I'm pretty happy about this, as you might expect. I knew from the beginning that there would be quite a bit of interest in these prints, but I wasn't sure how many people would actually be willing to 'sign on' for the year-long adventure. And if the subscriber base had stayed in the sub-100 zone, I would have been in trouble. It has always been my intention to keep our prints as reasonably priced as possible, as I don't want them to be 'exclusive' in any way; I want normal people to be collecting them for fun, and not for any perceived 'investment' value. (Whether such value will exist in the future is really no concern of mine, and in any case, beyond my control ...)

When I tried to figure out the pricing for the series, I did so by making a spreadsheet of all the costs, then setting the price so that a figure of around 100 subscribers would be the basic break even point. Now with 'normal' printing - when you get your quote from Kinko's, etc. - prices might work something like this: 500 copies - $50.00 / 1,000 copies - $60.00 Most of the expense is in the setup, and adding more copies is not much more than the additional paper cost.

Woodblock printing doesn't work like that. Of course we have some basic costs that must be covered before the first copy is made, and which then don't increase much - the carving of the blocks is the prime example of that. But all the other expenses: printers, paper, packaging, design royalty, transaction fees, etc. and etc. vary directly in line with the quantity. There is almost no scaling advantage at all. Although adding subscribers over that 100 mark does add something to the bottom line, the margins are still very thin.

Anyway, getting to the 200 mark - double what I had roughly projected a couple of months ago - is very gratifying, and mostly so to the printers here, who are now assured of steady work for the next 12 months. They don't yet know what they will be printing, as Jed hasn't created all the designs yet of course, but they do know that there will be food on the table all year long!

So ... just what are the numbers like? Here's the basic spreadsheet (click to enlarge), showing costs for one Portraits print. The numbers are in yen, but as it happens, the yen/dollar rate these days is very close to 100/1, so those of you who know dollars should just read this sheet as though it were in pennies. If you see 1000 it means $10.

[I have also prepared a .pdf version, as well as an Excel version, if you want to play with numbers yourself ...]

As you can see, the first 100 is just barely break-even (less actually, when you factor in some of the unaccounted expenses also mentioned at the bottom of the sheet). Upping the print run to 200 adds some breathing room, and puts us marginally 'in the black'. (If you're curious about why the carver's fee is based on a percentage of the quantity produced, something unheard of in this business, and why that percentage varies, you will find a basic explanation in the [very long] piece I wrote a few years ago outlining some of my plans for our business - 'Mokuhankan in the year 201x').

Honestly speaking, as I wrote in a blog post here a short time ago, the price should be higher. $35 would make much more sense, bringing the carvers and printers payments more into line with a good hourly rate, and leaving a slightly healthier 'house' margin. So we're going to think long and hard about this over the next few weeks, but I suspect that we are going to have to give in and put it up. But either way, we have a bunch of people busy working (and learning), more people busy providing paper and supplies, some ancillary people happy to have work supporting the production (packaging, etc.), and ... 200 (presumably) happy subscribers!

Not to mention the legacy: 200 x 12 = 2,400 beautiful woodblock prints with our names on, spread around the world to make their way down through the years ...

For those who are curious about that 'around the world' comment, here's a breakdown of the subscriber locations:

• USA : 124
• Canada : 14
• England : 11
• France : 11
• Australia : 11
• Switzerland : 6
• Mexico : 3
• Germany : 3
• Austria : 3
• Italy: 2
• Russia
• Malaysia
• Brasil
• Sweden
• Singapore
• Guam
• Northern Ireland
• New Zealand
• Belgium
• Denmark
• Netherlands
• Finland