Wednesday, July 09, 2008

2006 – My Great Publishing Adventure – Part 3 of 3

Note: This is the last of a three part series describing my adventures in the publishing industry. Here are links to the first two parts:

2006 - My Great Publishing Adventure - Part 1 of 3

2006 - My Great Publishing Adventure - Part 2 of 3

Part 3:

So I got my book printed. Now what? Now comes the part you can't control, which includes getting reviewers to review your book, getting bookstores to carry it, getting people to visit your web site, and getting people to buy your book. By comparison, the steps up to this point are easy.

- Book reviews. There are four major book review publications that everyone in the industry pays attention to: Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, ForeWord and Booklist, from the American Library Association (ALA). Here's the catch with these big reviewers: they only review books before publication. Therefore, you need Advance Reader Copies (ARCs) to send to these reviewers, and others. What is your publication date? If you are the publisher, you get to choose. Your book is golden in the months just prior to its official release date because it is new and it doesn't have a track record. I chose a date that was about one month after printing was complete. That allowed time for the books to work their way through distribution channels to the warehouses of the wholesalers. Another consideration is that the reviews of the four big reviewers need to show up in the databases of the wholesalers, Ingram and Baker & Taylor. That way, a bookstore person or a librarian doing a query on your book will see the reviews. Even a slightly negative review from a big reviewer is more impressive than no review at all.

Unfortunately, the four big reviewers only review a fraction of the books they receive. None of them reviewed my book, nor did the major newspaper book sections. I received nice reviews in my local papers and a paragraph in the Seattle Times, plus reviews in several small papers around the country. I was very concerned about the wholesaler databases not having anything, so I decided to purchase a review. Yes, both Kirkus and ForeWord offer a review-for-fee service. It doesn't mean you get a good review, it just means the book gets reviewed. I purchased a review from ForeWord for about $300 just so I would have something. It turns out that the person hired to do the review was from the Puget Sound region, which is where my book is based, and she loved it. I got a very good review. Later, ForeWord Magazine selected my book as a Beach Read Selection in July of 2006.

- Book fairs. As a publisher, I was able to attend two large book fairs in 2006: Book Expo America (BEA), which was held in Washington, D.C., and the ALA Annual Conference, which was held in New Orleans. These events are not open to the public; you must be "in the biz" either as a bookstore employee, librarian, publishing company employee, literary agent, author sponsored by a publisher, or an established book industry participant of some kind. That adds up to a lot of people and there are tens of thousands in attendance at these large events.

Most publishers rent a table, or many tables, starting at around $1,200 for a small one. They display their books and usually some kind of artwork or gimmick to get passersby to stop and browse. Nothing is being sold, but lots of books and trinkets are given away. The idea is that a bookstore owner or librarian will take a book home and fall in love with it and order copies of it.

I did not want to shell out $1,200 just to display one book, so I joined a trade association for small publishers, called Independent Book Publishers Association (IPBA). This group rents a large booth at major book fairs and displays books offered by its members. I was able to attend the fairs at no cost, other than getting there, by volunteering to staff the IPBA booth. In addition, members can purchase time slots at a small table at the end of the IPBA booth where they can feature their books and offer signed copies, flyers, business cards and other goodies. When it was my turn I put out a bowl of chocolate covered almonds and that got people to stop so I could pitch my book. Since I happened to also be the author of my book I was able to give away signed copies, which proved very popular. However, I have no idea how many sales resulted from that exposure.

- Readings and appearances. The single most effective way that an author can get the word out about his or her book is to schedule a reading at a bookstore or some other venue and invite people to attend. My most successful reading event was at my local independent bookstore, and that is where any author should begin. By building on that event I was able to get invitations to speak at other regional bookstores. Here's a very important lesson: bookstores want your book to be "in distribution" through wholesalers before they will schedule a reading. That is so they can order returnable copies, a point I made earlier in my discussion of book distribution. After the reading, the store will usually stock your book for as long as people buy it; therefore readings are also a way of getting your book onto shelves.

