No Sales = No Royalties

Spending too much or even too little on your book production can harm you as a self-publisher in ways your may not ever know. You may have the greatest story or the best information on the planet, but if the book buyer isn’t attracted enough to your book to at least pick it up and review the cover and some of the pages, you won’t get a sale.

And why should you as the author be as crass as to dirty your hands with such a mundane thing as book sales? There is a sales to royalty equation that goes like this no sales = no royalties. It would be nice if we could earn money on our writing without having to convince a reader to give it to us, but we can’t. Book sales and book marketing isn’t just a silly inconvenience, it is the truly the engine of publishing.

Critical Questions for the Self-Publishing Author

• What form should your book take to maximize marketability and sales?
  • Do my prospective readers want a hardcover book?
  • Will a soft-cover book appeal more to the readers?
  • Are the readers looking for a bargain or a keepsake?

Presentation Makes All of the Difference

Example of Celestial Seasoning's art

I learned this lesson myself some twenty years ago. At the time, I was working for a natural health magazine in the advertising sales department. One of my favorite advertisers was Celestial Seasonings herbal teas. Their marketing was second to none. Every time they introduced a new product, they hired top-notch illustrators to create the image used on the boxes and ads. They were beautiful. It wasn’t uncommon to have two to three Celestial Seasonings full-page ads in every issue and I can tell you they really dressed up the magazine.

Then as a foil to Celestial Seasonings, was a 1/6 page, black and white, ad for a book which I won’t name for obvious reasons. Their advertisement was ugly to the point of hideousness. It was poorly designed and the photo looked like someone kicked around before inserting it. We tried to bury the ad in places where it wouldn’t wreck our precious image.

We had in place a system to help track advertising results. Celestial Seasonings, of course, always pulled a good response, but at the end of the day, the ugly little black and white book ad would pull equally well, and often more, than Celestial Seasonings. Why? We came up with a lot of theories, but the one that sticks with me after all these years is that book advertisers were consistent with their target buyers. Celestial Seasonings appealed more to the artistic, upscale, yuppie audience. The ugly book ad looked cheap, and offered their product at a discount. It was consistent. The look of the ad matched the purpose. How many books would be sold if they went in with beautiful, full-page ads? I think that their cost would be much greater and their sales would have been less because the message wouldn’t match the purpose.

Make Sure the Message is Consistent with the Marketing

Authors, think about the main purpose of your book, and how you intend to market it. If you can get a clear picture in your mind, many of the questions will answer themselves.

I can shed some light on the subject; after all I’ve been in printing and publishing for 35+ years.

1.  Typos are like car accidents – no matter what you do to prevent them they still happen. The first car accident on record happened in Ohio in 1891. Since there probably wasn’t another automobile in sight the driver hit a hitching post (no one knows if alcohol was involved). Even though there weren’t enough cars in existence to have a crash, a crash still occurred. Typos will happen. That doesn’t mean you should ignore them. No. You should make every effort to find and crush them, but to save yourself some grief, just remember, you probably won’t succeed.

I read a blurb in a trade magazine years ago where one of the major dictionary publishers said that they go through  132 proofing steps every time there is a new edition, and they still find errors. That doesn’t mean authors should slough off grammar mistakes and typos, but they shouldn’t beat themselves up over it either. Just be sure to fix it before the next printing.

2.  What you need is a divided personality. Except for a professional athlete perhaps, does anyone have a bigger ego than an author? If we didn’t believe in the value of what we write we wouldn’t write at all. We’ve worked hard to hone our skills and we believe that our book is a jewel just waiting to be discovered. Self-confidence is not a bad thing until it gets in our way. It is hard to see a dangerous pothole in the road when we are blinded by the headlights of our own egos. How many people try out for American Idol believing that they can sing and go away defeated and insulted when faced with the truth. We’ve all picked up books that are so bad we wonder how they ever got published. Before you trick yourself into believing something untrue, seek professional input.

3.  Never, never, never send your book off to print without professional editing. I don’t care how good you are, no one, and I mean no one, should try to edit their own book. As human beings we all have a kind of blindness associated with our writing. Our wonderful, creative minds generate the words we put on the page. This same mind can look at a sentence we’ve written with an error in it and we will mentally correct the mistake so that it passes by totally unseen by us.

