Wasting Money on Print Exposure:-)

Somebody in the advertising business must have bought a mailing list with my name on it because this morning I got an email titled "Print Exposure Sells Books!" Being a bright boy, I cottoned immediately to the fact that they were talking about print media, as opposed to say, photography exposures. I pretty much always delete junk mail without looking at it, but I have a soft spot for book marketing related stuff, might even go as far as to call it a professional interest. So, I opened the puppy up, HTML formatting at all, to see what I'd learn.

The headline (big font) was:

"Using Print Exposure to Sell Books..."

I didn't get the three little dots after books until I read the next line:

"...Can Be the Difference Between a Best-Seller and a Bargain Bin Dweller"

Obviously the author of this ad copy hasn't been reading my blog. In my book, chasing bestseller status is for big egos and deep pockets, and thanks to a short-discount, my titles won't end up in bargain bins. Still, anybody can get a headline wrong, so I read on to the first paragraph. To paraphrase, "There are so many new books getting published that you have to do something to stand out."

I've been known to make similar statements myself, mainly related to carefully choosing your market, establishing an online presence, writing a good book and making sure you aren't living in the vacuum of your own counsel. Is that what these people are pitching?

"That's why most experienced authors and publicists will tell you 'Print is King.'"

Oddly enough, that couldn't run more counter to the book marketing advice I give. I've always figured that spending money on print advertising is the last stop on the line for a publisher or publicist who's run flat out of ideas. But maybe I'm judging them too harshly. Reading a little further, I learned that they aren't pitching paid advertising at all. Their approach is that you pay them to assist you in getting editorial mentions, press releases, and if they're clever, helping you become a resource to reporters who would rather turn to a branded database for "experts" than simply Googling them up.

So, as much as the first couple paragraphs of copy were a complete turn-off to me, I think I understand where they are coming from. Here's my take on print media publicity, whether editorial, obvious PR, expert attribution or even authoring articles. It fun to have a clipping to send your Mom and it looks good on a resume if you want to work as a trade author, because they see all this stuff as a platform for selling books. If you're following my short-discount model with print-on-demand and no bookstore stocking, you might sell a book for every hundred thousand or so people who see the print exposure - it's that inefficient. One of the problems with the print media is they don't have any hyperlinks to Amazon or your website with the option to "Buy it Now!" Another problem is that nobody is reading whatever the print media is because they're looking for your book. If they were looking for your book (or a similar title) they'd be at the library, a bookstore, or searching online.

Print exposure can't hurt you unless you're hiding from the law, but in terms of places to invest your time and money, you'd better be careful. I may be very atypical, but I've never bought a book because I heard the author talking on the radio or saw the title or author mentioned in an editorial fashion. In fact, when I hear authors talking on the radio, I usually change the station. A lot of it has to do with the subject and whether or not the chance media encounter can leave the potential buyer passionate enough about the book to track it down and buy it. Nothing I've written or published falls into that category, but I tend not to make big promises in my titles. If I was publishing books like "The Insomnia Cure", "The Worry Free Audit Guide" or "Understanding Women in 999,999 Easy Lessons" then I might value print exposure more. Maybe I'm just jealous:-)

Starting an Online Book Publishing Company

There are tens or hundreds of thousands of online publishing companies around the world today which were started for the purpose of attracting visitors to their websites to sell them something other than books. Some of the content they publish is of very low quality, even stolen or automatically generated by computer software. However, there are also a large number of top-notch writers and professionals who would have been working as trade authors or part-time journalists ten years ago, but who are now publishing online and retaining ownership of their work.

Publishing online before going to paper provides book publishers, especially those who are just starting out, and important competitive advantage. The online draft of the book will draw feedback which can help you tweak the contents for the market, and it can also tell you, before you invest in going to paper, whether or not the market you expected is really there. What's more, whether or not you decide to go to paper with a particular book, the visitors to your website may be interested in other titles or products that you can sell or market for others.

You don't need to obtain an ISBN block before you start publishing books online, but you will need to periodically register a copyright for your website if you want to be in a stronger position should infringements occur. You don't need any fancy software either, but I do recommend publishing your drafts as HTML pages, not as PDF's or through blogging software. The advantage of plain HTML is it allows you to manually link the chapters into a logical cluster and seems to be favored by the search engines in the rankings.