The great thing about a reading is that, for an hour or so, you have a group of people listening to you talk about your book. When you consider the number of entertainment options out there competing for attention, breaking through that marketing noise with a single novel has become nearly impossible. A reading is face to face, it's personal, and even if people don't buy the book they may mention it to others or they may buy it later as a gift.

A reading event will usually be announced in the local newspaper. However, getting people to attend is your job. I personally invited people to my readings, and I asked them to bring a friend, and I went around in advance and put up posters.

Important caveat: many bookstores, even some independent ones, will not host readings by self-published authors. This is one case where starting your own publishing company in order to publish your book is basically the same as self-publishing, as far as these stores are concerned. The lesson here is to simply call or write to lots and lots of bookstores and see which ones accept you. It also helps to be willing to travel.

- Advertising. In an effort to increase online awareness of my book I contracted with a book promoter who reads, or looks at, your book and then chooses a dozen web sites on which to place a display ad that is linked to your Amazon book page. This cost about $900, and it resulted in some "click throughs" to my Amazon page, but I didn't detect any significant jump in sales. I also ran some Google search ads. For these, you bid an amount for placement on a page, but you don't pay unless someone clicks on the ad. Again, I got some traffic to my book page but I didn't really see any sales.

- Media and publicity. Another great way to get the word out about your book is to try to get the media to do stories about you. This is free advertising, but you need to have an angle that attracts media attention. The fact that you wrote a book is not interesting. There must be a "story behind the story" if it is going to be newsworthy. Fortunately, I had one, and that was Hurricane Katrina, which is a small but important part of the story line in my novel. I also happen to be from New Orleans and was there when Katrina landed. I placed a quarter-page announcement in a publication called Radio-TV Interview Report (RTIR), which is a catalog of people who are available for radio and TV interviews. Once I paid for the ad, an RTIR copy editor talked to me on the phone and helped me craft an attention getting announcement. The headline read:

"A Native of New Orleans Reveals: Why the City I Know May Already Be Gone"

I thought it was a bit over the top, but when it ran in August of 2006, as the one-year anniversary of Katrina approached, my phone started ringing. I ended up doing more than a dozen live on-air radio interviews with stations all over the country and in Canada (but, surprisingly, none from Louisiana or anywhere in the Deep South). I did these interviews from my home phone, usually at some odd hour. In addition, I had one television appearance on the morning news in Seattle on the day of the Katrina anniversary, which was August 29. All of the interviews generally went very well, and they were fun, but I did not see a huge bump in book sales from any of these appearances.

- Selling books. So now we come to the point of the whole enterprise: selling books. Of the five thousand that I printed, I sold about fifteen hundred. Almost all of these were during the first six months after the book was officially launched in July 2006. While I was actively promoting the book using all of the techniques I've mentioned—plus some that I didn't mention, such as my email newsletter and blogging activities—people were buying books. However, I eventually had to face the reality of paying bills. I had been surviving off savings for several months and finally, in the fall of 2006, I had to return to the work force as a software engineer, which has been my profession since 1992. Once I had a day job my book promoting trailed off to almost zero, and book sales followed the same route. I kept the book in distribution for as long as I could, but it was getting expensive and I was not selling books, so I canceled the distribution in the summer of 2007 and took delivery of the remaining books, which are now at my house. It took a long time to cancel the distribution agreement, since by contract they must hold the account open so that wholesalers can return unsold books, and the wholesalers must allow bookstores to send back unsold books. In all it was about nine or ten months before I could finally stop paying the distributor to hold the account open.