A writer who deems himself/herself able to edit his/her own book is like the attorney who represents himself in court. The attorney has a fool for a client and so does the author. I know, it isn’t easy to let someone tamper with your baby. Carefully consider your choice of editors. Select one you respect enough so that if they call your baby ugly, you may not agree, but you’ll be inclined to listen.

4.  What is the editor’s job? That’s a good question and the answer is — it depends. Don’t ask for a light edit or proofreading only unless you have had a heavy edit first. Proofreaders check for punctuation, spelling errors, and standard grammar usage. Heavy Editing or Copy editing involve such things as checking sentence structure, diction, sense (vagueness), mixed metaphors, use of passive voice, and flow.  Ghost Writing and Book Doctoring involve something more intense. This type of editor will analyze the book and make the changes or write the copy if the author isn’t skilled. When should you call in a Book Doctor? If you know your skills are weak call one in at the very beginning, or if during heavy editing it becomes obvious that major structural changes need to take place.

Is that all? Not hardly, there are technical editors, indexers, photo editors, acquisition editors, etc. What an author needs to take into consideration is that publishing a book is a complicated and difficult task. No matter how professional the editorial team is, no one is perfect. Mistakes will be made, but everything is correctable. After all, printing is just ink on paper.

5.  You have only yourself to blame if you don’t carefully select your editors. If you are being traditionally published you don’t have a choice. Self-publishers on the other hand are required to choose unless they go to one of those Internet book mills. You know the places who advertise low prices, speedy production, and quality work? If they can put their services on sale you can bet that their services are bottom of the barrel. Don’t let your precious baby toddle off into the lackadaisical arms of strangers. They may seem very nice, but if your book never gets a chance because it is sub-standard it doesn’t matter how nice the people were, or how low the price was, does it? Don’t cut yourself short.

The God’s-honest-truth is that most self-published books are sub-standard. The Red Hen Association has been formed in part to help and encourage authors improve their quality. If self-publishing is ever going to break into the mainstream we will have to overwhelm it with quality books. Otherwise, we self-publishers will be forever viewed as second rate.

One e-reader = how many bookshelves?

Don’t Believe the E-book Skeptics

Originally posted at the Huffington Post

Slate’s technology writer Farhad Manjoo recently wrote a very interesting article about some off-base predictions of yore about our digital future. He focuses on a whopper of a Newsweek column from 1995 (which is actually titled “The Internet? Bah!“) about how the Internet would be a passing fad because, among other things, online shopping can’t replicate the experience of a salesperson, an online database can’t replace a daily newspaper, and the Internet was so jumbled he couldn’t even find the date of the Battle of Trafalgar.

Whoops.

Rather than just hardy har har-ing at the article, Manjoo takes a different, and very insightful approach. He notes that the author of the article was hardly a Luddite – he was actually deep in the weeds of the early Internet. The problem with the article wasn’t that the author was dumb, the problem was that he was looking strictly at the Internet of 1995 and ignoring the potential for innovation and change.

Manjoo lays out four principles for more successful predictions about our digital future:

1. Good predictions are based on current trends
2. Don’t underestimate people’s capacity for change
3. New stuff sometimes come out of the blue
4. These days it’s best to err on the side of (technological) optimism

When people make predictions about our e-book future, I find myself mystified that some people are so dismissive of their inevitability. I see blog posts and comments around the Internet from people who look at the nascent e-book landscape and think, “Blech. Expensive grayscale Kindles in a white piece of plastic? No way e-books are going to catch on!” Some people admit that they’re going to be a part of our lives, but do so grudgingly and see them as yet another signpost that we’re all going to hell in a handbasket.

Here’s the thing they ignore: e-books are only going to get better.

Move over Nostradamus, here are some predictions about our digital book future:

1. The e-book reading experience is only going to improve.

Sure – not everyone loves the current grayscale Kindles and tiny iPhone reading experience, particularly for books that are illustrated or are beautifully designed. But better devices are coming and it’s going to open up a new era of book design of unlimited possibility.

