September was a pretty hectic month at Catherine Self-Publishing HQ. Although I’d set the (purely decorative) release date for Backpacked as September 5th and the release date for Results Not Typical as October 1st, my cunning plan was to get them both out at the start of September, say nothing and then just shine a bright light in their direction whenever their turn came. That way I would be free, theoretically-speaking, to concentrate on writing The New Novel by the end of last month. But self-publishing two books simultaneously had an unexpected side-effect: it showed me – for the first time, really – what a pain in the arse self-publishing can be. Or more accurately, it showed me what a pain in the arse self-publishing is when you self-publish a paperback.
Self-publishing was to me, right from the start, mostly about producing a physical book. At the very beginning, it was only about that. Because that’s what a book was back then. (Ah, back then. Do you even remember November 2009? The Kindle still looked like something Fisher Price made and Hocking hadn’t even self-published.) I discovered Smashwords while twiddling my online thumbs in the week it took for my CreateSpace proof copy to arrive; when I initially made the decision to self-publish, e-books weren’t even on my radar. When they showed up, they were only ever supposed to be a bonus. Now I’ve sold almost 9,500 books and only about 800 of them were print editions.
But I have, after all, sold 800 of them. Isn’t that better than a slap in the face? Isn’t that actually a great number for a Print-On-Demand paperback, especially when you consider that an outstanding POD paperback success is 200 books, and most authors are lucky to shift more than 10? And it’s not like making a paperback is all that much extra work. You’re making an e-book anyway, so what’s an extra few hours making an interior and adding a back cover to your e-book cover’s front? And even if you never sell any, haven’t you only “lost” the price of your proof copy? And if you do sell some, don’t you only have to sit back and relax while Amazon takes care of everything? Isn’t self-publishing a paperback easy?
Yes, but none of those things are the problem.
When you self-publish, your aim should be to sell as many books as you can, to get as many readers as you can and to improve your standing as a writer as much as you can while spending as little as you can without sacrificing quality or professionalism. But when you add paperbacks to the mix, you don’t do that. At least, I don’t do that. I haven’t. Producing paperbacks and having them available has cost me more money, I’d guess, than selling 800 of them have brought back. And I wouldn’t have had to spend any of that money – or worry about it at all – if I’d been able to say, “Well, actually I won’t be doing that because Mousetrapped [or Backpacked or Results Not Typical] is only available in e-book.”
For instance, stock. You need to get it to send out review copies, to sell books to friends and family, to give books to friends and family, to have at your book launch, to get on a shelf at your local bookshop. But once your hands touch a copy of your POD’d book, chances are you’ve lost money on it. The unit cost of the book is probably cheap enough, but you’ve had to pay to ship it to you. CreateSpace have recently improved the costs of their formerly astronomical shipping charges, but to avail of their economy option you have to be exceptionally organized. Today is Saturday 15th October. I can order 30 books from CreateSpace and get them to Ireland via economy shipping for just $63.99, or just over $2 a book. That’s pretty good. But what’s not pretty good is if I order them today – I’m writing this on Saturday 15th October – they won’t get here until Friday December 9th. That’s two months from now.
You could stomp your feet and say you’re not offering paperback review copies, not bothering with a launch or getting into bookstores, and instruct all your friends and family to order from Amazon (which itself creates another problem which we’ll get to in a minute). But you can only do this if you’re willing to ignore what’s expected of you. If your book is available in both paperback and e-book editions, you should offer reviewers either a paperback or an e-book. I say this as both a self-publisher and a book reviewer who doesn’t read or review e-books. If you don’t do this you look cheap, and you might also potentially offend the reviewer who gets the message that while you want their time and support, you don’t think it’s worth the price of a “real” book. Book launches are easy enough to avoid, but when it comes to friends and family… Well, good luck with that. You’re going to need it.
