9 Bloody 99 (Or - Aiming at Amazon)

So far in Chasing Innocence. Potter thinks up an idea. He writes a book. He edits the book. He lobbies literary agents and discovers a harsh reality. He wants people to read his book so he makes his own publishing company. Now he has total control and the aim is high quality entertainment. He worked with a copy editor, proof editor, model, make-up artist, photographer, graphic artist and bought a book about publishing by Aaron Shephard. And then two other books by the same man. Potter signed a deal with Ingram's to print his book. He worked with a typesetter to create the printed book and when the first proof was printed in greyscale, he found out why and fixed it. Ingram's accepted his book for printing and euphoric, John made a big mistake. He had no set publish date so he revised his ISBN data at Nielsens to 'published'. The pre-orders already purchased for the target price of £5.50, started getting printed and delivered. With pictures of the book popping up across Facebook the book started getting noticed, just about the same time its availability glitched. The lead time on Amazon dropped from next day to 6-9 days, the price shot up from £5:50 to the full RRP of £9:99. The glitch fixed itself and Amazon were now stocking the book, actually ordering copies from Ingram's to keep in stock - hoorah. But we were still looking at the despairing sales killer of £9.99 for the paperback.

So what had gone wrong?

When Ingram's accepted my book for printing, they took control of the books 'distribution data', previously held by Lightningsource. This contains among many other things, the full RRP and wholesale discount of 45%. This is what Amazon had been using to sell the pre-orders at a reasonable price. When Ingram's take that data it then takes three weeks for it to properly appear on their systems. Which of course I didn't know. During this time Amazon and other stores cannot apply these discounts to their pricing because they can't see the data, so they sell it at the full RRP. That is never going to make your book competitive. The RRP is only there to contrast against a more realistic discounted price. If I hadn't set the book's status to published this would all have gone on in the background while it was still in pre-order. We live and learn.

The good news is I have just one week left of the three weeks. Anyone who knows something about Amazon and selling through them, might be asking why I am not subscribed to Amazon's Advantage program? That would be a very good question.

The standard process for indie publishers selling books on Amazon, is to create an Amazon Advantage account and YOU pay for and ship the books to Amazon and you give up a 55% discount. Amazon as the worlds biggest book seller then have a monopoly on your book's pricing. It can mean your book being priced quite high (yes I realise the irony). The reality is, Amazon are a hugely efficient seller. They work very hard to make sure you (the customer) come to them for EVERYTHING.  They pull in data from all kinds of places on absolutely everything that can be purchased. Their database is not a record of what they sell, it is a record of everything that can be sold. They want you going to Amazon as a habit, which they have been very successful in achieving. They know you want what you buy from them NOW. So if they suck in details of a book called Chasing Innocence, that is not part of their advantage program and people start buying it, they will very probably buy in stock, just so they can be competitive and ship it to their Prime customers for next day delivery.  Just as they are likely, as they were during pre-order, to aggressively discount the price for a book their automated systems think is cheaper elsewhere, because it's not part of Advantage.

As an independent publisher of my own fiction novels I am focused on people enjoying the experience so much they recommend someone else do the same thing. Not going Advantage is not about making more money, I get the same if Amazon sell at 9:99 or 5:00. It is about shifting books and getting them into the hands of readers. Word of mouth is key, as are high standards. A competitive price is vital. With Amazon selling my book at 9:99 I am going to struggle to sell beyond family and friends. So I will be very grateful in a week or so, when these pesky databases start catching up with each other.

Shades of Grey

The real thing

Last week, two days before Christmas Eve, I received the printed proof of Chasing Innocence. The proof is for me to accept everything is correct, that there are no errors in the cover or layout. Once I click 'Accept' on the printer's website, the book becomes available to buy. For those that have bravely pre-purchased, it means the book will be printed and despatched. Accepting the proof is a big thing. I was totally in awe of the proof - from the fact I was actually holding my book as a real book for a start. It also looked sensational and everything inside looked great. It would have been easy to simply accept the proof and get giddy at the prospect of it being packaged and sent on its way. I didn't though, because, well, life is never that simple. I did cuddle the proof some more and alternatively stared adoringly at the front cover, and eventually got down to checking the front and back for errors. I then started on the interior layout. It occurred to me very quickly something was wrong with the print. I cornered Prid, handed her the book and told her to read a page of two. She said all the right things that included lots of wows, and wonderfuls. And then cautiously closed with the statement: 'I can see dots in the text.'

