Hoping some folks here have some self-publishing experience and can help me out a little.
I am in the midst of writing a book nothing fancy or sexy, just boring technical information on a very specific area of expertise. Thinking perhaps 300-500 per year will sell. Not mass market at all.
This has to be print on demand and also through eBook sales to keep the expenses down.
Any advice on what online web source is god to use for my type of book ? All other advice will be appreciated.
You will want to sell it as Kindle and Nook format. This can be difficult if you have any complex formatting like nested tables, equations, diagrams etc. but the beginning step is a very clean XHTML version - Word can handle it, but do some research on how to format, what to avoid etc.
For print publishing - how do you intend to sell it? There is a spectrum of POD providers from those that are basically short-run printers and nothing else, to POD-based Amazon competitors like iLibris. Are you going to handle publicity and fulfillment yourself from POD or short-run sources, or do you want a service to handle it all and mail you a paltry amount for each sale?
My goal is to publish the book and have the price in the $135-150 range, so that I make roughly 100 per sale.
Amazon & whoever gets their cut and I get the about $100, but again I do not know if this is a reasonable expectation or not.
I could fulfill the orders and the thought in my head was I would always have 15-20 around the office and set myself up to mail out the door when an order comes in. Have the help to do that, and I know the people that would perhaps send in 100 or so orders per year.
But it also has to be on Amazon.
Frankly surfing through the web sites on this I am finding it hard to estimate the costs of all this.
Printing = X
Amazon charges = Y
etc
I’ve always used regular trade printing for books, but unless you commit to 1000 or more it’s not cost-effective. Lulu.com is perhaps the best of the POD service companies. You can log in there and use their tools to price various configurations of books. I just priced a 6x9, black interior, hardcover with dustjacket at $17-20 with various page counts. They will produce and ship copies to you to do with as you like, or they have avenues to the major booksellers as well.
Amazon takes about 20% as its cut for small sellers and covers $3.99 of shipping costs. Figure shipping at $5, because it’s much cheaper and easier to ship USPS Priority in small quantities than to muck around with your own packing materials, labeling, postage etc. to save $1 or so with a cheaper rate that will be slow enough to irritate buyers.
Your price seems very high unless it’s very specialized material that readers will pay for. That is: not only must it be worth $150 to get it, but they can’t have any easy options to get cheaper or pirate editions, either.
Book sales are not the way to make money from expertise any more. At best they’re a way to create specific material that you profit from in other ways.
Also, 300-500/year sounds like a very ambitious number for a self-published work. My self-published book hit 600 (about 10 years ago; no e-book sales in that) and even those numbers were enough to put me ahead of millions of other titles at Amazon. If it’s something like a textbook where you have a captive audience, you can probably count on that, but you really have to set your expectations low. I can’t tell you how many people launch into self-publishing with expectations that they think are modest but which are actually orders of magnitude higher than reality.
Since you’re still in an early phase of all this, I’d have to write a book to even try to address such general questions. Maybe I’ll just point you to Lightning Source as a place where you can see some POD prices and wholesale margins for print and ebook. Lightning Source can list you in catalogs and at sites like Amazon without you needing to do it yourself.
I will second your general comment that it’s a lot harder, a lot more involved and has a lot lousier returns than most would-be author/publishers think. Getting all the words in a row in Word is hardly even step 1.
But I was answering the OP’s questions, of which I’m sure there will be more and which I’ll be happy to keep answering until they haul him away in a straightjacket…
Actually, I have some fond memories of having done it myself, but the cost of those memories (in terms of both effort and cash) were far beyond what I’d budgeted on the project. I remember attending some conventions and talking with other self-publishers and we’d both be sort of dancing around how well the convention was going… eventually I’d say something like “Let’s be real. You’ve sold three copies today, right?” and they’d finally sigh with relief that they didn’t have to keep pretending it was fifty.
Well this would be a printed reference source for a very specific type of software used in industry that costs $2500 - 5000 per seat depending upon configurations. So i am not thinking that $135 - 150 is out of line.
I know most of the people in the business and there is no other reference source out there in printed form. I would know if there is, and it just is not there. I am thinking there is a market for this and even if it is 100 per year then I would still do.
