My sister just sent me a diagnostic flowchart for achieving matrimony. It's her take-off on the education reform flowchart I gave her a copy of last week - we work fast in my family with whatever tools are at hand. I mention the tools because she didn't have a copy of Visio and did the marriage flowchart in some Adobe software, maybe InDesign, which really isn't designed for the job. Unlike my education reform flowchart, her matrimony graph (it's not exactly a flowchart) was prepared especially for me, so I can't guarantee it suitability for other users.
The point is, having carefully considered my options, I'm leaning towards running away. My lease here is up in a month and my house hunting efforts have taught me that there are a lot of really bad houses available, so I'm thinking it might be a good time to buy a tent and see the country. I tried seeing the country on a camping trip after graduate school fifteen years ago, but I mainly saw the highways as I drove as much as sixteen hours a day in a hurry to get nowhere in particular. Given the cost of gas and the fact that I'm older and slower, it might make sense to go with a hard limit of 200 miles a day, maximum, and actually stop and visit places.
Many authors go on extended tours of speaking engagements (did he say engagement:-) and book readings at least once in their lives. But has anybody ever gone on a cross-country publisher tour, visiting self publishers and writing about them online? I don't know that I'd be the right person to do it, but it sounds kind of interesting at first blush, and could give some structure and meaning to my midlife crisis. I have standing invites from a couple of self-publishers around the country to drop in and say "Hi" if I'm in the area, but I'd have to run the quantity up quite a bit if I was to have any chance at getting good at it, much less coming up with some useful prose. I suppose some new self publishers wouldn't mind getting their photo and titles listed on my website, but I may be too honest for some people's taste.
How would something like the Runaway Bridegroom Publisher Tour work? I'd have to line up some publishers interested in meeting me ahead of time, call them when I'm going to be in reasonable driving range for a day or two, and plan to meet somewhere for a coffee. I've corresponded with too many "interesting" authors to have any inclination to meet them in their homes, invariably located on isolated country roads, complete with a kid playing the Deliverance theme on a banjo. I'd also be inclined to setting a pretty short time limit for a meeting, like a half-hour, to make sure we talk about the publisher's titles and not sit around swapping publishing war stories.
My guess is that it would be a learning experience for me and a disappointment for any self publishers who expect enough publicity to have a noticeable impact on their sales. It would also force me into a cellphone and cellular Internet service, the latter which I'd love and the former which I've been avoiding like matrimony, dating, and most other things universally adjured as good. At least, I haven't come across a cellular Internet service that you can buy without a cellphone, but I have a month to look. I'm not exactly committed to the venture, if I came across a good house sitting or sublet gig in the next month, I'd probably take that instead and just keep going as is.
In the meantime, I'm reading a biography of Darwin in which he is quoted as having written (during his bachelor days) that a wife would make a better companion than a dog for old age. I have a hard time taking the words at face value as he was famously dependent on his eventual (religious) wife, who gave him ten children and did more for his gene pool than all the barnacles he dissected. Or is it considered "not cricket" to point that out?
Publishers Who Use Print-on-Demand
I've heard from not a few self publishers over the years who embraced offset printing to their detriment, simply because they wanted to avoid being tarred by the POD brush. They never quite believed me when I pointed out that print-on-demand is used by just about everybody who is anybody in publishing when it makes sense, namely, for titles that aren't expected to sell in large numbers on bookstore shelves. Dedicated POD users include a large number of academic presses, small publishers and self publishers, but also include big name trade publishers managing their backlist and special editions, such as large print, in the most cost effective way possible.
