NBDB has to be congratulated for doing such a fantastic job in bringing poetry closer to the Filipino reader (I said pretty much the same thing in my ‘message’). Executive Director Andrea Flores was delightful, as always. I was studiously avoiding looking at her all throughout her introduction of me as one of the guest speakers because as introductions go, it was decidedly meant to fluster. I am still flustered and, at the same time, quite grateful to Andrea for articulating something which I had really never addressed before, least of all in public, i.e., the transition from graduate studies and Read or Die to working as the program director of Vibal Foundation. Being with Vibal has made it possible for me to extend the work that I could only dream of doing before, and while I studied the ceiling as Andrea spoke about the Foundation, I was struck by a profound sense of closure. My boss always tells me, “Tin, if you have passion for what you do, you will never lose.” I’ve never quite made up my mind as to whether or not I regret the extravagant, passionate, unthinking idealism that drove Read or Die. Now I know I don’t. RoD gave me purpose and being with the Foundation channeled and sharpened that purpose into resolve.

Enough about me, anyhow. I also ran across the poet and artist Beng Limpin, whom I hadn’t seen since Pasko ng Komiks two years ago. Apparently LIRA is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year  and they have several activities lined up. Hope we can participate in some way!

We’re always happy to get suggestions for more titles to develop though and we will probably need help in sourcing original material again. Just drop me an email if you’ve got any ideas brewing.

As for the question of whether or not we intend to publish contemporary graphic novels, there are no plans at the moment, but that doesn’t mean we’re closed to the idea. Mostly it’s a question of getting actual good material. We’ve received conceptual pitches for stories, but until we see honest-to-goodness scripts/storyboards, we can’t or don’t commit. Same applies to book ideas or proposals. We do approach artists/writers/editors to commission them for specific projects but it’s not just a one-way traffic.

(I know it’s kind of weird having to link to other people’s blog posts when talking about our books since we haven’t gotten round to setting up our publishing website… but we will. Soon. Or sooner, hopefully, if things go according to schedule.)

Speaking of digital fiction: Working on setting up a literary channel for POC–called POC Lit–and have actually approached a potential editor. My boss and I had a couple of conversations about establishing a literary imprint last year, and we have some ideas in the back burner, but then we go back to the issue of publishing paradigms. Right now, our focus is to build the academic and art imprints with respect to print, but the Web is, of course, another thing altogether. So watch out for POC Lit.

The publication of El Indio is actually a spin-off project, of sorts. We had decided to publish an art book on the late great Francisco Coching (it’s out, by the way! but more on this later) when we heard about Gerry’s restoration of the original El Indio pages. Once he finished the restoration, we packaged the book, printed it, and launched it in time for Komikon 2009. The price is P600.

Atlas Publishing–the original publisher of Coching’s komiks–decided to come out with their own compilation of Lapu-Lapu, another work by Coching. Their book is much cheaper, retailing at P120. So I guess comparisons between our compilation and theirs are inevitable, but what’s interesting is that these comparions took place within the context of a larger discussion on book selling and publishing in the Philippines. Given the state of book reading in the Philippines, should komiks –or Philippine books in general, for that matter–be cheaper for the public to afford them? On the other hand, why can’t our prices be competitive with foreign books? If people can shell out P1000 or more for a Marvel anthology, why can’t we spend P600 for a well-produced novel by a local artist? Gerry and some other people argue that there’s an insidious standard at work here, that the price of a book should be commensurate to both the economic and intellectual value of a book.

Speaking as someone who does work in publishing, and who is very much involved in the costing and pricing strategy of the books we produce, I wish I can say that it’s as straightforward as that. In the end, I guess, it depends on the publishing vision that drives your enterprise. What sort of books do you want to publish? What sort of publisher do you want to become? We want to make beautifully packaged, well-edited books, but doing this takes a lot of time and money, which drives up the price of the books. And trade publishing is a capital-intensive and laborious process in the first place, aside from the fact that you can only sell your books piecemeal so that revenues are always projected in the long-term.

For example, the Coching art book was initially priced in the region of P1500 but since it took us four more months from the supposed production deadline before it could go to press, the final retail price is now P2000. We wanted to make sure that the reproductions of the komiks included in the book (covers and interior pages) hewed as closely as possible to the originals; komiks employed a different palette, all vivid primary colors and stark lines. The designers had to work from the originals, which first we had to locate (see: difficulties of finding archival material), and the process of editing them took up even more time.

So the economics are seemingly straightforward, in this case, but does it mean that if we had finished the book on time, we would have stuck to the original price? Maybe we should not have bothered with the extra research and gone on ahead with what we had. Maybe we could have printed the entire thing on a lower grade of paper, driving the costs down even more, since paper usually consumes 30% of printing costs. However doing this just doesn’t fit with our publishing vision, so we ended up with books that are perhaps more expensive than the ‘usual’ Philippine books (though still considerably cheaper than those ridiculous coffeetable books on Philippine beaches etc that retail at P4000 in local bookstores… more on this later), but which we hope people would buy because we put in every effort to ensure that they would be worth the price of purchase.

Atlas, on the other hand, probably wanted to make sure that their compilation would be readily available to people who simply couldn’t afford the P600 price tag. And that’s okay, that’s their vision for publishing, and it’s great. Publishers will publish what they want to publish–for a variety of reasons, economic and intellectual–and readers will have their own priorities about the books they want to buy.