It is also a source to generate more work for myself.
I like the advice, and I do want to be realistic. Once again thanks
I suggest that you check lightningsource.com. 8 years ago I co-authored a book with somebody that has been published twice by reputable publishing houses. We are happy to control our material, and have made more money than we would have if we had published the traditional way. We still sell several hundred books each month, even if the book is dated by now. We inted to self-publish another one within year.
Just remember not to skimkp on an editor. And hire a designer if possible. You will have to buy your own ISBN, and do your own marketing. Doing it right is very involved, just so you know.
It sounds like you have a handle on your market and the material’s value - my only further question would be whether or not any of the material is proprietary or copyrighted. If, say, Oracle charges $2500 a user for access to a reference system, you can’t just copy that into your own material and sell it. I’ll assume you are working with self-created, legitimate material.
Mighty_Girl is right, though, and barely scratches the surface. Yes, you CAN write a semiliterate, half-finished manuscript in Open Office and have one of these providers put it between covers for you… but that doesn’t make it a book. You need at least some editing and proofreading by a qualified person who’s not you. You need to have it laid out book-style so that it’s readable and usable by the end audience - and that’s something that’s between having some skills and experience and a lifetime of craftsmanship. The templates and guidelines you will find online and provided by the POD companies are a poor, poor substitute for real expertise.
For very small-market goods, you can forego an ISBN, and handle marketing through direct contact and limited advertising and so forth; you don’t need to scale up to the kind of mass-market trolling needed for fiction or mainstream nonfic or reference. You can also get an ISBN from many of the POD providers, which is cheaper than filing for your own set and enables you to sell through the resellers that require all products to have one.
Just to recap: the parts that come after finishing the manuscript are not trivial. Having Staples or Office Depot print it out and bind it does not make it a book - and while a POD service can do a lot to make it look more like a “real book,” it’s no different if the material and layout are amateur.
Happy to keep answering questions as long as you’re working on this.
I used CreateSpace, Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, and Smashwords to publish my novel in paperback and ebook. It is not particularly difficult if you’re somewhat computer savvy. Besides the artwork, the total cost to me to self publish was less than $50. Self publishing is really, really easy and cheap nowadays, and I highly recommend it.
I’m sure you did well, and I’d concur that it’s become really, really easy. However, I’d like to make some observations from long experience.
First, fiction is rarely demanding in terms of layout. Few novellas/novels do anything but flow from page to page with a chapter head here and there.
First-prime, I don’t see many novels well done by self-publishers and even small presses that should know better. I have at least a half-dozen books from a well-known, highly regarded specialty press whose interior layouts make my eyes bleed. Poor font choice, no concept of text spacing and margins, no idea how to lay out headers or chapter breaks, and the peculiar inability to set the front matter in type any smaller than the body. The result is pages that are much harder on the eye and tiring to read and easy to start skipping material on. The typography of a book intended to be read by the page needs to be “transparent” and not interfere with the reading effort.
Second, any kind of technical publishing requires 10X the effort and ability of flowing text; if you need tables, equations, pullouts, multiple levels of heading etc. it becomes a delicate juggling act requiring skill of at least the sidewalk entertainer level, if not Cirque du Soleil. Just pounding it out page after page without adjusting the layout components turns it into a visual brick, and even extracting information on a lookup basis becomes more difficult than it should be.
Third, yes this stuff does matter. It’s not elitism or artsy-fartsy nonsense; simply laying out a page of text that is pleasing and relaxing to the eye makes all the difference in the world. I have a novel pushed on me by a friend that is so badly typeset I had to go find another edition to read; the first is like trying to read Hebrew or Cyrillic characters and you have to physically drag your eyes over every line to parse it. (It is, for the record, a relatively lightweight piece of humor, something that should be no effort to read.) For technical publishing, those problems multiply and if you don’t get it at least mostly right, readers will never be able to use the book effectively.
Technology has made many things “really, really easy” - but many of those still need skill and experience to be even “passing good.”
The Barbarian is right. It’s much more involved than that.
I founded a publishing house, registered namrs, logos etc. I also registered the book with the library of congress, just to name a few of the things we did.
I am typing on my iPad, so please ignore the typos.