So, for all the non-believers out there, I've come up with a simple way you can
browse print-on-demand titles and look at the publishers. It doesn't create an all-inclusive list, just those pages that happened to be indexed by Google for some reason or another on the Books-A-Million website. You can use the advanced search page on Google or just copy and paste the following as a single line into Google:
booksamillion "print-on-demand" -next, -matches site:www.booksamillion.com
The result I get this morning includes some 16,000 titles, only a small fraction of the print-on-demand titles in print, but a good sample to surf through. In the first ten pages of results, I saw the following "name" trade publishers:
Little Brown and Company
Delphi Books
Tor Books
Pocket Books
Atria Books
Lyle Stuart
Fredonia Books
HarperFestival
John Wiley & Son
Palgrave MacMillan
Basic Books
Harcourt
Simon & Schuster
HarperCollins Publishers
In one case, "My Sister's Keeper" from Atria Books, the current BAM page showed the title as in stock somewhere, as opposed to the print-on-demand designation that was in the page in Google's cache. It could be they use POD for stop-gap while reprinting books, or that they have books printed on demand in sufficient quantity to stock some vendors. Next it occurred to me that looking through random pages was silly when I could just add a publisher name to the search string. Reading publisher names off the spines of books next to my desk, I quickly added the following publishers with some print-on-demand titles to the list:
Random House Trade (random)
McGraw-Hill Professional (mcgraw)
Alfred A. Knopf (knopf)
William Morrow & Company (morrow)
Back Bay Books (back bay)
Vintage Books (vintage)
W. W. Norton & Company (norton)
Scribner Book Company (scribner)
Addison Wesley Publishing Company (holt - mistaken hit:-)
Ballantine Books (holt - another random hit)
Jossey-Bass (houghton = more random)
Finally, I realized we need some sort of normalizing factor, like, what percentage of POD books are actually represented in these Google searches of Booksamillion.com. So I repeated the search with iUniverse as the keyword, and got just 437 results. That compares with the 16,131 results for iUniverse (who I believe uses POD exclusively) in the Amazon catalog, suggesting that roughly 4% of the print-on-demand titles available are being turned up through these searches. I tried PublishAmerica, got 276 results on Google/Booksamillion and over 20,000 on Amazon, putting the number of titles represented under 2%. Xlibris drew just 67 through Google/Booksamillion and 16,000 through Amazon, again suggesting that a very small fraction of print-on-demand books in the Booksamillion site are being cataloged directly by Google.
So, what does it all mean? For one thing, it means I couldn't think of anything else to write about and returned to an old theme. For another thing, it means that next time some big publisher you're talking to says something snide about POD, you have a way of checking (with a probability somewhere in the low single digits) whether or not they've used print-on-demand themselves. If they've used POD for a large enough number of titles, they should show up.
So, for all the non-believers out there, I've come up with a simple way you can
browse print-on-demand titles and look at the publishers. It doesn't create an all-inclusive list, just those pages that happened to be indexed by Google for some reason or another on the Books-A-Million website. You can use the advanced search page on Google or just copy and paste the following as a single line into Google:
booksamillion "print-on-demand" -next, -matches site:www.booksamillion.com
The result I get this morning includes some 16,000 titles, only a small fraction of the print-on-demand titles in print, but a good sample to surf through. In the first ten pages of results, I saw the following "name" trade publishers:
Little Brown and Company
Delphi Books
Tor Books
Pocket Books
Atria Books
Lyle Stuart
Fredonia Books
HarperFestival
John Wiley & Son
Palgrave MacMillan
Basic Books
Harcourt
Simon & Schuster
HarperCollins Publishers
In one case, "My Sister's Keeper" from Atria Books, the current BAM page showed the title as in stock somewhere, as opposed to the print-on-demand designation that was in the page in Google's cache. It could be they use POD for stop-gap while reprinting books, or that they have books printed on demand in sufficient quantity to stock some vendors. Next it occurred to me that looking through random pages was silly when I could just add a publisher name to the search string. Reading publisher names off the spines of books next to my desk, I quickly added the following publishers with some print-on-demand titles to the list:
Random House Trade (random)
McGraw-Hill Professional (mcgraw)
Alfred A. Knopf (knopf)
William Morrow & Company (morrow)
Back Bay Books (back bay)
Vintage Books (vintage)
W. W. Norton & Company (norton)
Scribner Book Company (scribner)
Addison Wesley Publishing Company (holt - mistaken hit:-)
Ballantine Books (holt - another random hit)
Jossey-Bass (houghton = more random)
Finally, I realized we need some sort of normalizing factor, like, what percentage of POD books are actually represented in these Google searches of Booksamillion.com. So I repeated the search with iUniverse as the keyword, and got just 437 results. That compares with the 16,131 results for iUniverse (who I believe uses POD exclusively) in the Amazon catalog, suggesting that roughly 4% of the print-on-demand titles available are being turned up through these searches. I tried PublishAmerica, got 276 results on Google/Booksamillion and over 20,000 on Amazon, putting the number of titles represented under 2%. Xlibris drew just 67 through Google/Booksamillion and 16,000 through Amazon, again suggesting that a very small fraction of print-on-demand books in the Booksamillion site are being cataloged directly by Google.
