Relatively few self publishers can produce a book entirely by themselves. I've gotten to the point where I'll do the entire layout and cover design, but I always hire an editor and a number of proofreaders. There are some excellent writers who may be comfortable editing themselves, but most writers can't even proofread an e-mail, so proofreading your own book is just nuts. You can outsource a certain amount of market research, though I don't really recommend it, and hiring illustrators or a photographer is also common. Of all the self publishing services I've seen offered, marketing is the one I'm most skeptical of. Promoting your books is the main job of the self publisher. If you have to outsource that, you probably aren't going to make it.
How much a self publisher can afford to spend on outsourced publishing services depends entirely on the future sales of the book. The problem with this if you are a first time publisher is you can't possibly estimate how many copies you are going to sell. My rule of thumb for self publishing is that any book that sells over 2,500 copies a year is doing terrific. Titles selling between 1,000 copies and 2,500 copies are doing good, and those selling between 500 copies and 1000 copies aren't too shabby. The average self published book probably sells much less than 500 copies a year, which means it would be hard to justify a lot of outsourced expenses to get it into print. I'm sure everybody reading this assumes that their first book will be one of the ones to sell over 2,500 copies a year, even 25,000 copies a year, and while that may happen, it's like counting on winning a lottery ticket. The number of books any given title sells is simply much lower than most authors think.
Getting back to self publishing services, the most indispensable one is proofreading. Nobody publishes perfect books, many non-fiction trade books I've read average an error every ten pages or so, but that's hardly an ideal yardstick to measure yourself against. If you have friends and family willing to read your manuscript for free, take advantage, but it's critical to give them the book in its final typeset form. Last minute changes and edits are probably the main source of errors in professionally produced books, and the way to avoid this is not to rush to the proofreading phase until the book is truly finished. In addition to free proofreaders, I always hire local college students and pay $10 or $15 an hour to get some extra eyes on the job.
Competing for second in importance of the self publishing services you can outsource are editing and cover design. It's not that I believe cover design is more important than interior layout, to the contrary, but it's easier for most self publishers to learn how to do a passable job on layout than on cover design, and cover design is also cheaper. Cover designers who do a reasonable job abound on the Internet, prices range from around $99 to around $299, for which you may even be able to get your feedback incorporated into the design. Local designers are more likely to charge by the hour, and however low their basic rate, it will quickly add up to $500 or more if you start making changes. Editing, on the other hand, is always charged by the hour or based on the count of pages or words. I've paid anywhere from $15 to $25 an hour for editing, based on the editor's experience, which means anywhere from $500 to $1500 for paperbacks in the 40,000 to 80,000 word range.
Hiring an interior designer can be highly problematic, and I'd only recommend paying by the hour with tight limits or a low page rate, not much over a dollar a page a book consisting of text. Graphic artists who do book design as a sideline are happy to charge from $5 to $10 a page, which quickly gets you into the $1,000 range for something most readers will never notice as long as the job is moderately competent. It's also relatively easy to learn how to produce a book block directly out of your word processor, but it's definitely worth reading a book or two on the subject first to aid you with font selection and basic layout decisions.
Unfortunately, authors who rush into self publishing when they can't find a trade publisher for their first book typically pay for all of the publishing services above, and pay top dollar at that. Add the cost of an ISBN block and setting up the book with a print on demand printer like Lightning Source or Booksurge and you've invested around $5000 without selling your first book. That's cheap by trade publishing standards, but the average self published book will never earn that back. Self publishers whose books fail to sell often blame the cover designer, the book chains, lack of access to distribution, but there's only one reason for a well written book to fail in the marketplace and that's lack of marketing. Nobody knows your subject or your book as well as you do, and nobody can do a more effective job marketing it than you can, so if you want to succeed at self publishing, you have to commit yourself to becoming at least as good at promoting books as writing them. If you don't have it in you, save yourself a few thousand dollars and a lot of sleepless nights, sign up with a reasonable subsidy press like Booklocker, and be satisfied with seeing your book in print.
Services Self Publishers Can Afford to Outsource
Diet Books and Fitness Guides for Healthy Profits?