I remember that my high school English teacher told us that when William Faulkner was writing THE SOUND AND THE FURY he wished he could have published the text in different colors to denote the different perspectives, but obviously that would have been prohibitively expensive for publishers at the time. Not anymore. With the iPad and other devices coming soon, E-books are going color.

Tomorrow’s writers are going to have almost limitless ability to include beautiful color photos and art and interactivity and creative design even in the mass-est of mass market books, the ones that are currently printed on cheap paper and sold on supermarket racks and where the idea of including anything colorful or design-y besides the cover is laughable.

Think of how much a fancy illustrated book costs now and then think about how cheaply that can be done digitally. E-books may be uglier than print books now, but they’re about to get more beautiful.

2. E-readers and e-books are only going to get cheaper.

Sure, right now e-readers are out of reach for much of the population. That’s going to change. Every new technology is out of reach until it gets cheaper. Digital toys that would once have sold for $100 are now given out in McDonald’s Happy Meals. Lower prices for iPad-like devices of the future are inevitable.

And while publishers are currently taking a stand against deeply discounted e-books, the $12.99-$14.99 price point that they are fighting for is still half the cost of a $25 hardcover.

It’s soon going to be possible to buy e-books cheaply on an affordable e-reader device, and they’re going to be more colorful and interactive than most of their print counterparts.

3. Finding the books you want to read will only get easier.

One of the most common fears about the coming era is that no one will be able to find the good books in a time when anyone can just upload their novel to Amazon. It’s the Fear of the Jumble, which was also expressed in that column at Newsweek, where the author complained that (in 1995) you couldn’t even find the date of the Battle of Trafalgar on the Internet. He didn’t realize that Google and Wikipedia would come along to give you that answer in mere seconds.

Already there are sites like Goodreads and Shelfari cropping up that allow people to swap reviews and recommendations about books. People increasingly find new books through blogs, forums, and heck, hearing from an author directly. It was never really possible before for authors to reach their audience directly – now it’s a piece of cake.

Humans are really, really good at organizing things. If we can organize the billions and billions of web pages out there so that we can find what we want within a few seconds I think we can manage a few million books.

4. People are ignoring the digital trend.

I was watching a Seinfeld rerun the other day and there was a funny moment when Elaine hated a movie she was watching so much she called the video store and threatened not to rewind it. I’m going to have to explain this joke to my kids. And then I’m going to tell them about this funny thing we used to have where used to get these things called DVDs in the mail rather than having them downloaded straight to the TV (or wall or inside our eyeballs or whatever we’re watching movies on in the future).

Everything that can be digitized is being digitized because it’s cheaper and easier to send pixels around the world than physical objects. First it was music, then newspapers, then movies. Books are next in line.

5. Habits change

Yes, yes. The smell of books, reading in the bathtub, writing in the margins, a bookshelf full of books, etc. etc.

People will still have that choice and there are some books that simply can’t be replicated digitally. But when faced with a better option, consumers shift extremely quickly. Right now the benefits of e-books are a little murky except for early adopters and those that can afford the devices. But that’s just right now. Pretty soon they’re going to be better (color! design! portable! interactivity! instantaneous!) and cheaper. Readers won’t pay a premium for an inferior print product out of habit and nostalgia in great numbers.

The e-book era is going to be one of incredible innovation and unlimited opportunity, and people who don’t see e-books dominating the future of the book world are ignoring the coming innovation and creativity and affordability. I refuse to believe the skeptics and pessimists. Books are about to get better.

Be sure to visit these related posts: You Can Never Trust An E-Book and How Can You Call an e-Book a Real Book?

I remember a television interview with John Lennon of The Beatles fame. The question asked was, “Do you know when making an album which songs will be hits?”

John Lennon didn't know

John replied that he never knew, in fact the ones that made it often surprised him. I think that is probably true of books too. Sometimes, not frequently, but sometimes, a book succeeds even when the author wishes it wouldn’t. Take the case of J.D. Salinger who detested the success of The Catcher in the Rye, when asked in an interview, “Did you think it would be such a popular book?”

Salinger’s response was, “It’s been a nightmare.” And that was all he would say on the subject.

