Steven W. Booth's Blog, page 6

The Sheriff Penny Miller Series

Here at Genius Book Publishing, we’ve made several changes in the last couple of weeks. We’ve modified our name, upgraded our site, rearranged our pages around the books, instituted a blog, and we’ve started to attract a lot move visitors because of it. Thank you to all our new visitors.

What we haven’t done is talk about our books (except tangentially—see our post about Digital Rights Management). I’ve ranted, I’ve done complex economic analyses. It is time to talk books.

Our first book, The Hungry, written by Harry Shannon and Steven W. Booth (which is to say, me), was released in October 2011. Compared to the sales results of many small presses, this book was a success. To date, we have sold over 4,500 copies, and sales are still continuing. Here are some of the nice things other people have said about it:

“Penny Miller is one of the funniest, kickass, amazing heroines ever written. I’m not kidding this book is just balls to the wall straight up zombie killing, gore fest of awesomesauce.” —Contagious Reads


“…the characters are the story. Shannon and Booth surround Penny Miller with men of questionable morals and backbone, and she’s not afraid to take the lead.” —SF Signal


“This woman—Sheriff Penny Miller—knows how to take care of business. ” —GoodReads


“Rather than trying to take itself seriously, [The Hungry] focuses on just the pure outrageousness of a given situation and exploits it in a way that leaves you grinning and wanting for more. I was thoroughly entertained.” —The Novel Blog

In Sheriff Penny Miller, we have created a character that every woman wants to be, and every man wants, period. (Okay, maybe not everyone, but let’s just say, lots and lots.) She and her companions, Scratch, Terrill Lee, and Sheppard, have made a great impression on our readers, and generated quite a bit of loyalty.

With the success of our first book, Harry and I went ahead and wrote The Hungry 2: The Wrath of God. This installment in the Sheriff Penny Miller series launches on July 6, 2012 (about 1 week from the date of this post). We have already had several nice reviews, and more are on the way. Here are two examples:

“…if you read for fun and if you’re looking for a great summer read for that weekend at the beach, the lake, your cabin in the woods or even curled up on the sofa in your air-conditioned living room.  This is the one, especially if you have a hankerin’ for some Zombies.” –Frank Michaels Errington


“The twist and turns the come out of this book are just simply put, awesome. I caught myself yelling and screaming and cheering at my kindle. I was on the edge of my seat the entire time.” –Goodreads.com

When The Hungry 2 launches, both the paperback and the e-book will be available (though it may take a few weeks before you can order the paperback in a bookstore). We wanted to have the e-book in as many different channels as possible, but the realities of the market dictate that it only be available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple iBookstore, and (hopefully soon) Kobo. My apologies to those of you who have chosen alternative e-readers. We’re working hard to make the book available in as many channels as we can without hurting ourselves elsewhere. It’s not easy, believe me.

We have another book coming out within about 6 weeks of this post. Sex, Death & Honey by author Brian Knight will be releasing August 17, 2102. We’re still waiting for reviews to come in, but we expect them soon and we expect them to be complimentary.

Sex, Death & Honey is the first novel in the Misadventures of Butch Quick series, but not the first installment. The prequel, a novella titled Big Trouble in Little Boots, is available now as a digital download right here at the Genius Book Publishing website.

Sex, Death & Honey follows the “seven-foot-tall, 250-pound Native American with a face like a leather football helmet” named Butch Quick. He’s a repo man, bounty hunter, and nightclub bouncer in the employ of his uncle. When he goes to repossess a 1968 Mustang from a neighborhood troublemaker, Butch gets more than he bargained for. By the end of the night, Butch is mixed up with the local drug kingpin, crooked cops, the District Attorney, a foul-mouthed bird, dirty sex, ugly death, and a dangerous woman named Honey.

Look for Sex, Death & Honey to begin receiving excellent reviews in the next few weeks. And don’t forget to pick up the e-book and paperback August 17, 2012.

By the way, some of you may have noticed that Sex, Death & Honey isn’t in the Sheriff Penny Miller series. And you’d be absolutely right. What can we say? Some books are just too awesome to stay on their own page.

