About Book Publishing

[bunn]

I thought this blog post by Jane Alexander about publishers and the market for books (fiction primarily I think) might be of interest to some of the people on my flist who are in the process of producing books, and for that matter to those of us that buy them.

(I quite like Jane, I came across her on Twitter and blagged a promotional Harry Potter Dobby toy off her, which Oldies Club then sold very profitably on Ebay. :-))

Comments

[inzilbeth-liz.livejournal.com]

Very interesting! Sounds like you really do need to milk the social media links all you can.

Tomorrow it's the old fashioned way for me though. I collected a load of posters from my publisher yesterday and I'm heading to Sarehole to spread the word! Hopefully my 'passion' for my subject will win the day!

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Fingers crossed it all goes really well -and if you can't sell a book on Aragorn to that crowd, there is no hope!

Have you found out if there will be a Kindle version yet?

[kargicq.livejournal.com]

Congratulations! Doesn't stop you milking the social media links as well, of course...

[inzilbeth-liz.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I confess I'm not very good at milking any of it but do feel obligated to at least try!

Edited as I now have a book icon! [Well that's an easy thing to do!]

[demon-rum.livejournal.com]

thank you! filing it away for future reference, just in case.

[kargicq.livejournal.com]

Interesting; I think that nobody in publishing has ever really know what will sell, which is why publishers make (and always have made) losses on roughly 80% of their books (subsidised by the 20%) and why 90% of ebooks sell only a handful of copies.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I wonder how well that failure rate translates to other stationery-type items - pens and novelty rubbers and notepads and atlases - traditionally sold by WHSmith?

I think in all forms of manufacturing you expect a percentage of total whittles, but I was interested by the idea that 'the customer' that the publisher has to sell to has changed from being the big chains, to being the public.

This certainly fits in with the book-buying habits I remember as a teenager, when basically the books I bought tended to be the books that were available, so to a great extent my reading was selected for me by library staff, bookshop owners, and the habits of people who handed things in to charity shops. (OK, I did occasionally order things in, but you'd have to be pretty sure you wanted the book to do that, and I think it cost extra then).

And then of course at Oxford you tended to find that people had read a surprising number of the same books/authors (within a pool of a few thousand at most probably). I wonder if that is still the case.

Must be a scary experience for a manufacturer moving from a BtoB market to BtoC. BtoC is so much more erratic and peculiar!

[kargicq.livejournal.com]

The other thing which makes a Big Chain Bookshop deal a mixed blessing for a small publisher is that the BCBs buy all of their stock on sale-or-return (often with a two or three month sales window)!!! This is an absolute nightmare for companies with tight cashflows.

I know that many small publishers now prefer to concentrate on social media/forums etc for their sales, which is somewhere between the positions mentioned in the article. (I think that if an author goes down the self-publishing route, each copy sold would produce much more profit but unless the author is good at marketing, not many will be sold. In my case I'm clueless about such things.)

I do wonder how young people choose books these days; probably still word-of-mouth recommendations from friends! Maybe I should ask some...

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

Fascinating. I'm gradually getting tugged towards self-publishing, I must say. Though I've currently got a second publisher reading my MS so I'm going to give him first refusal...