Don't get caught up worrying about the "company" part of starting an online publishing company before you have anything to sell. I'm not aware of any legal requirements you must fulfill before you start publishing online. The government doesn't consider it a business until you start earning or losing money that has to be accounted for on taxes. Some of the most successful online publishing companies started out as hobby sites that provided both the credentials and the platform from which the author began to publish books. That was certainly the case with my own publishing history, starting online, moving to self publishing, then authoring for the trades, and finally returning to self publishing.

The neat thing about online publishing is it's a relatively level playing field. While the search engines rank sites in accordance with both their content and their authority ranking, which takes time to build, you'll get some traffic from the start just based on the uniqueness of your writing. It doesn't work that way in paper publishing, especially in non-niche subjects where the key words in the title won't help you due to the mass of competing titles. The internet is more like an infinitely large bookstore with a billion or more people browsing the shelves. Sure, the big trade publishers and the big authority sites may have tens or hundreds of thousands of titles on the virtual shelves, but with a billion browsers, you can still draw your share of interest.

Finally, keep in mind that starting a paper book publishing company will cost you a few hundred dollars just for the ISBN block and costs will rise rapidly as you prepare your first book for publication. Starting an online publishing company costs you a few dollars a year to register a domain name and a few dollars a month to pay for hosting. Mistakes on paper cost money and can only be corrected by reprinting. Mistakes online take seconds to fix and the electrons don't cost a dime. Given my druthers (thank you, Huck Finn for pronouncing I'd rather as a single word) I'll always start with electrons:-)

What Happened to Ebooks?

I've mentioned on this blog a couple of times that e-books add about $500 a month to the bottom line of my publishing business. That's in the past tense now, since Amazon was my main outlet for e-books and they've begun eliminating all LSI e-books from their catalog. It will be interesting to see whether my direct and distribution sales pick up most of the slack, in terms of units if not profits, or whether Amazon e-book buyers were really preferentially shopping for an e-book from a vendor they were comfortable doing business with.

On the bright side, I'm not the only publisher with a list of e-books disappearing from Amazon. I used their Power Search function to check some of the big trade publishers’ e-book offerings for the past three years, and there were even more than I'd surmised. HarperCollins has listed 1569 paperbacks with Amazon after 2002, and 2765 hardcovers. They also listed 1148 e-books after 2002, all of which are likely versions of the paper books (didn't check them all for obvious reasons) and most of which now appear to be unavailable. Random House has 564 e-books listed after 2002, vs 1534 hardcovers and 1544 paperbacks. Time Warner had 622 e-book titles listed after 2002, Simon and Shuster had 225; the other big names I thought of seemed to have experimented less and dropped it. Still, there was plenty of variety for a while, much of it NYT bestseller list material. None of the titles I clicked on were still available for sale so I'm assuming they all got caught in the LSI wipeout.

It also occurred to me to check my website statistics for how many visitors have been drawn to my blog this month by an earlier post which is the #1 result in Google for "e-book sales." Hold onto your hat, the grand total was 32, or just over 1 visitor a day. That's a pretty sure sign that not many people are all that interested in how e-books are doing. The funny thing is I still hear from businesses on a fairly regular basis which have just developed the latest thing in DRM that they think will change the landscape of the e-book market. Personally, I don't think e-books will go anywhere in this country until school textbooks are replaced by electronic readers and a new generation grows up with them.

I did a little searching around the web for predictions from five years ago about what the size of the e-book market would be 2006. The range went from about $250 million to $2.5 billion, so some long forgotten analysts have some serious pie on their faces. I don't know of any realistic figures for the true size of the e-book market this year, but if you leave out the libraries and academic institutions who buy e-book material because they have to, I wouldn't be surprised if it's less than $25 million in the U.S., and that would include a lot of questionable literature.

So what happened to e-books? Are they even relevant to publishing discussions anymore? I spent around $700 attending a conference on e-books hosted by the National Institute of Standards in Washington, DC in 2000 because I thought e-books were the future of publishing. I came home from that conference convinced that free books are are future of publishing, with online publishers finding other ways to monetize the pages through advertising or sales of paper books. I'm not complaining about the two years I had a few e-book titles on Amazon, it put around $10,000 in my pocket (well, $5K for me and $5K for Uncle Sam). I can't say I'd encourage anybody to go into e-book publishing today unless they had content that just couldn't be monetized or delivered any other way.