Even the most casual observer of nonfiction bestseller lists can't help but notice that diet books often dominate the list and remain there for years at a time. I believe this has been going on at least since the 1960's, may have something to do with the widespread acquisition of color televisions, but that's another story. Diet books are often branded with the name of a celebrity doctor or the latest health fad resulting from some governmental pronouncement, and are pushed strongly by their trade publishers with big budget campaigns. Fitness guides are more likely to be written by celebrity trainers, who get into the public eye by talking about the foibles of the Hollywood stars they've trained. Anybody with the ability to market a book on TV by gossiping about famous people is probably better off with a big trade publisher than self publishing, which is the subject of this blog.
As usual, I turned to Amazon for a quick look at how health oriented titles by unknown authors are selling, and I used the subsidy presses as a proxy. The reason is that none of the subsidy presses do any meaningful marketing for titles, even if they are paid to, so an Amazon Power Search turns up titles that are doing well due to the efforts of the author. The string I used was:
subject: diet or health and publisher: authorhouse or iuniverse or xlibris or booklocker or lulu
This turned up 1214 subsidy published titles in the diet, health and fitness area, of which the top 10 had sales ranks under 100,000. None of the books were in the top 10,000 during this particular check, which should set off a warning bell for the aspiring self publisher. If you were self publishing your book with print on demand and getting the majority of your non-direct sales through Amazon, which is probably true for all the titles in the list generated, you'd estimate that the current top dog is selling less than 1,000 copies a year. Even if you earned a very healthy profit margin by going through Lightning Source, Replica or Booksurge, that's hardly a living.
So, should the aspiring fitness guide self publisher give up and look into writing adult titles instead? Not at all, because the method I used above for generating the bestseller list has a serious flaw. It only includes books from authors who used a subsidy publisher, and even though some of them may be fairly savvy marketers, none of them are doing it for a living because there's no living to be had! If I was interested in self publishing diet books and health related titles myself, I would have gone through a very different exercise on Amazon, a time consuming process of elimination to search out true self publishers of related titles and look at the reasons for their success. Without doing the many hours of work, the process goes like this. Search for:
subject: diet or health
which yields 283,637 titles, a few too many for me to start looking at. Even more impressive, the first 700 or so titles on a bestseller sort were in the top 10,000, the range where a self publisher can start thinking about making a living. In fact, it's one of the most dominant categories of books I've ever seen on Amazon. On the other hand, don't forget that for the 700 or so titles in the top 10,000 there are almost 283,000 also rans.
The bottom line is that if there's a market with a seemingly infinite ability to absorb new titles, it's diet and health books. The trick, of course, is marketing. Since almost all of these titles are sold as nonfiction, whatever the truth of the matter, they make ideal candidates for Internet marketing. As our check of subsidy publishers showed us, this isn't a niche category where a book is likely to get sales just based on the title, there's just too much competition. But if you start with the website, put the draft of your book online and work to build the traffic, you'll soon get an indication of whether it's going to work for you. If you start getting regular e-mails asking when you're going to publish the book, it's time to hire an editor, some proofreaders, pick a print on demand printer and publish.
A Story of Alternate Publishing Universes
Once upon a time there was a college student named Joe Newbie who blogged every day about the college life. He wrote about the food in the cafeteria, the parties he went to, what he paid for textbooks and life in the dormitory. Several times a day Joe posted updates to Blogger, and by the time he declared as a business major, thousands of people were reading Joe’s blog every day. Joe’s friends and readers kept asking him, "When are you going to publish a book?" but Joe laughed it off until he needed a project for Entrepreneurial Thinking
Alternate Publishing Universe #1
The knocking continued, but Joe had already drifted off, and as he had written in his blog that very week, "sleeping through noisy interruption in the afternoon is a vital skill for college students." When he finally woke up just before dinner, the first thing he did was sign the contract and stuff it in the return package thoughtfully provided by the acquisitions editor, Peter Heartless, and dropped it off at the campus center to be returned to Big Trade Publishers. Over the next two months, Joe edited his last couple years of blog postings into a book titled "How to Live a Happy Life at College" and sent it off to the publisher. He didn’t hear a word for a couple months after that, then a package showed up labeled "Final Proof" with a note from Peter Heartless that they were in a real rush, so could he please identify any errors by the end of the week.