During last week’s blog tour, I guest-posted on Sally Clements’ blog about the problem of explaining self-publishing to your friends and family. I had a launch for Mousetrapped (for which I had to order stock in for and subsequently made practically no money from the sales on the day) so any of my relatives who wanted a copy simply showed up and bought one. I also left a few copies in store so if anyone couldn’t attend, they could pop in there later and buy one then. For Backpacked, there was no launch and I didn’t want to order in 50 books at my own expense if I didn’t know that I was going to be able to shift them. Then I had what I thought was a great idea. The easiest way to estimate how many friends and family members would want to buy a copy of Backpacked was to get a list together, right? Ask around and find who wanted copies and how many of them they’d like. But this would be difficult to organize and I suspected that despite best intentions, some people would order Backpacked and then not pay for it when it arrived. So I opened a website where the people I know could go to pre-pay for however many copies of Backpacked they wanted. This not only meant that I’d order just the amount I needed, but it also meant that I’d have the money to pay for them outright and nobody could order in a copy without paying. (I also opened it up to the world, charging a bit extra to cover shipping; this was the Backpacked pre-order bookstore.) I circulated e-mails, told my parents to spread the word and pasted it all over Facebook. But no one understood what was happening. My friends and family didn’t get that this was their only opportunity to order a paperback of Backpacked, that this time there wouldn’t be a launch or copies in a bookshop or a stack of them in my house if all else failed. The bookshop closed without a single order from anyone I knew; every single book sold through it was destined for faraway shores. “It’s okay,” was the reaction when I explained – again – what was happening. “We’ll get it from Amazon.co.uk.”
Except they couldn’t, because self-publishing paperbacks brings yet another problem: availability, or lack thereof. You have almost no control over where you POD’d paperback appears available for sale. I’ve paid for the expanded distribution upgrade, CreateSpace’s “Pro Plan” ($39) on each of my titles, but only one of them is available directly through Amazon.co.uk. I always order from Amazon.com – where your book will always be – but there’s a shockingly large number of people who think you have to live in the United States to do that. And there’s another problem with selling POD paperbacks: they cost a lot. I had to charge $16.95 for the paperback edition of Results Not Typical just so I wouldn’t lose money. I’d never pay that much for a paperback myself, and I don’t expect to sell any of them. (And I haven’t even mentioned the book to most of my relatives…) If you are a fan of mine and you bought Mousetrapped on Amazon.co.uk for $14.95, are you still going to be fan when the only way you can get my newest book in print is by paying more than that, buying from a site on the other side of Atlantic and picking up some higher than normal shipping fees on the way? Or would you just not bother? I know I wouldn’t.
All of this could’ve been avoided if I’d just self-published e-books.
Which is why I might do it in the future. I could say to reviewers, “I only have an e-book – it’s not that I’m being cheap!” and save myself not only the unit costs of those complimentary books, but the cost of shipping them to me, shipping them to the reviewer and the envelope. No one would expect a launch and you can’t really put e-books in stores (well you can, strictly-speaking, but we’ll talk about that another day), and as hardly any of my friends or family have e-book readers, I just wouldn’t even bother telling them. If they want to read my books, they can buy a Kindle and figure out how to use it. When you publish an e-book with Smashwords, Amazon KDP or Lulu, your book becomes available where they say it’s going to become available, and those places cover all major e-book formats, e-reading devices, countries, planets, etc. There’s no shipping on e-books, no need to worry if the list price covers the manufacturing costs, no way to lose money. You can only make money from e-books.
This isn’t a random photo of a Gu Blueberry Cheesecake. I ate it while I was writing this post.
And it wouldn’t affect my sales. If someone doesn’t read my book because they only read paperbacks, so be it. There’s enough people who’ll happily read e-books to make this a non-issue.
There’s one other reason why I’d consider this e-book only route. I hope, some day, to be traditionally published. But I also hope that I can continue to self-publish alongside any traditionally-published books of mine. However I don’t want to be competing with my own publisher, and I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t offer me a contract if they thought I was competing with them. Therefore there would need to be a differentiation, clear and recognizable, between the two and I think self-publishing only in e-books would be a good way to do it.
Of course, I might never have this problem, and if I don’t I’ll be crying into my Cornflakes.
But anyway.
Fear not: I’m not about to run off and unpublish all my paperbacks and Self-Printed, which I personally think is best read in paperback form and judging by its sales breakdown between print and e-book editions, you agree, will always remain available in a physical form.
But not selling paperbacks is definitely something I’m seriously considering for the future.
