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.

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.