I got an invitation to a book launch party in Manhattan next week, and it got me thinking about the places where the worlds of self publishing and trade publishing diverge. I don't know NYC prices for renting a major performance space, for bringing in a half dozen name bands, not to mention free food and drink, but I'd be surprised if it weren't closer to $200,000 than $50,000. It sounds like a heck of an event, but I'm the sort of guy who will walk around the block to avoid a party, so driving a hundred miles to NYC for the evening isn't in the cards.
Most veteran self publishers would be happy with a net profit at the end of the year that wouldn't pay for this book launch party. Most new self publishers would be thrilled to death if they sold enough copies of their first title to pay for just one of the bands! We're simply talking about two different worlds with two different outcomes. The event isn't going to pay for itself with sales of autographed copies to guests. In fact, I'd be shocked if the book is even sold there. Outside of having a good time, the only thing the author of this book launch can hope to accomplish with the party is creating buzz. Even the big trade publishers usually don't go to this much expense in creating buzz for nonfiction, so I'm guessing it's really a case of the author wanting to throw a big party and maybe gain some momentum for highly paid speaking engagements.
This approach to publishing runs entirely counter to the model I advocate for self publishing which is predicated on the notion that authors shouldn't have to be performers. Getting invited to speak at conferences and to make corporate visits just gives me the chills. It's tough enough for me to speak coherently on the telephone. What I do is write and publish on the Internet, and I let my writing sell my books for me. I have a friend who threw a book launch party for a self-published book (I'd have shown up for that one but I was out of the country at the time) but it was strictly a celebration.
Sometimes, new authors will get extremely bad advice from publishing "professionals" or dashed-off articles in writers’ magazines which basically encourage them to imitate the trades on the cheap. It can't be done. I recently heard from a nice woman who read somewhere that she should pass out fliers to her neighbors announcing a book launch event in her home for her self published book. The only thing it accomplished was to get the neighbors laughing at her behind her back. You can sell your neighbors kitchenware or cosmetics in some communities without raising an eyebrow, but the only places I've been where you could sell your neighbors books were deeply religious communities, and they'd better not be books you wrote yourself.
A Book Launch Party in NYC
Help Self Publishing a Book
When I started self publishing in 1995, I did it blindly, and I made a lot of mistakes. The biggest mistake I made was not studying up on the subject before I started publishing. I believed if I published a "good" book, the world would beat a path to my door. I was half right. All of my initial sales came from overseas, and I had no way to process the payments without losing money. Rather than reading some business books or publishing books to try to learn where I went wrong, I gave up and signed a trade contract - without legal advice!!! If I had read just one article about book contracts I would have saved myself seven years of servitude, but that's what I got for being too proud to ask for help.
Aspiring publishers can find everything they need to know on the Internet. The only thing you need to know before you start searching is that you can't buy help self publishing a book. You'll encounter lots of businesses interested in selling you their services, including experts of every stripe, but it will be money thrown away. We learn in our childhood that "free" always comes with strings attached, and that "you get what you pay for." However, when it comes to learning about self publishing, the best information is free, it's just not very well organized. As to paying for help, if you understood what you were getting before you paid for it, you'd keep your wallet in your pocket.
After corresponding with thousands of aspiring authors over the years, I've concluded that the most costly mistakes result from hurrying. You've spent months or years writing a book, pushing yourself on and on with the promise that you'll see that book published. Then you find that the trades are neither interested nor polite, and you start looking around for other options. You come up with a budget for self publishing and you start looking for help. Five minutes of search work on Google turns up enough offers that you can start comparison shopping, and before you go to bed, you've chosen a subsidy publisher or a book coach. Your budget gets spent, you get a book to put on your shelf, and that's pretty much the end of it.
If you want to go into self publishing as a business, to sell a significant number of books and possibly earn a good living, you have to become knowledgeable first. It takes time, effort, and learning from mistakes, but the sooner you start with the mistakes, the less help they'll be in teaching you something of real value. It doesn't make sense to start suggesting mistakes you should make, so I'll stick with saying something about time and effort.
You'll learn a lot in your first thirty minutes of reading about self publishing on the web if you stay away from publishing company sites that are trying to sell you a service. You may learn more in your first 2 hours of reading than in the next twenty hours, because sources (and writers) will start repeating themselves. But if you take careful notes, it should quickly become apparent to you what parts of the self publishing process you don't understand. Use that knowledge to fine-tune your Google searches for more specific results, until you find meaningful answers to every open question you have.