Obviously I’ll still have to make paperbacks of any future books just for myself, because as we all know I’m not a fan of e-books. (Not of reading them anyway.)
There just might come a day when I do that in secret.
Like this:
Tags: Amazon KDP, e-books, Kindle, Mousetrapped, results not typical, self-printed, Self-Printing, self-publishing, smashwords
I feel your pain, really I do, but it is a country specific problem. CreateSpace can print in the UK so I wish they’d be willing to distribute proofs and stock from there as well, but they’re based in the US… and that’s the end of that discussion – at least as far as CS is concerned.
Lots of folks on the various self-publishing forums from the UK kvetch up a storm over it.
So.. here’s some thoughts to the contrary to at least consider:
Don’t keep stock. Don’t bother trying to get into physical bookstores. It’s not worth it. Friends and family can suck it up – what’s the adage? Open a shoe store and people will show up to buy new shoes whether they need them or not – publish a book and you’ll just hear crickets.
I hate to be like that, but I doubt people really “misunderstood” the process, but rather simply didn’t care enough to put in the effort. Don’t put yourself out to make them happy – this is a business and you’re now a professional. You don’t owe them.
Similarly, don’t shoot yourself in the foot by not having paperback available in the US. It’s a decent market and will sell copies based on your name and brand alone. It takes less than a day to format a properly edited manuscript into paperback.
And as for your sales ratios kindle/ebook.paperback – realize that’s one book and not all of them will perform the same. I’m six months out, 1000 copies into it, and 57% are paperbacks. There’s a very good chance you’re cannibalizing paperback sales by having such a low eBook price. Have you ever priced higher and seen if your paperback sales go up – enough so to make more gross sales than the loss of volume from eBooks? I have, they did. Now i stay at the higher price.
You and I are in the same exact sales categories – I suspect you’d have similar results. You’re in all my “also purchased” customer lists, so there’s definitely customer overlap. Just consider it at least.
I can guarantee you that they DID misunderstand, because now I have to order in stock to sell to them – they want copies, they just didn’t get with the program. Not everyone is prepared to buy books online and while self-publishers know all the ins and outs of POD, etc. the average person on the street does not.
I, frankly, don’t care about paperback sales. That’s not where the money is, but it IS where the stress is. I’m 18 months out, 9000 sales and can see across all my titles except for the “How To” that is better read in print that paperbacks only make up a tiny minority. Yet in terms of costs (shipping, complimentary copies, stress!) they take up the majority of the money I’ve spent. That’s just bad business.
Also I don’t bother with bookstores, as I have regularly talked about on this blog in the past.
I don’t think it’s a country specific problem at all. What about availability on online retailers other than Amazon.com? That’s nothing to do with where the books are printed or shipped from.
I would also that I *do* owe friends and family something. They support me, tell their friends about me, attend my events, share my links on Facebook and generally do everything they can to help me succeed. After all that am I going to turn around to them and say, “Go to Amazon like everyone else?” Hardly. But if I only published in e-book, I’d be able to say, “Well actually, it’s not available in paperback” and not feel guilty about it, or feel like the least I could do is get them some books. Again, not everybody is comfortable buying books online and without your book in stores, you have to provide them. People don’t understand when you tell them that you don’t have any copies of your own book.
I send out password protected PDF copies for review. I just make the password something specific to the particular reader/reviewer. Only one person ever asked for a print copy, they got it, and by golly they never wrote a review. My book has not been pirated from those copies. Just putting on the silly password was enough to keep people from trying to do so – despite it not really having any actual power.
I find that more and more reviewers are happily accepting e-books (you can download your own books in EPUB and Kindle mobi from Smashwords and then just attached them to an e-mail) which is also something that factors in this (potential) decision.
As a person who derives most of her income editing for traditional publishers, I find you are making a good case for them.
Wishing you a traditional book deal soon! In the meantime, keep up the good work, Catherine.
LOL – I’m wishing for it too!
Definitely food for thought. I agree that paperbacks are annoying to deal with. When I first published in 2008, 90% of my sales were paperback even though I had an ebook out (everyone kept asking, what’s an ebook?). Now I would say those numbers are pretty much flipped.
