‘Scary time’ for Irish imprints as increased production costs put pressure on margins
He added: “As independent Irish publishers catering for the local market, we don’t have the market clout of the international companies, who have deeper pockets and have bulk-bought to manage their manufacturing prices.”
Publishers are shopping around, Mr O’Brien said, adding that O’Brien Press has been “forced to use lighter or less-expensive paper in order to hold pricing at a reasonable level”. Ms Howard said the “seeds of these problems” were sowed in the years of the pandemic as “sales of print books unexpectedly rose, increasing demand, while people were leaving manufacturing jobs, leading to labour shortages in the printing and papermaking businesses”.
“As a result, many publishers are printing more quantities than usual for their initial print run, anticipating difficulties with reprinting should a book become very popular.” “A practical example facing us now is of a book we printed in 2019 and are now needing to reprint; the paper costs have increased by €6,000 on this single print job. Obviously, we cannot absorb a cost like that, so we are faced with trying to find alternative, less-expensive options.”“We also think that we might find more titles that we would like to publish but are no longer a viable project,” he added.
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