Chicken Scratchings

Posts Tagged ‘Business’

15 stacks of books higher than this

by Bill Ruesch

Latest figures based on ISBN’s reveal that the US published nearly 190,000 books last year.  If you assume an average thickness of 1″ per book, and stacked them one on top of the other you’d have fifteen stacks of books each stack taller than the Empire State Building in New York. Last year–15 stacks of books taller than the Empire State Building. This wasn’t over a ten or twenty year stretch, but just last year. Try to visualize these fifteen stacks standing beside the Empire State Building and then imagine what would happen to the streets of New York City if two, five, or ten year’s worth of published books were stacked among the buildings.

All of this is from US publishing alone!  Another 130,000 books were published in the UK. If you added these books to the stacks it would create another ten more Empire State sized stacks. It boggles the mind.

The Questions to Ask

• Does my book stand a chance?
  • The odds are, please excuse the pun, stacked against you.  Every hour of every day over 21 books are published in the US. The competition is unbelievably tough, but as difficult as it is, if you don’t enter the fray you are guaranteed to fail. Remember as difficult as it is to win a lottery, lotteries are won every day. Like Han Solo said in the movie Star Wars, “Never tell me the odds kid.” That is the attitude you must adopt.
• What is the best path for me to pursue in getting my book sold and read?
  
  • First dispel the notion that all you have to do is write well and you’ll become rich and famous. That’s a fairy tale. There is no happily ever after for 99% or more of all authors. Even Mark Twain in his heyday knew the value of marketing. It has been recorded that he had 10,000 people selling his books for him. If Mark Twain had to arrange for his own book sales, it isn’t too far of a stretch to think that you would have to too. Even traditionally published authors have to participate in selling.  The Red Hen Association has downloaded an interview with a contemporary published author, Casey Sherman. Mr. Sherman has some very enlightening things to say about book selling today. Check it out at Casey Sherman interview.
  • Consider the genre of your book. Small independent publishers produce four times as many nonfiction titles as fiction. There is a reason for this disparity. A nonfiction book usually has an identifiable market.  A book of fiction has a more difficult time locating its audience; however, a novel has the potential for much greater sales in the long run. According to  http://BookStatistics.com popular fiction comprises 55% of book sales, followed by 10% religious nonfiction, and 9% cooking and crafts.
• How many books do I have to sell to make money?
  • Large publishers say they have to sell 10,000 books to break even, but for self-publishers without huge overheads break even can come much sooner. It is difficult to name a figure for profitability because costs of printing, editing, art, illustration, and cover design can, and do differ for each book. Simple math is all it takes to determine earnings. Add all the sales and then subtract all of the costs. Be sure to keep records of all costs including transportation to and from events, mail and shipping expenses, professional services like accountants and attorneys, meals if you are out of town, etc. Not only will you want to report expenses to the IRS to decrease your taxes, but you can’t get an accurate break even number without it. Self-publishing is a business. It’s best if you treat it as a business and not a hobby.
• How have other authors done it ?
  • In today’s world it is easier and more difficult at the same time to be heard among the babble. The Internet makes it possible to reach out to the entire world. You can setup and start a blog for free in minutes. Just think, you can launch a soap box and speak to the whole world right now. The problem is that 175,000 other blogs are started each day according to Cnet. Nonetheless, a blog has become a necessity. A stagnant blog, will not serve you. Just because you build a blog site doesn’t mean that you will attract visitors. You have to market the site, in order to market yourself and your book.
  • Arrange speaking engagements where you can sell and sign copies of books.
  • Go to where the potential readership goes. If your book is about race car drivers, see if you can get the book into NASCAR events. Maybe your book is about fairies, go to FaerieCon or other fairy festivals. Got a cookbook? Go to places where cooking is the topic. Be creative and think in terms of places people might be who would relate to your book even if it is a stretch. I have a friend who writes books about Dutch oven cooking. He has an arrangement with a Dutch oven manufacturer to put a sales piece about his books in the box of every oven they sell.
  • Be fearless. Call on buyers for stores and ask them to stock your book.
  • Get your book on library shelves. Contact the American Library Association for places and times of librarian conferences.

  Will these tips really work? They aren’t guaranteed, but they will help. The biggest tip is make your own fame. If you find a way to become a household name, you will sell books. There’s your guarantee.

What is there about business that allows people do terrible things to one another and justify it with, “It isn’t personal, it’s just business?’ Those same people in all other areas of their lives are caring, concerned, and helpful — with the possible exception of driving cars. There’s something about getting behind the wheel of an automobile that turns nice folks into competitive savages.

