Self-Publishing Notes

Small Press/Self Publishing notes, from experience
by Clive Warner
Citiria Publishing

This series of notes was originally a set of emails to the Internet Writing Workshop.

They are archived here as a set, for convenience. Take what seems useful, ignore the rest.

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1. Why POD/PRQ?

After you . . (delete as applicable)

. . are beginning on the second layer of rejection slip wallpaper and only the baby's room still has real wallpaper

. . have been published by someone else and had a bad experience

. . have been published by a major house but then relegated

. . have decided that by the time you get an agent you will be using a walking frame

. . you might decide to self publish.

Once you have self published, that's pretty much 70% of what you need to know to operate as a publisher. I'm not going to discuss whether you should self publish or continue to look for representation. That's up to you. All I will say is that there might come a point when you come to realise pretty much how the book industry works, and take another path. This is about what happens if you do. . .

The Alternatives

* Traditional: First off, you have to decide if you should go the traditional way still used by all the big Houses, i.e. a print run, typically of 2500 books.

I've been through the experience of having someone else produce a print run of 3000, and I can't say the economics were favourable.

What happened in the end was that a lot of books got shipped out; some were damaged; of the remainder, many were returned, usually damaged; one of the distributors (B&T) had serious problems affecting many publishers; and so on. The publisher takes a beating.

It is not a good business model, especially not for the newbie.

Even after having had a novel published, I still couldn't find an agent to represent my next book.

* PRQ (Print Required Quantity) or POD (Print On Demand) is rapidly gaining acceptance. Even the large houses are now using it, as demonstrated by a recent and ongoing dispute between the Authors Guild and a major House, concerning when a work is "out of print". It's the ideal technology for the newbie, because:

* You need little working capital

* The quality is excellent

* It provides the ability to revise a book anytime at little cost

* The main players are also major global distributors

* There are a range of services from beginner to expert

For a beginner, someone wanting for instance to publish a family memoir, Lulu's Petals provides an appropriate level of service. Moving up to the commercial level of general fiction and nonfiction, Booksurge, owned by Amazon.com, provides a range of choices at various prices. And for those who can produce their own covers and bookblocks in-house and buy their own ISBN block, Lightning Source is an excellent choice.

I probably wouldn't have taken my first steps into publishing if it hadn't have been for an old friend and author who runs a small indie in the UK, Hideaway Books. But now, there are some excellent books that are must-haves, if you want to publish. More on this later.

But I will say this: It is within your reach.

2. Sourcing and methods.

If you'd like to jump ahead and look at what's out there, take a look at this site and navigate to "Publisher Reviews". Unfortunately there aren't *that* many reviews as yet. You'll note that some of the reviews are so negative that you would not want to go near that particular company.

The major player - Lightning Source - is neither mentioned nor reviewed. (Disclaimer: I am a Lightning Source customer.)

While I have been chewing over what to write here, I have been busy investigating Booksurge, Amazon's POD company. I requested pricing info., and this is what I got:

"If you are providing us with a camera ready PDF file for the interior the fee is $99, and the cover submission is $499 if you're unable to provide us with a camera ready PDF file. The suggested retail of a 300 page, 6x9" book is $17.99 and our author discounts vary depending on the quantity you purchase. For example if you order 100 copies the discount is 50% off."

50% might seem attractive, but note this: the standard discount a publisher must provide to Amazon.com is 55% of retail. And, by US law, you must provide the same discount to other book sellers operating at the same level - meaning B&N, Borders, Books A Million, etc.

So Booksurge expects you or I to invest in 100 copies and then have to pay $8 each? That is a recipe for losing money. Besides that, the whole idea of PRQ (print required quantity, otherwise known as POD) is to NOT have book stocks.

Also, Booksurge refuses to state who prints for them (Lulu uses Lightning Source) which makes me wonder if they also use Lightning. It appears to me, at this point, that Booksurge is merely emulating Lulu.com which is OK for amateurs, but not for the indie publisher who actually wants to grow a company in the book business.

