I had been toying with the idea of doing a book on demand for several years. About four years ago I took the plunge. The concept seemed so logical. Produce just the number of books that people want. Target an audience that you really know. It seems like an ideal path for someone with a book that they believe in but that publishers looking to sell tens or hundreds of thousands of books just wouldn’t be interested in. So how did I do? Mixed emotions. After a little over four years I have arguably made a small profit, though nowhere chose to enough to compensate for the time I spent writing, editing, and promoting the book.
The book was actually a collection of the American Indian alternate history scenarios that I wrote for an online newsletter I produce. I called the collection American Indian Victories. It ended up at around 200 pages. I researched several book-on-demand publishers, and pitched the collection to one that seemed professional. American Indian Victories is still available to order on line. If you do a search you can find it on Amazon.com. It is probably available for special order through most bookstores .
I’m not going to get into the economics of book on demand publishing. I’m also not going to plug the book here (though if my royalties soar I wouldn't mind it). I just want to share a few thoughts about what I’ve learned so far in the process of getting a book on demand ready to go.
In my case, for the book on demand process I was my own editor. To a large extent I was my own marketer. To some extent I was my own distributor. A lot of the lessons that follow stem from finding out that the people who ordinarily do those functions in book publishing really do earn their keep.
Lesson 1: Putting the finishing touches on a book is a lot harder than I thought it would be. When I write my on-line newsletters, I try to edit them carefully. I do a fair amount of fact-checking. I check for spelling errors. I check for grammar. I check for excessive wordiness. I try to be as professional as I can. I thought that putting a group of scenarios together as a book would be a piece of cake. I was wrong.
I spent days and weeks fact-checking. I spent hours checking the proper spelling of names (often a weakness for me). I spent more days and weeks making sure the formatting was consistent between scenarios. Finally I thought I had everything right. I printed a copy of the resulting book off and did one final edit check. I found over ninety things that I needed to change in that last edit check. Most of them were minor. The spacing wasn’t quite right here. A couple of pages later I used italics for emphasis one place and bolds in an equivalent situation at another place. Somewhere else I used effect instead of affect.
Most people that read the book would probably not consciously notice any of those ninety-plus things. The rest probably wouldn’t notice more than one or two. So why was it so important for me to take care of them? Because if I didn’t the problems might not register consciously but they would leave a subconscious impression of lack of professionalism. I tried very hard to avoid leaving that kind of impression. That last five percent of little touches that separates good amateur stuff from professional work takes a lot of time. Hopefully I got it right.
Lesson 2: Once stuff is on paper, you can’t take it back, at least not completely. If I find that I’ve made a mistake in one of my on-line scenarios, I can go back and change it, even years later. If I make a mistake in print, there will always be at least a few copies of my book out there with that mistake in it. That has already bitten me to some extent. In one of the scenarios I speculate on the relationship between blood type and smallpox survival rates. About a week after the last possible time that I could have kept that out of the book, I found a study that seems to refute that relationship pretty decisively. That bothers me more than it probably should. I like being accurate.
Lesson 3: This all takes a lot longer than I expected it to. It took months from the time I had the manuscript in what I considered good order to the time that the book was finally ready to go on sale. I had to arrange for cover art (I actually did my own using Photoshop and Illustrator). I had to figure out what I wanted to say on the back cover. I had to write advertising copy. I had to communicate back and forth with the person arranging my covers, and with the person doing final formatting for the printer.
Lesson 4: Selling a book takes a lot of time and effort. I did a lot of things to get the book out there. I have a lot of other ideas that I think will work if I ever have time to try them. All of those ideas have one thing in common. They take time—time I would ordinarily be spending writing. Experienced authors have always said that writing is a business, and that the business side is just as important as the writing. I’m finding that out, and I’m sure I’ll see more evidence of it as time goes on.
