Publishing For Profit

What are your favorites? You know, the ones you hear over and over from people who aren’t professionals in the book business?

Some of mine:

This book will appeal to everyone. No, it won’t.

There are no comparable titles. There are almost 400,000 books published each year in the US alone. Every book has competition.

I’m an author, marketing is your problem. Only if you don’t care about money or your career. Yes, publishers do market the book, but they can’t market it nearly as well without the assistance of the author.

I don’t need any editing. Every word is perfect. Ahem.

This is public domain. I found it on the Internet. Things on the Net are still under copyright.

My book would have been a bestseller if only the publisher had printed enough copies. Very few publishers have difficulty feeding demand for a book. If there’s any demand to feed, that is.

You need to know someone or be a celebrity to get published. No one cares how good your book is. Acquiring editors are scouring every source they can find for the next unknown with a brilliant manuscript. The lucky few who find one have a huge career boost. Those who find more than one are made for life. (See my last post for ways to get published.)

Publishing with a well-known POD company is a good way to get “real publishers” to notice your book. There are no shortcuts in this industry.

Okay, your turn!

I keep hearing writers say that they can’t get their manuscript published. On closer examination, most of them haven’t tried the right way or they haven’t tried enough. What’s the right way? How much is enough? Here’s my take on it:

1. Start with a manuscript that’s good enough. How do you know if yours is ready? Get a critique of it from an editor, bookstore buyer, or someone else in the business who has worked with that kind of book. Don’t ask an English professor or someone who has worked on self-help books, when yours is science fiction. Don’t rely on the opinion of anyone who is fond of you, and never trust the opinion of anyone who’s related to you!

2. Know the market. Writing a book is only part of the author’s responsibility. The rest of it involves promoting that book. Know who your ideal reader is, with great specificity. Understand why that reader wants a book of this type, and what needs that book should fill. Know a lot about the other books available to meet those needs. How is yours better for that reader? (Yes, this applies even to fiction, and no, writing with the reader in mind doesn’t have to mean becoming a hack. Literature reaches deep into our psyches and fills our most important needs.)

3. Know the market even more. Figure out where these narrowly defined ideal readers hang out, and what else they may be doing (besides reading books). Think about how you might help those who will most want it to find it. This may entail blogging, participating in listservs, or writing for magazines that are read by your target reader.

4. Write a pithy sentence or two that captures the essence of what makes your book distinctive and appealing and to whom. (It’s called an elevator speech.)

5. Using all of the above, write a proposal that tells an agent or editor about your book, its market, and why it will appeal to that market. Include enough information that it’s clear you will be an asset in the marketing of this book.

6.Assemble a list of 50 or so agents **who handle your type of book**, and write half or a quarter of them a personalized query that encapsulates the proposal in 2 or 3 short paragraphs, all within the expressed requirements of that agent, and the conventions applicable to your type of book.

If you don’t get a request for a proposal and/or a manuscript from a good number of them, your query needs work. If after sending proposals, you don’t get a request for a full ms from most of those, your proposal needs work.

When you’ve ironed both of them out, send more queries to the rest of your list. Don’t use up the full list until you’ve got a solid query and proposal.

7. If you haven’t got 50 rejections from agents and editors, try again and again . . .

8. Work on the next book while you’re trying to sell this one. Even if this one doesn’t sell initially, you’ll probably be able to place it after you have another book that sells successfully.

9. Once your book is published, work hard, in concert with the publicist assigned by your publisher, to make your book a success. Every agent and acquisitions editor can now easily see what your past sales were like. So can the buyers who order stock for bookstores. It’s no longer enough to leave your career in the hands of your publisher’s over-worked and under-paid marketing department.

10. The book business is a very, very small one. Treat everyone well, or you’ll get a reputation that you don’t want. Treat them very well, and word of that will spread, too.

Now for the stinger: I’ve never written or published a book. I’ve never been an agent or an acquiring editor. All of the above is based upon what I’ve heard from those who are agents and editors over the 17 years I’ve been doing this.

So, all you who read this — what did I get wrong?

There’s a story doing the rounds that Amazon is telling small presses to do their POD printing with Booksurge, enroll in Advantage, or Amazon will no longer directly sell their books, leaving them to Marketplace sellers alone.

Regardless of why they’re doing this, we small presses would be better off if they stopped. Legal action takes quite some time, if there’s any legal avenue to pursue. We’d be better off if we could persuade them that it’s not in their best interest either. So, why might they be doing this?