By a raise of hands how many authors out there would be unhappy if they had his success? I know that I wouldn’t. I’d be jumping up and down and praising the Lord. My dream come true was Salinger’s nightmare.

How can you know if your book will be a bestseller?

How can you know if your book is going to be a hit? You can’t. There are too many factors involved to make anything a sure deal. You can have a beautifully written manuscript, with superior editing, a wonderful design and even though it should sell – it won’t. There just aren’t any guarantees.

Let me give you an example from my own life experience. Twenty-six years ago I was involved in publishing a natural health magazine called The Herbalist. As a service to our advertisers, and a way to monitor ad response, we included a bingo card. For those who don’t know, a bingo card in a magazine has nothing to do with the popular game named Bingo. It is a mail-back card with numbers matching numbers inserted into the advertisements. A reader could circle the number on the ad that interested them. We collected the data and sent computer printouts to the advertisers. Sometimes an advertiser would get pages and pages of response and sometimes they would get very little. What surprised me was the success of a tiny, 1/6th page black and white ad for a book. The ad was poorly designed and the photo used was so bad that it looked like someone dropped it and ground it into the dirt with their heel. It was so ugly we took great pains to place it in inconspicuous places so it wouldn’t ruin the look of our magazine. Month after month this small ugly ad pulled some of the best response. It often out-pulled beautiful, full page, full-color ads.

We tried to come up with an explanation of why this was happening. Someone suggested that the ad looked so cheesy that people assumed it was a bargain. Others thought the subject of the ad was more germane to our readership. We didn’t know what the truth of it was then, and still don’t today. Things work or they don’t.

There is only one guaranteed way to fail

That’s the point with publishing. There is no guaranteed way to succeed and only one guaranteed way to fail. The sure way to fail is to not publish. Maybe J.D. Salinger should have gone this route. It could have saved him a life of seclusion.

Can you improve your chances of success? You bet! There are many roads you can take to promote your book. The good news is, if one road doesn’t work for you another might, and The Red Hen Association of Self-Publishing Authors has been formed to help you succeed by shining a light on the path. We will do our best to help you, but the real magic is to keep trying. Don’t give in to discouragement and keep trying. That’s the best advice anyone can give.

In my last post, I tried to make a distinction between vanity publishing and self-publishing. I also tried, with limited success, to convince the readers that the very word vanity is insulting. What I don’t understand and I hope someone will explain it to me, is why authors, particularly those who paid their dues and know how difficult it is to succeed in publishing, would want to continue labeling other authors with the demeaning term vanity.

Just because an author wants to print and distribute a book to a limited audience doesn’t make them vain.  Family histories, poetry, even cookbooks usually come about as a labor of love. I thought about Love Publishing as a possibility and then decided it would probably be misinterpreted as an euphemism for romance or sex.

Instead I suggest that we re-name this type of publishing as limited. Limited Publishing instead of vanity is kinder, and really more accurate, don’t you agree?

2. Self-Publishing

New authors are vulnerable and there are plenty of people just waiting to fleece them. Whether they are wolves or knaves doesn’t really matter–the point is RUN away from them as fast as you can.

I have nothing but scorn for those publishing businesses that prey on the dreams of new authors to tap their wallets and bleed them dry. There is an abundance of trip-ups and traps in alternative publishing. One tip-off is praise that is too lavish. Once they say the book will only need light editing–watch out.  Stephen King in his Author’s Note at the end of his recent book Dome, wrote “Nan Graham edited the book down from the original dinosaur to a beast of slightly more manageable size; every page of the manuscript was marked with her changes.”  If Stephen King requires heavy editing, what do you suppose a fledgling author might need?

Many claim that they will produce your book and market it through catalogs or other means.  Authors write to me about using these services and discovering, too late, that they are just a number, a notch in the publisher’s belt. After signing on the dotted line and paying their fees they were turned over to employees with questionable skills.  One author told me that when speaking with a graphic designer she was told to peruse clip art and select her own graphic for the cover.