So what is the bottom line on books on demand? I learned a lot about what an editor has to go through to get a book ready for publication. Hopefully that will make me a better writer, or at least an easier writer for an editor to get along with. That could be a very valuable lesson for me. Was it an expensive lesson? It was certainly expensive in terms of time. I learned a lot though, and so far I think it has been worth it.
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Comments: 22
Thanks for sharing this. After the Gather contest and various other endeavors in the attempts to get work published, I'd imagine more than a few of the Gather authors will be considering their options, which could include POD. It is good to hear your experience on this. It is no surprise that the marketing end of this is pretty time consuming and you point out some of the other time consumers as well.
Most writers would probably like to focus as much on writing as possible, but getting the work out there is also a challenge. It reminds me of product development: 1/3 specs, 1/3 development and 1/3 testing. Then, if your team is lucky (and good) you are done.
The funny thing is that in my day job as a product manager, every once in a while, I'm asked to create an abstract for an article and I've found that lots of them over the years have gotten accepted, at which point I need to sit down and write the article. So, in that case, most of the work is in the writing and then a company like TMC does the heavy lifting of publishing and publicity. Strange business this putting words onto paper...
BTW, I found the same thing about publishing and mistakes. When I put the first chapter of my novel up here, so many glaring things came through right away that I was immediately embarrassed that I hadn't caught them before. And that was just an internet copy! Sheesh.
In terms of Amazon.com sales rank I was pretty competitive with traditionally published books in my specialized genre for a year or so. Not everybody is going to have those built-in advantages, and I want to emphasize that even with them I didn't make enough to justify the effort in an economic sense. I would have made far more per hour flipping burgers.
I want to also emphasize that if you are going this route you need to really do your research. Some book-on-demand companies do produce shoddy product that you really don't want your name on. Some of them require exclusive rights for excessive periods of time. If I had gone into this blind it would have turned into a fiasco.
I was also lucky in that I was capable of coming up with a reasonably presentable front cover on my own. That made the book much more sellable. Covers do sell books, or at least get people to notice them and consider buying them. Typically, book on demand covers will not be top-notch unless the author finds a way of making them good.
As I said earlier, some of the book on demand publishers, maybe even a lot of them are fly-by-nights that produce shoddy work. However, there is nothing inherent in the concept of book-on-demand publishing that says the product has to be shoddy.
There are a few publishers out there that do professional work, at least on the physical book. I happened to find one, and have been happy with the results. Before I chose them I researched probably a dozen book-on-demand publishers, going through their contracts with a fine-tooth comb, checking on-line writers groups for the buzz on them, and looking at how their products looked and how they were treated on amazon.com and the other on-line venues. If you don't do that kind of research, then yes, you are likely to have a bad experience. Apparently you did have a bad experience, and I'm sorry that's the case.
As far as the fan base is concerned, if you don't have that before you go into it you may sell a few dozen or fewer books to your family and close friends, but otherwise you won't get noticed. Print-on-demand is too easy. It bypasses the cr*pfilters that publishers normally provide. That means that you end up with so much junk out there that people generally shy away from it. The one exception to that is if they know ahead of time that this particular author really can write and has something meaningful to say. If you have already proven that to a substantial enough group of people, you can make it work. However, you have to lean over backwards to make sure everything about your book says professional. You can't afford to have grammar errors are misspelled words. You can't afford to have any aspect of the book that is in any way flawed.
Either way, concentrate on getting beyond this realm because the pits is still the pits. You know that much. I hope? Umm, actually I've thought about and studied the whole book-on-demand issue in a lot of depth. Would I do it again? I would prefer to get traditionally published simply because making a book-on-demand work takes so much time away from writing. However, writing as a profession is about getting your material to an audience willing to pay for it. If I have strong, objective evidence that there is a big enough audience for something and traditional publishers are ignoring it, then of course I'm going to try to find non-traditional ways to get the material to them.
