook. They were more focused on having an interesting concept.

We’ve built this model around print-on-demand publishing. Our business relies on print-on-demand publishing. Now we're going worldwide, and because of Ingram and the printing and distribution that you have, we can do that.

I think my business partner wouldn't be so modest, he'd probably say we're taking over the world, but I think we're doing really good things. We're shaking up the publishing industry and we're doing it with Ingram. And we’re very thankful for that.

Lastly, what’s your favorite book? It doesn't necessarily have to be a cookbook, of course!

Favorite book... that's a hard one!

There are two books that aren’t my favorites exactly, but that have influenced the way we work. The first is Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The reason why that has influenced the way we work is because we want our authors to write whatever they want to.

And the other book, which is a really one out of left field is Ram Dass's Be Here Now, which is a book on philosophy based on Buddhism and Hinduism. In that book the first page has a pie chart of how the profit is distributed, and I really like the honesty and transparency of that.

One change we’ll be making for Season 2 of Takeaway, and in Takeaway LA, is that the first page will have a pie chart that shows the distribution of funds. While we’ve always been very upfront about our profit model, the titles in season one 1 of Takeaway didn’t include this chart.

So, it's about marrying that honesty and transparency with the creative freedom of writers. Those are the two books that I feel have made Somekind Press.

The text of this conversation has been modified slightly for brevity and clarity. You can view video sections from this conversation at www.ingramcontent.com/publishers/lp/case-study-somekind-press