Why self-publishing?
Self publishing gives you total control of your work; nobody else has to judge whether or not your book should be published. You can decide everything.
It’s a lot quicker to bring your book to the market place. With modern technology you can do this is in weeks or even days – a mainstream publisher will take at least 6 to 9 months.
Your book may well fill a niche market that a mainstream publisher would not consider commercially viable. However well written it is never going to attract commercial investment because of the limited size of the potential market. But with a bit of hard work by you might sell a few hundred or a even a few thousand copies over a period.
The chances of being picked up by a traditional publisher without being a known writer, or celeb are extremely slim, probably several thousand to one against. It is well known in the industry that unsolicited manuscripts rarely make it past the ‘slush pile’ that every publisher accumulates. Publishers are, quite rightly, only looking for commercial success, and unless your book has that marketable ‘hit’ quality, there is very little chance of getting a publisher to invest in the unknown and untested.
What are the disadvantages of self-publishing?
The author will of course have to bear the costs themself. Although the expenditure in producing a book is well within the reach of most authors, the cost of publicity and marketing could prove substantial.
The author is unlikely to have the ‘clout’ of an established publisher to find outlets for the book, although with more and more books sold online through stores such as Amazon, this problem is lessening all the time.
How easy is it to self-publish?
This depends on how you want to do it. You can either assemble all the necessary bits and piece together yourself, editor, typesetter, cover designer, printer, distributor etc, etc in the traditional manner, or you can use a company to do all that for you. With the advances in publishing software and the internet you can complete lot of the work, saving yourself money, and then ask Authors OnLine to complete the job professionally.
What is Print On Demand printing?
Print On Demand (often abbreviated to POD) is the ability to have a print run starting from a single copy upwards and to only print copies needed to fill existing orders, thus ‘on demand’. This eliminates waste and the necessity to print large quantities of book that may never be sold.
Modern digital printing means that instead of a printer producing X thousand copies of a single title, the printing process can easily produce one copy of X thousand titles. A POD printer will, typically print several hundred titles in a single print run.
How do the costs of POD compare with traditional Offset Litho printing?
Costs of printing a POD title are fixed per copy at typically 1p per page (2p per sheet of paper) plus about 70p for the cover and, although deals can be made, do not generally reduce for larger runs. With offset litho printing the initial cost is high, as plates have to made of your book layout, then the more you print the cheaper the cost per book becomes. Printing large runs can bring the cost down to as low as £1 or less per copy for a typical novel, but the initial outlay will be substantial.
With offset litho printing, you will have to finance the printing before receiving a penny back on your investment. Typically you will have to pay your print bill on 30 days (if you can get the credit), but you won’t get your money back for at least 90 days (see Getting your book into bookshops) and that’s assuming the public have bought the entire print run.
With POD printing you don’t have to finance any books sold to the retail trade. The printer supplies the retailer, collects the money, deducts his print costs and pays out the difference.
What are the advantages of POD?
Once you have published your book it can remain in print for ever. With a litho print run, once the volume printed has been sold, either you will have to print another run or the book is ‘out of print’.
It is cheap and easy to update the content. You can correct the typos you missed at any time and don’t have to live with thousands of copies out there with glaring errors. Likewise if you need to update future copies because of new information you have that facility.
Your book can be available for sale without having to be ‘in stock’ with wholesalers, who will charge you for the privilege and probably require a bigger discount for holding stock.
With the rise of large internet bookstores such as Amazon, POD titles are their perfect partners. Orders are taken online and instantly electronically ordered directly from the printer, who either delivers back to Amazon within a day or two or sends the book directly to the customer on behalf of the store. The Internet store doesn’t have to warehouse stock, and in most cases delivery will only be marginally slower than books held in stock. It will also be a lot quicker than sourcing books from traditional publishers where stock has run out.
Your book can available worldwide instead of just a national basis. The large POD printers operate with printing presses in different countries and your book can be made available, in high street stores in for example both the UK and North America with local delivery costs. If you had a litho print run overseas stock would have to be transported from its warehouse at international rates .
You won’t have to finance any printing of retail orders, only those you order for your own purposes (See - How do the costs of POD compare with traditional Offset Litho printing).
What are the disadvantages of POD?