It has been said that we all have the capacity for good and evil inside of us. I suppose that is true because as a child I found myself doing something mean for no particular reason. I’d like to believe that I’ve outgrown that, and have risen above my mean streak. Mature people learn to replace hostility with nobility of character. Don’t they?

Therefore I was deeply shocked and disturbed when a person I’ve known for many years, and know to have the highest moral values, insisted I stop discussing the immorality of buying book printing from China, because it created feelings of guilt. Huh? Moral people don’t feel guilt if there is nothing wrong and there is something really wrong with Chinese printing competition — wrong, and dangerous to us and the American way of life.

I won’t expound on the China problem in this post, but please go to my post Chinese Printers Play Dirty In Stealing US Customers for more explanation.

Did you ever see one of those signs that said, “Don’t Walk on the Grass!”? If one person or a dozen, walks on the grass it won’t cause any real harm, will it? No, of course not, but if hundreds, or thousands, or if one person crosses that same place thousands of times will it injure the grass? Absolutely.

If one self-publisher, or one traditional publisher, sends a book title to China to be printed will it cause damage? No, but if printing goes overseas as the same rate of other US manufacturing jobs, we are surely on the path to becoming a third world nation. Again see my post for further detail. Is that an outrageous claim on my part? It sure sounds outrageous, even I will admit that. How could it happen? This is America after all, the land of the free.  If it costs too much to buy from this country don’t we have the right to buy from another? Oh yes, we have the right but is it the right thing to do? If our actions today, create a third world economy in the United States, who will be looking out for the disadvantaged in the world? Will China, Iran, or Venezuela step up and set the moral standard? Think about it. What will happen to the world if the United States of America is no longer in a position to help right the wrongs?

The congress and the business moguls have been selling us out for many, many years. Our cities are emptying because manufacturing jobs have been going off-shore. Who benefits from the reduced costs multinational corporations enjoy from cheap labor? Is it the US workers? No, it is the greedy tyrants at the top of the pyramid insisting that, “It isn’t personal, it’s just business.” The same in China. The workers suffer and the elite prosper.

There is only one way to defend ourselves and our way of life, stop buying products made in China. My wife and I are on a diet. I saw an offer for a diabetic cookbook promoted by Publisher’s Clearinghouse that looked promising, so I ordered it. My wife noticed the label on the back saying it was made in China. We returned it.

We went to Costco. They were selling women’s clothing made in the USA. The skirts and tops were more than what we could have bought from stores featuring off-shore goods, but the USA tag sold us.

The two of us are walking on the grass, or in this case, the noxious weeds. We know we can’t have much impact. Alone we won’t stop the ruination of America, but we will do what we can and we invite everyone who loves America to do the same.  Stomp, stomp, stomp.

I’ve been following the tirade over Harlequin’s effort to create a self-publishing division. I don’t understand the fuss and bother. By insisting Harlequin use the term Vanity instead of Self, isn’t the publishing industry really bullying authors into wearing a Scarlet V of shame? Haven’t we matured since the mid-1600′s when John Milton self-published? I can almost hear the grade school chants of “Cry baby titty mouse, laid an egg in Grandma’s house” when the phrase vanity publishing is tossed about.

First of all, let’s set the record straight. Self-publishing is not vanity publishing. Both self-publishers and vanity publishers share one trait, they pay for all of the expenses of publishing a book out-of-pocket. The difference between the two is in the distinction made by intention. Self-publishing is a business–the business is distributing and selling books. Self-publishers should be respected if not for their works, for their courage. How many traditionally published authors can honestly say they have the moxie to do the same?

Vanity press is reserved for those who want to have a book in print, but have no intention of sales and distribution beyond their immediate group of family and friends. What is wrong with that? A book from the heart speaks more to love than vanity.

Better remember who runs things here.

Do you really think that is right to deride an author whose dreams are fulfilled once the printed and bound book is in their hands? I don’t. I don’t know what dictionary the publishing world is looking at when they call these people vain. It’s the equivalent of using a racial slur. It’s ugly and should stop right here and now. Vanity publishing may be an accepted term, but it is time to scour it from the lexicon.

Maybe it is because the publishing competition is so fierce, but with the possible exception of professional wrestling, there seems to me more criticism, chiding, and mean-spirited bickering among writers than in any other industry. Psychologists will tell you that this childish name calling behavior comes from insecurity and fear. Are the mighty publishing houses and best selling authors really afraid of Aunt Martha in Iowa making an attempt at the brass ring without hamstringing her with the scarlet V? She will have plenty of other rivers to cross like distribution, marketing, etc.