My costs from Lightning for the same book would be roughly half the Booksurge price, and I can drop-ship directly, plus I don't have to keep any stock. So why doesn't everyone simply establish an account with Lightning? Good question. You can open a Lightning account but first you need to know how to produce a book, and that is where the majority of would-be self publishers fall down. They haven't got the knowledge and skills.

What's involved in book production?

* You need to be able to edit at a professional level. Until you have successfully edited other people's books (which I have), you're really risking a lot if you self-edit the finished product, because most writers don't make professional editors.

* You need to be able to design the interior layout and this is an art form. Will you use drop caps? What font, point size, leading? To hyphenate or not? Did you know that the first paragraph of a chapter should not be indented? There is a host of such detail.

* You need to be able to design and lay out the cover. Do you know the difference between CMYK and RGB and which one isn't acceptable? What is "bleed" and how much is required? What are the "danger zones" for text? How do you generate a bar code? Where are you going to source the graphics / artwork?

(I have to tell you, here: A book sells on its cover. Books with "template" covers look cheap. Why would you spend years writing the book and then settle for a crummy template-cover? That's just plain dumb.)

At Citiria we pay serious money for cover art even though we have in-house graphics design capacity.

For instance, REBODY, my new SF-satire, (in proof as I write this), has cover art by David Rabbitte. David did graphics for Star Wars and X-Men and is a well known comic illustrator. I negotiated the art contract with him because I wanted a specific look for the cover, and because he is very well-known in the business. Illustrators of his calibre typically charge $500 for a cover.

Even after that, however, we still have to design the rear cover and spine, and do the glyphing (glyphing means all the font work, we use Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Indesign for this.)

* You need to be able to typeset. And I am not talking about using MS Word.

Microsoft Office is all well and good for the office, but it cannot typeset a book to professional standards. For that, you need to be competent with a program such as Quark Express, Pagemaker, or Indesign.

At Citiria we use Indesign, a heavyweight package that costs serious money and takes serious time to learn.

The basic items you need are a good graphics package - Photoshop is the standard; a desktop publishing package such as Indesign; Acrobat Pro (to Preflight and check PDF files as necessary); plus MS Office. Quite a lot to learn and be expert in.

And there is one thing you should know: Publishing requires enormous precision and accuracy of work.

Slight errors cost lots to fix.

3. Production prices.

Continuing my remarks about different methods and suppliers, I have to report it's been a week now and Booksurge failed to respond to my question about discounts, which was basically: "Is Booksurge designed for self-publishing authors or can you supply books also for indie publishers?" Here's a story from someone who published with them. (Retrospect: Booksurge did eventually reply. I understand they are aiming at helping the individual self-publisher rather than at small presses.)

I was curious about the mentioned publisher and so I took a look at the price list area. Using my present job as an example, it would cost me $9.07 per copy in a 50-off quantity (9x6 trade paperback)

Since I need to supply booksellers at a 55% discount, let's do the math: RRP = $17.95 (almost the same as Booksurge's recommended price, but I arrived at the price through research, not through them!)

Discount of 55% = $9.87 Sale price = $17.95 - $9.87 = $8.08

My price = $9.07

Profit/Loss: LOSS of 99 cents per book.

Does this seem like a good business model to you? Evidently not.


4. More on selling price.

** Short run (50) per copy = $9.10 Shipping for 50 copies = $32 (with luck) Cost per copy = $9.74 LOSS 1.66 **

Short run offset, 1000 cpy, = $5 shipping? warehousing? interest charges for the $5000 tied up in stock? Profit? Loss? Hard to say. **

Lightning Source, per copy, PRQ: Cost per copy = $5.10 Drop shipping, no warehousing. Shipping per copy is about 65c, so the profit is about $2.35.

