To The Author In Search Of A Publisher

I distinctly remember listening to E. G. Marshall trying to reboot radio drama. I would be driving home or back to grad school after a date with the delightful girl I eventually married, and the car radio helped keep me awake. Late night radio often has unsold air time and a certain class of vendors gravitate to this cut-rate advertising. 

One of which had a rather stuffy sounding guy talking about "the author in search of a publisher."

He was trolling for suckers for the vanity press. For a few thousand 1979-dollars you could have your manuscript turned into a real book and get it printed. Yay. 

Then what? You'd have a garage full of boxes of books. Then it was up to you to find a way to sell them. Good luck with that. Most of the time, this was not a wise investment of one's savings.

Time passes and technology advances. It is now completely feasible to realize camera-ready typeset pages using just your home computer and a laser printer. It's trivial to produce good looking book designs using just Microsoft Word or any number of other cheap or free tools. Good. We can now produce "galley proofs" at home.

And if you want to fill your garage with boxes of books, any medium-sized town will have several print shops who can obliged you.

The last two paragraphs enable any non-idiot to completely disintermediate the vanity press guys. The dirty little secret is that writers in search of a publisher could have disintermediated them back in the '70s, too.

But even if you did, and you saved thousands of 1979-dollars it was a sucker bet. How are you going to get those boxes of books out of your garage and into bookstores?

Then an amazing thing happened: Amazon.com. Now, all you had to do was hook up with Amazon to get those boxes of books out of your garage. The amazing thing got amazinger. Amazon came out with the Kindle. And they had the good sense to buy a print-on-demand publisher. Now, anyone could click a web site and your book in bits or printed-on-demand would be shipped to their door.

This made me think that self-publishing a non-sucker bet. (And I hope you'll vindicate my opinion by buying either The Aristotelian or Finding Time.) I think self-publishing is a viable route for any writer who doesn't have a book deal. But you gotta be smart about it.

I think the vanity press companies are still a sucker bet. I don't understand how they can still exist when they are so trivially bypassed.

What's truly amazing is the tangled network of ownership. The biggest vanity publisher is now owned by a traditional publisher. You can get the details here.

Why would a traditional publisher own a vanity publisher? In the former case, the publisher pays the author an advance and royalties. In the latter case, the author pays the publisher. Heh. If I were the publisher I'd quit with the advances and royalties. So, there are some conflicts of interest here.

I don't quite know what will come of these changes in book publishing. It looks to me like we aren't seeing the old sucker-bets going away. Instead I think we'll see a whole raft of new and improved sucker-bets to beware of. Let me know if you come across any.

Vanity of Vanities

(This is step #12 of my How To Publish An eBook thang)

When I was a kid I'd hear radio ads that pitched "for the author in search of a publisher.' And those ads were for vanity publishers. You gave them money, and they'd print your books. You'd get several large boxes filled with copies of your book and they'd sit in your garage until the heat-death of the universe.

Those books would stay in your garage because you are not a distributor nor do you have a business relationship with a distributor like traditional publishers enjoy.

Amazon changed all that when they combined the functions of bookseller and distributor along with book-on-demand printing. And they have a company called CreateSpace.com. If you want to publish a paper edition of your book, you want to research CreateSpace.

You also want to do a reality check, but I'll come back to that.

They work just a little differently from Kindle Direct Publishing because they're not sending your bits to Kindles, they are printing and shipping paper editions. Your ebook doesn't have a back cover or a dust jacket. (If you want a hardback edition, you'll have to think about that binding, and that dust jacket. You'll have to talk to a printer and bookbinder about hardback editions.) CreateSpace just prints trade paperback editions.

CreateSpace charges a nominal setup fee and they require you design a wrap-around cover that combines your front cover design, a spine, and a back cover design. The back cover nominally has a blurb as well as a few testimonials and or editorial squibs from reviewers.

If you want to put a physical copy of your book under your nephew's Christmas tree, you can use CreateSpace to make it. And if you have other customers who don't use Kindles or Nooks, you can service that market using CreateSpace.com to print-on-demand books that Amazon.com will sell and ship to your customers. But that's time and effort. And your paperback edition will use a different ISBN number than your ebook.

Maybe you'd better take a look at how well your ebook is selling first.

I've heard the rule of thumb that several tiny publishing houses uses is: Only do a paper edition of the work after you sell 100+ ebook editions of a work. That makes a lot of sense.

Let's suppose you start selling books hand-over-fist. You'll want to get as many books in as many hands as possible through as many channels as you can manage. But what if your stunning work is not appreciated by the reading public. Or your stunning work is universally loved, but nobody in your target market finds out about it. At some point you have to take a sober look at how well your work is selling and decide whether there are less-dead horses to flog.

You have to listen to your market and learn from it. I was surprised that Finding Time does not out-sell The Aristotelian, because I know there's much more value there. Nevertheless, I was shocked to learn that promotions for Finding Time tended to drive more sales of The Aristotelian! I'm by no means an expert or even mildly competent in this marketing business, but I do know that the sales numbers tell me.

If you have a book that is not selling fast enough as an ebook, it's only going to sell more slowly if you bring out a paper edition.

Conversely, if you can reach a good-sized market that wants your ebook, the numbers may justify multiple editions: trade paperback, hardback, signed-and-numbered collector's edition. Each of these editions will be an opportunity to wring more sales out of your market. Personally, I think every bookshelf and coffee table would look a lot better with a leather-bound, glossy paper, signed-and-numbered boxed copy of Finding Time.

Sadly, I think I'm the only one who thinks that. And that's why I won't bring out that edition until I've got the sales to justify the expense and trouble.
(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)