So should I stop selling paperbacks? No. I won’t (probably–hey, never say never) in the forseeable future for several reasons. The main one is that having a “real” book lends credibility, which is super important for self-publishers and people who start their own publishing company like moi. The average person I talk to is blown away when I tell them I sell mostly eBooks–they don’t get it. They don’t truly believe you’be published unless there’s something they can hold in their hands.
And in a sense, they’re right. Most people who only self-publish eBooks do so because they don’t have the skills or money to hire a cover designer, get the book formatted properly, manage stock, etc. Hope that’s not offensive to anyone reading this, but it’s been true in my experience.
Now by 2014 or so…all bets are off. I have no idea whether it will still be necessary then.
Angela that’s an excellent point that I neglected: credibility.
Would I be in the position I am today if I’d never self-published a paperback? Not a chance. I could list 50 things that have happened to me – magazine stories, newspaper coverage, radio interviews, etc. – that wouldn’t have occurred if I didn’t have, at one time, a bookshop launch or hard copies to send to reporters, etc.
And I agree with you: when people only publish e-books (generally speaking) it’s because they don’t have skills, money or both.
What I’m saying is going forward I don’t really see a need for me to publish paperbacks, but I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t.
Completely agree with you, Angela, about those who lack the wherewithal to get the book handled properly from the beginning, including professional editing. Those people tarnish the rest of you.
Just FYI, going with lightning source encounters none of these problems for print (although you pay a little extra up front the savings more than pay for it). You have complete control over whether it appears on uk and other sites and you have complete control over retail discount. You never have to keep any stock, because you ship to your reviewer directly from Amazon because if you have prime membership it’s actually cheaper than going to the post office (i.e. you buy the book from Amazon, ship to the reviewer and you get reimbursed later from LS revenue). You ship to Australia by buying from book depositry and shipping directly to your reviewer and save 10 bucks over going to the post office. As an example your “Results” book would work out as follows: LS charges you $6.23, Amazon takes 20% of 16.95 which is 3.39, which is less than the 3.99 shipping without prime, that leaves you a net of $7.33. No stock, and it has effectively only cost you 3.39 to ship it and the convenience of not stocking it. At that rate you can easily lower the print price.
But I don’t want to do any of that – I am allergic to complicating things. And I can’t even sign up for Amazon Marketplace (or Prime) from the Republic of Ireland so I wouldn’t bring the headache of it upon myself.
I think some commenters are missing the point here – I’m not looking for solutions to these problems that will enable me to continue to self-publish paperbacks. I just want to self-publish e-books, which at this stage in my self-publishing career is the most effective way to continue to earn money, gain readers, etc. in terms of lowest cost and minimum effort. Getting started required me to have a foot on either side of the fence, but there’s no real reason to continue doing it now.
Gotcha. I think you now have enough credibility with your existing print bookshelf that you can exercise your right to simplicity!
Catherine, I get your point and loved the clarity of your post. Joe Konrath has been championing “ebooks only” for a long time now. In today’s publishing climate, that’s how the money is being made. More and more, physical copies are losing ground to ebooks in overall number of sales, and if one is in the business of MAKING MONEY off one’s writing, then one HAS to choose the path that gets one there. I, too, love physical books more than my ereader, as do my friends and family, BUT the majority of the book buying public are converting to buying ebooks.
For the first couple of books that an author puts out (the stage that I’m at), the excitement of having that physical copy in your ( and relatives’ and friends’) hot little hands gives a rush like no other, but I suspect, as an author’s list of books grows, that novelty wears off, and business sense begins to rule.
By the way, I have both Mousetrapped and Self, in physical book forms and am glad that I had the choice, but if I want a book badly enough, given the much better price structures of most ebooks, and the ease of making an ebook purchase, I would have purchased them both on my ereader if that was the only form offered..
Hi Catherine – when I self-pubbed in April of this year, I decided to concentrate solely on e-books and not paperbacks. I have another book coming out soon – and again it will be available only as an e-book.
I came to this decision for the same reasons you have outlined – national paperback distribution is impossible to achieve as an indie. Maybe if I lived in a city then I could at least do library talks or book shop signings and sell a few paperbacks – but that’s not going to happen a remote place in Scotland where I happen to live. So thank goodness for Kindle, Sony, Apple, Kobo, etc etc and their ever increasing appeal to both readers and reviewers.
