Was it worth it? Part 3- Bach’s Andante and wearing a publisher’s hat

To recap:

I’m looking back at my decision to typeset and publish my arrangement of the Andante from Bach’s Organ Sonata No. 4.

This is a piece I arranged and performed for myself. I originally had no plans to publish it, thinking it wouldn’t sell many copies and take a lot of time to typeset. However, in December of 2023 I changed my mind and decided to give it a go AND to track exactly how much time it took me! (14.5 hours)

How to measure worth?

So was it worth it? Of course there are many ways to measure worth (and I’ll talk about some of those later on) but for now, let’s start by measuring one of the easiest and most universal measures of worth – money! (After all, money can often be traded in for whatever you need it to be – time, more harps, food….)

Unlike a typical work arrangement, where you get paid X dollars to do Y, publishing a piece of music is trickier to evaluate: once published, there’s no guarantee as to how much money you might make. At the same time, a piece of music can earn you money until the day you die!

Given the potential to earn money over a long period of time, how best can we think about and measure this value?

I think the most accurate answer is the concept of return on investment (ROI).

To do that we separate out the costs of creating the sheet music (imagine, for a moment, that I was paying someone else to create the Andante. That cost, that expense, would be [wearing my publisher’s hat] my investment, one that I hope does well) and look at what sort of return we get on that cost, that investment, over time.

As a quick example, suppose it cost $1,000 (to choose a nice round number) to publish a new piece. And suppose each year that piece earns $500 in profits.

After one year we’re still down half our initial investment – a negative 50% return, not good! After two years we’ve broken even, but if you compare that to investing that initial $1,000 in some other type of investment we’ve missed out on two years of growth or interest.

Year three, however, we’re now up $500! A 50% growth of our initial investment, which works out to a yearly compounded rate of almost 15%. Better than the historical average rate of return of the broad market here in Canada (around 8%) and something I would call a decent success.

So that’s the basic idea of ROI – and that example illustrates how the time period you measure can determine whether you view something as a success or not. It also illustrates how you don’t necessarily have to make back your entire costs the first year – you can be down money over several years and still end up having a positive ROI over a longer time period.

Of course at some point in order to have a positive ROI you’ll need to have brought in more than your initial investment, and the longer it takes to turn a profit, the larger the eventual profits will need to be in order to outpace the returns you could have had with some other investment.

How much is my time worth?

Ok, if we’re sold on the concept of ROI, what are the costs if this project – what is my “investment”?

In this case, it’s my time (14.5 hours of it, to be precise!) so let’s imagine that I, wearing my publisher’s hat, hire myself (wearing my typesetter and editor hat) to create this arrangement of the Andante.

What would I charge?

Well, an easy answer would be my hourly teaching rate.

In January of 2024 that was $57 US/hour at the conversion rate at the time*. So 14.5hours x $57 equals about $830 USD – this is my initial investment that I (as a publisher) hope to eventually surpass via sales.

Or is it? Given it is my own project, I can kind of justify talking myself down in price. For example, I can imagine telling myself that, after all, teaching is definitely harder and more challenging… so I could charge less for typesetting, right???

It’s definitely true that teaching requires my complete attention and focus, whereas for typesetting and editing there are many times when I could be listening to music, or even have a podcast going in the background.

Trying to add an additional hour of teaching to an already full day of teaching and practice will leave me exhausted; fitting in an hour of typesetting is much more feasible. As well, typesetting is something I can do at any time and completely on my own agenda, rather than on a schedule.

So I can potentially see myself charging myself a lower rate (though really, this is because in the end, it is my own project).

Let’s say I was willing to accept $25/hour (just to use a nice round number). That would result in a cost/investment of about $360.

Great, let’s keep both those totals ($830 and $360) in mind and look at how much the Andante has made!

The Sales Figures ($)

I published the Andante on January of 2024 so I now have over a year’s worth of data. In the year since I’ve published it I sold 45 copies at $7.50 (USD) each, for a gross profit of $337.50. 45 copies is actually more than I thought I might sell – my best guess would have been around 30-35, so that’s great!