It's important to consider what happens when it goes the other way and a book takes off and becomes a big seller. Guess what? The publisher must print those books and pay for the printing before the books leave the warehouse. This can be a significant up front investment if the book sells in the hundreds of thousands of copies. Furthermore, it takes a long time to get paid. That's because the distributor holds a large percentage of the revenues against future returns. In the typical arrangement the small publisher gets something like 30 percent of revenues starting about 90 days after a book is introduced. This means you cannot realistically finance the printing of additional books with proceeds from the early print runs. The money doesn't come back to you fast enough. The reality is, to sell big, you need to start with a very large investment. When you do the math you can see that book publishers take on enormous risk. This is why book publishing has gotten to the state it is in, where you see large publishing houses scrambling for the next blockbuster title that pays for all the other titles that sell in low numbers.

Will I self-publish my next book? Probably not. In the end, I feel there are too many disadvantages to publishing your own book, especially a novel. That said, the publishing business itself is fascinating in many ways, and I think it would be a thrill to bring out books by other authors, especially those gems that most readers will never see in today's publishing environment. But this takes a big investment, and I haven't figured out how to make a living at it, at least not unless I operate for many years and build up a stable of modest-selling titles. Therefore, unless I win the lottery (which is unlikely since I don't even play the lottery), I won't be actively running a small press again any time soon.

For my next novel I plan to follow the traditional publishing route. I will shop for an agent and hope the book gets sold to a publisher. Even then, I know my job will not stop there. I will need to make appearances, maintain a blog, contact all my friends and acquaintances, and do everything I can to get people to buy the book. Why do all of these things? Because these days the publisher can't do it for you. You are the main seller of your book. Your publisher might pay some of your expenses, and arrange a little publicity, but if you are going to give a reading in, say, Denver, you'd better write to all of your friends in Denver and beg them to go and, while they're at it, bring others with them.

What regular publishers give you that you can't buy is credibility. When Penguin sends your book to Publisher's Weekly it will probably get reviewed, even if you are a debut author. The large newspaper book sections will most likely take notice. Many bookstores may gamble on some shelf space, maybe even near the entrance if you have been billed as a "hot new literary phenomenon." In other words, the odds of your book becoming a hit really goes up if you have the book industry behind you. But, and this is the sad truth, if your book doesn't take off in three or four months, certainly no more than six months, then the "buzz" will stop and most copies will be returned to the publisher to be recycled. Yes, what doesn't sell gets turned into mush to make new paper to print new books. This is called pulping. But look at it this way, if your book ends up in the pulp room, then it means it never really caught on with readers. If you had self-published you would have made the same discovery at your own expense.


Sea Changes, my novel, published by One Sock Press

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Sunday, July 06, 2008

2006 – My Great Publishing Adventure – Part 2 of 3

Who did the editing and design of my book? In the next few sections I will describe the steps I followed to get from a first draft manuscript to a set of electronic files that my offset printer would accept. Please read Part 1 for a description of how I got to this point in my publishing saga.

- Editing. Here's Rule #2 -- Don't Edit Your Own Book. Of course, you will do some initial editing, especially as you are writing your second draft, and subsequent drafts. And of course you will share your manuscript with your writing group and get feedback. You are probably doing all of these things. Right? However, that's not what I'm talking about. The kind of editing I am referring to here is the kind that would be done by a publisher who plans to publish your book. This is real editing by someone who is thinking of story structure and characters and commercial appeal and not about your precious words and the lovely scenes that you have given birth to, with great pain. This editor is ruthless and pragmatic, and has probably just finished editing an exciting manuscript with vampires and kinky sex, and your manuscript is putting him or her to sleep. The red ink is bleeding all over your pages. This the kind of editing you cannot do to your own book.

The first draft of my novel was about 73,000 words. I wrote second and third drafts and cut it down to about 62,000 words. This is short for a novel, especially a debut novel. Most publishers want first novels to be at least 80,000 words. This is partly because they want a hardcover book that can be sold for about $24.95. Therefore it needs to have some heft to it. However, since I was my own publisher and I wasn't producing a hardcover book I decided to forge ahead with 62,000 words, since it would keep down printing costs.