Traditional authors and want-to-bes do tend to sneer at book-on-demand authors, and in many cases rightly so. On the other hand, my sales figures in comparable venues really have been competitive with theirs, and that's with me spending under a hundred dollars in actual advertising costs. I got to choose my own cover. They had to take what the publisher gave them. I got to say exactly what I wanted to say. They didn't. If the book had really taken off, I would have received a very substantial part of the proceeds, far more than a traditional author could dream of getting. I did have to spend money up front, but so did the people sending manuscripts to traditional publishers. How many times do you have to send a manuscript out to a traditional publisher before your costs for postage and copying are comparable to what you would spend on setting up a book-on-demand? In this overcrowded market the amounts are probably going to be comparable.
Times change. Many of today's authors would not be able to break into today's novel market if they were not already published. Word processors and cheap laser printers mean that far more people can actually write a novel, and the cr*pfilters at traditional publishers are so clogged that getting through them makes getting noticed in the First Chapters competition look easy and rational by comparison.
At the same time, those same word processors and laser printers have made existing authors far more productive. They are formidable competition because of the name recognition and the track record. You can spend years, or even decades trying to get traditionally published and not make it, even if you have good stuff. If I can figure out a non-traditional way to bypass all of that mess, get my writing out there, and make money at it, I will. If that means another book-on-demand, then that's what I'll do. If I can figure out a way to sell fiction through a book-on-demand, then I'll do that too, though I would rather not do it that way because of the time commitment.
I had the experience everyone has that does it. Nothing happened. I spent nothing because the services were free. With print on demand there is no distribution unless you buy the books yourself. The average number sold by this method of printing is 75 copies.
A better idea is this:
Macmillannewwriting
I've already submitted my entry here. Many of these entries were already vanity press books that had failed. Now they've failed again. That's the norm. You can invent a new term for vanity publishing but Print-on-demand i.e. Docutech machine from Xerox, is the technology and the business model is the vanity press.
Most of mine go out exactly the described above: by email for free.
agentquery follow the directions.
All: My only major regret is that I've simply no longer had time to actively promote the book for the last two years. As a result, sales have trailed off considerably. When you don't have a company advertising budget behind you you've got to keep promoting or you lose momentum quickly.
At the peak my Amazon rank was in the 60,000 range--nowhere close to a bestseller but quite acceptable for a specialized non-fiction book from a first-time author. Now it is down in the 700,000 range, which means I've got to start promoting again.
Shameless plug alert: If you want further information about the book, feel free to stop by this part of Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/American-Indian-Victories-Dale-Cozort/dp/1591131790/ref=sr_1_1/104-3826075-4695163?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1176066586&sr=8-1
If you can't get that to work, just go to Amazon.com and type: "American Indian Victories". Amazon has it in stock, and it is available new and used from 24 Amazon affiliate sellers, one of which is charging 3 or 4 bucks over the list price for a collectible edition. I'm not sure what that's about. Maybe I signed it or something.
In any case, I'm happy with the results I personally got, but I may very well be an extremely rare exception to a general rule of unhappy Book on Demand authors. I'm not in a position to argue that one way or the other, nor do I care to do so.
Low expectations are the best way to acquire this state of mind. I left avenues to get beyond it. It's up to you to use them, or not. As I said I've never heard of so-called book on demand only the printing technology and the business model. The end result is almost always the same. It has nothing to do with happy, sad or disgruntled.
So far, I am very happy. (Getting the ISBN was a little difficult, until I got hold of the National Library of my country (South Africa) and was told it is free... got my ISBN for the current book AND the one I am working on, and have registered the book with the National Library).
So far I have sold to friends only but I will be marketing it soon. Being the cheeky sod that I am, I will be sending copies to all the critics here in SA :)
So far, I am happy with POD and, of course, I have no other recourse anyway :D
Will let you all know if anything changes...
BTW: My book is science Fiction, which, for some reason, I have been told is the most difficult genre to sell. I have no idea why as sci-fi is rather popular....
