Archive for the ‘Publishing’ Category

Selling to the Sellers

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

Direct sales to friends/family coupled with online ordering is a decent way to start selling books, but to reach that elusive, lucrative market of “people who’ve never heard of you”, you need to seek out other channels. Amazon Marketplace and eBay are two options, but I don’t believe your book is ever going to be the subject of an impulse buy; for that, you need a brick-and-morter store. There are still independent stores in the UK that will stock indie books (notice I didn’t say bookstores – you need to think outside that box) and even some chains (I’m working on a deal with a larger chain right now, and will report back once I have some news). Getting your book into a store means talking to the owner/manager, and that can be an uncomfortable experience for some people, particularly writers who are just emerging into the daylight with their newly printed book. Knowledge helps calm those nerves – knowing the realities of the retail process before you stat talking frees you to worry about making a good impression. Not everyone has a friend like the awesome Haroon Mushtaq (@theanonwonder) to educate them in the ways of book retail and distribution, so I’m sharing his advice – and the knowledge I’ve gained following his advice – here:

Retailers will only take your books on sale-or-return terms. This means you give them X books, and sign a pro forma contract that says in Y months, they owe you X books, or the selling price of your book for each book they’ve sold minus their cut. If no books sell, the retailer doesn’t lose anything other than the shelf space the book was occupying, and you get the books back. This is why you deal with indies and small chains; do you have the cash to ship 1000, or 10,000 or even 100 books to Waterstones with no guarantee you’ll see any return? Do you have the room to store 1000 returned books? I know how much room 100 books takes up – believe me when I say you don’t have room for 1000.
Retailers take a cut based on a percentage of the cover price. This is typically 35%. I don’t want to say it’s always 35%, but I’ve not met anyone asking for more or less, so I’m assuming it’s always. I’ve also never felt the need to haggle on that deal; as far as I’m concerned, it’s fair.
Retailers will take a quantity of your books based on their opinion of how well it will sell to their customers. They know their customers better than you – it’s their job to know – so you have to accept their appraisal of the marketability of your book. You don’t need to pitch the book like you would to an agent/publisher, but they’ll want to know the setting/target market to get a feel for whether it fits their customer type. As an extreme example, you probably wouldn’t be able to get erotica into a children’s book shop (unless as part of an elaborate and tasteless practical joke).
The above point doesn’t mean that you should accept a retailer’s assessment without question; catch someone on a bad day, and they might view your book in an overly negative light. If you truly believe your book could find a market in their shop, ask if they’ll take a single copy and gauge interest based on that. Your book might tap into a market they’ve not found yet. As with all things, however, no means no, so don’t be pushy.
Your book has to be able to stand on the shelves next to its mainstream brethren without looking like a dog chewed it. It has to be a quality publication.
The retailer hasn’t the time or inclination to read your book, so needs to make a gut call on whether it’s a) any good, and b) well-edited and proofed. Their only way to do this is to look at how you present yourself, and infer the attention to detail you’ve paid the book from that. You don’t have to wear a dinner jacket and top hat; just be yourself, but make sure it’s a clean, tidy, laundered and polite version of yourself. Oh, and I know this seems obvious, but take a copy of the real, printed book along; no one is going to make a call based on a copy of the manuscript, nor on your word that the book is awesome.
Get business cards printed, and make sure you have some with you. The retailer needs to be able to contact you to re-order or to return the books, so make it easy for them. Also, when choosing your design, don’t go for glossy cards, or those new “tiny” cards that are the fashion; the one thing most people do with business cards is write on them, so make that possible.

And that’s it. I’ve been following this advice for a couple of weeks now, and have placed the book in three of the five stores I’ve tried (with a couple more in-progress). The two who didn’t take it thought it wouldn’t sell to their market, which is fair enough, and brings me to my final point; the relationship between a writer and direct retailers is more like a partnership than a buyer-seller arrangement. Placing a book in the wrong store hurts the retailer as well as yourself; find the right store and everyone gets paid. Be polite, but remember that you’re in a position to make them money if your book is good and you work hard to market it. You’re offering them a business deal as an equal, so enjoy the encounter, meet someone new, and do some good business.

