These days, amongst other hats, I find myself wearing the hat of a music publisher (in a very small way). I had planned to do a bunch of blogging from this perspective in 2024, and yet here it is, December 31st already… Guess I better get on it!
As a publisher, one of the decisions I make is whether to “greenlight” a new sheet music project. As a composer and arranger I have plenty of music that I’ve written or arranged for me (as a performer) but as a publisher I have to decide, does it make sense to devote time and energy to getting it in a polished, publishable, state?
I want to riff on this topic in a series of blog posts, using as an example my arrangement of the Andante from Bach’s Organ Sonata No. 4 (BWV 528) that I published in January of 2024.

This is a piece that I first I heard on the piano. I tried it out on the harp and fell in love with the endless Bach progressions, eventually adapting a piano transcription and performing it during my 2023 New Zealand tour.
I thought about publishing my arrangement, but the Andante is the kind of music that I tend to think has a limited market (it’s quite challenging to play) and at the same time I thought it would require a fair amount of work to create a beautifully typeset version in Finale (my music notation software).
Keep in mind that at this point I didn’t have any sort of nicely written version in Finale. Instead I was playing from the piano music, with pedals and a few of my fingerings and other changes written down, and a lot just in my head. I have a good memory and tend to be quite lazy about writing down things – I figure I’ll remember it and I don’t want to take time away from practicing…
So that was where I was in the summer of 2023 when I filmed and uploaded a music video of the Andante. After I posted the video I was surprised by how many people commented asking for the sheet music. This made me start to rethink whether it was worth trying to publish it.
The tipping point was when, in December of 2023, a masters student messaged me asking whether she could get a copy as she wanted to play it for her grad recital.
I decided to give it a go over my Christmas break. And I decided to record how long it took me – this could help inform future decisions!
HOW LONG I THOUGHT IT WOULD TAKE:
I made a guess, based on previous experience, as to how long it would take me. Was I in the ballpark or totally off in terms of the amount of time it actually took?
My guess was it would take around 5 hour to do a rough typeset, and then another 5 hours to polish and finish it – 10 hours in total.
The piano transcription I was working from consisted of 5 pages of fairly tightly spaced music:

Typesetting Bach is often a good+bad situation – on the good side, there are typically no dynamics, phrase markings, or other such things (ignore the stuff added by Stradal in his piano transcription). These can add a lot of extra time and I find them to often be fiddly and annoying. Phrase markings, for example, in Finale often need a little bit of extra adjustment, rather than just click and go.
On the “bad” side, Bach tends to write multiple voicings and that really slows down my workflow – not to mention that every so often Finale won’t handle the layout of a multiple voicing section in the way that I want it to and I’ll have to mess around with fixing that (often including yet another, hidden, layer to force the layout I want).

So what do YOU think? How long did it take me? 10 hours? Longer, shorter?
For me, I had a couple questions going into this project that I hoped would be answered:
- How long does it take to do something like this, and would there be any parts that were significantly faster or slower than I estimated?
- How many copies would I sell of this fairly advanced piece? Would the project be “worth” it?
Stay tuned for the answers :)
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