What Do You Get From Your Publisher?

July 12th, 2010

I keep hearing the question, “Why bother with a publisher? After all, authors are doing a lot of the marketing, and their work is the core of the book.”

My answer: Money, distribution, time and quality.

Money: You’re not risking your own money, and a publisher will invest a lot more than you want to risk. A trade book will usually cost more than $20,000 to launch. Yes, self-publishers can substitute time for money, and there are other ways to economize, but any commercial publishing venture takes a big old wad of cash.

Distribution: Even a modest-sized house will have better distribution than you’ll be able to secure on your own. Yes, anyone can sell online, even through the biggest sites, like Amazon. But that leaves a lot of potential sales and readers that you’re not reaching. You can trade volume for margin, but it’s a move that needs to be carefully examined.

Time: Publishing well is a lot more complicated than it seems. You can certainly learn to do it. There are even books on most parts of the process, and if you read three or four overviews, one or two on design, a couple on editing, three to five books on publicity and book marketing, and a couple on the general business aspects of running a publishing company, you’ll learn a lot of the basics, but that’s eleven to fifteen books, plus time to try the techniques and practice. By the time you’ve learned to publish at all well, you could have written another couple of manuscripts.

Quality: Most “civilians” don’t consciously see the difference between a pedestrian cover design and a good one, let alone the difference between a pro’s text layout and an amateurish job. But these “trivial” differences do matter in the end. They can make someone decide to buy or not to buy your book, on an unconscious level.

All the people who decide what gets onto the bookshelves can tell the difference at a glance. These standards are the way they are because they work.

So, yes, Virginia, you can self-publish successfully. There are even a few people who use one of the so-called “self-publishing companies” successfully. But your chances of getting a larger readership, or of getting a decent living, from the effort are much better if you sign up with an experienced publishing team.

So, that’s a very short answer to a very complicated question. Which points did I gloss over, or even get completely backwards? If you’re still with me after that last hiatus, you must have an opinion. Let’s hear it!

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Posted in For Authors, Publishing Answers | 6 Comments »

How Big A Problem is Piracy?

March 12th, 2010

Do you sell electronic versions of your book? I do.

Have they been pirated? Mine was, even before I started any sort of marketing push.

From my reading, there appear to be 3 types of pirates:
–Those looking for profit
–The terminally naive or astonishingly ignorant, who don’t realize that they’re doing harm, much less breaking the law
–The misguided idealists who believe that they’re striking a blow for artistic liberty, freedom, against corporate villains, or some similar concept.

The profit motivated ones tend to have many of the same issues that legitimate publishers have — they have to find customers, and bring them to purchase their books. And they have to do so cost-effectively. That’s just one reason that they tend to focus on “big” books. Because they need volume, they’re also not all that hard to find and shut down. This is one place where significant enforcement assets will have an effect.

I believe that the terminally clueless tend to be large in numbers, but to download relatively few books. This is one way in which our industry is different from the music business. There are a lot more people interested in downloading music, and they’re likely to download many more songs. A song can be listened to in a few minutes, where a book, even a short one will absorb hours. And most Americans read no more than one or two books per year.

Those one or two downloads per person might amount to a very large number indeed, but it seems likely that most of those downloads are not cannibalizing sales, whether or e- or print books, that would have occurred without the easy availability of illegal copies.

Even if these people constitute a costly problem, finding and prosecuting them is problematic at best. This group is also likely to be willing to buy if the legitimate ebook is both easy to buy and inexpensive. And as time goes by, it may be that the relentless efforts of IP rights-holders will finally make a dent in the assumption that this is a harmless infraction, and not a real evil at all.

The misguided idealists, though, can provide a problem that is both hard to find and has a significant impact. These are people who may work as hard as any publisher, as a volunteer. (Just about the only way to drop personnel costs below those paid by publishing is to use volunteers, as we all know to our sorrow!) They crack DRM, they scan books, and they generally upload masses of material without thought of compensation. They’re hard to identify, because they’re not looking for compensation, and may well have rafts of pseudonyms. It can be hard to tell that all of these different identities resolve into a single entity worth catching.

