So you want to publish a (paperback) book? (1 of 2)

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.

Example: Chasing Innocence = 366 pages

• 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

2) You submit the book's cover art and book content to the printers. You set the RRP and you set a publish date about three weeks into the future. You STICK to that date come hell or high water. Never ever change it.

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.

So that's what I have struggled through in getting the book on Amazon and priced almost competitively. And what can go wrong if you mess with automation. Despite all these problems I've sold forty-five paperback books via Amazon to family and some great friends. In the ten weeks Chasing Innocence has been available the printers have reported shipping thirty-four books to anonymous other buyers. Probably to other online sellers like the Book Depository. Which brings us to the next stage. Finding a platform from which I can market the book. £6.89 is about £1.50 from being competitive but it's the best price it has been. I now feel I can at least start pushing the book to magazines and newspapers and see what happens.

Check-in next week for the Kindle journey to date. I'm off now to hunt down that 'hard to find' tag.

Click Accept

Yesterday morning, 5 January 2012, I received the second and final printed proof of Chasing Innocence. At midday yesterday I clicked 'Accept' on the printer's website. About 20 seconds later the book was listed as being available for printing. Which means it's done, finished, good to go. Ready to be bought, shipped and delivered into the eager hands of Amazon buyers all around the world. Of course there would be the obligatory spanner in the works - I updated Nielsen's who manage book data in the UK, and brought the publish date forward from 31 January to NOW. But Nielsen's takes a few days to update and Amazon is stuck in the pre-order state. That will fix itself in the next few days, I had just hoped the pre-orders might get shipped for the weekend.

So, yesterday was full of a thrilling sense of jubilation, expectation and a huge chunk of hope. It was a marker for the end of a process and in so many ways, the beginning of something else. I look back to October 2007 when I first had the idea for Chasing Innocence, to the months and months of daydreaming and the uncertainty of how to even start a book, what should a first chapter contain? Who am I writing for? What style should I be writing in? Of Sunday afternoons in Borders reading through a stack of Chapter Ones while drinking tea. The uncertainty of it all really stands out. Of trying to find time to write as I started a new job and found myself commuting 3hrs a day, and then moving house. I did leave the uncertainty behind at 60,000 words in October 2008. I got my head down and finished the first draft in April 2009 - one morning after four months of 5AM starts. I felt then a sense of jubilation just as I do now, little knowing just how much of the journey still stretched before me. Just like it does now I suspect. The rest of that year and much of 2010 was spent taking the rough draft and making it as good as I could, while learning the very important and difficult art of getting feedback and taking criticism. I recall the endless mistakes and the steep learning curve. The very steep learning curve. The wasted time, the wasted months I spent preparing letters for agents, another lesson learned. Of trying and failing to give the whole book a consistent grammatical narrative.

Throughout the whole process I had been determined the book would be a product of my creative endeavours alone. I knew a lot of people that spent a lot of time TALKING about writing books, I knew a lot of people that spent a lot of time studying writing, researching and attending lectures and conferences. A lot of people that spent a lot of time involved in the concept of book writing without actually doing much of it. I never have been any good at studying something and applying the knowledge seamlessly to the real world experience. I would and did learn all my mistakes the same way I have always learned them - the hard way. I wanted the experience of actually writing a book to shape my knowledge. The process also gradually brought about a startling realisation - that I am a bit of control freak. Having lived 44 years as me, this had never once occurred to me. The irony being I know people exactly like this and often shake my head sagely and might even voice the thought that they need to, 'Let go.' Once I realised that was also me, I tried to understand it. I'm control obsessed, not because I don't think anyone can do it better, it's just that I doubt anyone to fully realise what I have in my mind to a finished product that matches my expectations. Others say I'm just driven, others say I'm mad. In Chasing Innocence this had led me to create a great story and great characters. I wasn't sure though. I mean I thought I had, but I was also full of self doubt. I spent the close of 2010 and early 2011 toiling over and over grammatical issues that were artefacts of many lessons learned, that I couldn't rectify because I'd been looking at them for so long. I realised if I was to progress, I did need to let go. I needed help.

I came to Daniel Goldsmith Associates via a literary agent recommendation and lots of research. There are a lot of companies willing to take your manuscript and make it a book, but too many of them are like production lines with limited capacity for quality. I wasn't even sure what the next stage towards publication might be, I just wanted to know what a professional editor thought of the book. I wasn't even sure what to expect.

If there was ever justification needed in my letting go, Katie Green is it. I contracted Daniel Goldsmith to provide editorial feedback on Chasing Innocence and in return I got from Katie a detailed and illuminating report. It turned out the story and characters were everything I thought they were, the epilogue didn't work and some of the chapter endings needed tweaking. Some things weren't clear. There were some real grammatical issues. I made almost all the changes Katie suggested and her second editor report confirmed that the grammatical issues remained. I wonder if she ever contemplated that she would be the one to eventually fix them? I got two colleagues to read Chasing Innocence. Others had gone before them but these were the last two. The first read the pre-Katie version, the second the post Katie version. The first confirmed what Katie said in less specific terms and the second reader gushed. I decided it was time I took the next step. I decided I would publish Chasing Innocence. There was no way I would hand it to the production line of self publishing companies. I wanted the control being my own publisher afforded me. I wanted the finished product to sit beside a 'properly' published book and look better. It seemed a natural move to use Daniel Goldsmith to help with this, they were a trusted commodity in an arena I knew little of. The service they offered also afforded me more interaction. As the publisher I would have final say at every stage.

The first step was Katie Green's great achievement, she heroically copy edited my whole book. Reading the manuscript for the first time after this process was a moment of triumph and utter relief that will be difficult to ever better. The copy edit was justification for the part of me that realised I could not fix the problems, over the part determined to belligerently do it alone. In return Katie had given a great story a consistent grammatical narrative and made it a great read. A huge difference.

