Every once in a while, I get the urge to title a post along the lines of, "How much wood could a woodchuck chuck…" and though it’s not a great strategy for constructing an essay, it’s the reason I’m writing about why book buyers buy books. For starters, I would divide book buyers into four basic categories: retail customers, institutional customers, large book business buyers and independent book business buyers. Each of the categories can be broken down further and may even deserve a post of its own, but it’s probably a good idea to present them all together once for the sake of coherency.
Retail customers include people who buy books to read them or put them on coffee table to impress their friends, and people who buy books for their friends and family. The little crack about impressing friends foreshadows that even in this simple category, people buy books for diverse reasons. As a publisher, it’s important to figure out before publishing a book what factor is most likely to close the deal for the average buyer, and to make sure you meet that goal. For an impulse buyer title, the key might be price, availability or shelf appeal, while for a reference book it might be weight or a recent copyright date. Gift books and books for pleasure reading might be bought for their uniqueness or for their sameness, it’s really a question of personal taste.
Institutional customers include schools, government offices, large companies, essentially any entity that is purchasing books for use rather than resale. These are some of the easiest buyers to figure out because they often publish requests telling you exactly what they are looking for, right down to the part where the apes either drowned in the deluge or learned the backstroke. I’m differentiating here between schools which provide free books to students and universities which sell the books through bookstores. Institutional buyers have muscle in the publishing world and they know it, so they won’t hesitate a moment to tell you they are only interested in your book with certain changes. Generally speaking, this isn’t a segment that most self publishers target.
Large book business buyers include Barnes & Noble, Borders, Amazon and Books-A-Million, retail chains that carry books, and university bookstores. University bookstores may account for as much as a quarter of all retail book sales, though this has more to do with the cover price than the volume. University bookstore buyers are typically acting as procurement agents for instructors. If instructed to stock your book, the buyers will do so as long as you don’t throw too many obstacles in their path. Buyers for bookstore chains operate on a few different levels. Obviously, they care about their history with the particular publisher, how much money and effort the publisher and the author will invest in promoting the book, and the size of the print run, which is seen as a measure of the publisher’s commitment to the title. One hears they are sometimes swayed by a full court press on the part of a title’s backers and a three martini lunch, but I don’t swim in that sea so I can’t really say. Retail chains like Walmart may also go for a super sales pitch (without the martinis) and the right price, and with the exception of universities, all large book buyers are heavily influenced by facts on the ground. If a title sells at a high rate through any outlet and generates buzz, they’ll be willing to give it a shot if it fits in their business model.
Finally, there are independent book business buyers. The reason I didn’t limit this category to independent bookstores is that most specialty stores find that niche books are a profitable sideline and help increase browsing. Specialty stores are often served by specialty distributors who carve out a number of niches and actively promote the books of publishers in their stable. The downside with specialty distributors is a discount rate in the 60% to 70% range. Some specialty distributors do floor planning for their customers, actively managing the book section of the store (often one bookcase) to maximize profits in a minimal space. Independent bookstores can deal with wholesaler/distributors like Ingram or Baker and Taylor, master distributors, specialty distributors or direct with the publishers, depending on how much paperwork they want to be bothered with. Independent bookstores run by trust fund babies can choose books according to their personal taste, but most independents are in a battle for survival, and have to serve up what the local masses are interested in chowing down.
A single title might sell for a number of reasons to different types of buyers, but if you kid yourself that it’s all of the above and more, you are going to find that your only option is always a large overseas color offset run. That means gambling tens of thousands of dollars and forcing yourself into an expensive distribution solution where the only way to come out ahead is to publish a bestseller every time. You may get better investment odds than with a lottery ticket, but you’ll lose far more often than you’ll win, and those will be expensive losses. For publishers using print-on-demand, consideration of why book buyers will buy your book is even more critical than for offset publishers, because the inherent limitations of print-on-demand providers will prevent you from competing on every point. Quality moves in lockstep with price, and distribution on a short discount is available only through a tiny subset of printers. Weighty tomes are a bad match for glued perfect bindings, and color interiors are just too expensive at the current prices. So don’t be a "run it up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes" publisher, do your homework and keep your shirt on.
Why Book Buyers Buy Books
Buying Just One ISBN Number or Publishing Too Many Books
I’m not one of the "publishing experts" who is going to tell you that reviewers study your ISBN number to see what size block you’ve been issued and use that to determine if your book is worthy of reviewing. The reason I’m not going to tell you that is because it’s baloney, nobody examines the hyphen position on ISBN blocks to determine the publisher size. Reviewers have either heard of your publishing company before or they haven’t. My reason for discouraging the purchase of a single ISBN number is that it greatly increases the chance that you’ll be adding profits to Bowker’s bottom line in the future, and I really hate a monopoly.
