Self-Publishing Unboxed by Patty Jansen

Author:Patty Jansen [Jansen, Patty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Authorship, Language, Non-Fiction, Publishing, Reference, Self-Publishing, Writing Skills
ISBN: 1977800467
Amazon: B0762Q1ZRN
Publisher: Capricornica Publications
Published: 2017-10-07T23:00:00+00:00

What About Print?

* * *

MANY WRITERS DREAM of seeing their books on the shelves in their favourite bookstore. There is something romantic about paper books that can’t be replaced by ebooks.

But this area is all stitched up by the publishing industry. They have the investment-heavy channels that supply the books, the reps that travel around to the bookshops that sell the books to the owners, and the back-end system setup that bookshops use, with a scan of the ISBN, to order or re-order their stock.

They also give the bookshops the discounts they need in order to make a profit and pay the rent or mortgage, and pay their staff. And oh, themselves.

Bing-bing-bing! Bookstores need to make money in order to survive. They don’t do it for love of books (although many of course also do), they don’t do it so that we can feel comforted to know that old bookshops still exist, they do it because they have to pay their bills.

There is a huge industry that lies behind the books that you see for sale on the shelves and it is also one where it is very hard to compete without the bulk discounts and onerous returns policies that make selling your Print On Demand books a lot of work for not much money.

I’m not entirely saying don’t do it, because there are some cases where you might want to give it a go, but it’s very hard to make decent money selling print books.

If you write non-fiction, especially non-fiction that is tied to your locality, if you’re a local author and are well-known locally or if you write picture-heavy non-fiction, you will find that your sales will naturally skew towards print anyway and you may try.

But it’s hard and a lot of work.

In 2000, I published a full colour non-fiction book. I had it printed in Hong Kong, shipped to Australia, and I paid the customs duties. I sent flyers to about 800 bookshops and visited whichever ones I could reach while also having young children. It was a lot of work, but because I knew the—very specialised—market, I sold a lot of books. Would I do it again today? Nup. I’d probably make a pay-for-content website. For one, do you realise how heavy books are?

For fiction authors, especially of adult fiction, print is far less than 5% of our sales. If you rocked up to a bookshop, managed to be there at the time the book buyer was in, held the book under her nose, why would you think she would even consider you? She probably gets asked the same question by at least 2-3 suckers published by vanity presses per week. She’s probably been burned a few times.

You can add print to your available formats, but do so only if you can do it easily or cheaply.

If you can format your own books, if you have InDesign and know a bit about print formatting, sure, why not, but if you have to pay someone to format it, I would think twice, or I’d at least wait until I was selling quite well.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.