Tags: Binding, Bookshops, Business Cards, Distribution, Marketing, Proofreading, Retailers, Sale-or-return, Self-publishing, Shops
Posted in Publishing, Retail | No Comments »

Don’t Read Me

Friday, December 11th, 2009

So it’s illegal to import and sell eBooks from foreign territories, despite the publishers delaying eBook sales for months after the hardcover release? Is it illegal to buy a copy of a printed book in the UK, take it to the US and sell it? Possibly, but I can’t be bothered to check. And I bet the publishers/distributers can’t be bothered to care either, as the bulk of printed books prohibits excessive abuse, so it’s a self-limiting problem. US distributers/retailers lose a few sales – a few points of a percent – no problem. Enter the age of ubiquity, and now they have a problem. So they slap some DRM on it, restrict customer rights to the point of rendering the product an expensive novelty for the techno fetishists, and kill a market before its first Christmas. Interesting.

Or, not. The problem with the eBook revolution, is that not one person in any of the corporations currently fighting for market position has had what this emerging technology requires: an original fucking idea. This is the same restrictive crap the movie studios/distributers have been forcing down our throats since films went mainstream – artificially creating demand by delaying releases to get two bites at the cherry. Well look how that turned out; now they have to release simultaneously worldwide just to secure some box office take before everyone gets sick of being treated like children and just downloads the film from the torrents out of spite.

And here are the same companies owned by the same media groups pulling the same crap with the same consumers. Except you can’t do it with books, because books are perfect, and people love them. People didn’t love VHS, and they don’t love DVD. It appears they’re even less fond of Blu-Ray, and as for downloads… no deal. You try to strongarm people into how they consume books, they will walk away. There are enough books in print right now for everyone on the planet to read in their lifetime, without running out of great stories. People can wait for the publishers/distributers/tech companies/big-ass retailers to dry up their pissing contest and maybe concoct an original idea between them, instead of trying to find new ways to overcharge us for the same shit twice. You want my money? Add value. As of now, DRM stands for Don’t Read Me.

And, yes, it’s been a bad day. Sorry about the language…

Tags: Distribution, DRM, EBook, Publishers
Posted in Opinion, Publishing | No Comments »

Independent Preconceptions

Monday, December 7th, 2009

I came to a realisation today – one that is both unsettling and reassuring. But first, the background.

I’ve been out talking to independent booksellers (or trying to) regarding selling my new book, and a friend was doing the same on my behalf further afield. She spoke to one bookshop owner who thought my book was too modern for his clientele, and that it would struggle to sell as it didn’t have a local setting or anything to provide an angle he could push. Fair enough – I’ve learned something there. What he said that set me thinking, though, was that he was very impressed with the finish and design of my book (both the binding and the cover) and that it was refreshing to see an independently produced hardback, as most indie books he saw were in paperback, and were typically of low quality, printed on cheaper paper and with basic or unskilled cover designs. And this is a man who is happy to deal directly with indie publishers/authors; this is not a hostile market.

After my friend had reported back, I was thinking about what I’d learned from the encounter, and that was when I came to my realisation; the perception of my book, in concept, is shaped by the actions of every independent author-publisher out there. Every rushed, unedited, cheap book that someone has tried to sell damages the perceived value of my book with potential readers and retailers. That’s pretty unsettling.

But I’m looking at that situation another way now. I’ve flipped it around. Every one of us, by doing the best job we can to produce a quality product, can reinforce the reputation of indie books as an alternative, rather than a second-rate option. That’s pretty reassuring. With the tools and technology now available to everyone, both in production and communication, the time has never been better for us to work together and create a new market – one where an indie book is judged on the quality of its content rather than its cover.

