Fifteen or so years ago when I was unhappy about everything from the way the world worked to the way my stomach didn’t, I went on a vegetarian kick. I kept it up for a year or more, and while I didn’t go so far as eliminating tuna fish (one of my five basic food groups), I stayed away from meat and prepared foods. It’s the only period in my life that I bought any nutrition or cook books. I was actually forced to cook some when I was a vegetarian, and I worked as a cook a few places in my college days, but I do very little of it now. In fact, I haven’t had a stove for around ten years, and I’m currently staying in a temporary apartment in Jerusalem without a refrigerator for three months, but that’s another story.
Back in those aforementioned college days, my basic bachelor’s diet was dark tuna fish every other day (88 cents for two cans at Star on sale) and macaroni on the days that fell in between for dinner. I used to melt American cheese on the macaroni, not realizing at the time that it wasn’t so much cheese as solidified vegetable oil with cheese flavor. Sometimes I’d get creative and boil some rice and fry an onion instead. My roommate used to accuse me of being ascetic, but I saved my pennies for lunch, which was either a meatball sub from the roach coach on the quad or a slice of Sicilian pizza from the Greek place on Huntington Ave. Breakfast was coffee and a cigarette.
Twenty years later, I’m not really in a good position to write and publish a cook book, but I’d love to find one that met my needs. As a bachelor who really can’t be bothered to do much more than boil water on a hot plate, it would have to show some real imagination. Unlike the me of twenty years ago, I actually care about things like nutrition and dietary fiber these days. For example, I quit smoking cigarettes and started eating a little breakfast some years back, which eventually standardized on oatmeal. Then I got bored with plain oatmeal and wanted more fiber, so I ventured into bran cereal with yogurt, but the stuff requires refrigeration. About two years ago, I finally figured out how to combine the best feature of bran cereal (dietary fiber) with the best features of oatmeal (texture and hot) as follows:
Put one teaspoon of Taster’s Choice instant coffee in a ceramic mug. Fill to within a half-inch of the brim with bran cereal. Next add boiling water, noting that the level of the cereal will drop as the flakes become water logged, and stop adding water when the top flakes are just above the surface. Next, stir the mixture with a tablespoon, making sure to dissolve the instant coffee throughout the mixture, and let stand for 3 to 5 minutes to solidify. Eat bran-coffee cereal with a tablespoon and try not to get it on the laptop keyboard, because it hardens like cement.
Now why can’t somebody publish a cook book like that for me? Save me from the dinner I just had:
Open one can of tuna fish and drain oil. Use a fork to extract the tuna from the can onto a plate. Rinse one tomato and one small cucumber (pickling size). Dice the tomato and the cucumber onto the plate. Take an unsliced loaf of bread, slice off bread to taste, plate with the tuna, tomatoes and cucumber. Add salt. Sit in front of the TV, use the fork to get some of the tuna fish and vegetables onto a piece of bread, eat like a starving man.
A niche cook book for non-cooking bachelors might be a hit with a self publisher. I suppose it might even work for a trade publisher if it were humorous enough. The ideal for me would be a cookbook that features meals that can be prepared in seconds from ingredients that keep for years, and nutritional information. Focus on the fiber and the protein, please.:-)
Print on Demand Self Publishing
This self publishing blog was inspired by all of the e-mail questions I've received about the print on demand publishing model I advocate in my book. While I learn a great deal from reader feedback, some of the questions just repeat themselves over and over again, just like bloggers. I've covered most of the common questions over the past three months with individual posts, but I thought I'd rank them here with a couple of links for each. Without further ado, the top five questions are:
1) How can I sell more books?
My favorite answer is online book marketing but the caveat is it may already be too late in the self publishing process if you've published a book for which there's no market. As a self publisher, you are the acquisitions editor, and you can't pretend you're running a publishing business if you're willing to publish anything you write. Print on demand makes it extremely inexpensive to publish books, but selling books is another matter.
2) How do I start a self publishing company?
The first step is obtaining ISBN numbers without which you are an author, rather than a publishing company. Next comes sitting down and deciding what you are hoping to accomplish by starting your own publishing house. Take a lesson from publishing industry numbers and then, before you give up all hope, contrast the results with working as a trade author.
3) Should I use a subsidy publisher?