The proof edit was done by a freelance editor who also works for some of the established publishers such as Transworld. Having never fed back to Daniel Goldsmith anything on a book's quality other than the content of the professional proof edit, she told them in Chasing Innocence we had a bestseller. The proof edit gave the manuscript a professional shine and highlighted two flaws that caused several late nights. In producing the book's front cover we surpassed my wildest dreams. I had provided Daniel Goldsmith with a stunning image. Getting that image was one of the most remarkable experiences and the combined effort of a photographer, make-up artist, model and my direction. The graphic designer turned it into something quite jaw dropping. He produced a cover that sells the book at first glance, for my mind, and puts questions in your mind that only reading the book will answer. You can't really ask more of a cover. The final stage was the mystical art of typesetting. Something I know a lot more about now. Daniel Goldsmith produced a layout that took the eye easily down the lines of text and from page to page. A typeset that was easy to read and very importantly, took my higher than average word count and made it 366 pages. A fact that becomes more important when you consider each and every page impacts the cost of printing the book.

In clicking 'Accept' yesterday and releasing Chasing Innocence for printing, I was completing another stage in a personal journey. Getting my book into the hands of lots of people, is the next stage. One that I need to balance alongside the two books I intend finishing over the next twelve months. Finishing this leg of the journey and putting Chasing Innocence in a position where people can read what I write, took learning something about myself, and embracing it. It was a lot of hard work, at all times a wonderful creative experience and through collaboration, I saw the book grow into a polished product through the input of many people. WE really did do it.

Five Pages

We all read them at sometime or other, although not all of them all the time. We open a book and flick past the page that tells us the title and who wrote it and we might catch the copyright year on the next page, along with a snippet that might say 'similarity to any persons living or dead'. On the next page we ignore the dedication because we don't know the person it's dedicated to and on the next we read the mood setting prosaic quote. Then we turn to the first page of the novel. And when we turn the last page we get the sometimes short, very often long list of acknowledgements that tell us the lengths the author went to for an authentic story. And importantly, how many people showed extraordinary commitment bringing the story to the printed page. I'm invoking the printed page for reasons I'll explain at the end.

In the lifetime of owning a book how much attention will you pay to these pages? Unless the prosaic quote is super cool or the dedication particularly imaginative the answer will of course be - very little. Sometimes acknowledgements can be interesting if you're stuck with nothing else to read. These are five nothing pages. You find them in every book and very recently I discovered creating them is not easy at all.

The Title Page - Admittedly the easiest. With the triviality of writing the book over, you now have to decide on a thought provoking title. It will probably be the one you thought of at the very beginning. Then you choose whether your plain ordinary 'own' name will be your author name, or maybe you make up something exotic. Then all you have to do is write both on this page. The publisher's name goes at the bottom. Simples.

Publisher's Statement - Sometimes also known as the title page verso  because it's always on the back of the title page. First off, none of the 'legal' stuff on this page will be a problem in a legal sense, not the: 'moral right as the author' stuff or the: 'persons living or dead' bit. This is all standard publishing legal speak. None of it has to be certified, no copyright has to be stamped, no sworn moral statement is recorded, and you don't sign a bit of paper guaranteeing none of the characters are real. You research the same page from similar genre books and make sure all the bases are covered, and of course make sure the correct publishing company, author name and copyright year are recorded on your page. The first real stumbling block will be the sequence of numerics and dashes at the bottom of the page. The ISBN is a unique product code assigned to your book. It will be used by sellers everywhere for selling, ordering and re-ordering the book. In the UK ISBNs are dished out by the Nielsen Agency. You fill in a form, attach your title and publisher statements, a cheque for under £200 and wait. Understanding the form is not always easy, it's got a guide you use when filling it in. You can also buy books that will help. You will get your ISBNs between 3 and 10 days after the agency receive your correctly filled in form. Then you put one ISBN for each version of your book (hardback/paperbook/epub) beneath the legal stuff, then a final mention for the publisher at the very bottom. Then this page is done.

The Dedication - Writing your first book is a very personal thing. So it seemed perfectly natural to me that I would dedicate the book to Me. Apparently that's verbatim. In the future I don't think this page will be so much of a problem. But for this first book the dedication had to be all about me. Finding someone I really, really wanted to dedicate my first book to, took over a year. Sending it to the printers forced the decision on me. I had three potentials that meant a lot. The dedication I chose meant the most in the end, other than Me.

Prosaic Quote - Strictly speaking you don't need one of these but they can set the scene. Of course you will need to acknowledge the quotes original author and seek appropriate permission, or use a very old one no longer covered by copyright. Or you can make up one of your own - which is what I did. The quote that immediately precedes the first proper page of my story started as a wordy tagline for the book. It evolved over a period of 18 months, usually as I walked across Hyde Park in the morning, into something a little tragic and beautiful. Which is perfect for the page that follows it.

Acknowledgements - Who'd ever have thought saying thank you could be so difficult and repetitive. My word of advice, start one of these just about the same time you decide to actually write a book, or you'll forget a whole bunch of people. And then when you have everyone you ever wanted to thank, you have to decide on levels. You start slowly and build pace to the chest beating eulogies. Of course I only started mine in the weeks prior to sending it off to be printed. It went from: 'It's too short and clinical.' To struggling not to sound like I was accepting an Oscar.

And finally, one day, the book will be in the reader's hands and we take comfort knowing they will have to flick past these pages to start reading. Unless of course they have an eReader, which will simply take them straight to the prosaic quote or maybe even the first page if you're not careful.