Publishing a book was something I never envisaged doing. I did it because lobbying agents seemed a terribly ineffective way to get published. I wanted people to read my book. I also wanted the experience for the reader to match anything produced by commercial publishers. I knew I had a great thriller but I would need help turning it into a polished product. I hired a model for the cover and a photographer to take the imagery. I worked closely with a literary consultant to copy, proof edit and use my cover imagery to design a jaw dropping cover. They also typeset the paperback book. Over a period of three months my story was transformed into a book. This post is the first of two detailing what happened next.Before we get going, you should understand the following:
1) I have started every stage of this writing/publishing journey without any understanding at all for what I was getting into. That goes right the way back to 2002 when I started writing with a vague notion I'd create something Peter Jackson might want to make into a movie.
2) I REALLY didn't have any clue at any stage for what I was getting into. I've learned a LOT!
3) I analyse. I do this all the time and for everything I set my eyes on. I hope the analysis you are now reading, of my attempt to publish a paperback book, informs your journey. Or at least entertains you. The parameters that comprise this analysis may change, so my analysis might not now be accurate. It may have been weighted by factors I have now forgotten. Or I might just have got it all horribly wrong.
I'm selling through Amazon. I love Amazon as a consumer and I love them as a publisher. I would struggle to sell anything without them. Selling Kindle books through Amazon has been a dream. I will cover Kindle in the second Publishing post. Selling paperbacks through Amazon has not been such a fluid experience. Mostly because I didn't comprehend one simple detail - that Amazon is almost totally automated. Here is what should happen when you publish a paperback book. It is most of what I did with a few notable exceptions.
1) You calculate how much profit you want from each paperback book. Of course you have to compete. Commercial thriller paperbacks typically sell from between £4 - £6. Lee Child's The Affair is currently £5.39 I chose Lightning Source as a printer as they also act as a warehouse distributor. They are part of the giant Ingram's chain. Amazon will order from them direct. As will other online resellers. Your paperback book will typically cost you 70p per copy to print + 1p per page. You add whatever profit you want and then add 20% on top, which will be your reseller discount. The total will be the Recommended Retail Price.
- Base cost £0.70
- Per page cost £3.66 (1p per page)
- Add profit = £1
- Total so far = £5.36
- Add 20% reseller discount (£1.08)
- Recommended Retail Price (RRP) £5.36 + £1.08 = £6.44
3) You register your book's ISBN with Nielsen's (I'm based in the UK, I think it's Bowkers in the US). You give it the same RRP and importantly the same publish date you set with your printers. You STICK to it come hell or high water. Never ever change it.
4) A week or two after registering with Nielsen's Amazon will automatically suck in the books details from Nielsen's including the Publish Date. If this happens before the publish date your book will be made available as a pre-order. Do not be tempted at any stage to change the publish date. Not ever. This is one of the key factors that keeps Amazon hooked into your book's pricing and to the reseller discount. The reseller discount is VERY important.
5) Remember that bit about Amazon being automated. It isn't really aware of your book as a sell-able entity. Your book is a database record amid hundreds of thousands of other records. Amazon is not worried about profit or loss on your individual book, it's about the collective profit. Amazon will buy in your book from the printers at the RRP minus the 20% reseller discount. As Amazon wants to be competitive it will list the full RRP and sell at a discount. Your book will likely appear at any price between the full RRP or as low as the price Amazon bought it for (RRP - 20%).
6) As Amazon is fully automated it will sometimes sell your book at a lose in the name of the greater good. While my book was listed as pre-order it was available for £5.20
So that's how it might happen if you don't at any stage foolishly change the publish date, like I did.
At the outset I set my publish date to four weeks into the future. January 31st 2012 as it happens. When my book became available to order from the printers on 6th January I got over excited. I didn't know just how automated Amazon are and I didn't know just how much they were clued into the publish date. I contacted Amazon and asked them if they could change the publish date to 6th January. They very kindly obliged.
Two days later they shipped my book to the people that pre-ordered and they ran out of stock. They went to the printers and ordered more books but the publish dates didn't match. They bought books and shipped them but the Amazon pricing jumped from £5.20 to the full RRP I had at that time of £9.99 This is when I had the reseller discount set at 45% The Amazon price stuck at a despairingly uncompetitive £9.99 I changed the publish date at the printers and Nielsen's to correspond with Amazon. It made no difference.
Somehow even Ingram's the HUGE parent company of the printers got confused. I had changed the publish date at the printers hoping it would synchronise the price with Amazon. Instead Ingram's listed the book as 'hard to find'. There is nothing, it seems, I can do to alter this. Hard to find books are sold from the printers without the 20% reseller discount applied.
I tried to shift the Amazon price down from £9.99 and to get the book de-listed from hard to find. I would succeed on the former and fail on the later. I made sure Amazon, Nielsen's and the printers publish date all matched the original 31 January publish date. The pricing didn't change. In mid-February I joined the Amazon Advantage program and changed the RRP to £12.99 out of necessity to meet the Advantage program's need for a 60% discount on the RRP. This still gave me a theoretical profit of £1 per book. Except by the time I'd shipped them six books I'd lost £2 on the deal. I couldn't take advantage of the printers ability to drop-ship cost effectively because Amazon require specific packing information to be enclosed with the books. The price stayed at £9.99
At the end of February I published Chasing Innocence via CreateSpace in the US - Amazon's own printing and distribution service. I priced this once more with a £1 profit and hoped the US dollar price would shift the UK price. It did. Based on the exchange rate the UK price dropped to £8.90 then for some reason I don't yet know, down to £7.05 It stayed there. While this was going on I'd had a brain wave. I changed the RRP at the UK printers to £6.89 and applied a 20% discount, just in case I could lift the hard to find tag. I closed my Advantage account with Amazon and brought back all but two of the Advantage stock I'd shipped to them. This forced them to go and find more stock. They found it listed as hard to find at the printers, but at least the RRP was £6.89. Which is why, if you look at the paperback on Amazon right now, you will see it's listed at £6.89 with no discount. The automated processes of Amazon are selling it for the exact price they bought it.
Check-in next week for the Kindle journey to date. I'm off now to hunt down that 'hard to find' tag.
2 comments:
Geez, who'd want to be a publisher, eh? Don't change the release date with book 2!!
Who'd want to publish indeed! Never changing a publish date ever again. Now if only I could remove the hard to find tag, the world might be mine.
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