One of my priorities with Vegan Serendib is to make sure that it was as substantial a book as Feast — I didn’t want the vegan edition to be a lesser version. So it’s roughly the same number of total recipes, the same page count, etc.
But as we’re making final decisions this week, one question that arose was whether to change the paper type. For Feast, we used Ingram’s standard 70/105, the mid-range paper. Not quite as heavy or as bright-printing as their premium paper, but still quite nice.
Unfortunately, printing and production costs have gone up, due the pandemic inflation and supply chain issues, so we were faced with a tough choice — if we kept the 70/105 paper, we’d need to bump the hardcover price up by $5 in order to actually make even a minimal profit. The hardcover was already $40, and we’d have to take it to $45.
I didn’t want to do that — it felt like I was charging vegans more for their version of the book, which seemed unfair (even though it was really a matter of timing).
But we got Ingram to send us some samples, and thankfully, I think their standard paper is going to be just fine for this. I can see and feel a slight difference when I have them side by side, but the standard still looks good and feels substantial. You don’t want cookbook pages that are going to rip easily, especially if people may be turning them with wet fingers!
But I think this is going to be fine, so we’re going to go with the standard paper, and that means we can keep the price at $40 for the hardcover, whew.
Indexing and copyediting is done now, I think — we’re going to have our cover designer adjust for the new paper (which affects the thickness of the book and therefore the layout of the cover), and then I think we’ll be ready to order a galley print copy of the hardcover? And then Stephanie will work on the design for the print paperback? Getting close, folks. Exciting!
