Wearing a publisher’s hat – new blog series

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.

Cover image of my arrangement for harp of the Andante from BWV 528

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:

An example of the original piano transcription
An example of the original piano transcription

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).

Example of my finished arrangement
Example section from my finished arrangement

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 :)

Comments

7 responses to “Wearing a publisher’s hat – new blog series”

  1. Joyce Newport

    I’m going to guess double the time – 20 hours.

    1. Josh

      Pretty close! Ended up being 14.5 hours

  2. Susan Price

    10 hours? 🤔 Nope.
    Given the quality of what you publish, I’d be amazed if you did it in that time Josh. Not sure if you had included all the thinking time you would have to do, in addition to doing it, and revising before you were happy with it.
    Happy 2025 to you. Hope it’s a good one for you.

    1. Josh

      Hi Susan, yeah, it definitely doesn’t include the time spent actually creating the arrangement – when I decided to typeset and publish it I had already created, learned, and performed it – if I included THAT time as well would be some very large number for sure!

  3. Susan Price

    PS I’m going to go further than Joyce and say 30 hours all up from conception to publishing.

  4. I want to be sure that you know that Finale is no longer being supported. I, personally, have begun the long process of switching to Dorico, because it gives me the ability to make beautiful published scores. For current Finale users there is an amazing crossover price that you should consider taking advantage of (here in the US it was $149 and I believe that is still available.

    1. Josh

      Thanks Mark! Yes, I saw the news and have taken advantage of the crossgrade price. Will definitely write about Finale and Dorico in future posts!

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