Self Publishing and Home Publishing Questions

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Self Publishing

Questions? Comments?

Should I Self-Publish my Book?

Question) From your experience as both an trade author and a self-publisher, was it very difficult to self publish and sell your books?

Answer) I wish I'd never signed a contract with a trade publisher, and I do talk about that in the book. However, I've had websites online since 1995, and that's where the majority of my sales come from, just like you found me. I push web marketing because it doesn't force authors to become performers, which I'm not. I've gotten to the point where I wouldn't publish a non-fiction book unless I already had at least 100 people a day visiting a draft version on the web. As to difficulty, it's easy if you stick to the basics. All the stuff you read and hear about what a book has to be is meaningless, the only things a book has to be are well conceived and marketed. Author's who've never come close to my sales sometimes give me grief over the fact I only use one title page, rather than having on for the title and another for the publisher, trivia like that. Never mind trying to look "just like a real book." If you've published a book that people enjoy reading or find useful, you've already done better than the average book published by the big trades.

Q) I'm setting up a publishing company, can you give me a contract to use with my authors?

A) There are form contracts available in all of the publishing law books which you can find on Amazon, but it would be nuts to use one without really understanding it. Get a publishing lawyer. In publishing, the rights are the entire business.

Q) Do I get ISBN numbers and codes from the UCC?

A) I've never heard of UCC. The ISBN agency for the United States is Bowker, they have a government granted monopoly. Their website is www.bowker.com and they also publish Books In Print. Anything else is a scam. UPC is for generic products, not specifically books. Books need a Bookland barcode, you can get them for free on the Internet or pay around $8 for a film version if you're using an old-fashioned offset printer. I don't know about videos, they may need a UPC. I'm no expert on the subject, but I think the cost is registering to be a legit vendor, not the software to produce barcodes, which would be simple. Try doing some research with Google on UPCs for videos. See the basics of book self publishing.

Q) Should I self publish or use a subsidy press?

A) Are you doing this as a business or as a hobby? If you're doing it as a business, paying somebody to publish a book for you is already a lost cause. They will not market the book for you and no amount of marketing you pay for will help, the book industry just doesn't work that way. When's the last time you bought a book by somebody you never heard of based on an advertisement? On the other hand, if you're ready to go out and promote your book, it's just a matter of making it available. I use Lightning Source, the Print-on-Demand provider who actually prints all the books for the big subsidy presses you've probably been dealing with. They don't work with directly with authors, you have to set up a publishing business first, which basically means spending $225 on a block of ISBN numbers. Lighting Soucre offers a true home publishing solution, since you don't need to carry any inventory. If you want a reasonable subsidy press, try Booklocker.

Q) Can I home publish a book without a new Library of Congress Control Number?

I don't bother with LCCN numbers myself, they're an obsolete system for identifying books that's been replaced in all usages I'm aware of by the ISBN. If you're shooting for library sales, a CIP number doesn't hurt, but it will hardly generate sales, it's just a minor bona-fide. I actually had an LCCN number appear in Ingram for one of my books, along with the Dewey number, without any involvement on my part. Some library must have submitted the info to one of Ingram's data sources. Some publishers get all tied-up in what numbers to put in their books so they'll look official or sell better, but aside from the ISBN, it's all pretty irrelevant. If you don't market your books, they won't sell. If you do market them, having a one or another cataloging number isn't going to make a difference. I do sell plenty of books to libraries and have never had an inquiry from one on the subject.

Q) Can you recommend a good self publishing firm?

A) The term "self-publishing firm" is a self contradiction, though I'm aware there are companies out there using it. If you self-publish, by definition, you are the publisher. If instead of obtaining a block of ISBN numbers (around $250 in the US), you pay somebody a fee to publish the book for you, they are the publisher. Every book must have an ISBN number to appear in online catalogs and be orderable by stores, and an ISBN block can only have one owner of record, who is the publisher of record.

Q) Have you ever published or sold any e-books?

A) My bestselling eBook has sold around 50 copies in its first two months, this was enough to make it #1 on the Amazon early adopter list for around a month, and it might still be in their top 100 overall. After the first month with it, I issued my other two books as eBooks. It turns out that some small percentage of customers actually prefer eBooks, plus there's the international crowd who would have to pay a ton and wait for weeks to get a book from Amazon. Having your books available as e-books is also a big help during the Christmas season when Amazon fulfillment slows down and non-gift buying customers aren't willing to wait. Overall, I think eBooks work best for professional books, as opposed to fiction, but you never know until you try. I do have an article on how to publish an ebook.

Q) Do e-books and print books need individual ISBN's?

A) Depends on who does the e-book and where it gets sold. I assigned a new number for an e-book I just did, but Amazon made up their own number anyway. I did the e-book through Lightning Source, and I don't think they would have taken it without one. However, if you do an e-doc direct with Amazon, for example, you don't need one at all. I did later e-books with Lightning Source assigning a unique ISBN but not going to Bowkerlink and filling out the info, so it's not really been used up since it doesn't appear anywhere other than Lightning Source's computer system. That said, I don't think I'd try reusing those numbers for new print books, too much risk of confusion.

Q) Why did you publish e-book versions of your print on demand books?