I see a whole bunch of possible reasons, including the recent trend toward non-trade discounts on some types of books sold through LSI/Ingram, a grab for vertical integration and larger market share in an evolving marketplace, or a mis-guided bit of executive hubris.

Let’s start with the discounting: There has been a trend lately for smaller presses to take advantage of the range of discounts that LSI allows publishers to set, and still sell their books through Ingram.

Instead of using the standard 55% discount for wholesalers, small presses have begun to tell LSI to sell their POD-original trade books at 20% discount. Amazon has been buying these, but it can’t be happy about the deal. Could it be that they’re trying to force this practice to stop?

It might be easier if it simply announced that it will only purchase trade books on traditional trade terms. When you think about that, however, its current actions are having that effect. Either they print through Booksurge, which offers only trade-type discount schedules, or they join Advantage.

If this is the issue, then, if LSI forces similar terms upon its clients, Amazon will relent.

An enormous proportion of the books printed using POD are sold through Amazon. They’re generally in the “long tail” and Amazon is one of the few booksellers to have mastered the techniques and built the expensive infrastructure required to sell such small numbers of so many different products cost-effectively.

I’ve blogged before about how the book business may be about to undergo a radical shift, as mass paperbacks in some genres are replaced by ebooks on something like a Kindle. If Amazon’s vision of the future is something like mine, they may be making a bid to establish significant barriers to entry in delivering ebooks or print on demand books.

It’s already going to be very expensive to try to duplicate Amazon’s search capabilities and their branded presence in consumer consciousness. But possible competitors, such as eBay or Barnes and Noble, both of whom have much of the infrastructure already, might be tempted in the coming evolution of the book business.

When bookselling is more about moving bytes than bits of paper and binding, what is to keep Amazon on top? Perhaps if they can push most of the on-demand printers and the “publish on demand” vanities out of the arena, they can make it that little bit more difficult to attack their supply line as well as their base with readers.

If this is their motivation, they’ll fight tooth and nail, because it’s a survival issue.

On the other hand, it could just be that some new executives don’t know what they don’t know. Never underestimate the possibility of cluelessness even in a small group of otherwise smart folks.

So, what’s your pet theory?

I was recently asked how items like ISBN and copyright registration costs should be handled: what accounts should they be in, how should those accounts be tied to the particular title, and how they should get into COGS. (Cost of Goods Sold)

I’m going to start answering this at a simpler level: COGS comes in 3 types. PPB, Royalties, and Plant Expenses. PPB means Paper, Printing and Binding. It usually includes everything on your printing bill. We all know what Royalties are. Plant expenses are those costs where the total expense doesn’t change when the number of copies sold or printed changes. (NB: Plant means something very different outside of book publishing!)

ISBN and copyright would be plant items. So are design, editorial work, etc.

Plant expenditures are recorded as a current asset, until the book is published. At that point, you begin to amortize the total over the expected life of the title. This reduces the asset by a certain amount each month, and moves that amount over to the COGS — Plant account.

Assets accounts usually begin with a 1, liabilities with a 2, equity and retained earnings with a 3, revenues with a 4. Many publishers also assign their COGS accounts to the 4s. Then selling, distribution and marketing are usually in the 5s.
Operating expenses are usually in the 6, 7, and 8 ranges. Extraordinary items, interest and taxes are in the 9s.

If your accounting program allows long enough account numbers, you may want to assign the second through fifth digit to describe the type of item, and the sixth through tenth digits might designate the title.

For example, your chart of accounts might show an account number 1 3510 67890.
This could be decoded to read: 1 = asset.

Next digit: 3 = inventory or plant. (2, 3 or 4 = current asset, 5 through 9 = long-term asset.)

Then comes 510 = ISBN registration. (There’s no common arrangement for these digits, this is just an example!)

And last, 67890 = title id. Usually the end of your publisher prefix, and the title identifier. (Omit the check digit or not, according to taste.)

Let’s suppose, though, that your accounting program doesn’t allow such long account numbers. Then, you may need to employ sub-ledgers. These expand the level of detail you track for a particular summary account. Plant asset records are often kept in a subledger, and only the totals are entered into your general ledger account. Then you can use Excel or something in your accounting package to track individual titles’ accumulated expenditures, and the offsetting amortization.