Bowker doesn’t offer the option to purchase a single ISBN on their website, but some self-publishers have reported that if you write to them or talk to a rep on the phone, they will sell you a single number. The prices I’ve heard vary with rounding, but the last figure I heard was over half the cost of a block of ten numbers. In other words, if you decide to release a hardcover, an easy reading large type edition, a second edition, or another title, you’ve got to go back to the well and buy again. With that very next purchase, even if you only buy one ISBN number, you’re already over the cost of a block of ten. It just strikes me as penny wise and pound foolish.
On the other hand, I have seen a growing phenomena with small publishers who use print-on-demand but who purchased large ISBN blocks and get a little too careless with publishing new books. This can mean publishing books that they don’t really want to invest too much time into, or churning out public domain and out-of-copyright classics on the theory, "What can it hurt?" It can hurt the bottom line of a publishing business to publish too many titles just because it’s not that expensive. I’m not talking about damage to a publisher’s reputation, there aren’t any blacklists for sloppy publishers and it’s a rare customer who checks all the backlist reviews on Amazon before buying a new title.
It hurts the publisher’s bottom line to publish too many books because those inexpensive setup fees add up to something, in the thousands of dollars if you’re talking about dozens of titles. Even more importantly, packaging those titles still takes time, which is time stolen from researching the market for titles with a better chance of success, and marketing those titles already in print. Sometimes I suspect some publishers keep publishing new titles just because they want an excuse not to work at marketing their existing line-up. It’s just easier to keep throwing new ideas at the wall and waiting to see if one sticks – you know – the big trade approach:-)
New York Publishers and Doing Lunch
I received a number of invitations this year to do exactly the sorts of things I don’t like doing, public speaking, traveling, eating with strangers, the very things I feel an author shouldn’t have to do to get by. Fortunately, I’m earning a decent living self-publishing, so I was able to turn them all down. Thinking back on the year, I got some unexpected publicity through a brief collaboration on Amazon Longtail Analysis, through a DRM problem on one of my e-books, and through this blog. However, the most interesting proposal I got this year was to have dinner in New York with the Vice President of Sales for one of the top five trade publishers in the world.
I turned the proposal down without even thinking about it thanks to two of reasons I listed above: travel and eating. The funny thing that occurred to me this morning as I was thinking about restarting the blog is that I’d made the right decision for the wrong reasons. I came to this conclusion when I started trying to think of how the meeting could have benefited my publishing business and kept on drawing blanks. I suppose "doing lunch" (even when it’s dinner) in NYC with a publisher might have made a nice anecdote if I ever write another book about publishing. But, having already been published as an author by a top trade, I can truthfully say that there’s nothing I want from them at the moment.
Then the flash bulb went off! Is it possible that they wanted something from me? A big New York publisher with over a billion dollars in sales wanting to chat with a self-publisher who has yet to break $100K? Since I’m single and the VP in question is a woman, I suppose it might have been some elaborate setup for a blind date by friends or family with my best interests at heart, but I kind of doubt it. I think she was interested in picking my brain a little about Internet book marketing, which has become a sort of a public crusade with me. Having spoken to several editors at this publisher’s over the years, it was clear that they took the institutional view that Internet book marketing doesn’t work. A paraphrase from an acquisitions editor I spoke to back in the mid 90’s was "We tried that and it didn’t work."
I finally got to wondering what exactly they tried. Did they pick some title they’d been unable to give away on paper, much less sell, put the whole thing online, and then nod their heads sagely when nobody bought it? Did they take press-ready PDF’s (complete with crop marks) and bury them in some hidden corner of their website, accessed only by a small text link from a "New technology" page? Did they spend a lot of money and time setting up a whole website with access by registration only, and no way of knowing what the site contained until you signed up? I’m willing to bet that whatever traffic they got they tried to sell the book(s) at full retail plus shipping and handling, with some clunky form-driven process required to process the order that frequently made the browser lock-up.
Maybe it was some combination of all of the above, but the one thing that’s become clear to me, listening to big New York publishers talk about Internet marketing, is that they are all convinced that it’s some complicated new game. They’re all wrong. There’s nothing simpler than marketing non-fiction books on the web. All it requires is patience, large excerpts and a quality book. Patience is required because it takes time for web pages to earn traffic from the search engines based on how they are linked by other sites. Large excerpts are required, in standard HTML (i.e., web page format) because nobody is going to link to an advertisement. Finally, a quality book is required because the people who read the large excerpts aren’t going to be motivated to tell other people about it through linking if they don’t think that it’s good.
That may sound like a tall order to a NYC publisher, but it’s as close to child’s play as it gets for a self publisher. You don’t even need to master a basic HTML editor to post the excerpts, you can do it with a free blogging tool, like the one I used from blogger.com to publish this. The one thing I left out above because it doesn’t apply to large publishers who already have established websites is that you need to get a couple initial links so that search engines can start finding your site. You can get them by posting informative comments to the types of discussion groups or blogs that welcome the practice, you can spend a few dollars on a PRweb or a similar service, you can submit to directories (though I wouldn’t waste too much time), or you can beg friends and co-workers. The most important thing you can do, and the advantage you have over the large publishers, is to start the web marketing process before you finish writing the book.