What a lovely day for a spot of strategy. The Book Fair always allows us to get a sense of perspective and having a general chat the day after is both a good time to think about wider issues and a great way of procrastinating before facing the frankly horrendous inbox.

So what did we decide should be our strategic plans for 2007-8?

Not so fast, my pretties. To look forward, first we have to look back. Some fascinating things come from looking at the title p&ls (yes, other publishers, we run a title-level P&L every week, and you should too. This industry is too focused on volume sales. Who cares? Margin is much more important.) Frinstance:

Adept has generated nearly £100,000 margin. Phewfo. (Gross margin as in sales less royalty, discount, print and directly attributable title costs - as opposed to net margin which is gm after overheads. We used Adept's gm to pay for everything for two years).
Our top ten (out of 50 live) titles account for 65% of our total margin.
Our second best selling line in terms of volume, value and margin is Boxing Fitness.
We made exactly the same cash gross margin on Living the Good Life as The Crafter's Companion, yet Living has sold only 38% of the volume of Crafters.
10 books have made more than £10,000 gross profit.
Our average gross profit per unit is £1.31.
Our average cost per unit is £1.20.
Our average sales value per unit is £2.50.

And so on. All fascinating stuff - to me, at least. I'd love to hear what some of your figures are like, to compare and contrast.

And so to the future! In 2007 we are publishing 30 titles. We will knock this back a bit in 2008 to around 20-25, to allow us to spend more time on each title - at 30 we're bumping up against the number we can safely sell in volume. Our frontlist categories will be thrillers - crime and horror; general fiction; historical fiction; general non-fiction; crafts; sports; and gift - so if you are an author with an unpublished book in any of these categories, you should think about submitting it! We plan on buying as many books as possible direct from authors and are committed to maintaining our open submissions policy.

We are going to evolve our project manager approach a little bit in that I will be 100% focused on sales and marketing - both domestic and international - and running the company. I just don't have time to run the company properly as well as working on my own non-fiction list, so I will do the sensible thing and focus on doing a good job of selling, getting our data right, automating even more of the process including digitisation and marketing material creation and making sure our financial position is well-managed. We are well-organised already but having more time to focus on this stuff will make a huge difference, I'm sure. I have quite a few books to manage between now and October, though, so this will be a gradual change. I will have to wheedle at the others to continue my martial arts list for me and bribe them with delicious lunches like the one we had today in Exmouth Market.

Anna is going to take on an increasingly large number of third-party cover design projects (as will Gilly and James to a slightly lesser degree), because she's very good at it and self-contained projects like those are easily managed from the US. (I am going to stop doing them.) She's also stepped up to take responsibility for US publicity, bless her.

Our printing strategy is going to evolve to include a POD element. Once our titles have sold through their first print run we are going to use the efficiency of POD to keep our titles in print. It means our cash doesn't have to be tied up in stock, and as POD books are now pretty much indiscernable from litho printed ones, it doesn't affect the reading experience.

We are going to formalise our environmental, sustainability and corporate social responsibility policies. I want us to be at the cutting edge of sustainable practices and we are going to focus on that quite a lot over the next 12 months. Gilly has been the driving force behind this to date and I imagine she will be Snowbooks' expert, although we are all very keen on supply chain visibility, reducing waste and being as efficient and low-impact as possible.

So - nothing dramatically different but it's great to have a good chat and see that we're all agreed about our direction. This is only a selection of our plans, and of course we have some bits which are top secret and guaranteed to make us gazillionaires, but if this is interesting and you would like me to tell you more, shout and I'll oblige.