Combining the information tracked by title for sales, subsidiary rights revenue, PPB, Plant and Royalty expenses, as well as marketing and distribution expenses, will give you a very good handle on which books were successful and which were not. They can help you understand whether or not your projections before the project launched were accurate or not, and sometimes they can even help you pinpoint why one book succeeded and another did not.

All of this is pretty complicated, so please do ask questions in the comments section. You do NOT have to register, just comment away.

It depends.

Are you interested in selling books? If so, then where will they sell? Bookstores won’t stock books that don’t have a good spine and a commercially viable cover. And on-line stores like Amazon use thumbnails of the cover to help sell books because good ones work.

Without a good cover, your readers won’t look at your book long enough to get hooked. There have been a few exceptions, as with any rule, but not many. And who wants to make it any harder for your book to succeed in this world?

So packaging matters, even when you’re selling words. Allot enough resources to guarantee a good cover if you want good sales.

Now for the hard part: what makes a good cover? I have a few thoughts, which may be all wrong, so please feel free to contradict or argue with me in the comments:

Spine: Should be clearly legible from a distance of 3 to 4 feet, by your target audience. (For example, if they’re boomers, their eyes may no longer be good, so make it even larger font, and less ornamental.) If it’s popular non-fiction or fiction, consider including a thumbnail image.

Front cover: Look at the books on the store shelf where you want yours to appear. What do the successful ones have in common? Your design should have a similar design sensibility (color schemes, type of art or lack of same, font type, overall “feel” . . .), and similar amounts of information.

Back cover: The copy here (or on the jacket flaps) is critical. You have a very few sentences to tell the reader why they’ll be glad they bought your book and not the others that meet their needs. You may want to use blurbs (do other books on the shelf?) or summaries of benefits (not features) or plot synopses. Whatever you say, make it count!

Really, I’m not the person to ask, so I’m opening it up to all of you. What grabs you and makes you pull down a book (other than a known author or branded series)?

Now that I’ve had my Kindle 1.0 for a week, I still love it. Nonetheless, I can see what I would like for the future:

1. Better resolution for graphics.
2. More font options, so that publishers can do a little typography.
3. Better h&j routines. The justification tends to do funky things to word spacing. Maybe it could come with some h&j routines it could do on the fly?
4. Waterproofing. I like to read while I walk from place to place. I can’t take my Kindle out in the rain, per the manual. (I’m in NYC and driving just isn’t an option for most errands.)
5. Slightly better searching and suggestions in the Kindle store. Right now, whether it’s because the selection is still light as we all rush to convert to the format, or what, it’s still not as good as the regular Amazon experience.
6. Longer battery life, or the option to upgrade to a longer battery life. I’m having to recharge after reading for a day or so. Not that it’s a real problem, but . . .

Color would also be nice, but not at the expense of resolution.

So, all the rest of you — what do you want in your Kindles? Better web brower? Better searching by tags? What?

And I just found yet another reason why publishing people ought to love the Kindle. Agent Kristin on Pub Rants tells how it’s making her life easier.

And I love it! Celebrate with me!

I’ll blog more about it, and possible improvements, later.

As our industry starts to change, it’s important that we think about what the essence of publishing really is. This is especially true as the barriers to entry drop and many new people flood in to join our profession, without any indoctrination from the rest of us.

My list starts with owning the ISBN block, which is critical to making the book available to the public. If your national ISBN Agency doesn’t have you as the publisher for those numbers, none of the functions below can override that.

Publishers also must either do or hire someone else to do the design and editorial work on the book. The design must include both the design and composition of the interior, as well as tailoring the cover to the market. The editorial work includes making sure that the structure and overall execution of the content are adequate, as well as getting copyediting and proofreading, etc.

Publishers are the venture capitalists of the book world. They fund the joint venture of author and publisher in launching this book and reap a share of the rewards.

Publishers provide appropriate marketing to the target audience. They also provide distribution to the sales channels where the audience will shop for books.

Publishers have expertise in their industry and the market. They may not do all the functions themselves, but they know who can and how to find them. And they control the process, ensuring that quality standards are met.

So, what did I miss? What needs to be amplified? Where was I just plain wrong?

What do YOU think are the critical functions?

You’ve just spent a good chunk of your life writing your book-to-be. You have decided against submitting it to agents and established publishing houses (which may not be a good decision, but that’s another topic), and you’re now looking for the best way to self-publish. And let’s assume that widely dispersing your message, fame and/or fortune are among your goals.