Once I had a stable draft and had received valuable feedback from several early readers, I knew it was time to hire an outside editor. This advice came from many articles and tips that I had read about self-publishing. I am amazed, now, at the number of self-published books that are not professionally edited, and it shows, glaringly, in terms of clumsy sentences, misspelled words, punctuation errors and problems with tense and pronouns. Catching those problems still doesn't address major revision editing, where an editor tries to improve your story by identifying whole scenes or chapters that need reworking.

I began by getting quotes from professional editors. The high quote was about $6,000. The middle range quote was about $2,200, and the rock bottom quote was a few hundred dollars. I decided to do the editing in two stages. I initially hired the low-cost editor to do two passes and look for anything that detracted from the story. He found problems with grammar, spelling and punctuation, even though I had gone through the whole manuscript many times and was "sure" I caught everything. More importantly, he made useful suggestions for tweaking the story so it had a better logical flow. I applied all of his recommendations plus a few others that I thought of and then had him do a second pass. He found more problems in the second pass. The editing process takes lots of different pairs of eyes and many passes through the manuscript.

My second stage of editing came late in the process when I was ready for my final offset print run. I hired a very talented and very expensive professional editor in Seattle. Fortunately, she gave me a good rate after looking over my manuscript and declaring it "fairly clean." By this point I would estimate my book had been read by at least ten different people, and I had personally read it twenty times. Yet, this editor found more problems. For example, she caught misspellings of the words "fluorescent" and "alstroemeria" that all of the other readers and the computer spell checker overlooked. She caught punctuation errors and pronoun mismatches and verb tense inconsistencies. She also made helpful comments about narrative and dialogue that improved the story.

In general, I believe editing is one of the most important investments you will make if you self-publish a book. And don't forget Rule #2.

- Cover art. Since I am not an artist or graphic designer, I knew early on that I would be budgeting for someone else to design my cover for me. As with everything else on this journey, I began by reading lots of articles and trying to understand how book covers are created. First of all, if you use artwork or photographs on your cover, the images must be 300 dpi (dots per inch) and must use a color scheme known as CMYK (Cyan Magenta Yellow Black). This is different from RGB (Red Green Blue), which is what you get when you take a picture with your digital camera. Also, the image out of your camera will probably be 72 dpi instead of 300. Furthermore, this 300 dpi CMYK image is usually submitted in a special format known as TIFF (Tagged Image File Format). To accomplish all of these tasks you can invest in a good software package, such as Adobe Photoshop, or you can hire someone to do it all for you. There are graphic designers out there who will design your book cover and prepare all of the files for submission to your printer, whether it is a POD outfit or custom offset or digital. But this is expensive; a graphic designer may charge by the hour or quote a flat rate. The estimates I got were between $2,000 and $3,000.

As with the editing job, I saved money by outsourcing part of the graphic design job and doing the rest myself. I began asking around for references and eventually found a wonderful graphic designer who, as it turns out, lived right in my neighborhood. I discussed the project with her, and showed her some photographs I had taken while writing the first draft of the book. She immediately began to think of combining images into a montage. I gave her a compact disc containing several dozen images and she came up with stunning front and back covers that I never would have thought of myself.

The part of the cover work that I did on my own was to prepare the cover files according to the printer's specifications, and to tweak the text on the back cover. If I had had to go back to the designer for each little change then my bill from her would have been twice as high. As it was, I ended up paying under $1,000 for the graphic design work. Now, here's an important caveat: I was able to do part of the cover design work because I had the same tools she was using, namely Photoshop and InDesign from Adobe. I had invested in those tools when I started my publishing business because I knew I would use them for many kinds of tasks. For example, you can use Photoshop and InDesign to create professional-looking brochures, cards and flyers to help promote your book.

- Interior layout and design. There is a step in the publishing business that is usually invisible to authors. You write your text in an ordinary word processing program, such as Microsoft Word, and then when you get your book from the printer your words are nicely laid out on the printed page. How does that happen? It's called typesetting, and like everything else in book printing it is time-consuming and expensive. Typesetting is the process of controlling the spacing of letters, words and lines on the printed page. Today it is done with special software, such as, you guessed it, InDesign from Adobe. There are other packages, but InDesign has become the industry standard in recent years.