Tags: Binding, Bookshops, Indie, Printing, Self-publishing
Posted in Opinion, Printing, Publishing | 2 Comments »

Letting Go

Sunday, December 6th, 2009

Just a quick post after the monster that was Typesetting 101, but I wanted to capture this feeling while it’s fresh. I was skimming my print-submitted text to find a page to screen grab for that post, and I noticed a typo. And I freaked. Now, I know that this print run is small (110 copies) and that I can resubmit the files for the next run at a small charge but, man, did I feel bad. I felt bad because all of the people who have bought the book now have a “defective” copy, and they are the people who are supporting me now when I need it most. I felt bad because I pride myself on my attention to detail. I felt bad because my proofreaders (Mark and Julie) also pride themselves on the quality of their work, and I know they’d feel like they let me down.

Basically, I was freaking out and very pissed at myself.

Turns out it wasn’t a typo, and I’ve just been staring at this screen for so long I was seeing things. In my defence, the word “eighth” does look damned freakish if you stare at it long enough (never mind that my spellchecker would have caught it – thinking that was just adding to my sense of failure).

So, now that my heart has stopped hammering, I can reflect on the situation. I know there’s going to be at least one typo in the printed book. There has to be. I’ve seen them in traditionally published books, so I know that even professional teams of proofreaders miss things. The point of this post, and the question I want to ask is, at what point do you say “I’ve done everything I can to ensure I’m shipping a tested, quality product?” How much proofing is too much?

At what point can you let go?

Tags: Printing, Proofreading, Spellchecking, Typos
Posted in Publishing | 5 Comments »

The Economics of Fair

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

A couple of people – friends of friends – have commented that the £12.99 cover price of my book is a bit steep. I understand that people place different values on material objects, and that the low book prices they see each week in the supermarkets has conditioned them to expect more for less, and I also understand the market forces at play in the supermarkets offering books at those prices, so I wanted to take this opportunity to open up my business model by way of explaining the cover price I set. My model is actually pretty simple:

No one was shat on in the process of getting my book to market.

I’ll explain by way of a couple of examples.

If you buy cheap meat from a supermarket, the animal who provided your food was subjected to the absolute bare minimum living conditions for its entire pitiful existence. Outdoor-reared, humanely-kept animals cost more in upkeep over the duration of their life, so you pay more for the meat. Of course, both are killed and eaten, but that’s another discussion. Relatively speaking, it’s the battery chicken getting shat on. Literally in this case.
If you buy your kid a cheap school shirt from a supermarket, you’ll save a few pounds that you could maybe put towards Christmas, or a day out, or some sweets, whatever. The person who made that shirt got paid so little that they can barely afford to feed their kids, let alone buy them a bar of chocolate. I know that this is another situation where the politics are complicated (if you paid more, would they get paid more? Probably not…) but the balance of the equation is that they get shat on so you can save a quid or two.
If you buy a book from a supermarket – say the new Terry Pratchett – there’s a good chance that the supermarket is selling it at near to or below cost (the latter tends to be the case with event titles like Harry Potter). You get the book for around £5, and the supermarket gets you through the door to spend your wages on the weekly shop. Have you spotted the person being shat on in this equation? Yes, it’s the owner of the independent book shop who doesn’t have tinned goods to sell and is relying on sales of event titles to keep trading. He/she can’t sell that book for less than cost, and their sales dry up.

Through all of the transactions that I’ve been involved with in the production of Make a Move, I’ve always asked myself this question first: is it fair? My printer was happy with the price I paid, as was I. I’m going to absorb some of the postage and packing cost for my online customers (once online ordering is live) as I want to offer a fair total price for the delivered book. When I found out how long Sam had been working on my cover art, I changed the deal, because he’d been putting in so much time, the original deal wasn’t fair any more.

I’m not trying to be a saint; I’m just trying to have fun, and shitting on people to get what I want isn’t fun. My book costs more because it’s been ethically sourced. You’re not happy with the £12.99 price? No problem.

Just head on over to Tesco and buy yourself a nice, cheap battery book.

Tags: Ethical, Event Titles, Printing, Shops, Supermarkets
Posted in Opinion, Publishing | No Comments »

Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Narrative Thrust

Monday, November 30th, 2009

My book’s been in the wild for three days now, and I’ve noticed a theme emerging in the responses I get when people take receipt of their copies – some variation on “oh, it’s a lot nicer than I expected”. Translation: “oh good, it’s not shit”.