First, let’s clear up some confusion. If you buy the ISBN from RR Bowker (or your country’s ISBN Agent), you’re self-publishing. Otherwise, you’re using a vanity press. It doesn’t matter that they call themselves a “self-publishing company,” or a “POD publisher.” It’s still the latest version of the vanity press.

Second, let’s put a stake through the heart of another common misconception: you do not need a “POD publisher” to use POD printing. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of POD printers who will happily print your correctly formatted manuscript as a book for a far lower cost.

So, one of the reasons to self-publish, instead of using a new-style vanity press is a lower printing cost. And, of course, if your book takes off, you can always switch to an offset run.

But wait, the vanity press probably tells you that you can terminate the contract at any time. So you think that if your book takes off you could still go offset? Nope. You see, most vanity presses do the design work on the text and the cover. And they own those designs. Even if they do give you the rights to the designs, they still own the ISBN. And that they can’t give you.

The first few digits in ISBNs identify the publisher of the book. You can’t transfer those numbers, and if you tried, the old publisher would still get all the orders, all the payments and all the liability for your book. And that’s a mess.

So you buy a new ISBN for the new edition — and lose all the sales momentum. The ISBN might as well be the book as far as bookstores and Amazon listings, etc. are concerned.

And here’s the real kicker: everyone from the people who select books for stocking in the bookstores, to reviewers, to librarians — that is, everyone between you and your readers — knows the major vanity press imprints. And they look elsewhere for quality. Even if you do put out a quality product through one of these imprints, that fact is unlikely to be noticed.

True self-published books can be produced in such a way that they can compete on an even basis with anything else in the store. It’s not easy, and there are no shortcuts, but it can be done. It is done with astonishing regularity.

The chances are very good that you already own books that were self-published, without having noticed it. Most well-published books from author-publishers will not advertise that fact.

Do I advise you to self-publish? It depends. It depends upon you, your book, your abilities and resources, and your goals. The publishing business can be addictive. You may love it so much that you quit your day job, and join our ranks. You may starve, but saving small publishers from that fate is why I’m here.

Most writers really aren’t best served by self-publishing. And doing it well takes everything you need to be published by a “big NY” house, and even more. It’s not a shortcut or an easy way out.

But, if you’re really good at self-promotion, and you have business management down pat, if your book is actually ready for primetime and it has a narrowly defined, easily found market, and if you have the money to invest in preparing it for publication, then, MAYBE, it might be a good option.

There’s an obvious answer: of course they are. Like many simple answers, this one is wrong. Or at least it’s incomplete.

We all know that the current system was invented to allow bookstores to order current stock during the Great Depression. It lived on later both because it’s hard to reverse a system like this one, and because publishers benefitted from it as much as bookstores do.

How do publishers benefit from the returns system?

It’s easier to get booksellers to take a chance on innovative books. After all, their risk is much reduced. Many people in our business bemoan the lack of variety and quality in trade books. The return system gives a break to those new and risky books that do get onto someone’s list.

Net sales increase. Very few readers will special order a book that isn’t on the shelf when and if they look for it. If your book isn’t there when the customer comes, that’s a lost sale. With the returns system, bookstores order more copies, and your book has a better chance of being available for purchase.

Net profits increase under the current system, for most publishers. If you have the right balance between increased sales, and increased returns, you can make more profit. Of course, you can go too far in this direction. You need to find the point where the margin you’ll make from the next extra sale will exactly balance the cost of the extra returns necessary to make that extra sale.

Returns give you information that isn’t always easy to get any other way. Until recently, it wasn’t possible to know how many of your books were being sold to end readers. (Thank you, Bookscan, for changing that!) The only way you knew a book hadn’t walked out the store’s door was a return.

It’s still not possible to find out if books have been unpacked and shelved, or not, until you look at the boxes that return. And you won’t know if readers pick the book off the shelf and then put it back (meaning that the spine or front worked, and the copy didn’t), until you look at the condition of the returns. There’s at least some value to that information.

This system distributes rewards and penalties fairly. A book that sells through well, and a publisher that consistently brings out such books, will bear a lower cost. If we had no returns system, and simply gave larger discounts, those discounts would be applied across the board. Returns are more accurate in assigning costs.

Last, but not least, publishers are going to bear the cost anyway. Chains have much more power in today’s book business than the publishers do. So the cost of the books that don’t sell will hit publishers in either the form of returns or of higher discounts. In the current regime, at least we get the books back.

This isn’t the prevailing view, I know. I eagerly await your comments and arguments!