Although POD printers use high quality material for their covers and paper, because they are printing your book along with many others on the same print run you will have a restrictive choice of paper and cover material.
The same may well apply to the choice of book sizes, although most POD printers do offer most industry standard sizes.
POD books are not accepted as ‘shelf items’ by the high street book trade, who only work on a sale or return basis (See ‘Getting your book into bookshops’).
What is an ISBN and why do I need one?
ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number, and is usually shown both inside the book on the reverse of the title page (known as the Title Verso page) and in the form of a bar code on the back cover. It is simply used as a means by which the retail trade can identify the book and any variation thereof. Any book made available for sale via the book trade is required to have one.
Each version of the book, paperback, hardback, large print, e-book, etc. will have a different ISBN. So it could be said that ISBN is slightly misleading, as it doesn’t apply to the book’s title, but the form in which it is manufactured. A more accurate name might perhaps be ISPN where the P stands for product.
In 2007, to conform with modern bar code standards the book trade fell into line with the rest of the retail world and changed from a 10 digit ISBN to a 13 digit one often referred to as an EAN (European Article Number). All 13 digit numbers now start with 978 which simply means it is a book. It is a mathematical formula with the last number being a check digit. The other numbers contain information about the publisher and of course the individual number allocated to that product version.
How do I obtain an ISBN?
Authors OnLine supply individual ISBN as part of their packages.
Alternatively you can purchase them, but only in blocks of 10, from Nielsen Bookdata www.nielsenbookdata.co.uk for about £110.
What’s the difference between Vanity Publishing and Self-Publishing?
This depends on who you ask.
Ask any employee of a traditional publishing house and they will automatically advise against self-publishing, probably genuinely believing that books should only be published by them. There is a myth, and believe me it is only a myth, that ‘if it’s not mainstream published, then it can’t possibly be any good’. In reality, after helping self-publish hundreds of amazing high quality books, and some not so good, we can assure you that is total nonsense. The figures speak for themselves. Traditional publishing is in retreat, self-publishing in all its different forms is on the rise.
The dictionary definition of vanity publishing is ‘Paying to have your own book published.’ So technically all self-publishing is vanity publishing. However with the advent of, first and foremost, POD digital printing, secondly self-publishing companies also know as Author Service Companies, and of course desktop publishing software, this has removed a lot of the problems associated with the old vanity publishers. The main complaint about ‘vanity publishers’ was that they often used slick marketing to hoodwinked the author into thinking they were simply sharing the costs of publishing and (often non existent) marketing, when in fact they were paying for everything (This was known as Partnership publishing). The author usually had to pay thousands of pounds for the initial setup and then, because POD hadn’t been invented, was forced to finance a large print run. A considerable percentage of books would probably remain unsold in the author’s garage or loft.
Nowadays things are very different. The investment required is at a much lower and all reputable self-publishing companies point out the risks. (Some still do exist – sales are not guaranteed!).
Will bookshops stock my book on their shelves and how do I go about it?
The simple answer to that question is, no, they won’t buy from you directly. You may however be able to persuade your local bookshop, especially if your book is of local interest, to stock a few copies.
The book trade, and certainly the larger chains operates almost exclusively through wholesalers, and won’t stock any titles unless they are available via them.
Also, because of hangover from financial problems bookshops were experiencing back in the great depression of the 1930’s, the book trade still operates on an agreement whereby it is able to borrow its stock, return anything it doesn’t sell and pay its bills for any remaining stock after 90 days. It is known as ‘Sale or Return’, or ‘SOR’ for short. The risk to bookshops is therefore borne almost exclusively by the publishers.
Therefore knowing that risk, the first thing you need to do is to persuade one or more of those wholesalers to hold stock of your title. Since the risk is yours and they can return the books to you at any time, most will be prepared to buy a few copies from you.
Companies such as Authors OnLine have built up good relationships with the major distributors and will be able to get the them to take stock, but the financial risk will be yours. POD titles can be printed on an SOR basis, but you will probably have to finance the print run and suffer the returns.
Who owns the copyright to my book and how do I establish it?
Unless you have plagiarised somebody else’s work, or have signed it away to a third party, copyright is automatically yours. The problem is proving it. The simplest way to do this is to put a copy of your work in a well sealed envelope and post it back to yourself or a trusted third party, such as your legal advisor. Should a dispute occur you go to court and hand the judge the sealed envelope with the date stamp on it. Once however the book is published and legally registered with the British Library, your copyright is then a matter of public record.
