In honor of the efforts made here at Langhorne Creative Group, the first real post I'll make at the blog will take its cue from a friend of mine who was thinking out loud about doing some art and publishing projects on his own. With the year of experience I've had doing just that, I shared some thoughts on the business part of making books with him, and I figured you all might like to read about that, too. Long story short: it's a lot of work, and it's a lot of fun.
The first step in publishing books is to get beyond the stage most people plop down at of saying, "I WANNA WRITE A BOOK!" They think they have a great idea, they might even get as far as writing two pages of it down, and then they decide that writing is hard and stop. That's what probably 99% of people who want to be a writer do.
When people find out I'm a writer, they often say, "Man, I got this great idea for a story! You should publish it!" I'm always looking for good material, so I tell them to give me something to read, which has worked out exactly one time (Joseph Tate, for the curious). The rest look slightly crest-fallen that I actually said I wanted to see what they got and say, "Okay," and then promptly never do anything about it. Believe it or not, it actually takes more than that to get your book out there. A writer writes, and they do it often, whether they wind up scrapping what they wrote or not. The important part is they keep at it.
Publishing your own books is not incredibly expensive, either, as your start-up costs to get the book published and first small batch delivered is only in the low hundreds, not thousands of dollars. Obviously, I don't own my own print shop, but there are print-on-demand services that are very good and inexpensive, and there are printer services that are dirty crooks looking to rip you off, so make sure the deal they offer passes the smell test. If you don't want to pursue a legacy publishing company (the big publishing labels, like Random House), which is a tall mountain to climb to get their attention to being with, the print-on-demand services can be very easy to use, you can order what you want when you want, and there is plenty of room for profitability.
However, distribution will basically have to be a from-scratch experience without the legacy publishers. In my year of publishing, I have made it into four independent bookstores in Tennessee (Paris, Jackson, Memphis, and Franklin), Amazon.com, and Kindle and Nook. I dropped barnesandnoble.com and booksamillion.com because the profit margins were not worth the effort, and they raised the prices on my books, which I don't dig, because I don't want people ripping off my readers. Chain bookstores won't carry your book in their stores if their distributor doesn't carry it, and distributors don't want anything to do with self-published titles.
That leaves you with indpendent bookstores, which are often owned by cooky people that don't want to do anything that might result in promoting their business for free, so you'll have to hustle each of them. It's a hit-or-miss proposition, but I'm very happy with the bookstores I work with (shameless plugs: Books and More in Paris, Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis, Something to Read in Jackson, and Landmark Booksellers in Franklin). Each of these stores also has different policies on what they will carry, how they'll split the profits with you, and if they do booksignings or not, so you just have to work it out with them. All of my stores carry my books on consignment, which means I put the books on their shelves at no cost to them, and when the book sells, we split up the sales price at an agreed percentage. The most common split I've seen is 60/40 (60% of sales price goes to the me, 40% to the store), but I've seen better and I've seen worse. Charlene at Books and More is FABULOUS to me, so please, give her ALL OF YOUR MONEY, but I dropped out of talks with a bookstore in Atlanta because there was no way I could make any money selling through them. I want to be in the Atlanta market, but a good piece of advice here is: don't take a bad deal, even if it expands your distribution network. A bad deal is still a bad deal. Actually, that goes for the rest of life, too.
There's more I could go on about, but I'm just putting out a taste of what goes into the nuts and bolts of getting a book to market for now. Oh, I almost forgot the fun part of doing it your own way: if you want 100% creative control over your work, so you can tell your story exactly how you want to tell it and see people dig your stuff, independent publishing is a great way to get into the book market. So if you will write the stories you say you want to, have a little cash to get started, and want to hustle to get your book out there, it's great. I love doing it and will keep doing it as long as I dang well please. And by the way, independent publishers can sell just as big as the legacy publishers when they do all the right things, so the sky is the limit. Thanks for reading.
The first step in publishing books is to get beyond the stage most people plop down at of saying, "I WANNA WRITE A BOOK!" They think they have a great idea, they might even get as far as writing two pages of it down, and then they decide that writing is hard and stop. That's what probably 99% of people who want to be a writer do.
When people find out I'm a writer, they often say, "Man, I got this great idea for a story! You should publish it!" I'm always looking for good material, so I tell them to give me something to read, which has worked out exactly one time (Joseph Tate, for the curious). The rest look slightly crest-fallen that I actually said I wanted to see what they got and say, "Okay," and then promptly never do anything about it. Believe it or not, it actually takes more than that to get your book out there. A writer writes, and they do it often, whether they wind up scrapping what they wrote or not. The important part is they keep at it.
Publishing your own books is not incredibly expensive, either, as your start-up costs to get the book published and first small batch delivered is only in the low hundreds, not thousands of dollars. Obviously, I don't own my own print shop, but there are print-on-demand services that are very good and inexpensive, and there are printer services that are dirty crooks looking to rip you off, so make sure the deal they offer passes the smell test. If you don't want to pursue a legacy publishing company (the big publishing labels, like Random House), which is a tall mountain to climb to get their attention to being with, the print-on-demand services can be very easy to use, you can order what you want when you want, and there is plenty of room for profitability.
However, distribution will basically have to be a from-scratch experience without the legacy publishers. In my year of publishing, I have made it into four independent bookstores in Tennessee (Paris, Jackson, Memphis, and Franklin), Amazon.com, and Kindle and Nook. I dropped barnesandnoble.com and booksamillion.com because the profit margins were not worth the effort, and they raised the prices on my books, which I don't dig, because I don't want people ripping off my readers. Chain bookstores won't carry your book in their stores if their distributor doesn't carry it, and distributors don't want anything to do with self-published titles.
That leaves you with indpendent bookstores, which are often owned by cooky people that don't want to do anything that might result in promoting their business for free, so you'll have to hustle each of them. It's a hit-or-miss proposition, but I'm very happy with the bookstores I work with (shameless plugs: Books and More in Paris, Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis, Something to Read in Jackson, and Landmark Booksellers in Franklin). Each of these stores also has different policies on what they will carry, how they'll split the profits with you, and if they do booksignings or not, so you just have to work it out with them. All of my stores carry my books on consignment, which means I put the books on their shelves at no cost to them, and when the book sells, we split up the sales price at an agreed percentage. The most common split I've seen is 60/40 (60% of sales price goes to the me, 40% to the store), but I've seen better and I've seen worse. Charlene at Books and More is FABULOUS to me, so please, give her ALL OF YOUR MONEY, but I dropped out of talks with a bookstore in Atlanta because there was no way I could make any money selling through them. I want to be in the Atlanta market, but a good piece of advice here is: don't take a bad deal, even if it expands your distribution network. A bad deal is still a bad deal. Actually, that goes for the rest of life, too.
There's more I could go on about, but I'm just putting out a taste of what goes into the nuts and bolts of getting a book to market for now. Oh, I almost forgot the fun part of doing it your own way: if you want 100% creative control over your work, so you can tell your story exactly how you want to tell it and see people dig your stuff, independent publishing is a great way to get into the book market. So if you will write the stories you say you want to, have a little cash to get started, and want to hustle to get your book out there, it's great. I love doing it and will keep doing it as long as I dang well please. And by the way, independent publishers can sell just as big as the legacy publishers when they do all the right things, so the sky is the limit. Thanks for reading.