There's no shame in signing up with a subsidy publisher, but it's important to realize you are being published by them as opposed to self publishing. Subsidy presses will publish anything, from fiction and how-to books to poetry and memoir. There are subsidy presses that specialize in Christian books and some that only publish cookbooks. What they all share in common, whatever their fees and contracts, is that none of them provide any effective book marketing, and in the aggregate, they sell very few books.
4) Should I use print on demand?
Print on demand gives publishers the ability to cost effectively print one book at a time, but it's the vertical integration of printing and distribution that makes it a viable model. Currently, the best option for self publishers working with print on demand is Lightning Source, but they currently have limitations with illustrations and greyscale graphics, which I try to avoid entirely.
5) Should I publish e-books?
Once you are set up as a self publisher using print on demand, publishing e-books is easy, and there's little reason to set up your own e-book server and software. There are different design considerations to look at, especially with e-book covers. The problem with e-books is that they are not huge sellers, though Amazon is striving to change that with their new Amazon Shorts e-books and by concentrating e-book sales in the U.S. store.
Book Publisher vs Book Printer
Authors new to self publishing often confuse the role of a book publisher with that of a printer. In fact, these two businesses have about as much in common as farming and running a restaurant. Yes, both publishers and printers deal in books, but publishers don't own printing presses and printers don't file for copyrights. To put it as crudely as possible, printing books is essentially a value-added paper business. Printers take two commodities, paper and ink, and add value by putting the two together. The more books you buy from an offset printer, the cheaper they get, until the price starts to approach the value of the paper, ink, amortization of the press and labor. Below that they'd be selling at a loss. Publishers, at the lowest common denominator, are intellectual property holding companies. If you want an unflattering characterization of a big trade publisher, think of an opportunistic law firm with a large marketing department attached.
The main reason it's now easier than ever to confuse a book publisher with a book printer is that a huge market has crept up for middlemen who in truth are neither one nor the other. In the old publishing world of offset printing, packaged subsidy publishing deals for authors and so-called "self publishing companies" existed, but their prices started in the thousands of dollars due to the high printing costs involved. Equally important, those traditional subsidy publishers (also called vanity presses though I don't think it's a good description) couldn't do much to make their authors’ books available through distribution. Thus, authors who did their homework could quickly figure out that they were throwing their money away on a dream, with practically zero chance of selling books.
In the past decade, print on demand and internet bookselling have changed the game for authors, whether they set out to make a living through self publishing or they just want to see their book in print. By allowing the books to be printed one at a time, print on demand changed the minimum cost to get a book "into print" from over a thousand dollars to less than a hundred. At the very same time print on demand technology was becoming a reality, the internet opened up a whole new way to market and sell books that could completely bypass traditional book distribution and retail outlets. Like them or hate them, Amazon is now the worlds largest bookstore, and every book publisher can get their books listed by Amazon.
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A whole new crop of subsidy publishers, companies which charge an author a fee to get their book in print, have sprung up to take advantage of the Lightning Source business model. These companies are all middlemen, and for the authors who merely want to see their books in print and available through Amazon and distribution, the better ones offer a low cost way of doing this. However, it's important to understand that apart from charging authors a fee rather than paying an advance, subsidy publishers differ from traditional book publishers in one critical way. They lack a marketing department, which means, unless the author does all of the marketing, there won't be any sales to speak of. Some subsidy publishers offer marketing services, for which they charge, but I've never seen any evidence that those marketing services can generate enough sales to pay back a significant fraction of their costs. It's money thrown away. Even worse, some subsidy publishers emulate traditional book publishers and they take the intellectual rights to the book by contract. Whatever you do, never sign a contract with a subsidy publisher who claims any rights at all to your book. Charging you to take ownership of your intellectual property is just adding insult to injury.
Print on demand has been a tremendous boon to both subsidy published authors, who can now get their books in print for hundreds rather than thousands of dollars, and for self publishers. True self publishers can now cut out the middleman and start earning significant money on every book they sell without having to invest in a garage full of books and a shipping and handling operation. All that's required to become a book publisher today is a typeset manuscript and cover in PDF format, an on demand book printer with distribution, and an ISBN block. Of course, if you want to make a living publishing books, you need to market them, because nobody is going to beat a path to your door. I'm a huge advocate of Internet marketing for self publishers, because with a little web savvy, many non-fiction titles make terrific web content that will draw visitors and buyers to a website. I was so taken by the new model that I stopped selling my manuscripts to trade publishers and started publishing them myself, including my latest title, "Print on Demand Book Publishing - a New Approach to Printing and Marketing Books for Publishers and Authors."