It’s flattering that people are impressed with the quality of the product, but it’s also worrying that their expectations are so low. That got me thinking; if customer’s have so little faith in a self-publishing author to deliver a professionally printed book, does that also extend to writers’ faith in their ability to produce one?

Probably, and that’s one misconception that needs kicking into touch right now.

One fact you might not be aware of: you have access to the same printers as the major publishing houses. It’s true; you can deal direct with the printers, and with the publishing industry so downbeat right now, a lot of printers are trying to attract indies and small presses in an effort to adapt and survive. The only difference between you and a major publisher is the order size (which has one minor implication I’ll detail below). Aside from that, it’s a level playing field.

Don’t believe me? Okay – let’s assume you’ve placed an order for 100 hardback books (a typical minimum for digital printing) and take a look at the anatomy of the end product.

Dust Jacket – it’s a sheet of paper. They print your artwork on it, laminate it in gloss or matt for a nominal fee (if you choose) and wrap it around the book.
Binding – fabric-covered cardboard. I guess you could use some expensive fabric woven by Parisian chorus girls in their spare time, but as there’s a dust jacket hiding it from view, it’s not going to add much value. I can’t see any difference between my binding and any of the hundreds of “pro” books on my shelves.
Spine Embossing – this is a nice touch. I thought about saving the money, but I believe it does add value, and it’s useful to identify the book if the owner loses the dust jacket. All the printers ask for is a print-ready PDF with the lettering in black; they make up a “brass”, and use that to stamp the books.
Endpapers – these are the sheets of paper glued onto the inside of the book cover, joining them to the pages seamlessly. You can go for the same colour as your book’s body pages, but I think it looks nicer to go for a different colour – graphite in my case. These definitely add something to the look of the book, but you need to decide if it’s worth the extra cost. The endpapers my printer provided are very cool, with a thick, grainy texture.
Paper – this is the one area where large publishers have the option to go one better. Note that I said “option”; this isn’t a default choice. The papers available for use with digital presses are perfect for the job, but for larger print runs – over 1000 or so – litho presses become cost-effective, and these can handle thicker paper, which some publishers may choose to use. By “thicker”, I don’t mean that each sheet is visibly thicker than the lighter, digital-friendly weights; what I mean is that the paper responds differently when you bend a half-inch thickness of it, and it may be slightly more opaque. This is the kind of difference only a borderline-OCD perfectionist like me would notice, but it’s something you can investigate yourself.

So that’s it. There’s nothing else to a book. Okay – so there are custom jobs you could point to; my hardback copy of Rant by Chuck Palahniuk has a crazy image printed inside the dust jacket. I spotted it for the first time when I was inspecting the book as research for my print run, over a year after I read it.

Are you convinced? Are you happy that your self-published book won’t look like the poor cousin on a mainstream-fed bookcase? If you are, that’s one less barrier between you and your readers. If you’re not, just check out some printers and ask for samples; see for yourself.

Tags: Binding, Dust Jacket, Endpapers, Paper, Printing, Self-publishing
Posted in Printing, Publishing | No Comments »

Are We Having Fun Yet?

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

It’s been a mixed day. My regular coffee-and-internet wakeup routine included reading this post by Mur Lafferty – someone who’s positivity and ideas have always been inspiring to me – being mildly negative about self-publishing. One comment in particular caught my eye: that self-published books “won’t be in book stores”. If I were categorising her comments on her behalf, I’d put that one under “generalisation”.

Next up, the BBC News website offered comments by the author MG Harris off the back of this article on self-publishing. All of her comments were valid, but I’m worried that the general air of negativity was off-putting for anyone considering financing their own print run, particularly the following:

“However, author MG Harris believes that writers taking on the whole publishing process themselves can fail to give their work proper scrutiny.
“It’s all too easy to just end up writing whatever you feel like writing and then just say ‘it’s ready’ with a few minor superficial corrections,” she explained.
She added that real publishers have all the expertise needed to bring sheets of words into a marketable book.”