What is a Fair Price for an E-Book?

Yesterday, I came across a Facebook post which I decided to repost on my timeline. The Facebook post, for those of you who can’t see it, compared a $3.50 cup of coffee with a $2.99 e-book. The point of the post was that a cup of coffee which can be produced in under a minute is worth more than a book that took 2 years to produce. Whether it should be or not is the question before us.

This Facebook post has been shared over 25 times as of this writing. Obviously a lot of people believe that e-books hold more value than cups of coffee. But a high school friend of mine decided to post a comment on my edition of the post. Here is what he said: “It’s the economy of scale. The ebook can be replicated unlimited times while the coffee can only be consumed once.” While it was nice to hear from him after about 2 decades since we last saw each other, I have to say, in my opinion, that his argument is misleading and essentially false.

My friend’s argument is logical, but inaccurate. He starts with the premise that, because an e-book is electronic data, it has the potential to be copied an unlimited number of times—with the implication that there are actually an infinite number of possible copies available over the lifetime of the book, which is also unlimited. However, even though the book can be reproduced easily, the market for that book—the number of people who may be willing to buy the book—is decidedly limited. The market may be 1 person, or it could be multiple millions, but it is still limited.

Let’s say that an average e-book has a market size of one million readers who will actually pay to read the book (I should wish for a potential market of one million for my books!). My friend’s argument seems to be that, because the book has the potential to sell a million copies, we should price it as if there is a buyer today who is willing to purchase every one of those million copies right now (this concept is known as short run economies of scale). If I could sell a million books today, yes, I can see giving a discount to that buyer that would cover the cost of making the book (author time to write the book, editing, cover art, e-book formatting and conversion, and marketing), and would give me a nice little profit. If the fixed cost of making a book (before a single copy is sold) is, say, $20,000, I as the publisher (not to exclude self-publishers) can only break even if I earn those $20,000 back. As a business, I’m entitled to make a profit on my investment, albeit perhaps a small one. So let’s say I sell one million copies at once (remember, selling them one at a time has a different economic model), then I would need to charge $20,000 plus a profit of, say, $1.00 per book (this is actually kind of low, but remember, we are giving a bulk discount here). The sale price would be $1,020,000, and I should be able to put that money in the bank today.

However, there is NO buyer willing to pick up one million copies of the book today. Amazon is the biggest market for e-books today, but they don’t buy in bulk. They don’t buy at all. As I explained in a different post, Amazon only acts as a middle man. Someone comes to Amazon to buy this book, and Amazon sells it to them on the publisher’s behalf. Amazon takes a cut (usually about 30%), and imposes a download fee of $0.15 per MB on the publisher. This is a sale of one book, not one million, and thus the economics of the situation is that we, as publishers, should be able to charge a reasonable amount for that book based on the potential sales for the foreseeable future (a week, a month, a couple of months perhaps).

If economies of scale were the controlling factor here, and we used the numbers from the previous example, here’s the way it would look. We have potential sales for the foreseeable future of, say, 1,000 books. Economies of scale dictates that we divide the fixed cost (in this case, $20,000) by the number of potential sales (1,000) to get a base cost of $20.00 per book. ADD to that the 30% cut and the upload fee from amazon, and we get a price for an individual sale of the book of approximately $28.75 (the calculation is $20=0.7*x+$0.15, where x is the sale price—by the way, I rounded up $0.03). The problem with using economies of scale in this scenario is that there are very few people—hardly 1,000—who will pay $28.75 for an e-book under any circumstances. If we presume 2,000 sales in the foreseeable future, then the same formula yields a price of $14.44. Still too high. Let’s do the formula one more time for 3,000 potential sales in the foreseeable future. We come up with $9.67. Now, depending on the quality of the writing and the reputation of the author (and publisher), someone might be willing to pay that. I should point out that the author/publisher makes NO profit at these volumes and prices. NONE. If we add a reasonable profit—we’re in business, after all—the prices would go up again.