These people can be stopped only by persuasion or by denying them access to distribution channels upon which they rely. Many of them reason from a radically different set of assumptions or values than those that motivate the book publisher, or the author. Of course, some people hold their minds open to persuasion even by those with whom they disagree most. But most people simply discount and reject arguments that threaten cherished beliefs. This guarantees that persuasion will be less effective than we would like.

Unfortunately, the impact of the sincere zealot can be significant. Even when the cost of tracking down illicity uploads and issuing takedown notices is non-trivial, we may need to engage in it.

Each of you may want to crunch some numbers and come up with an estimate of the number of uploads/downloads required to make an impact on your bottom line, and the size of the customer base for each pirate haven that makes that number of downloads likely, in order to judge where you should search for these copies, and how much effort you should expend on getting them removed.

Personally, I use something like my marketing campaign-based sales estimation technique to make these decisions.

How do each of you handle this?

Do you see another breed of pirate out there?

How do you assess the severity of the issue?

And do you have any other topics you’d like to see me respond to?

Posted in Publishing Answers | 3 Comments »

Guest Post: There’s More To Book Layout Than Meets the Untrained Eye

February 1st, 2010

By Michele DeFilippo, owner
1106 Design
www.1106design.com

Michele is a frequent contributor to many of the publishing lists and email groups, so, when I knew it was time to discuss design, I asked her to pitch in. Thank you, Michele!

We’ve heard the question many times, “Should I layout the interior of my book myself?” Seems like a no-brainer. You have word processing software. You know how to set margins and choose a typeface. You even know about books that describe the process (written by folks who are not trained in typography by the way). So why shouldn’t you layout your own book?

Of course you can and should use your word processing software to write your text, but interior design and formatting are best left to people who do this for a living. Why? Because there are a lot more details involved in page composition than you’d think.

For starters, word-processing software does not have the sophisticated hyphenation and justification controls that professional page layout software does. This results in tight and loose lines that are unsightly and that distract the reader. And even if you were to buy page layout software, there is a very steep learning curve. It’s a mistake to assume that no knowledge of typography or design is required to use it effectively. As the saying goes, “Owning a hammer does not make one a carpenter.”

There are several dozen conventions to be followed in book design that may not be perceptible to the reader, but when followed, they give your book a polished appearance. But it’s not only about knowing the rules, it’s knowing how and when to bend or break them on a case-by-case basis that makes the difference between an amateur layout and a professional one. These decisions must be made quite often when the words in the text don’t cooperate with the page geometry.

Quality typesetting has never been about the tools. Experienced typesetters rarely use software at the default settings. We adjust the settings for better results, sometimes paragraph by paragraph, line by line, and even word by word. Why? We were trained to see the difference between “so-so” type and great type.

For what it’s worth, only beginning self-publishers consider using a word processor for page layout. Established publishers wouldn’t think of producing the text in this way. They know that experienced book designers bring real value to the table, offering creativity and aesthetic judgment that only comes with training and experience.
When we show customers the difference between their attempt at book layout and our own, they are usually blown away. They’ll say something like, “Wow! I thought my layout was just fine. Now I see how bad it really is!”
Here’s a current before-and-after example. IC_Book_Orig.pdf is the client’s attempt at book layout, and IC_Book_Designed.pdf is our design. (You may want to open or print both PDFs to compare the pages side by side.) See the difference? In addition to a much better look and the elimination of giant spaces between words in the original, professional typesetting saved 5 pages from the original’s 19 (more than 25%), thus reducing the client’s printing costs significantly.

It’s been clinically proven that quality typography improves reading comprehension. More importantly, an amateur job won’t satisfy the distributors, reviewers, and book retailers, the “gatekeepers” of the book industry, who will immediately spot a beginner’s efforts and reject your book as “self-published.”