So, what does it all mean? For one thing, it means I couldn't think of anything else to write about and returned to an old theme. For another thing, it means that next time some big publisher you're talking to says something snide about POD, you have a way of checking (with a probability somewhere in the low single digits) whether or not they've used print-on-demand themselves. If they've used POD for a large enough number of titles, they should show up.
Amazon Associates Publishing Book Sales
The Amazon Associates program is my longest standing business relationship on the web. I've been with them so long that I remember when they sent us all T-Shirts. Mine wore out back around '98 (hint, hint). While the Associates program adds a couple hundred dollars a month to my bottom line and helps me promote my own titles on Amazon, I think my favorite part is the reports. I'm just a numbers freak, always looking for causal relationships and trying to reverse engineer systems from the outside. Just for a change, I thought I'd share my Associates sales of publishing books for the last quarter, April - June 2007. I'm leaving out titles that sold less than 5 copies, and were are a lot of them.
My top publishing book for the quarter was my own Print on Demand Book Publishing, as it better be! It sold 73 copies through Associates during the quarter, just under a copy a day, and essentially all of the sales were direct. A direct sale is where a customer clicks on my Amazon link and buys the book as a result.
My second and third best selling books of the quarter were both Aaron Shepard's. Associates logged 33 sales of Aiming at Amazon and 24 sales of Perfect Pages. In the case of Aiming, only a quarter of the sales were direct, which means most of the customers went to Amazon to see my book and then purchased Aaron's in addition, or instead. In the case of Perfect, half the sales were direct, the other half were probably split between people finding Perfect by way of my book and by way of Aiming.
Associates also logged 11 sales each of Steve Weber's The Home-Based Bookstore and Dan Poynter's Self-Publishing Manual. In the case of Weber's book, all 11 sales were direct, from my page about Amazon sales ranks. In the case of Poynter's book, all the sales were indirect, people arriving at Amazon by way of my book or one of the others, then buying the Self-Publishing Manual. Bringing up the long tail was Steve Weber's Plug Your Book with seven sales, all but one indirect, so I can't be doing a very good job plugging it.
On a lark, I went back and looked at the Associates report from my last pre-blogging quarter, April - June 2005. It turns out I only sold 26 copies of my publishing book through Associates that quarter, and I didn't sell five or more copies of any other publishing book. So I can credit the blog with tripling the Associates sales for that title and boosting publishing book sales in general. That doesn't mean that I'm selling more overall than I did a year or two ago, in fact, I know I'm selling less than last year. It just means I'm getting less bang for my force-multiplier buck on the Amazon site itself, thanks to a lot of new competition and the widespread use of on-Amazon promotion techniques I've stayed away from.
My top publishing book for the quarter was my own Print on Demand Book Publishing, as it better be! It sold 73 copies through Associates during the quarter, just under a copy a day, and essentially all of the sales were direct. A direct sale is where a customer clicks on my Amazon link and buys the book as a result.
My second and third best selling books of the quarter were both Aaron Shepard's. Associates logged 33 sales of Aiming at Amazon and 24 sales of Perfect Pages. In the case of Aiming, only a quarter of the sales were direct, which means most of the customers went to Amazon to see my book and then purchased Aaron's in addition, or instead. In the case of Perfect, half the sales were direct, the other half were probably split between people finding Perfect by way of my book and by way of Aiming.
Associates also logged 11 sales each of Steve Weber's The Home-Based Bookstore and Dan Poynter's Self-Publishing Manual. In the case of Weber's book, all 11 sales were direct, from my page about Amazon sales ranks. In the case of Poynter's book, all the sales were indirect, people arriving at Amazon by way of my book or one of the others, then buying the Self-Publishing Manual. Bringing up the long tail was Steve Weber's Plug Your Book with seven sales, all but one indirect, so I can't be doing a very good job plugging it.
On a lark, I went back and looked at the Associates report from my last pre-blogging quarter, April - June 2005. It turns out I only sold 26 copies of my publishing book through Associates that quarter, and I didn't sell five or more copies of any other publishing book. So I can credit the blog with tripling the Associates sales for that title and boosting publishing book sales in general. That doesn't mean that I'm selling more overall than I did a year or two ago, in fact, I know I'm selling less than last year. It just means I'm getting less bang for my force-multiplier buck on the Amazon site itself, thanks to a lot of new competition and the widespread use of on-Amazon promotion techniques I've stayed away from.