This author sent me a copy of her book. I read it cover-to-cover because I wanted to know for myself if it was a worthy book. It was. It was an excellent book. The cover art, however, violated all of the basic rules of good graphic design. It utilized four different type fonts, and the graphic was a small smiley face. The design fought the intention of the book. The book’s message was serious and the cover was silly. There were other problems with the inside layout too. So the author paid good money to get her book produced and she should have kept it in the bank instead. Remember no one will buy your book if they can’t get past the cover.

Don’t, please don’t, place your precious manuscript into the hands of publishing grist mills who hire the incompetent, the unknowledgeable, or inexperienced just to keep their costs down.

A bargain price should be your first tip-off. When they offer you a special deal or are having a sale, run the other way. These companies do not care about you or your book, their only concern is that you give them money and they produce it as cheaply as possible so they can maximize their profits.

If your ultimate goal is to someday sell your self-published book to a traditional publisher, you won’t impress anyone if your book appears to be sub-par. Doesn’t your book deserve the best chance of success you can give it?

I’m not just talking through my hat here. Yesterday I was asked by a librarian to tell her about book publishing in today’s world. I am not a publisher, but she thought my print production experience would give me an understanding.  One thing is very evident, everything that was once true before, is not true now.

The traditional book publishing business has changed dramatically. In the past a publisher bought the rights to an author’s book, they edited the book, typeset the book, promoted the book, they printed the book, and they distributed the book. In return the author received a royalty. Today publishers demand that the author do most of the promotion. The author has to set up their own book signings and public relations tours. And the biggest surprise of all is that if an author is over fifty or deceased you can forget about it. In the past the quality of the literature reigned supreme. Not anymore. By today’s publishing standards Emily Dickinson’s poems would have never seen the light of day.

What’s going on with publishing? In my opinion it is too focused on the almighty dollar and is losing its soul. Can you say profit motive?

Mountains of Books

It could be because the shear magnitude of manuscripts circulating is overwhelming. In fact, most traditional publishers will not accept a manuscript unless it comes to them first through a trusted literary agent. They’ve barricaded themselves in their towers and I believe, cutting off their noses to spite their faces. I know, I know, those are cliches and not a particularly good ones, but it makes my point. Traditional publishing has become a closed loop. If you are in the loop, you’ll get published, if not, good damn luck.

The tragedy is that the pressure is on the popular authors to keep knockin’ ‘em out at a speed that keeps the cash registers ringing, but floods the public with marginal work. It has the feel of an egg farm. Just keep the authors on the roost pushing out eggs as fast as they can.

No wonder everyone thinks they can be a writer, when the bar is set so low. Much of the material that gets through to the bookshelves is not worth reading. I can’t believe that those authors are proud of their work. How could they be? Today’s system turns potentially good authors into hacks. Is that too strong? I’m sorry, but if anyone has laid down good money to buy a book, knowing it is light beach reading, and found it falling short of that expectation, then there is something really wrong with the system. Publishers, especially well-known publishing houses should guard their honor with their lives. Maybe is is just me, but if their stamp is on a book, the public should be able to trust that it has real intrinsic value.

What about authors who haven’t found a place in the closed loop? Self-publishing is their only hope. What do I mean by that? If you have a manuscript that in your opinion, must be published you can do it yourself. The traditionalists haven’t thought very highly of what they call vanity publishing. Vanity publishers have been mocked and derided. If you had to resort to self-publishing you were considered to be a second rate author. That belief is disappearing. Some excellent writers are self-publishing now to earn more profit on the book sales, or are using the book sales as a bargaining point to secure a better publishing contract. Numbers talk.

Today, since the publishers have pulled back into their shells, authors have no choice but to do all the work themselves. It’s like the old Golden Books story of The Little Red Hen.  After all of the work is done and the book is selling well, then, and only then will the publishers get interested.  I tell you it is the profit motive.

Richard Paul Evans wrote and promoted his little book called the Christmas Box Story. He was so successful in selling it that the publisher paid over $4 million dollars for the rights. He proved that his book was a viable piece of property and the publisher who now wanted in, paid dearly for it.  That’s where publishing is going. You self-publish, you self-promote, you keep a bigger slice of the pie, and if you get a good enough offer, you sell it, if you want to. Some publisher-authors may never want to get in that game at all.