I’d hope “real” publishers do have the expertise to produce a marketable book, and I know that easier access to the market will allow a lot of unedited, rushed work into the wild, but it’s patronising to suggest there aren’t writers out there with the technical and marketing skills needed to produce a professional, polished product and market it.

It was with those words in my mind that I drove into town to take my first shipment of Make a Move to the Manchester Travelling Man store and sign the paperwork for the sale-or-return deal I’ve arranged with them. Abby, the co-manager, was impressed with the quality of the finished product, and put them out on display, and a colleague from work arrived to buy a copy while I was there having made the trip into the city just for that reason, so I signed the book at his request, thanking him for being my first “real” sale. It was a fun time for me, especially if you compare it to the enforced solitude of writing 100,000-or-so words.

And that, right there, is the whole point that people seem to be missing. There isn’t a lot of money to be made in self-publishing, but if you’re doing it just for the money, as in any endeavour, it’s going to be a soulless task. I’m doing it because it’s fun. It entertains me to do it. Okay – I’ll admit to 5, maybe 10% of ego in the equation, but primarily, I’m putting Make a Move out myself, because meeting people, talking about the story and writing in general, working with printers, working with my graphic-designer friend Sam – all of those things are infinitely more fun than leaving my book to rot on my hard disk while the “real” publishers work out whether the eSky is eFalling at all.

I’m not trying to be a positive voice amongst the doom mongers; I’m just offering my answer to the question that titles this post:

Hell yes.

Tags: Marketing, Sale-or-return, Self-publishing, Shops
Posted in Opinion, Publishing | 2 Comments »

Les Livres Sont Arrivées

Saturday, November 28th, 2009

Yes, the books have arrived, and they’re amazing. Just a quick post to let everyone know that the books are now available to buy direct from me, and will be on sale in Travelling Man Manchester (website) from tomorrow (Sunday 29th) with other stores to follow. I’m still wrangling with the online payments, but that option should be available this week.

Here’s a photo of the books as I unboxed them, so you can see Sam’s awesome cover art:

So the books are done; now the hard work starts…

Posted in Printing, Publishing | No Comments »

Font-slapped: A Cautionary Tale

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

I hadn’t considered fonts when I was writing my book; I wrote in the default font for Pages, then later Scrivener. I just liked the readability of the defaults, so stuck with them. When I exported to Word from Scrivener, the end target was a submission copy of the manuscript, so I formatted everything as Courier New, double-spaced, you know the score… It was only when I was typesetting the book that I considered the fonts I wanted to see in the final print.

I asked my friend, Mark, who knows more about books than everyone else I know put together, what font he’d like to see. His response: as long as I can read it and it’s not Comic Sans, who cares? That left me with plenty of choice.

Due to my setup, I needed a font that I had on both Windows and Apple machines. I looked at Garamond, Book Antiqua, Georgia, Palatino Linotype – all common, but perfectly serviceable fonts, and not boring, generic, overused Times New Roman. With the subtle differences from that most ubiquitous of typefaces, I had plenty of fonts from which to choose. I couldn’t lose.

Yeah I could.

Late in the book, I introduced some characters crucial to the story. Characters from Latvia, with Latvian names. And of course, I wanted to show off a bit and choose names with some of the curious accents common in the Latvian language. I set myself a short timescale to finish the print-ready files to send to my printer, as I knew I needed that pressure to stop me from picking over every detail a hundred times and just get it done, so when I found the Latvian names at the end of the book filled with black rectangles – indicating that those characters were unavailable in the selected font – I didn’t have much time to fix the problem. I didn’t want to go back to the research and choose new names – these characters were alive in the book now, and their names had stuck – so I ran through my list of suitable fonts, desperate to find one with support for those crazy accents.

Of course, there was only one serif font on both systems with the character support. Times New Fricking Roman.

The book text looks good – looks great in fact – but I’m a control freak and I wanted my choice of fonts. When you’ve committed to managing every tiny detail yourself, things like this are important. Hell, every detail is important.