There is a payment processing fee for each sale (from Paypal). This varies a bit depending on the country of origin and whether it’s part of a larger order or not, but on average it costs about 55 cents per order. That brings the net, pretax, profit to about $310.

So after a year I am still a long way away from recouping the “pay myself well” figure, and close but not quite at the “accept a lower rate because I believe in the project” figure.

BUT, I hear you say, remember that earlier example? That was underwater as well after the first year, and it took until year 3 to become profitable!

It’s true that if I earn that $310 amount again each of the next two years I’ll be slightly profitable after year three (about a 4.33% annual return) using the $830 cost/initial investment (and very profitable using the $360 figure).

However, the problem here is that typically (for me at least), my sale charts look like this:

See that huge spike of sales at the start? This makes sense, right? It’s hard to match the jolt of sales from launch day without some other extraordinary event (for example if the video featuring the Andante suddenly went viral, or the Andante become THE wedding piece to play, etc.).

Barring something extraordinary I’m unlikely to match the same sales as last year.

If we eliminate that first chunk of sales and just look at from the end of January of 2024, I only made $110. Because I feel the audience is somewhat limited, I’m not at all sure I’ll even match that $110 rate this year (in fact I would be surprised if I did).

Of course maybe there will be some extraordinary event, but for now, it’s not looking like an amazing investment. There’s a reasonable chance I will end up with a positive ROI based on the $360 figure, but I may never recoup my initial investment based on the $830 figure.

Does that mean it was a failure?

Well, I don’t consider it a failure! In the end I’m happy to have put my time into the project and proud and pleased with the finished product.

Now is the time to revisit the question of how to measure “worth“. First, still in a $ frame of mind, I think there are some benefits that aren’t capture by the sales numbers  – for example, some people may have visited my store because of the Andante and then ended up buying additional music, or perhaps NOT buying the Andante but buying something else instead!

And I have the feeling, although I don’t know whether this is true or not, that there is also some small benefit to having a larger catalog of music (up to a point, at least) and so adding another piece has some extra value… (What do you think?).

Then of course there are the non-financial measures of worth – I love the feeling of have created something that I think is worthwhile (there’s that word “worth” again), and that has the potential to stand the test of time. Will harpists be playing this arrangement in the 22nd century? I sure hope so, and how cool if they are!

I love Bach and I love this piece, so it feels good to have put this music out there in the hands of harpists – a worthy project.

I also learn something with every project that I do, building skills and making it so future projects are better and more efficient, yay!

And on a purely selfish basis, I’m glad to have a nicely typeset version, including fingerings, so that in the future when I go to play the Andante again, I won’t have to try and remember what I did on this passage or that passage!

Final thoughts:

In the end, my initial prediction that the Andante would have a somewhat limited audience and might not be “worth” typesetting, was largely correct. At the same time I was pleasantly surprised by the number of copies I sold (I think I underestimated how many people love this piece).

Tracking my time proved a good reminder that the final stages of putting a publication together (writing notes, designing a cover, getting it set up on my webstore) does take time and that’s something I’m keeping in mind for future projects.

So far, at least, it may not have been the most lucrative use of my time, but 14 or 15 hours can easily disappear doing things such as watching YouTube videos, and I’m happy to have had that block of time turn into something concrete!

Of course, wearing my publisher’s hat I will continue to weigh whether or not to “greenlight” a project, at the same time as keeping in mind that some projects are worth doing even if the $ don’t always make sense!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series looking at the Andante. Stay tuned for further musings on music publishing and if you have any questions or suggestions for a future topic, I’d love to hear from you!

*I’m using USD for the numbers in this article, even though I’m in Canada, because my store, until recently, had pricing only in USD, and it’s a currency that most people are familiar with – i.e. even if you’re not in the US you probably have a better sense of what $1 USD is worth compared to knowing what $1 CAD is worth.