Traditional publishers/print houses could never print just one book or a small run of books as it would make the per unit cost incredibly expensive. I have been in advertising and/or printing since 1986, and I've specced out a lot of jobs. The majority of production costs are up front, and when the presses are running finished copy, the cost then becomes merely materials for the press run.
The digital age changed all that.
I have published two books. Two books that probably wouldn't be looked at by a traditional publisher. Why?
Because they are poetry anthologies, and the market for those is rather small. This doesn't mean that the writing is bad; it just means that demand is limited. But I wanted to get some books done to 1. go through the experience and 2. have a body of work in the pipeline for the time I get my novel finished. Additionally, I wanted to officially copyright the work in order to protect it.
I published my first book through PublishAmerica. I emailed them the manuscript, and they approved it. Upon approval, they sent me a contract to sign, which I did and returned to them. Then I edited the manuscript myself for typographical and punctuation errors, and switched out a couple of poems I wanted to replace. I also created the cover artwork, which they used.
PublishAmerica took care of the ISBN registration and distribution through major online channels - note: they do not do placement in brick and mortar locations. They sent me two author's copies, and the whole process cost me nothing.
PublishAmerica will edit the book for you; it adds more time to the process if you are wiling to wait. They will also design the cover for you if you have no experience in doing it yourself. They send out files for you to approve, pdfs for your review. The whole process took about 2-3 months before I saw my book up on Amazon for the first time.
There are a lot of advantages to using a service like PublishAmerica. The biggest is the most obvious - no cost to the author. I didn't pay PA a dime for the publishing. I did purchase 25 books from them when the project was complete for sale to friends (signed copies) and for promotional use, but that was it for expense.
Unfortunately, there's a flip side to all these great advantages.
1. PA does not promote your book for you - you have to do that.
2. PA will do a mailing to a list of contacts you give them, but that's it.
3. PA's acceptance standards aren't the highest in the business.
4. PA's book prices are high - my 180-page poetry anthology, From Here to Never, costs $19.95 on Amazon and at PA.
5. PA's contract requires a 7-year commitment to them. At the end of the 7-year period, if you don't notify them that you want to end the relationship, they will extend it another 7 years automatically.
6. PA's royalty structure could be better.
7. Bookstores don't like to stock books from publishers like PA due to the lack of a buyback agreement. (PA says that this has changed on their site, and they now offer the agreement). The other reason is the high cost of the book which lowers margins for the store, plus the lack of promotional support from PA.
8. PA's book layout is merely adequate (more on that later).
The business model of PublishAmerica is to publish as many people as they can who will provide them with a mailing list of friends and family to try and promote the books to. It's that simple. Do you see the inherent problems with that model? I did early on, but I overlooked them and tried to publish my second book through them as well. Why? Refer to paragraph 4.
Well, I submitted my second book to PA. It was several weeks before I heard from them again. Their email to me was short and direct. It basically stated that because my first book hadn't sold in sufficient numbers, they were unwilling to publish a second book for me.
I wasn't surprised. I wasn't even disappointed.
Instead, I decided to check out Lulu.com.
I will cover that in my next blog entry.
No comments:
Post a Comment