The change in conversation has been interesting. My wife and I own a small traditional publishing company. And, before you jump one way or another, we’ll be closing the extended publishing part this year after more that 15 years of being in business. Why? Well, for a publisher that assumes all of the financial risks, all of the editing, designing, and a lower profit to give back to the authors that put forth much effort in writing good stories, the model isn’t working these days.
For those that think the app stores requesting 30% is ridiculous, try getting paperback books into book stores. They would like a 55% discount off the cover price. That means the most profit you could make on a print book is 45% of the cover price. But wait, there are printing costs, distribution costs, and shipping costs. For a book that costs $15 in print, you are down to about $3 per book sold if you are lucky. If we even split the “profit” for a book 50/50 between us and the author, we each get $1.50 per book. We had more favorable terms for the authors. So, it would take many sales to pay for graphics, ISBNs, editing, marketing, and so forth. We did well with some titles, but others, not so much.
With digital books, Amazon asks if you would like to vary prices to their liking with a higher profit margin. While this usually works out well, the profit is still lower. Since the different companies can not decide on format, you then need to adjust the files for the different platforms. This requires more editing if you want to maintain a great experience for your readers on the different platforms.
Many authors do not have the skills the individuals of this great group have and they can not format a book well, include a table of contents, or design a cover that reflects the content and doesn’t infringe on the copyright of others. I am not saying all authors, just many. It takes time to do these things and align it to the requirements of each distribution provider. We did it to help those that had good stories share it with others.
The story itself was not enough most of the times. The authors needed to be willing to get out there and do what Robin did for Michael Sullivan, market the book and encourage more stories to be told. We interviewed Robin and Michael around the time they released his first three books. Robin was a driving force that believed in the stories and helped every step of the way. Michael wrote the stories for his family. If I remember correctly, they did not publish the books until Michael had written all in the first series. They have done well because they had drive and a good story. We’ve followed them for many years. It has been great to see them where they are now.
If you have a story to tell, there are so many opportunities to share. Self-publishing is definitely an option, especially for new authors. Get those first few books out of the way before searching for a publisher so you can get some feedback from your readers. Attend conferences, post your work in online forums, engage your audience whenever possible. You need to be as passionate about sharing your work as you are about telling the story in the first place.
I know many of you may have had other experiences, so no worries. I just wanted to share part of our story.
And, to tie this back to the original topic, I have many books in Apple Books. Some were imported from other sources and some purchased through Apple. If we want to share books, we sometimes use Amazon since I can share the books with my wife. Apple has some good sales on books at times. That is when we purchase directly from Apple.
I apologize for the long post. I guess I had to just get it out of my system. Thank you for reading…hopefully…
