Archive for the ‘For Authors’ Category

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What Do You Get From Your Publisher?

Monday, 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 »

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

Monday, 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 | 9 Comments »

The Profitable Publisher — A new E-Book Series

Tuesday, 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

Tuesday, 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 »

When Should I Use POD?

Monday, 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

Tuesday, 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

Wednesday, 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 »

A Google Settlement I Could Support

Monday, September 28th, 2009

So, the original Google Settlement is dead, dead (spell that D-O-J: dead). As frequent readers of this blog may remember, I wasn’t too enthused about it, and I won’t be grieving.

I do, however, hope that some version does come to fruition. I think it has the potential to make enormous sums for most small and micro-presses, and to keep authors’ work alive for a far longer time.

It might even help reverse the steady decline in book reading that has afflicted this country.

What would I like to see in that agreement?

1. Compensation for the infringements to date going not to rightsholders, but to the formation of the rights registry. The proposed compensation in the old agreement was so small per title as to be utterly useless, but in the aggregate, it could move many mountains. That registry could benefit all of us in much larger ways, and forcing Google to pay for it will ensure that no other corporate behemoth gets the idea that they can infringe with impunity.

Part of the cost of establishing this registry would include widespread advertising in the US and elsewhere covering how the works can be claimed, or registered if not yet scanned, and where. It should also be possible to try to port the LOC rightsholder database over to the new registry.

2. All non-search uses on an opt-in basis ONLY during the life of copyright. This is critical, because anything less eviscerates all of copyright. It’s a precedent we cannot allow.

3. Search results displaying a reasonable amount (half a page? A whole page?) on an opt-out basis for all book length works. This is an exact parallel to web search (which has already been tested and found to be fair use), and is critical to growing our knowledge base. To do this, Google will get the right to scan anything not excluded by the rights holder. Google can monetize this with ad display, as is currently done for web sites.

4. Opt-in only licensing to libraries. A reasonable split would pro rate the licensing fees by the length of the file covering each work, payable to all rights holders as long as the work is in copyright.

5. Opt-in only licensing of the right to sell ebook, POD and other versions of the works in the database. I liked the 65/35 split between Google and the rights-holders. It seems reasonable.

So where do those enormous sums come in?

6. Every time someone clicks on a book search link, the page should include a free ad for the book. And if the book is available through their site or a major on-line source, it should include links to those sellers. Affiliate links, perhaps, so that Google gets a commission, but links nonetheless. I suspect that this will greatly increase book sales, especially for small presses and self-published authors.

I’m sure I missed some important points. What would you like to add?

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Marion’s Rules of Publishing

Friday, September 25th, 2009

This isn’t complete, and I’ll try to keep adding to them, but here are a few of my favorite rules:

1. You may get what you pay for, but you rarely get much more.
Great, cheap alternatives usually have a catch.

2. Crunch your numbers.
If you’re making a decision that can have a major impact on your results, always test the alternatives, and compare the changes in your bottom line. (If you don’t know how, read the rest of my blog, take a seminar I offer at one of the publishing conferences near you or ask a question in the comments!)

3. It depends.
You’ll hear a lot of general rules pronounced (including this list). Most of them are true for at least some circumstances. But all of them have exceptions. Look at the situation in front of you, and think it through, rather than relying upon a rule.

4. There are NO shortcuts in this business.
There are, however, a large number of very attractive routes leading to heartbreak.

4A. Those dinosaurs, the “big NYC publishers,” are run by some very smart people.
If they’re not doing something that seems simple and obvious to you, the chances are pretty good that you’re missing something.

5. Success at self-publishing is harder than getting published by a mainstream house.
(IF you define success in terms of exposure, fame or profit.)

6. I repeat: crunch your numbers!

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E-book Pricing

Sunday, August 9th, 2009

We all know the basic theory for finding the right price: figure out how many your readers will buy at each price, and how much it will cost you to produce each copy at each volume, and then look for the price/volume combination that yields the greatest total margin.

We all also know that this is easier said than done for print books, even with the advent of databases like Nielsen Bookscan, but it’s practically impossible for ebooks. So far. Bookscan doesn’t measure sales for ebooks. You can’t call Ingram and get sales numbers for them, either.

And no one knows what the Amazon ranks for ebooks mean — not to mention, that those volumes for a given rank would change wildly in the future, as ebooks become more popular. So, we can’t really predict the volume for a given price.

What can we do? We can say that for certain types of books, certain price expectations are becoming common. For example, Amazon has made $9.99 the norm for a trade book currently in hardback. And the ebooks of titles currently available in mass market paperbacks tends to range between $3.99 and $6.39, with the upper end representing current and high-volume books, and the lower end representing backlist.

And yes, Virginia, there is a backlist for mmp in ebooks. Who knew that this was possible?? Of course, it wasn’t for print books, because of the economics of producing, storing, shipping and selling the physical object, but ebooks make it work.

In short, we’re going to have to fall back upon the old standard: find your books’ competitive titles, and price your book to meet that competition.

Will that offer you enough revenue to cover your costs? Or even, wonder of wonders, make a profit?? That is, indeed, the question. And what costs should you consider?

1. Royalties. Authors deserve to get an amount similar to the amount they get for the sale of a print copy, in my opinion. Not a similar rate, but a similar total. That may well mean that the rate is double or triple the royalty rate for print, given the smaller list prices. And publishers should consider setting the breakpoints so that we’re splitting the proceeds evenly with authors after our investments have been recovered.

2. Marketing: getting the message out to your readers is pretty much the same thing, whether you’re selling a print book or an ebook. Same types of people, same reasons to want the book, same selling points in the book. (Currently a smaller total pool of potential buyers, but that will change, I suspect.)

3. Plant costs (that’s publishing jargon for the fixed costs of preparing the manuscript for publication): the only one you don’t have, for the Kindle and some other types, and for now!, is compostion/text design. All of the editing still needs to be done (structural/ developmental, line, and copy-editing are all important to the quality of the final book). Cover images are still necessary. Etc, etc.

If the ebook is just an extra dab of icing on top of the cake of a book you’d do anyway, then the plant costs are almost irrelevant, but that’s obviously not going to be the case for very long.

4. Distribution: yes, you don’t need to ship the physical object, but you DO still need to pay those who own the channels through which you reach your reader. That may be Amazon or Fictionwise, or whoever, but it’s still a very large chunk of the revenue, if not most of it.

5. Cannibalization of Print Sales: whether through piracy, or because you believe that your readers would buy print if and only if they didn’t buy an ebook, it is possible that ebook sales will cut into your pbook sales. It doesn’t seem as if this happens yet for most types of titles, but it’s something that every publisher should consider.

In the end, only you can tell if the projected sales revenue will exceed the costs for a given title. And the only way to do that is to run your numbers, just as you did for a print book.

Some things never change.

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Posted in For Authors, Publishing Answers | 1 Comment »

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