Joe looked at the contents and was stunned. A mock-up of the cover showed that the title had been changed to "Party Animal and Scholar" and there was a stock photograph that made him blush. As he scanned the pages, his fists clenched as tightly as his teeth at every stupid sidebar graphic with helpful hints that weren’t his and often directly contradicted what he’d written. When he examined the text more closely, he saw that it had been radically changed to match the hints and tips, and that his style had been completely obliterated in accordance with some politically correct guidelines. One of the reasons Joe’s blog had been such a hit was his colorful language and honest emotions. His fingers shaking, he dialed-up Peter Heartless, who didn’t even make a show of sympathy. "Read your contract," Heartless told him, "The only reason we’re showing it to you at all is because we couldn’t hold you liable for any slander otherwise. We all worked very hard on this and it’s going to press next week. We spent thousands on that cover art, you should be grateful."
Joe sunk into depression and began to lose weight. His grades at school suffered, he lost interest in posting to his blog, and the same students who came to his advance check party now bought the book just to laugh at him. Nine months later when the first royalty statement came, it showed a negative balance of $357.86. As Joe frantically read the statement, he realized that the 10% of net rate on the first 10,000 books was earning him less than $1.00 each, and they weren’t selling that well. Six months later, the next royalty statement included a check for $1854.21, and there were quite a few returns. If Joe had been around to see the following semi-annual statements, he would have seen that total royalties for the book came to less than $7000, but by that time, Joe had graduated (by the skin of his teeth) and gone to Alaska to find himself. Unfortunately, before Joe could find himself, a bear found him, and the bear lived happily ever after.
Alternate Publishing Universe #2
Joe got up and answered the door and was greeted by Lin Smart, a shy girl from his Entrepreneurial Thinking class. Lin had a whole handful of papers which she proffered to Joe, explaining that she’d done an analysis of his contract and compared it to self publishing with print on demand, which happened to be what Lin’s mother did for a living. Lin showed Joe that she had researched Big Trade Publishers titles, and based on the expected word count, that they would publish his book in a 6x9 format at 192 pages and price it at $14.95. With royalties starting at 10% of net, and net selling price averaging about half of list, Joe would be earning a little less than 75 cents per book. If the book sold more than that, his royalties could eventually climb to just over a dollar a book, but she pointed out that only two percent of books in print sell over 5,000 copies a year. She had also read the fine print in the contract and pointed out that Joe was giving up the right to make future blog posts without getting them approved first, something that hardly fit his free wheeling style, that he had no control over the editing of the book, and that he was giving up the right to write any other books, blogs or anything that could be construed to compete with the Big Trade Publishers version. Lin explained to him that Big Trade Publishers wouldn’t actually market his book, that they were just hoping to get sales from his blog readers and that they would try putting an outrageous or lurid cover on the book to attract bookstore customers. It all sounded pretty bleak.
Then Lin showed him a Lightning Source case study she’d printed off the web. She explained that Joe could get a 192 page 6x9 book printed and shipped to Amazon and Ingram, the largest book distributor in the US, for less that $3.50 each, without having to fill his dorm room with books or paying for shipping and handling. Joe could give the book a $14.95 cover price, assign a short discount of 25%, and Amazon and Ingram would pay (14.95 x 0.75) $11.21 per book, leaving Joe with a net profit per sale of over $7.50. In other words, Joe would earn ten times as much on every sale as he would with Big Trade Publishers, and not sign away any rights to his future! Since Joe’s blog was going to do all of the marketing for the book in any case, Lin estimated that Joe could still sell about 50% as many books as he would have with Big Trade Publishers without getting his book in the chain stores. So if he was willing to gamble on her judgement, he could come out five times ahead.
Joe was floored. All this time he’d thought that the pinnacle of publishing was getting published by a reputable trade, and now this wonderful young woman was telling him that her mother had quit writing for the trades in order to become a self publisher. He asked Lin how much it would cost him to become a publisher and she answered quickly, "About $250 to buy a block of ISBN numbers from Bowker, set-up costs of about $100 at Lightning Source, and the work to prepare the book and design a cover, which I’ll bet my mother will help us with." Joe enthusiastically agreed, and the two of them were inseparable over the next few months, laughing at private jokes as they edited the blog entries into a book and got their friends (and one professor) to act as proofreaders. They published the book that summer, advertised it on the blog which was now getting over 5,000 visitors a day, and by Christmas they had sold 1,500 copies, netting them over $10,000 before taxes. The next year, sales continued to grow, Joe acknowledged that Lin was the best thing that ever happened to him, and they got married. Joe wrote another book about how to be happy which became a bestseller titled "Open the Door to Lin" and they lived happily ever after.