I love being an indie author. I can write what I like, work with whom I choose to on the professional side of things like editing and cover design (yes, I do things properly!) and as everything I now do promotionally is on-line – it makes complete sense to me that my books are available at the click of a mouse too.
So far it’s working well and I’m selling books without actually having to go anywhere. BUT of course I’m missing out on paperback sales (a huge portion of the market) and a real-shop shelf presence as well as the possibility of translation /foreign language sales. These are things that only a large traditional publishing house can provide – and it’s important to note that the smaller traditional publishers (and I had one of those once) are far more numerous than the big boys and they don’t have great paperback distribution, shop shelf presence or foreign language sales either.
So, as an indie author, I’m just happy to consider the e-book market as a niche market in which it is possible to succeed at a satisfying level both as an author and as a business person.
While e-books are great, you brought up a good point that when it comes to more business, reference, or how-to books, people still seem to like traditional printed forms. I’ve self-published two business books that have been huge successes in their niches and it’s always interesting to me how many more paperback copies (like 7x more) I sell each month versus e-book versions. For fiction I think e-book is the way to go but for anything reference-oriented paperbacks seem to be hanging on quite well.
Thanks for sharing your experience in such detail Catherine. It helps others like me weigh up the pros and cons.
In Australia, the shipping costs from CS are frightening. But I do love a paperback… something to put on a shelf, something to wave around at speaking engagements… *sigh*
I’m weighing up getting 50-100 paperbacks printed locally on a digital press (cheaper per copy than CS) or seeing what work-arounds can be achieved using Lightning Source who recently began printing in Australia.
I’m an indie publisher and *everything* – and I do mean EVERYTHING you’ve said is true. I can just multiply that refrain by 25 (the number of titles I have in print). It’s such a headache that in 2012 I am publishing eBooks only.
Amen, sister, I feel your pain.
Agreed, Diane and Catherine. I went with an e-publisher because for two years now I’ve only wanted to publish e-book only. And I stand by that decision every day. Paperbacks are not what I read and e-books are so much more versatile. I have so many interactive (enhanced) features in my e-book that I would never have available in the print version. And to be honest, I’ve heard so many people in the publishing industry tell me that my ebook has the most beautiful design/formatting they’ve ever seen in a digital book. I consider print to be old-school and passe and I have no desire to live in the past.
As you can see, I have a serious opinion on this topic! Thank you for bringing it up, Catherine!
Hello – what I’m going to say might sound like spamming – but I hope you will take it in the genuine spirit it is offered in. I won’t put links here or name the business – just describe what we’ve started up to try and ease the pain a bit for DIY publishers. I won’t be offended if you delete this comment – I’m just not quite sure how to word this so it is useful rather than salesy. I hope I get the balance right and sorry if I don’t.
My husband and I started a small press in 2009 and we have struggled through many of the glitches you describe. But we’ve worked out a way to minimise the financial outlay and maximise the distribution online for paperbacks. We love paperbacks and we love producing them in self-indulgently high quality – by using best practice techniques and good clever book design rather than expensive papers or print processes. But we aren’t prepared to spend silly money doing so because we are a business.
But this year we decided to start a separate little sideline – producing books for other people but offering ALL the services and tricks and wrinkles we’ve found over the last few years to enable a self-publisher to achieve the same results as we do as a publisher.
That means we can offer near enough full worldwide availability for POD paperbacks to be sold at competitive prices to the end customer and with fast delivery times on all the usual online outlets and capable of being ordered from bricks & mortar stores worldwide.
If you are interested you can message me on Twitter – of course there is an upfront cost – but it is not anywhere near as onerous as people think. We’ve had a few people use us for book cover design, interior design, ebook formatting (we specialise in special editions and poetry) and so far everyone has been very satisfied with value for money.
In other words we offer the traditional publishing experience as a pick and mix to self-publishers but without the stupidly high prices of a vanity press operation. We want to make a living but we also want to be able to sleep at night with crystal clear consciences. The new services for self-publishers (or indie presses who need someone to take some of the load off) are completely separate from our small press with different ISBN numbers etc and a different publisher name and never the twain shall meet so there are no worries about conflicts of interest between the two.