(Those of you who enjoy playing with spreadsheets might like to set one up for the price versus discount, and see how the profit/loss with 55% discount skews high cover prices. In practice, Amazon etc. discount the books by up to 25% , so if they discount by 25% they are still making about 30%)

Now, out of this, the publisher has to pay all the expenses of producing the book, plus promotions, plus author's royalty . . . and typically the author will get $1 royalty, leaving $1.35 for the publisher.

If you have ever thought publishing was a GRQ (get rich quick) business, think again. It's only when (if) you get a runaway seller, the economies of scale take over and you start to make real money. But it can happen; Bloomsbury was tiny when they took a risk on a silly schooldays-and-witchery story about a lad called Harry Potter . . .


5. Useful books.

I just found a very useful piece about online book marketing.

Required READING: The number one book on how to become a self publisher or indie, is: DAN POYNTER'S SELF PUBLISHING MANUAL, ISBN 978-1-56860-134-2, and the other one, about marketing and sales, really essential, is: 1001 WAYS TO MARKET YOUR BOOKS by John Kremer, ISBN 978-0-91241-148-4. (Disclaimer: I have no connection with these authors or books)

Poynter's book is a real eye-opener, aimed primarily at nonfiction authors but also very very useful to fiction authors.

6. POD presses - profit/loss (2)

The POD book review at Blogspot.com has a piece which states: 'When I refer to "small POD presses," I am not speaking of Lulu.com, iUniverse, and BookSurge, etc. I view those as subsidiary "printers," as they are all signed with a large printer based in LaVerne, TN.' (the only such press would be Lightning Source)

I think the site gives some useful insights into the various options, but really, it all comes down to this: If you decide to go your own way and publish yourself/others, you are not going to be able to get down to the price level required to sell successfully on Amazon, B&N, and the like, unless you either take the (big) risk of a print run - say 1,000 books - that you then have to arrange distribution for (another nightmare according to the emails from my first, defunct, publisher), or you go with Lightning Source.

The output costs of every other method that I've discovered so far, are simply too high to allow you to make any kind of profit.

Frankly I find this very disturbing as the implication is of a monopoly situation, unless anyone can provide an equivalent source of cost-effective PRQ printing?

Finally, another book recommendation (I have no commercial interest in it): Adobe InDesign CS, by Deke McClelland, was a great help in getting up to speed on InDesign.

7. Making a book.

Let's assume that you have a finished "final draft" in front of you, it might be yours or someone else's. Now you want to publish it.

A. Edit it.

About 2 - 3 weeks minimum. In house, but we also edit for others, and a typical 100,000 word book will cost about $1,000 in editing fees.

The text needs to be perfect down to the last word. No typos, no miss-spellings, no run-ons, all brands must be capitalised.

In other words the edit is composed of final text edit plus copy edit.

At the same time I edit (using MS Word), I put the text into a standard format: *page size 9x6 with the margins I will use in the finished book *single line spacing *the correct font(s) will be used. (This is just to give me an idea of how many pages, appearance, etc. and allow me to do a bit of adjustment if necessary)

B. Typeset it.

About 3 days, but very time-intensive. We do set for others, at $50/hour. About $350 for the setting work. You need to use a package such as Pagemaker, Quark Express, or InDesign. MS Publisher doesn't cut it! Publisher is great for greeting cards or calendars but it doesn't have the necessary abilities.

Using Indesign, I first create a MASTER page. This sets things like page size, margins, tabs, etc. All other pages will take up this basic layout, allowing me to change all pages with one adjustment.

After making the master, I then create an InDesign document for each chapter, and flow the chapter pages as required, adjusting tabs, placing page breaks, adjusting justification, and so forth.

The end product will be a collection of InDesign docs, one for each chapter. There will also be a doc for the "front matter" that precedes the chapters.

Finally I combine all the chapters into an InDesign "Book" document, where I sort out the page numbering. Then I export it as a PDF, compliant with the correct press standard (X-1A); add the origin info, and "Preflight" it using Acrobat Pro (a check to make sure it will pass the printer's standard tests.) And upload it.