Many people think that converting a word-processed file to a PDF is all the printer needs. That’s true. But it’s not all that YOU need. Printers won’t turn away a PDF that was made from a word-processed document. They’ll print your book because that’s what they’re in business to do. Their success is measured in how many books they print. Your success, on the other hand, is measured in the number of books you sell.

Your book design, inside and out, establishes your credibility in the eyes of the buyer. Buyers may not be able to pinpoint exactly what is wrong, but without a professional interior design, your book will not measure up to those that are professionally prepared. For the success of your new publishing endeavor, we hope you’ll give this issue some serious thought, and choose an experienced book designer to give your book the professional look it deserves.

Posted in For Authors, Publishing Answers | 7 Comments »

The Profitable Publisher — A new E-Book Series

January 12th, 2010

Hello all,

I have finally (!!) released the first ebook in my new series. Yes, the series name is The Profitable Publisher. This first entry is subtitled: Making the Right Decisions. It’s short (maybe 40 pages, if you printed it out), so it shouldn’t give your brain indigestion.

I’d like to think that it should help any publisher make more money from all of your books. If you are moved to purchase it (from Amazon, or elsewhere as it comes out in other markets), do please let me know what you think?

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Posted in For Authors, General Comments, Publishing Answers | 4 Comments »

My First Ebook is Launching

December 22nd, 2009

If you’re a frequent visitor here, you might want to keep an eye out: I’m teetering on the edge of releasing my first ebook in a series. None of them will be long: this one’s about 33 pages of text and 13 pages of spreadsheets and charts illustrating the techniques.

I’ve found that this is about the length at which the eyes roll back in the head and the brain shuts down, so why go longer??

I hope that any of you who grab a copy will like it. I’d love to hear what you think. (And if you email me with an error or confusion, I’ll send you a free copy of the next work in the series!)

Posted in For Authors, Me, my life, and this blog, Publishing Answers | No Comments »

Ebooks: What We Lose With Them

December 19th, 2009

Ebooks are wonderful things. I love them. I read on my Kindle, and on my Kindle app on the iPhone, and wouldn’t give them up for worlds.

With ebooks, we gain convenience and the ability to change font sizes. We gain on price and on environmental impact. We gain a number of obvious things. But we lose, as well, and some of the losses are less obvious.

We’re losing privacy, and we’re losing control of our books. We’re losing readability (both in terms of text design and in image resolution). And we’re losing barriers to entry, which is a two-edged sword.

Privacy: Some ebook readers already “phone home” and report what you’ve read and how far you’ve gotten in it. It’s not hard to imagine that this information could be used in many ways. Even if you’re reading on a device or an app that doesn’t seem to do this, it’s not hard to imagine hackers or security agencies that could install backdoors in your software that would allow them to monitor your activity. Paper books never do that. And it’s almost impossible to track your purchases at random stores, especially if you use cash.

Control: With a print-on-paper book, it’s very hard to take or damage your copy. With ebooks, someone else can take your copy without any physical contact with it. Amazon has already proven that they can pull your books back off the Kindle. Other ebook providers may or may not have the same capability.

Digital Rights Management techniques (DRM) also cuts into your control. It’s quite difficult to craft DRM that doesn’t prevent you from doing things that are within your rights, as well as those that aren’t. Certain types of copying are allowed, even by the most draconian interpretations of copyright.

Readability: Text design is an art that’s generally under-appreciated. But it doesn’t take long with a badly designed book before you realize that something feels wrong. It’s just harder to read, and often harder to understand. It’s not comfortable on the eyes. Something feels “off.”

But being able to change font sizes within a fixed screen size means that you text design and composition go out the window. Of course, the e-readers could come with a hyphenation and justification program, such as the modules that underpin TeX or InDesign, which would help enormously, but they don’t now, and they probably won’t in any near future. Who wants to wait for the text to be re-flowed when you change the font size? Who wants to pay more for the program or for the cpu size needed to run it?