Unless you sign an agreement to the contrary, using a self-publishing or author service company should not effect your copyright and you should be able to stop publishing through them at anytime.
Who owns the copyright to the artwork for my cover?
The simple answer is, unless you have an agreement to the contrary, the artist/illustrator does. You only have the right to use it in conjunction with the direct sale of your book, i.e. on the cover, or maybe a poster or flyer about it. Also the agreement may be with the author services company, so check if you can take the artwork with you if you change publishers. Just because you paid to have the artwork done, it does not automatically give you the right to use it for any other purpose. Printing T-shirts of your book cover and then selling them via E-bay without prior permission, is almost undoubtedly a breach of copyright. That is the law of the land, not a greedy artist or self-publishing company trying to hang on to ‘your’ cover design.
How am I likely to recoup my investment and make money on my book?
First rule – never invest money in self-publishing if you can’t afford to lose it. There are absolutely no guarantees and you should only go into it with your eyes fully open to that fact.
Second rule of self publishing – writing the book is only half the story. You will need to put yourself about to promote and sell it. Sitting at home hoping it will sell itself is unlikely to recoup your investment.
Having said that there are two ways you can earn money. Firstly from retail sales via the book trade and especially the Internet i.e. Amazon. However you will have to sell it at a wholesale price with usually between 40% and 60% discount. So your £10 retail priced book will be bought by the book trade for between £4 and £6. Your profit will be the difference between the wholesale price and the print cost, minus of course any cut agreed with the author service company through whom you may have published.
Alternatively you can buy your own copies, at a special author only price, or by arrangement, and sell them yourself - The profit is all yours.
How do I market my book?
When you first put pen to paper hopefully you knew who you were writing for, if you didn’t have a clue, or it was just for yourself, then you are probably doomed to fail and you probably shouldn’t expect a high commercial return. But if you did, you now need to sit and make a list of ways of letting the world know of your book’s existence.
Mainly, be realistic – Yes you can quite rightly think you are the next J K Rowling, and maybe you will be. We have seen a few self-published books in the best seller lists, but in truth it is very long odds. So concentrate on, for example if you are working in traditional high street, your local bookshop and expand outwards. Let word of mouth and the quality of the book itself be your main tools. So many people expect to get their book onto Waterstones shelves as soon as its published. They will take it but only when they see it can justify their precious shelf space, and you have to sell a few first to do that. The laws of supply and demand are paramount.
Ten years ago we would have said your likely success was very limited without the backing of mainstream publisher money behind it. Nowadays with the rise and rise of the internet with its specialist websites and social networking communities together with mass e-mail (legal please - don’t SPAM), its not too difficult to build up an advertising campaign to hail the publication of your masterpiece. And it can be fun too. There are thousands of books written about marketing and we suggest you consult a few.
We would also suggest contacting your local media and seeing what local fairs or events might suit.
Should I try and format my book and cover myself?
The simple answer is yes if you have the skills and knowledge, and no if you don’t - use Authors OnLine to do it for you. If you are familiar with MS Word and how to alter page layouts then you can probably lay out the text. Study other books to get a feel of how to do it. There are many pitfalls and quite a few tricks that only the most proficient formatter will know that you may not be familiar with. If for example you don’t know about ‘embedding fonts’ or ‘text compression’, or how to eliminate ‘widows’ and ‘orphans’, you are probably best leaving it to the experts.
Covers however are a completely different story. Unless you are familiar with industry standard graphics packages such as PhotoShop, Indesign Quark X-press, you are best employing the services of the professionals. A cover design is very important to the look and feel of a book is definitely worth spending money on. It is after all your shop window. Books can live or die by their covers.
Can I publish my book in colour
Yes you can but SIZES are restrictive and the covers are only in paperback at the moment. The main problem with colour printing is the cost per page. A black and white page costs 1p per page where as a colour costs from 3.5 – 7p per page which can make retail pricing uncompetitive. Having said that, we have seen many successful children’s illustrated books do well in the market place, but the larger content colour books may well have to retail at a far higher price than their mainstream competitors.