C. Design and layout the cover.

Impossible to say how long this takes. Cost of the illustration: $300 - $500, depending. Plus a lot of time involved in generating the back cover, quite often using elements from the front cover and/or additional graphics. However this is NOT the final cover - this one is for the ARC (advanced review copies)

We use Photoshop for most of this work. We have in-house graphic capacity allowing us to absorb a lot of this cost.

A complete professional cover layout to a template can be very expensive, up to $1000 by the time you have finished. This involves laying out the front and rear covers plus the book spine.

It is tricky. First you have to calculate the thickness of the spine according to the number of pages and type of paper. Then you make a cover template that includes front, spine, and back. Then you place the cover art on the front and rear covers, (also spine as required), and do the "glyphing" - design and placement of all the font work such as title, author, and so forth. You also have to place the images for the cover price and the bar code.

Finally you check that that the template complies with the printer's specs. for bleed, danger areas, etc. and you upload it. (Danger area = the area where text may be cut off when the cover is trimmed. Bleed is surplus cover area allowed for trimming to size. I have personally fallen foul of both these things!)

D. Proofing.

After uploading the cover and book block, I have to wait from 1 - 3 days to find out if there is a problem. There usually will be . . . and each error costs $40 revision fee, plus of course the work to fix the problem.

Let's say the design is perfect. Then I order a proof copy ($30) which will arrive by courier a couple of days later.

I examine the proof, page by page, and it it is OK (should be, by now!)

I go ahead and order as many ARCs as I intend to send to reviewers, anything between 32 and 128, usually, at an average cost of about $5.50 each.

E. Waiting and redesign.

Now I have to wait up to 3 months to get review comments back. I will pick the best comments for the back cover "blurb".

At the same time, I am finalising the new cover design for the commercial version of the book, going through stages 3 and 4 all over again.

F. Hold the publication party.

Which is where you blow several grand to entertain alkie media people who may or may not write about your new book . . . no guys, I am joking, this step is only for the big Houses! Unless you are very rich.

Probably I have missed some stuff, but I hope it gives a picture of what's involved in publishing a book.


8. nonfiction vs fiction

I've been getting some correspondence on the small publisher issue. In particular, Dehanna sent me some useful and interesting information - (thanks!) First, on the history of Booksurge.

Dehanna also reminded me of a very useful list of self-pub outlets, which I should have remembered to include since I already have (and use) the book.

Now there is one thing that I should have pointed out earlier -- much earlier! One of the members commented about editing and layout rates etc., and I should point out, the rates I quoted are those I use in-house. If you look for editing and layout from a professional company specialising in such services, you may get an unpleasant shock.

Secondly, please remember that I have been talking about FICTION books. Nonfiction is a rather different beast.

NF books usually have additional baggage to deal with.

This includes:

1. Table Of Contents: Usually more material to deal with than nonfiction.

2. The Index: Publishers of serious nonfiction works often hire specialists known as INDEXERS to create this. (yes I know MS Word can run an index for you, but do you think it will be up to the job of doing this for a NF book with lots of index entries and/or with specialised subject matter?) Actually, indexers are subdivided into specialities, too: e.g. medical, surgical, financial, computer books, and so on!

3. Other NF stuff: Even after the TOC and index, you may well have a table of figures, a glossary, a bibliography, etc. - not to mention the "notes" often found at the bottom of each page or at the end of a chapter.

4. Layout for NF is a whole mess of pottage. Think of a textbook: Masses of images, each of which must be accurately set in place. Text has to be flowed. Sidebars embedded. Often, different colours are used for text. And so on! I don't know what a professional layout editor charges for that kind of thing but I bet it is at least $100 per hour. Lightning Source for instance will charge me over $40 per half-hour for a simple adjustment, if I need to do that. (No, I don't go that route, I fix any issues myself and reproof.)

If you still haven't been put off the idea and want to investigate further, you really need to buy the books I mentioned earlier. Just as an example, I haven't mentioned any of the tasks such as copyrighting, drop shipping, pricing of US vs. UK books, and so on.