Trust the public. The people will decide with their money what they want to read, and who they want to read. If we continue insisting on antiquated terms to protect the high and mighty, maybe we ought to take another look at who’s really vain.

Bite your Tongue.

Those who decide to self-publish can hold their heads high, because they are counted among some of greatest authors in history. Below is but a partial list of authors who have chosen to self-publish at sometime in their career.

• William Blake, Ken Blanchard, Robert Bly,Lord Byron, Willa Cather, Stephen Crane,
  
• e.e. cummings,  Alexander Dumas, T.S. Eliot,Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Benjamin Franklin,
  
• Zane Grey, Thomas Hardy, Nathaniel Hawthorne,Ernest Hemingway, Robinson Jeffers,
  
• Stephen King, Rudyard Kipling, Louis L’Amour, D.H. Lawrence, Anais Nin, Thomas Paine,
  
• Tom Peters, Edgar Allen Poe, Alexander Pope, Beatrix Potter, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust,
  
• Carl Sandburg, Robert Service, George Bernard Shaw, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Upton Sinclair,
  
• Gertrude Stein, William Strunk, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoi,
  
• Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman.

Note: The list was pulled from John Kremer’s Self-Publishing Hall of Fame

If you don’t find at least one of your heroes here I would be very surprised. Also you may have noticed that quite a few poets populate the list. Modern poets complain that publishers aren’t interested in their books. It’s said that poetry doesn’t sell. Compared to a fast paced pop-novel of sex, violence, and action they are probably right. I have to keep reminding myself that publishing isn’t primarily about getting the finest works into the public’s hands–it’s a profit generating business like a grocery store. If the stock isn’t turning it is costing money. I, like many others, tend to glamorize the traditional publishing houses and imbue them with a nobility they just don’t have. It’s a business. Poetry, on the other hand, is something else. Poetry is a work of passion, not business. Publishers probably weren’t any more anxious to publish poetry then than they are now and that is why so many poets had to resort to self-publishing.

The Old Man

One of my readers added this comment about self-publishers: “For me all I had to do was find out that Hemingway’s first book was “self-published,” to help me make my decision and after 32 years of “practice” I feel I did it just right. And then later this year when I found out about Mark Twain’s force of ten thousand book agents scattered across America selling his works and Ulysses S Grant’s Memoirs (also published by Twain’s company which was run by his young nephew Webster).” Miles Cobbett, Author the Alaskan book CHAMPION.

Miles followed up with this comment in another post: “One more tasty tidbit about Hemingway and his publisher, that I bet you already know is his lively discussions in letters between him and Charles Scribner about Royalty Payments. I was fascinated to read in copies of Hemingway’s “Letters” that CS only offered to pay Ernest Hemingway 10 % of the net. And Ernest wrote back in a lively letter that he wanted 15 % or a Minimum of 12.5 %…
This was fascinating to me, especially when I read in the other book I wrote to you about, (Birth of a Salesman), how Mark Twain offered and paid U. S. Grant and his widow, a whopping 70% of the profits from publishing Grant’s Memoirs.”

I have more sympathy for the traditional publishers than you might think from reading my posts. They have to have highly tuned crystal balls to foresee the future. If they choose to take a gamble on an author, and it tanks, what do they lose? Why the entire investment, of course. And what about credibility? What happens to the employee who stands behind a book bomb? Or two, or three? Can you say pink slip?

If you know your book will sell–you stand behind it. Raise the money to print and promote it. You might be like my friend Miles Corbbett whom I quoted above. His self-published book CHAMPION is selling well and he owes it all to word-of-mouth advertising. Miles has this to say about his success: “Getting the word out has been a fun & challenging journey, but it’s all been done so far without any help from a Madison Avenue super advertising blitz.”

If you are a self-publisher, considering self-publishing, or a supplier to self-publishers be sure to check out the manifesto for The Red Hen Association of Self-Publishing Authors, Inc. (click here).

Mark Twain had an army of ten-thousand salesmen peddling his books all over the country. He understood the principles of marketing as they applied to his time. Today’s marketing is different and requires an understanding of blogging, social networking, books on Amazon, etc. You can get that information from The Author Platform (TAP). It’s not free but almost click (here) for more information. If you can sell your book yourself you’ll earn 15 times more than if you traditionally publish.

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This article was republished with permission from the author’s blog Talking Through My Hat.