Most of us would-be-published-authors are best expressing ourselves through the written word. That’s why we write. Unfortunately in today’s publishing environment whether you self or traditionally publish you will be required to market/sell your book. What do you do? Where do you start? You can follow the steps outlined in the author platform. I can personally vouch for it because I’ve done it and still refer to it even now. Follow this link to learn how you can participate for a nominal cost.

This article Reprinted with permission from Talking Through My Hat, originally posted Jan 27, 2009

What, you don’t believe it? According to my Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary the act of writing is all it takes to become an author. If you wrote something, you are an author.

To become a published author is another thing altogether. For most of us the ultimate goal is to see our books in print and distributed to readers everywhere.  After all, what is a writer without a reader? It’s Yin and Yang. Two halves of the whole. As far as I’m concerned a manuscript in a desk drawer defines you as an author, but something definitely is missing.

There are only two approaches you can take to get published. You can do it yourself (self-publish) or find someone else to publish it for you (traditional publish). How do the two choices compare?

At first blush it appears that the easiest path is to sell your rights and let someone else publish your book. Let’s face it this is what most of us think of when we talk about being published. The biggest hurdle with the traditional publishing model is that  4% or less of manuscripts will ever become a book. And for that 4% there are probably thousands that never even make it to a publisher’s desk. It’s pretty obvious that if your manuscript doesn’t get read, it will not be published. I’ve said it before, if you are unknown, getting a book published through traditional channels is like winning the lottery. The odds are that bad.

Let’s compare the two methods and help you decide which way is best for you:

weigh your decisions carefully

1.  Who accepts the financial risk? If self-publishing you pay for all the costs involved in producing the book including the editors, artists, and printers. In traditional publishing the publisher takes on that burden.

2.   Who has creative control over the look and presentation of the book? If you do it yourself, you retain the rights. If you sell those rights to the publisher they can do whatever they think is best. That doesn’t seem important to you? It will if the publisher changes the meaning of the text through their editing, or comes up with a cover design that would lead readers to a totally opposite idea from what you meant. It happens.  Your only remedy you have is whining.  Selling your rights will give you money, but it may not give you peace of mind. Which is more important to you?

3.  Who arranges for distribution? If self-published, the burden is all yours. No matter how good the book is, please keep in-mind that some channels, like national bookstore chains, may not be available to you. Many booksellers have a policy against accepting self-published books, but If  your book is traditionally published, and your publisher pays for distribution, many of those guarded gates will be opened. It doesn’t seem fair, but that’s the game.

4.  What about marketing? Marketing is doing all of the things needed to promote the book, making fliers, public relations, appearing on TV talk shows, and radio programs. Issuing press releases, teaching seminars, speaking at schools, clubs, and wherever you can find an audience. You’d think that if traditionally published your publisher would handle all of this. Wrong. Most book contracts today require the author’s active involvement in promoting the book. That involvement is much more than showing up for the occasional book signing.  So, whether self-published or traditionally published, you dear author, must by contract, be hawking your book, mostly at your own expense.  If you don’t drum up sales your book won’t move, except from the shelves inside the store into the discount bins outside. If that happens, your chances of ever being traditionally published again are astronomical.

5.  Profits, ah profits, who gets the money? The one who takes the risk takes the money. If you are lucky you’ll earn between $.50 -$1.00 per book in royalties. Sell ten thousand books and you get $5 to $10 thousand dollars. That same book, if self-published, could generate $150 thousand dollars.

The self-publishing model is heaven made for those authors who believe in their product and are sure that they can find a market. It is costly and difficult to self-publish, but if you are right and you can successfully reach your readers, the amount of money you could make is much greater. You can have financial freedom and personal freedom as well.

Which way is best? It all depends on you. Either way, it will take energy, money, and lots of effort. After putting everything you have into it, it may not be enough. If the traditional route is the one you choose, the odds are that you will never be published. If you self-publish and can’t find your audience, your garage full of books will hang like albatross around your neck. But remember, that even though the odds are notoriously poor, someone always hits the lottery eventually. Who knows, maybe this time it might be you.