So the moral of the story? Keep things simple and don’t show off; it’s the little things that’ll come back and bite you in the ass.

Tags: Accents, Fonts, Printing, Self-publishing, Submissions, Times New Roman
Posted in Printing, Publishing, Uncategorized | No Comments »

5 Things a Self-publishing Author Doesn’t Need

Sunday, November 22nd, 2009

It seems there are a lot of things to spend money on in getting a printed book to market. Kind of like optional extras on your new car. If you’re going to make any money on a self-published book, you have to keep your unit cost as low as possible, so avoiding any unnecessary expenses is vital. Whenever you are considering whether to pay for something, look at the increase to your unit cost price and compare it with the chance it will increase sales. If you can’t see a guaranteed return on investment, don’t buy it. Here are 5 things I decided didn’t offer enough return:

ISBN Numbers. Most independent booksellers don’t need a barcode to sell your book, and you certainly don’t to sell direct. So who uses a barcode? Amazon, Waterstones and supermarkets. If you can make a deal to supply to those retailers and stop your cost price being higher than theirs, you’re printing in such quantities that the £107 for ten ISBNs is negligible. In other words, if you need an ISBN, you can afford one; if you can’t afford one, you don’t need one. Apparently you need an ISBN to sell an eBook through Amazon Kindle or the other ePublishing services; yeah, eBooks are great…
Author Photo. Before the internet, the author photo (and About the Author section) created brand identity and enhanced the connection with the reader. Now we have the internet. The only thing you need to print on the back cover/flap of your book is the address of your website. If you’ve decided you want an author photo, don’t pay a professional to take one. So many people have digital SLR cameras and photo editing software now that you must know someone who can take that photo for you. Professional photographers turn up and take perfectly framed and exposed photos on demand; you have the time to experiment until you get the shot you want. I’ll post soon with some tips on how to get better portrait shots with a variety of levels of photographic gear.
Website. I’m lucky – I have a good friend who runs a web/graphic design company (Lemonaise) and is happy to help me out with my site, but even if you’re on your own, pre-built blogging platforms and services like WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger and so on are more than enough for establishing your web presence. Add a Twitter account and not only will you be expanding your reach, you’ll have access to thousands of people who’ve set up their own sites and offer links to help and advice. You don’t need to pay for a website (although you may choose to if you’re after something unique).
Distribution. If you’re going to make enough money to give up your job, you need access to retailers. But if you have the tens of thousands of pounds it would cost to supply Amazon et al at the cost prices they’ll demand, and you can supply those books on sale or return terms, with no guarantee of sales, you probably don’t need to work anyway. So let’s discount distribution at that level as beyond out reach. Print on Demand (POD) companies such as Lulu allow you to sell to foreign territories, as the books are printed in the country to which they’re shipped when ordered. Access to the US market for a UK author is tempting (it’s not something I’ve completely discounted) but the profit per book is so low compared to printing the books yourself, I’m not sure it’s worth it. If you could establish sufficient reputation in a foreign market to sell a few thousand books, I’m not sure the time spent couldn’t have been spent pushing your book in your home market, at ten times the profit (I’m generalising on the numbers, but I’m not far off). “Local Author” is a brand that can sell books, and you should work hard to maximise the returns on that brand.
Middlemen. We all need more middlemen, right? I don’t know too much about publishing services as I stop reading early whenever they’re mentioned. Forget vanity publishing, misleading branding or outright cons, there just isn’t enough profit on a small print run to leave room for anyone else to take a cut. You, the printer, your retailers; that’s the guestlist, and there isn’t room for crashers.

There are way more than 5 things you don’t need when you’re printing a book (swine flu is one I can advise against based on experience) but these are the main money-sinks I considered and discounted when planning my print run, and upon which I feel able to offer some insight. So what other ways can you suggest to keep that unit cost price as low as possible?

Tags: Author Photograph, Distribution, EBook, Kindle, POD, Printing, Self-publishing
Posted in Blogging, Photography, Publishing | 2 Comments »