Anyway sorry again if it sounded like a commercial – but I just wanted to point out there are alternatives springing up to make life easier and it doesn’t have to be quite so much of a headache and with careful optimisation of end price to the book reader/buying public you can feasibly sell paperbacks without burning a hole in your budget.
I’m about to self-publish a book for the first time in 5 years and boy is there a lot to learn! Thanks for all your posts: methinks I’ll be spending a lot of time on your site in the next few weeks…
Alastair
Producing paperback versions of my books is straightforward and, after the first one, quite simple. I am just in the black on my paperbacks, but I have to say the shops and distributor make FAR more money that I do.
Why do I bother? Because to get on local radio and into the papers, you have to have hard copies. You can’t do a signing of an ebook. The paperbacks are for fun and publicity, but the real profit comes from the ebook version.
I love finding indie published gems, but I have to admit I only read in paper!
However, I think that every writer has to find her right path–especially in the indie landscape–and you probably know what will shine the best light on your work, while allowing you to do the most important thing–write more books…
I self-pubbed both a paperback and hardback through Lulu.com. Found their live chat always helpful. Did the book and used one of their cover templates – didn’t pay for any of that. Followed their guidelines.
S&H – Lulu runs sales on books for NO S&H…and that’s when I ordered a bunch of books. Yes, I can get them at my author’s price and S&H can be around $2 per book. But without S&H, it’s worth it.
I paid for global distribution programs for each. Didn’t do an ebook since it’s already available as an ebook through a small epub.
Right now, I’m happy. Looked at CreateSpace, but they don’t do hardback versions and I wanted both.
Delightful blog. Found you from The Book Designer. I was just contemplating this very thought the other day, but then I felt the scratchy grit of paper on my hands and decided I would do the paperback. Not that it will make me any money. I do it simply to get a paper cut from MY own book.
Well, let’s put it this way: I wouldn’t have read MouseTrapped if it hadn’t been available in paperback. I don’t have an ebook reader, and I don’t particularly want one. So you will lose readers by not publishing in paperback format.
I also know that many reviewers still insist on receiving paperbacks.
But if neither of those things are a big deal to you at this point in your writing career (and they legitimately might not be) then definitely don’t bother with paperbacks! I agree that it’s a major PITA!
It sounds to me like you should add a rolling system…publish in ebook only format, launch, gather sales data while you work on your next book, and then launch a paperback version at some point in the future.
You’ve avoided the “reviewer” problem, you can still provide a physical copy to friends/family that don’t read digital but don’t need to for those that do, you can benefit from having multiple sales channels for the work, etc.
Doesn’t solve the whole “complexity” issue so you’d have to decide if the extra sales at a later date might be worth the effort of the extra formatting, but it’s an option to look at at least.
Great article, definitely some food for thought.
Very funny and very true. Half my books are niche published and my readers seldom if ever read ebooks. But there’s no reason my writing- and publishing-related books shouldn’t just be ebooks, as you suggest. Except that I personally think the reader-stuff is ugly, in part because I’m so old I recall short books “printed” in cuneiform. Nice to have so many choices.
I reached Andrew Browne (Design for Writers) thanks to you, Catherine. He took so much care, asked me so many questions. Now I have a stunning cover for my book, NOTES ON THE PAST INDEFINITE… So I am about to “go” with Create Space. My first ever print-on-demand publication… Nervous? You bet. But just to see that book (cover) on Amazon will be reward enough…
Correct me if I’m wrong but once my book is launched (?) on Create Space, that’s it. Stet. I cannot recall it for further edits and re-writes, not without (financial) penalty?..
Whereas if I settle for epublication only (Smashwords or Amazon Kindle or both) I can continue to work on my MSS from time to time… refreshing it as needs be… And it won’t cost me an arm and a leg to download and re-publish… And that at no extra cost?..
You can always update your book but you’ll have to pay for a new proof copy each time you do on CreateSpace, yes.
You can always update your book but you’ll have to pay for a new proof copy each time you do on CreateSpace, yes.
Yes, yes, yes!
Thanks, Alexis!