Screen resolution on the Kindle is roughly twice what the resolution is on a computer screen, but it’s still only 1/2 to 1/4 what a printed book offers. And it’s black on gray only. The color screens of iPhones and laptops offer the lower dots per inch to offset their colors. It’s not as easy on the eyes.

Lower Barriers to Entry: The last loss I listed is the lowering of barriers to entry. This means that we gain ease of publishing. But as readers it means that we have a harder time finding the books we’ll enjoy. And as publishers it means we have a far harder time rising above the roar of the crowd to draw our readers’ attention. And that means that more new readers will experience fewer wonderful books in the short time during which they decide whether they “like books” or not. And that’s the worst loss to our literary community.

As usual, I invite you to tell me what I missed or messed up. The comments section doesn’t require registration, although it is moderated to reduce the flood of spammers.

Posted in General Comments, Publishing Answers | 8 Comments »

When Should I Use POD?

December 7th, 2009

First, let’s separate the two kinds of POD: there’s Printing On Demand and Publishing On Demand, and they’re quite different. Unfortunately, it can be hard to tell them apart.

The publishers are services like Lulu and AuthorHouse that take your manuscript and publish it for you, at your own expense. They call it self-publishing, but if you’re using their ISBN, they’re the publisher, and you’re not. It really does make a big difference.

The publishers offer a range of services, but they usually include design of the cover and text, and may include some copyediting. They rarely go beyond the template-level in design, which means that the books don’t usually come up to commercial standards, and usually can’t compete on the bookstore shelves. They also almost never offer a deep or structural edit, which is what makes the biggest difference to a book’s success or failure in the market.

The printers offer very few services indeed. They all print your book, if you have an appropriately formatted file. Many of them will also do the packaging and shipping of your book, and some of them will take orders for you.

But if you send your book to a POD printer, such as LSI or 360 Digital, you get a much lower cost per copy, and you avoid many of the problems inherent in a vanity press. And make no mistake, the Publish on Demand movement is just a new form of the vanity press.

So, when should you use either one? If you’ve read my posts at all, you know that the first and most correct answer is “It depends. . . . ” (in this case, upon your book and your market and your ability to support your book in that market). The second answer is crunch your numbers, using a Single Title P&L. Estimate your sales, your costs, and so on and so forth.

(Expect a very short, very inexpensive, ebook on how to crunch numbers from me in the very near future. Email me if you want to be notified when it releases.)

In general, I suggest that people use publish on demand when you expect to sell fewer than a few dozen copies. I’ve done that myself.

More often than not, I would suggest using print on demand when your book is selling a couple of hundred copies per year or less. At that point, the improvement in your sales if you get a better design and if you have your own publishing company is usually enough to be worth paying a little more for the services.

In general, if you believe your book will be able to sell profitably in bookstores, you should not use POD. POD originals (books that start out as POD, in either meaning of the initials) don’t have costs that are low enough to allow them to compete on bookstore shelves. Either the terms of trade offered to the stores are inadequate or the retail price has to be too high, given the cost per copy.

And last, but not least, if you think your book might sell more than a couple of thousand copies, then you should probably avoid a publish on demand contract at all costs. Why? First, because you don’t own your own ISBN. So you lose all connection between their edition of the book and yours if you decide you want to drop your costs and use offset printing. (And that will make thousands of dollars of difference in your bottom line.)

Second, because in those arrangements you very rarely own the rights to the design of the book. And the cover design is a critical part of your marketing momentum, too. So you’re taking a double hit if you switch.

That’s the short and most general version of my take on the subject. Do you think differently? Please do feel free to challenge me below. More opinions and information can only be good.

Posted in For Authors | No Comments »

Guest Post: Pete Masterson on CreateSpace Vs. LSI

November 24th, 2009

Pete Masterson is a very generous man who shares his experience as a printer and a designer with many new publishers. He participates on many listservs, including the Yahoo Group Self-Publishing. It was on that group that the following piece first appeared. He has graciously given me his permission to quote it in its entirety:

Using the CreateSpace Publishing Plan Calculator that you can download from the CreateSpace web site (this is an Excel spreadsheet with macros). These prices are all based on a color cover and a black interior book.

