So You Want to be Published (pt. 1)

Publishing, in its own right, is not a big deal. All it means is that you have found someone who has agreed to print your book for you, sometimes with some sort of cost involved.

There was a day when a writer would shop his/her manuscript to publishers in hopes of landing a contract. If that avenue failed, then the writer could still go to a vanity press and pay thousands of dollars for a hundred or so copies of the book. The old paradigms have changed somewhat over the years, as they often do. The large publishing houses are, for the most part, no longer interested in entertaining unknown authors. They are in business to make a lot of money off the Tom Clancys and Danielle Steeles of the world - in other words, the sure things. The low risk things. And they have swallowed up a lot of the smaller presses that used to seek out the up and comers.

That leaves a lot of "micro" publishers, one or two person operations our of a garage or small office somewhere. These folks tend to act more like brokers or agents as they don't have their own staff on hand to edit, print and bind. They also tend to be specialists, like poetic cookbooks of Maine, or something like that. So where does that leave the emerging writer class?

They can continue to send manuscripts out for probable rejection (unless they run across a publisher who is absolutely wowed by them), or they can go the print-on-demand (POD) or self-publish route for little to no cost.

Little to no cost. Yes, that's what I said.

Here is where the paradigm shift in publishing benefits you, the writer.

The traditional publishing model prints up a number of books for distribution through bookstores and promotional events. Let's say that 5000 books are printed for release into 300 bookstores (I don't know what actual numbers would be, this is just an example. For the release of a well-known author, I assume that 5000 times ten several times over is what gets printed). And let's say that those 5000 books cost the printer $2 - $3 per to produce each book. Plus you have distributors' costs, retailers' costs and royalties involved in the cost as well, which brings the book well up into the $7 - $8 range to purchase.

Well that's $10,000 - $15,000 in inventory that the publisher has committed to the process, and it also means shelf space will be required. If the book doesn't sell well, despite the money and effort put into promoting it (that's another cost), then the burden of the costs goes back to the publisher because there is usually a buy back agreement between them and the bookstores.

Enter the digital age. Enter the new paradigm.

Each book is output on high quality inkjets - even 4-color covers - from digital files. This part of the process alone negates the need for negatives, plates, and paginated artwork, not to mention stripping and darkroom work (printing terminology).

Then comes the bindery work - collating, trimming and binding the pages to the cover. This may or may not be automated as well. I don't really know about that part of it. What this new paradigm has done has allowed the publisher to produce as many books as are needed to fulfill orders. In many cases, it may just be one book. But it can all be done in a cost-efficient manner which opens up new doors of opportunity.

This is part of an ongoing series on this blog.