Why Dan publishes with SJMP

I have been a subscriber of Saint James Music Press (SJMP) for the past year. For those of you that don't know about it, SJMP is an online publishing house that offers yearly subscriptions to it's website. Once you have a subscription, you have access to the entire catalog and you can make as many copies of the works as you need.

SJMP recently added some Dan Gawthrop works, so I contacted Dan and asked him to give me a little background into his thinking. Dan and I have known each other for years – primarily through ChoralNet. Our conversations usually center around music publishing.

 

Here is what he had to say about his works with SJMP:

My own publishing company, Dunstan House, continues to be my primary outlet and will publish all the new choral items routinely. No changes are planned there. But there are in my DH catalog a number of works which, I feel certain, could and would be of value to choirs if they were only aware of them.

The downside of owning the publishing company is that you not only have to pay to get things into print, but you must also pay for all of the advertising and promotion that any title receives. This has been a constant problem over the years, quite likely the single largest drawback that I have encountered in connection with the self-publication business model: I could only barely afford to pay the printing costs; promotion was mostly beyond my reach. Long story short, I agreed with Mark Schweizer at SJMP to perform a little experiment.

I agreed to withdraw from my DH catalog a limited number of titles which I felt were worthy efforts but which had languished unknown through no failure of quality but only because I could not afford to promote them. I have licensed them to him for the period of two years (which is his standard agreement with all his composers/arrangers). We will now see whether SJMP can make them "new" again in the eyes of his market.