I was fortunate enough to find one of the good ones. They were very upfront about what they did and didn't do. I knew what I was getting into with them. I set a series of goals for myself and figured out what level of sales it would take to meet those goals. I asked myself if that level of sales was realistic. It turned out to be.
One part of being upfront is that they made it quite clear that I was responsible for any errors or typos that made it into the final product. They gave me the final product and warned me that this was my final chance to correct things. I worked hard to make sure it was right. If any typos got through it was because I missed them.
They were upfront with me about how the book would and wouldn't be sold. Essentially they made it available. I marketed it. I take full credit or blame for success or failure of that marketing.
I knew going in that they didn't really screen out anything but the very worst dregs of writing. If my book or cover is bad--even embarrassingly bad--then that's solely my problem. I take complete responsibility for the resulting product. I think American Indian Victories is a good book. I'm proud of it, but then I'm biased.
This is a total fallacy and urban myth. "Traditional" isn't a real term. It was coined by Publishamerica, a predatory vanity press, unlike the upfont ones like the ones Dale and I used back in the day. Commercial publishers don't charge anything: they pay you for your work. They don't pay "anybody" for their work though.
The biggest sci-fi publisher is Tom Doherty. TOR. They require no agent to submit. Have at it.
Tor-Forge
Print on demand vanity press products stand no chance regardless of effort because there are no books on shelves to begin, with which is the point of POD. Online sales are microscopic in the book market. They only way they find their way into a store is if the author consigns them after purchasing books themselves. There's no way to make a go of publishing that way, but Lulu is the way to go if you must consider yourself, printed, most likely before your time.
I had a life changing experience of a very spiritual nature at a late age ... I knew then of something that I had known absolutely nothing about prior to it. I read for years in an attempt to better understand it ... knowing in the back of my mind that there was a great story in it that people really needed to know about. I thought that someday I might write a book about it all.
Thirteen years later I did just that ... only then did I become aware of just how hard it is to get published for the average first time would-be author.
Because time was a factor and I was anxious to get the book available to the world asap, I did some little research about POD because it could all be done from my home (I live very remote in the mountains) via the Internet. I ended up torn between AuthorHouse and BookSurge. I chose the latter because they had been recently purchased by Amazon and for some reason I trusted Amazon to be reputable (big name ?).
Their 'sales pitch' information 'sounded' very promising to me ... many good things were 'implied' ... I am quite the skeptic normally, but I fell for their higher end 'package' to the tune of a little over $4,000 (up front) ... it promised very much to me. As it turned out, it was mostly wishful thinking on my part ... something that they seem to well recognize and use to their advantage ... business 'as usual' it seems.
The 'mechanics' of the process and the finished result were rather good IMO. It was just the lack of fulfilled 'implications' around the potential selling (availability) issues ... I was led to believe that it would be fully available in book stores ...
My fondest wish was that the 'word' would somehow get out and spread ... mine was a 'spiritual mission', not about profit (fame and fortune) ... I had a transcendent 'message' that in 'essence' was most valuable ... I expected the readers that could use it best to be spiritually led to it ... all I wanted was for it to be available.
It now is ... and to insure it is as easy as I could make possible (so far), I self developed my own web-site to make it freely down-loadable to anyone.
Part of my 'package' was the 75 hardcover volumes I received ... and still have because I have become so disillusioned that I have not sent any of them out yet to all of the places I had intended to for reviews ... I may yet someday, but it doesn't seem so at the moment.
I have sort of 'gave up' on the dream ... feeling that I have at least made a good faith effort at satisfying my spiritual obligation to make 'the word' available.
Actually, the world as a whole could care less, being too distracted by 'normal' materialism and objective (exoteric) religious concepts to even place any value, let alone desire for knowledge of things transcendently spiritual that are so subjective and esoteric (most know nothing of the differences) ... maybe it will take off long after my death ... what will be will be.
Spirit Calls ... could change the world for the better ... Peace, j.