In the end, you'll still need some help self publishing your book, but that help should be limited to services you can contract with individuals for editing, proofreading, and design. If you can design the book and cover by yourself, that's great, I've gone that route myself, but don't kid yourself that you can do your own proofreading,. What you absolutely don't need if you want to self publish as a business is one-stop shopping, a company who will do everything for a fee. Those subsidy publishers are great for authors who just want their book in print, but it's a business for the subsidy publisher, not for the author.
If you read through a couple dozen of the archived posts on this blog, you'll find that I continually return to one central point. No matter what else you do right, your book won't sell unless you market it. You can't buy help marketing a book, you have to learn how to do it yourself if you're going to have any long-term chance of success. My own approach to self publishing combines print-on-demand for printing and distribution with Internet marketing as the lowest cost entry into publishing, but there are certainly other approaches that work. Just don't take anybody's word for what does or doesn't work without seeing the details and confirming them independently.
Authors and Writers Independence Day Compromise
I decided to "work" this July 4th, to make a point about the independence I found in self publishing and the compromise involved in business. The greatest gift of being self employed as an author is that we can write when and what we want. Of course, as our customers are free to buy whatever books they want whenever the fancy strikes them, there's no guarantee we'll make a living next year. The fundamental compromise in self publishing is we can do what you want, but, if we want to make a living, we’d better consider what our potential customers want as well.
I rarely quote authors at length, but I made sure to get the following passage from John Donne up on my original website in 1995, one of the most concentrated bits of prose ever written.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
Donne
What Donne expresses so elegantly with "No man is an Island" is that as much as we stand on our own feet, we're all of us born and raised and buried by others. As a "completely independent" self publisher, I have more dependencies than I care to count. What makes me more independent than when I was working as a trade author is that none of my current dependencies are absolute or exclusive. Starting with the Big Three:
I'm dependent on Lightning Source to print my books and get them into Amazon and distribution, here and in the U.K.. If I wanted to sign up with Replica instead, I could get the same printing deal in the U.S., with Baker&Taylor distribution instead of Ingram. If I wanted to sign up with Booksurge, recently purchased by Amazon, I'd get the Amazon part of the equation. I could use any other print-on-demand or offset printer and take delivery of my books for resale through distribution, Amazon Advantage or direct mail order, but it would be a lot more work for a smaller profit per book. Lightning Source, in turn, is dependent on Foner Books for maybe one tenth of one percent of their printing volume. I don't think they're scared of losing us.
I'm dependent on Amazon to sell a goodly percentage of my books, a relationship I encourage by sending potential customers to the Amazon site through the Associates program. I could send them to Barnes&Noble.com instead, I could just suggest they order through their local bookstore, or I could sell direct only. The advantage of sending customers to Amazon is the force multiplication factor, the more books you sell through Amazon, the more books they sell for you, through enhanced placement in search results and in their Also Bought lists. Foner Books nets about $500 per quarter through referral fees to Amazon, meaning we directly sell about $25,000 a year worth of books for them, about one thousandth of one percent of their annual book sales. They wouldn't even notice if we ended our "partnership."
I depend on the search engines to help people find our website, primarily Google. If Google decided to eliminate small publisher websites from their results, reworked their algorithm in some way that our pages no longer appeared, or simply went out of business replaced by a search engine that didn't work in a similar way, we'd be in trouble. I could try to rework my website to do better with other search engines or in the new system, I could advertise for visitors (costly), or work from dawn to dusk trying to rebuild traffic, but that wouldn't be much fun. Google indexes billions of web pages; Foner Books has well under a thousand web pages online. Foner Books comprises far less than one millionth of their index.
Independence in the publishing business is a compromise for authors. Nobody can tell you what to write, but you can't tell anybody what to buy. Nobody can make you sell books through this or that outlet, but you can't force this or that store to sell your books. When I worked in a more conventional business years ago, I figured if we could reach 10% of our supplier's total volume, we'd be in a pretty good position to negotiate terms and conditions, and we did. As a self publisher, I'd have to pick a pretty small printer or distributor for our sales to reach 10% of their volume, which means they wouldn't have much weight in the broader publishing business either.
The Big Three dependencies I gave above aren't our only dependencies - we're dependent on the U.S. Post Office, on UPS and Federal Express, on the ISBN agency, on our editors and proofreaders, and on any other freelancers we bring in to produce a book. We're dependent on our web host, on our Internet Service Provider, our bank, our lawyer, and even the tax agencies we work with. I'm proud to be a self publisher on Independence Day and I believe self employment was at the heart of the Founding Fathers’ concept of Republic. But, I understand that as far as independence goes, authors and writers are a pretty dependent lot!