Now, my friend would argue that I’ve made his point. As the potential number of sales increases, the break-even price goes down until ultimately the price of an e-book normalizes to $0.00 (or something close to it). But economics is messy, and predicting the future is difficult and often wrong. We cannot predict the future with enough accuracy to be able to do the kind of analysis that is required by economies of scale. That’s why economies of scale was set up around a one-time sale, not many sales over time. If there were a buyer for 3,000 copies, or better, a million copies right now, then a business person can make a rational calculation of how they might cover their costs and make a profit. And the last time I checked, the purpose of being in business is to make a profit.

So I say to you, and to my friend, that economies of scale do not apply to the e-book market. Authors and publishers should be paid a fair, profitable price for their hard work. I, personally, am content with the “sweet-spot” that Amazon has established between $2.99 and $9.99 (which is where authors and publishers are paid 70% royalties). It would be nice if people were willing to pay more, but there’s no reason, just because an e-book is electronic, that they should pay less. And if that means I make $2.00 per book selling at that price, or $4.00, or even $7.00, good for me. But I don’t see any reason that, just because the e-book file can be reproduced an unlimited number of times, I should have to charge a price based on an infinite number of sales. That’s not economics, that’s fantasy.

Update: Some of you may have picked up on a small deviation of fact. Economies of Scale is generally considered a long-run phenomenon. In the short run, it is more accurate to say that the marginal cost of production goes down when fixed costs are averaged over an entire production run. They are effectively the same concept, but in different time domains (one is in the long run, the other is in the short run), and I find it amusing that both my friend and I made the same mistake in treating economies of scale as a short run phenomenon. Silly us! I guess the lesson on economies of scale was for me as much as anyone.

Who We Are Not — A Look at Publishing Genius and Genius Publishers

Recently, I’ve spent a great deal of time—and more than a few words—describing who Genius Publishing is. The time has come to describe who we are not.

In the last 5 days or so, I’ve been indulging in that guilty pleasure, Googling myself. I wanted to see what people saw when they searched for the term Genius Publishing. It turns out, there are two other players in that particular name-space that might be confused with us.

The first is a company called Publishing Genius. They are in Baltimore, and they’ve been around for at least 6 years. They even have their own Wikipedia page. That, in my humble opinion, makes them way cooler than we are. I sincerely hope they are selling lots of books and are having a great deal of success in their business. (I also sincerely hope that one of you Wikipedia editors take the time to memorialize us as well. Thanks!)

The second company is called Genius Publishers. There are only a few references to them, particularly on bookjobs.com. They are advertising for interns for various positions (see the link), and because of that and the fact that they don’t seem to have another website, I get hits for Genius Publishers all the time. In fact, I’ve received at least two contacts from people looking for jobs in the recent past. Since there is so little information on them, I have no idea if they are new or established, if they are reputable or otherwise. If anyone knows more about them, please leave a comment.

The reason I am bringing your attention to these potential competitors is because, frankly, we are not them.

I tried to be careful when choosing the name of my publishing company, and when I discovered that the name Genius Publishing was pretty much clear, I felt comfortable entering that name-space. But it is becoming clear that I am being confused with at least one of these other groups. That’s not good for me, and it’s not good for them.

Thus, I have made the decision to differentiate our company from theirs. I have been quietly changing references to our company to the term Genius Book Publishing. You can now see it on our header, in our title (in the tab at the top of your browser), and on Facebook and Twitter. This is a logical move because I own the domain GeniusBookPublishing.com, rather than GeniusPublishing.com (which is for sale and the last asking price I saw was $10,000). Since someone may pony up the $10k at some point, it is better if I differentiate myself from them as well while I have a chance.

So, when you see my Vitruvian logo with the addition of Book in the name, you can be confident that someone didn’t walk off with my logo (which is public domain—thanks Leonardo!). Genius Book Publishing is different in no other way, and you can rest assured that we will continue to publish books that are as high quality as we have been saying all along.

Update: About 3 hours after posting this, I got a call from some very nice woman asking if I were Genius Publishers and if I had an internship. I guess it will take time for the name change to kick in.