There were indeed dots in the text. You only really saw them while reading in a well lit room, but it screamed: 'Amateur hour'. One of the things I have worked very hard to do, is make Chasing Innocence look like a commercially produced book. Not looking self published is not a matter of vanity for me, its about the authority professionally published books come with. If you trust the book as a polished product  then that allows you to buy into the content. Self Published books come with an expectation there will be a lesser standard. As a consequence you hold back from fully committing to the story because you are looking for the errors. I don't want this AT ALL.

So I didn't want dots. I pondered a lot of causes. Maybe the printer budgets for a certain amount of ink per page? Maybe the quality of print won't be the same as those used by commercial publishers? Except I was using one of the biggest and most respected printers in the industry: Lightning Source. So was there something wrong with the PDF bookblock submitted by the typesetter? As a publisher it is my responsibility to make sure the bookblock, the book's interior text,  meets the printer's requirements. As with every stage of this process there had been complications, three different versions of the bookblock had been produced. For the final incarnation I had checked the chapters were in sequence and that the bookblock contained the whole book, I completed some technical checks and submitted it along with the book cover. A few days later the proof had arrived. The next day a colleague picked the proof off my desk. The colleague is Tim. He has worked in the printing industry and has lived the creation of this book on a weekly basis for the last two years. Once he had confirmed the cover was sensational he flipped it open and took a look inside. 'It's printed in greyscale.' he said after two seconds of contemplation. 'Have you noticed the dots?'

Greyscale text printed in Black and White

Greyscale would be a word that haunted my every thought for the next 7 days. The book's contents are printed in black and white, which can't translate greyscale to the printed page, which caused the dots. But how had I got greyscale in the first place? The typesetters had used QuarkExpress v9 (QE9), an industry tool for formatting the book's contents. I had the source layout file used by the typesetters. A quick download of the trial version of QE9 confirmed the source text was a perfect black. So converting the layout to PDF had somehow changed black text to greyscale. But how, why?

In trying to replicate the problem I hit a brick wall of printing terminology. But I do subscribe to lynda.com, which I can't recommend highly enough. I spent three hours that night watching through publishing printing tutorials. This gave me the basic understanding for producing the bookblock PDF for printers. Creating the bookblock through QE9 showed varied results. Sometimes the output text was greyscale, other times black. So we come back to, why? This is where I learned about the difference between RGB and CMYK. The former is a three colour standard we see every day, it is used to produce colour on our computer and TV screens. It is the colour used by QE9 to produce the black text on the screen. CMYK is a four colour standard used by the printing industry. Lightning Source, my printers, had very specific requirements for bookblock creation. I realised the typesetters had produced a bookblock that exceeded these standards but in doing so QE9 had converted black RGB to greyscale CMYK. The interesting irony was it didn't do this every time. So how did I produce a bookblock that would work?

I spent the next five days juggling Christmas duties and learning everything I could about the different standards required for producing print ready bookblocks that weren't going to surprise me when they landed on the doormat. This included more hours on lynda.com and paging through the venerable Aaron Shephard's website and the numerous books of his on publishing I own. Of course his books contained most of the answers but before the detail had meant little. I now had context and studied the semantics of producing a printer friendly bookblock. Aaron Shephard's key advice was to use the Adobe Distillor for creating Adobe PDF files, and leave as few decisions on output to QE9 as possible. I researched Lightning Sources' exact requirements for printing standards and finally I had output that had black text. I then followed their specific requirements for checking the content is compliant and then I uploaded it. That was last night. The new proof should arrive sometime next week. Failing any further 'learning opportunities', I will be clicking 'Accept' with a huge sigh of relief.