A) In the case of my books, I didn't add e-books to make big bucks, I wanted them to be easily available to people in countries Lightning Source doesn't print in. To my surprise, I've since found that some customers in the US and UK simply prefer buying e-books, either because the instant gratification (they have the book within minutes of paying) or because they actually like reading off a computer screen.

Q) Do you use Digital Rights Management (DRM) with your e-books?

A) DRM is critical to me. Even though everything is hackable, one of my titles is what the insurance industry would term an "attractive nuisance," a crime waiting to happen. Your average person isn't going to go to the bother to scan the whole book or hack a DRM scheme just to post it to a board, but somebody who pays anything for an unprotected PDF or other format might do so out of the goodness of his or her heart. If I didn't care about DRM, I'd sell a PDF off my website with PayPal (works all over the world, you know) and just e-mail it as an attachment to customers. I set the DRM in my e-books to allow one printing per year.

Q) If I ship books with Media Mail, what's tp keep customers from saying they nerver arrived?

A) For those of us who are still shipping books made out of trees, PayPal has added the US Post Office to their shipping options (used to be UPS only). What I didn't realize was that you can ship Media Mail with tracking via the Post Office website, I'd only been using them for Priority Mail labels and postage. You can now print labels (without any cut and pasting) and track media mail shipments for $0.33, or a few cents cheaper than doing it manually and buying delivery confirmation. Just keep in mind that this kind of tracking is really just delivery confirmation since they often don't bother scanning the bar code until the package is delivered. Make sure you inform your customers of this or they'll keep on asking, "When is my book going to ship," after they get the e-mail with the "tracking" number but the post office never show the package as being received.

Q) I hear I need to get my books into Ingram Distribution, but don't they have some sort of minimum I need to meet?

A) That's what their current website info says. It used to be 10 titles active (or promised) but then they shited to gross sales. I think I'd read about the program in a Publisher's Weekly a few months ago, but don't remember when it was scheduled to launch, and it's possible they've dropped it again. A few years ago, we were in on the ten title thing, then they kicked out a lot of people, including us, based on sales quantity. They were looking for some odd number at the time, like $17K per year, but that was the 55% deal, the 60% deal was supposed to be different. I may have gotten it wrong, I don't worry about it since moving to LSI, but there's nothing fixed about the deals B&T and Ingram offer. Neither can quite decide if they want to be bothered with micro-publishers on any terms, can't really blame them. They (Ingram) list a bunch of distributors on their site who will get small pubs into Ingram, but the discount terms get pretty nasty. Integrated book distribution through Ingram is the main reason we went with Lightning Source.

Q) What's the deal with Amazon Advantage and Marketplace?

A) If you're using Lightning Source, there's very little advantage to being in Advantage, and a big financial drawback, if you have a short discount. Advantage charges a fee for participation, insists on a 55% discount, and you have to pay shipping. On the other hand, LS sells direct to Amazon at the discount you set, hand-off, no shipping costs (either to you or to Amazon). If you do any web promotion, Amazon Associates is a must join. I get over half of my Amazon sales through my Associates account, the referral fees drop over $1000 a year direct to my bottom line, and it's a great way to track the success of various website strategies for selling books. When I first started home publishing through Lightning Source, I used Amazon Marketplace to buffer against poor availability as the automated Amazon ordering system slowly ramped up to meet demand. However, the fee structure of Marketplace is lousy, I don't like how Amazon that they overcharges for shipping and keeps almost 40% of it, and it probably works against their ramping up their ordering quickly. I haven't used Marketplace with my last two POD books (I sell direct off my website with PayPal processing credit cards and generating and USPS media mail label with tracking).

Q) How much discount should I offer for volume sales outside of distribution?

A) I have one book that gets volume orders outside distribution, it's had some classroom adoptions. I offer a 35% discount and free shipping for pre-paid volume orders, which I drop ship from LS. I don't accept volume orders without pre-payment. For onsey twosey distributor/store orders on any of my books, I offer a 35% discount for pre-paid, plus $2.25 S&H. If they want me to ship on a P.O., I charge the cover price. Haven't had any problems getting everybody to pre-pay this year.

Q) What do you discount your e-books at?

A) I went with 25%, can't see the point in going higher. Only place I've seen my LSI e-books available online is Amazon (US and UK)

Q) How long does it take Lightning Source to get an e-book posted on Amazon.

A) I uploaded a couple new e-books to Lightning Source on the Columbus day weekend. Approved the first on Sunday and the second on Monday. The one I approved Sunday was listed on Amazon UK that Monday night and Amazon US that Tuesday. The one I approved on Monday was listed on Amazon UK that Tuesday and on Amazon US today, a week later. One possible explanation is the Amazon UK updates their e-book catalog from LS every day and Amazon US only does it Monday night. Also, it took Amazon one week to link the first e-book to the parent ISBN, which they did without prompting. I'll see if the same thing happens with the second.

Q) How can I maximize the visibility of my e-books on Amazon?

A) Online promotion through your website or newsletters. Title tweaking is also useful if there are some unique terms in there. Internet promotion is the perfect match for e-books.

Q) Has Amazon stopped selling E-books?

A) Amazon dropped their "e-books" tab in favor of "New & Used Textbooks" this week. Wonder if it will revert once classes start up. In any case, you can't say they don't work at their website. They had some experimental thing going on the other day with big covers, that I hated. I hope it tested poorly.