A softcover book of 212 pages, 6 x 9 with a list price of $16.00:
CS standard plan, sold via estore you receive a net $7.06
CS standard plan, sold via Amazon you receive a net $3.86
CS ProPlan, sold via estore, you receive a net $9.41
CS ProPlan, sold via Amazon, you receive a net $6.21
Purchased direct from CS in small quantities for delivery to the publisher,
standard plan, you pay $5.74 per copy (plus shipping)
ProPlan, you pay $3.39 per copy (plus shipping)
Larger quantities may have a discount, but I did not see one show up
in the calculator up to 250 copies.

The CS ProPlan has a $39 start up charge per title. A $5 per year per
title fee is charged to maintain the listing.

———————————————
Using Lightning Source figures as comparison:
the same book with $16.00 list price:
With a 20% wholesale discount, you receive $9.14 per copy sold via LSI/
Ingram
With a 40% wholesale discount, you receive $5.94 per copy
With a 55% wholesale discount, you receive $3.54 per copy
The print cost per copy (in all cases) is $3.66 per copy
There is a start up cost of $75. A $12 per year per title fee is
charged to maintain the listing.

If you purchase copies direct from LSI for shipment to the publisher
this book would cost $4.08 per copy plus shipping.
This charge also applies to shipments made direct to customer at order
of publisher. (This charge is based on .015 per page instead of .013
per page for the interior. Cover charge is unchanged.)

orders of
50-99 units receive a discount of 5% (reduces unit cost to $3.88)
100-249 units receive a discount of 10% (reduces unit cost to $3.67)
250 – 499 units receive a discount of 20% (reduces unit cost to $3.26)
Over 500 units receive a discount of 25% (reduces unit cost to $3.06)
(plus shipping).

======
Analysis:

So, the CreateSpace ProPlan offers a slightly lower unit cost for
books shipped directly to the publisher — but does not seem to offer
any discounts for quantity purchases. (Per page rate is .012 for the
CS pro plan and .013 at LSI — the ‘cover’ charge is .85 for CS Pro
plan vs .90 at LSI — and this is the price difference.)

LSI gives greater flexibility in setting wholesale discount rates and
terms. Using LSI/Ingram distribution, the book is available to all
booksellers where CS is only available to Amazon. Using the CS
‘estore’ would allow a slightly better return on direct to buyer
orders from your web site.

In the end, the deciding factor is if the 20% discount through LSI is
more appropriate for your business plan or if limiting sales to Amazon
(and the CS ‘estore’) is suitable.

===============================================
Pete Masterson, Author of
Book Design and Production: A Guide for Authors and Publishers
Aeonix1@Mac.com
Aeonix Publishing Group http://www.aeonix.com
===============================================

Posted in For Authors, Publishing Answers | 1 Comment »

A Typical Trade Title’s P&L

November 4th, 2009

I’m sure many of my frequent readers know these numbers by heart, but some of you are new around here. So, . . .

Let’s look at a typical non-fiction trade book. (Fiction makes less money, by the way, unless it “goes big.” And we all know that’s as rare as finding gold in the gravel.)

So, let’s say, for simplicity’s sake, that your hardback has a list price of $30. (Those greedy publishers!)

The bookstore buys that book for $18. Now, some of those books will be sold for less than $30, but not most. That means the bookstore has $12 (40% of list) to cover rent, salaries, utility bills, and so on and so forth. Given that they’re not selling all that many books on a given day, you can see why so many bookstores are going out of business.

The bookstore doesn’t buy from the publisher, all that often, though. They buy from a wholesaler. Why? Because there are 100,000 active publishers in the US alone. And they can’t afford to deal with even 1% of them as direct vendors.

The wholesaler takes 15% of the list price ($4.50) to cover their costs of operation. And that’s a very, very slim sum. Our net is now $13.50. Out of $30.

