Thoughts On Independently Publishing Paper Books
We’re days away from the official publication date of The Death of Jack Nylund and I could not be more excited. So far almost a hundred people have added the book to their “to-read” shelf on GoodReads. Now, while that doesn’t mean they will all read it, it’s worth noting those who added my first book, Singular, are still in ... ahem ... single figures.
The pre-publication giveaway on GoodReads is still going on for another couple of days, so if you want a chance to win a signed copy, head over there. The blog tour to support the release of the book will begin on the 1st of October, hosted by Bewitching Book Tours. There are a lot of other things going on I won’t bore you with, but suffice to say with my second book I’ve got all my ducks in a row.
Except one.
And that brings me to the subject of this blog. The most difficult, most opaque aspect of independently publishing a book is the availability of paperback copies.
With ebooks it’s a matter of hours in many cases before the text of a book can move from my desktop to an online retailer’s searchable catalogue to your Kindle or Nook. With print copies all the parts I control can happen quickly, but getting the information onto Amazon – which is done by the “publisher” and, presumably by Amazon themselves – takes an unknowable amount of time.
The date of availability is important because I don’t want to run promotional activities for a book that isn’t available yet. The number of sales received for new books is also part of Amazon’s secret recipe for deciding how far up the charts a book goes – and this can have a huge impact on sales. If the release and the release publicity are mistimed then you’re starting at a disadvantage.
There’s another aspect of working through intermediaries and across multiple markets, and this is price. With an e-book I set the price – there’s a little widget I go into and (excepting VAT or sales taxes) I say what the price is you pay at the checkout. Physical books? I wish I had that kind of control.
I set a price with Lulu – the UK publisher – which is £7. Bargain, I hear you cry – and you’re right to do so. The Kindle price is £1.96 – an odd price because of that pesky VAT – or $2.99 in America, but for the UK price of £7 you get an actual bit of dead tree with Rob Moran’s great cover. I digress.
Lulu sells the book to a number of other distributers as well as Amazon, but those distributors from time to time also put their information onto Amazon and those distributors include a mark-up. All of this must happen automatically with machine spirits doing the work, because no rational human being would bother. The result is that the first print copy of Jack Nylund went on sale on Amazon in the UK a few days ago for £112.84.
You read that right.
If anyone actually bought one of those – and I’d bet they didn’t – the amount that I’d get from that sale would be somewhere north of £1, south of £111 (in the same way that Captain Scott’s expedition could be said to have faltered somewhere north of the South Pole, south of the North Pole). That’s a minor issue really, but confusing, bewildering and bereft of reason.
What I’m more concerned about is the US price. I had been planning to use Lulu as the US publisher as well – because I know some of you are Americans, Canadians or Australians and therefore you use Amazon.com to buy books rather than the .co.uk site. Going that way – with a UK-based publisher for US sales – results in a reasonably fair cost; the UK price of £7 is multiplied by the exchange rate, “plus something else”; so we arrive at $11.21.
That price isn’t unfair, but I didn’t have any control in what it was – and I’d much rather it was a round figure. I’m currently working to get the US print edition out using a US-based publisher for a little less than this, but again, if you’re really price-sensitive it’s on Kindle for only $2.99.
I think the next innovation in independent book publishing needs to be more creator control this final link in the chain between “us, the creators” (which may include you) and “you, the readers” (which may include me, and definitely includes some of “us”).
In the same way major publishers can set a release date for maximum marketing effect, I should be able to do this easily at the same time as assigning an ISBN. In the same way I can specify my Kindle price in Italy, Germany and India (if I wanted to), I should have the same control over print prices in major markets. Though I’m not hugely interested in the Italian price of Singular, since nobody has ever bought a copy in Italy (for shame, Italy – for shame).
And all of this is a preamble to saying, very quietly, that if you really, really, really wanted a copy of Singular now... well, you know, you could get one. But if you wouldn’t mind hanging on another ten days, I’d appreciate it.
The pre-publication giveaway on GoodReads is still going on for another couple of days, so if you want a chance to win a signed copy, head over there. The blog tour to support the release of the book will begin on the 1st of October, hosted by Bewitching Book Tours. There are a lot of other things going on I won’t bore you with, but suffice to say with my second book I’ve got all my ducks in a row.
Except one.
And that brings me to the subject of this blog. The most difficult, most opaque aspect of independently publishing a book is the availability of paperback copies.
With ebooks it’s a matter of hours in many cases before the text of a book can move from my desktop to an online retailer’s searchable catalogue to your Kindle or Nook. With print copies all the parts I control can happen quickly, but getting the information onto Amazon – which is done by the “publisher” and, presumably by Amazon themselves – takes an unknowable amount of time.
The date of availability is important because I don’t want to run promotional activities for a book that isn’t available yet. The number of sales received for new books is also part of Amazon’s secret recipe for deciding how far up the charts a book goes – and this can have a huge impact on sales. If the release and the release publicity are mistimed then you’re starting at a disadvantage.
There’s another aspect of working through intermediaries and across multiple markets, and this is price. With an e-book I set the price – there’s a little widget I go into and (excepting VAT or sales taxes) I say what the price is you pay at the checkout. Physical books? I wish I had that kind of control.
I set a price with Lulu – the UK publisher – which is £7. Bargain, I hear you cry – and you’re right to do so. The Kindle price is £1.96 – an odd price because of that pesky VAT – or $2.99 in America, but for the UK price of £7 you get an actual bit of dead tree with Rob Moran’s great cover. I digress.
Lulu sells the book to a number of other distributers as well as Amazon, but those distributors from time to time also put their information onto Amazon and those distributors include a mark-up. All of this must happen automatically with machine spirits doing the work, because no rational human being would bother. The result is that the first print copy of Jack Nylund went on sale on Amazon in the UK a few days ago for £112.84.
You read that right.
If anyone actually bought one of those – and I’d bet they didn’t – the amount that I’d get from that sale would be somewhere north of £1, south of £111 (in the same way that Captain Scott’s expedition could be said to have faltered somewhere north of the South Pole, south of the North Pole). That’s a minor issue really, but confusing, bewildering and bereft of reason.
What I’m more concerned about is the US price. I had been planning to use Lulu as the US publisher as well – because I know some of you are Americans, Canadians or Australians and therefore you use Amazon.com to buy books rather than the .co.uk site. Going that way – with a UK-based publisher for US sales – results in a reasonably fair cost; the UK price of £7 is multiplied by the exchange rate, “plus something else”; so we arrive at $11.21.
That price isn’t unfair, but I didn’t have any control in what it was – and I’d much rather it was a round figure. I’m currently working to get the US print edition out using a US-based publisher for a little less than this, but again, if you’re really price-sensitive it’s on Kindle for only $2.99.
I think the next innovation in independent book publishing needs to be more creator control this final link in the chain between “us, the creators” (which may include you) and “you, the readers” (which may include me, and definitely includes some of “us”).
In the same way major publishers can set a release date for maximum marketing effect, I should be able to do this easily at the same time as assigning an ISBN. In the same way I can specify my Kindle price in Italy, Germany and India (if I wanted to), I should have the same control over print prices in major markets. Though I’m not hugely interested in the Italian price of Singular, since nobody has ever bought a copy in Italy (for shame, Italy – for shame).
And all of this is a preamble to saying, very quietly, that if you really, really, really wanted a copy of Singular now... well, you know, you could get one. But if you wouldn’t mind hanging on another ten days, I’d appreciate it.
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