But wholesalers don’t deal with more than the top 1 or 2% of those 100,000 publishers. The rest need a distributor. That distributor takes roughly 15% of the list price in combined commissions and other fees. (Another $4.50 gone, leaving a princely $9.)

So, the publisher is getting $9. From that comes:

–Pre-publication preparation: (cover design, text design, structural editing, copyediting, proofreading, indexing, file preparation to meet e-book or printer standards, . . . ). This costs about $3,500 to 10,000 per title. And that tends to work out to $0.75 or $1 per copy for most mid-range books. (We’re netting $8.25, if you use the better number.)

–Printing: At a mid-range volume, that might be $3.25 per copy. (The net is now $5)

–Royalties. Non-fiction, hb, standard rates of 10% of list for the first 5,000 copies, 12.5% for the next 5,000 copies and 15% after 10,001. Let’s be conservative, and call it 10% of $30, or $3.00 per copy. (The net is now $2.)

–Marketing of 5% of revenue, or 0.05 * $9, or $0.45. The net is down to $1.55.

From that $1.55 (or 5.2% of the original $30) comes the salaries, utilities, rent and maybe, just maybe a few pennies of profit.

Now, there are other complications I didn’t treat. Sometimes bookstores buy directly from distributors or the larger publishers. That happens about 1/3 of the time, so you’d get back an average of 1/3 of the 15% that the wholesalers take. That raises your bottom line by another 5% of list, or $1.50.

BUT you also have to accept returns from anyone in the trade, in any condition, at any time. (Yeah, that’s not how the terms of trade on the invoices read, but it is what really happens.) Most of these books will have a 25 to 30% return rate. And that eats up your bottom line with books you printed but can’t sell. (It adds another $0..90 in cost, on a good day.) And then there are the copies you never quite manage to sell, and freight, and . . . .

In the end, a large publisher usually gets 2.5 or 3% of list through to the bottom line. A smaller one is lucky to break even.

And fiction? It’s worse!

You don’t go into this business for the money.

Last word: Publishing is addictive. If you haven’t get gotten hooked, do NOT start until you have consulted your accountant and therapist!

Posted in For Authors | 5 Comments »

Should You Sell Directly to Readers?

October 9th, 2009

The proverb among micro- and self-publishers is that “bookstores are lousy places to sell books.” (I believe Dan Poynter was one of the first to say it.)

This can, of course, be true. You have to offer significant discounts not only to the store, but also to the wholesalers, and a distributor, too.

It seems so obvious, especially given changes to the music industry, that we should try to reach our readers directly, and also try to sell them something over and above our words. (“What?” is a question for another post.)

Direct sales are the right idea for many small presses. They’re the wrong one for many others. Whether it turns out to be right or wrong, there are a number of problems, though, when you try to execute a strategy like this.

Readers don’t trust sites they don’t know. And why should they? You’ll have much better luck getting them to buy from known sites, like Amazon, or from a bricks and mortar store.

Fish where the fish aren’t. In other words, your book needs to be where people are looking for books, or at least for information about your topic, or for entertainment, or whatever. It’s much, much harder to bring people to you to buy a book than it is to put your book where people interested in your topic are already congregating and purchasing things.

Overhead and transaction costs are real, and significant, even if they’re hard to see. And they can kill your business even if you never understand how.

You may think you have no overhead or transaction costs because you’re operating out of an unused bedroom, and doing everything yourself. But even if you’re not writing someone else a check to do the necessary work, you’re still paying for it. How? Well, surely there’s something you could do with that time that would enrich your life more than packing your 597th box? That’s not going to market your books. It’s not helping you find more manuscripts (or write them yourself, whichever). And it’s certainly not a life experience you really need. (Well, not unless you have a whole lot of guilt to assuage.)

Do NOT neglect opportunity costs. Like most of the rest of the “real” world, they can hurt you whether you believe in them or not.

That’ll do for a start on a list of “gotchas” that must be dealt with. What others have bothered you? And what do you like about reaching out directly to your readers?

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