As with the other steps I've described above, I started by researching and getting quotes. They were all in the $2,000 to $2,500 range. Again, I wondered how I could save money by doing part of it myself. What I discovered was that, with a little self-educating, I could do all of it using InDesign.

I first imported the Microsoft Word document containing the final draft of my story into InDesign and then creating the title page, copyright page, dedication page, acknowledgments page and a foreword. I also designed special pages for the opening of each chapter and for marking the beginnings of sections within a chapter. I experimented with many fonts and finally settled on Garamond Pro. I played with the spacing of lines so that they would not appear too crowded on the page. I played with the margins so that the blocks of text on the page appeared properly proportional to the size of the page and were within the printer's specifications. Margin settings also have an impact on the page count, which needs to be a multiple of eight. I ended up with a 256-page book. This took many days of nearly full time effort. But, I was learning the printing aspect of the publishing business so I didn't mind it.

The best part about doing my own layout and design was that I had control of the text all the way to the very end. This would not have been possible if I had been working with a consultant. As it was, I was able to do last-minute edits until midnight of the evening that the final files were due to be uploaded to the printer's web site. I printed a complete copy of the final camera-ready version and my wife and I read it at least three times each in one evening. After the book came out I went through it and did not find any mistakes.

Next:

Part 3: Finding people to buy your book


Sea Changes, my novel, published by One Sock Press

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Saturday, July 05, 2008

2006 – My Great Publishing Adventure – Part 1 of 3

Let's get right down to the cold hard truth about book publishing: someone has to buy the books.

I know. It seems awfully small-minded of those publishers to be concerned with actual sales when it comes to your book, your creation, the product of your genius and your countless hours of effort.

Now, suppose you create a niche literary masterpiece that is highly prized by, say, seventy-three people in the world, not counting your Mom and your college roommate. You still need those people to buy the book if you want to make any sales. If you don't care about sales, just give the book away. Make it into a holiday gift for everyone you know. But if you want to cover your expenses (what a radical concept!) or you want a real publisher to take an interest in your book and have them try to cover their expenses (even more radical!) then there must be not just seventy-three people, but tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people wanting to buy your book.

In 2006 I decided I was going to beat the system. I thought, why wait for some publisher to give a thumbs up or down on my book? I knew it was good. I even did some demographic research on my target audience and I was sure they were clamoring for a book just like the one I had written. I was going to make their day.

I really, really wish someone had written an article like the one I am writing now and pinned me to the ground and said "You can't get up until you read this." I spent a lot of money and a lot of time learning some hard lessons about book publishing. If you don't believe me, just ask my wife. I even quit my day job in order to become a world famous author and publisher. Rule #1 -- Don't Quit Your Day Job.

For the remainder of this essay I will describe my experiences in publishing in the form of questions and answers. These questions are typical of those that I frequently get from people who want to understand more about publishing.

Would you recommend self-publishing? The answer: it depends. It depends on the kind of book you are writing and who you are writing it for and how you plan to reach those people. In my research I found an article about a minister of a church who wrote an inspirational book that he wanted to make available to his congregation. He self-published it through a Print On Demand (POD) publisher, which means that books don't get printed until they are ordered by a customer. The minister made the book available on a website and then invited his church members to visit the website and order the book.

Sounds like POD is the perfect self-publishing solution, right? A POD solution was the right choice in the minister example above for a couple of reasons. One, he wasn't trying to make a ton of money on the book, he was only covering his expenses. Two, he figured the total number of books involved would be a couple of thousand or less. It would cost quite a bit of money up front to print that many books and sell them directly to church members at the back of the church. By using POD, he only had to put up a small amount and then, as I already pointed out, the books would be printed as they are ordered. Third, since the minister was not aiming for a nationwide audience, he wasn't worried about getting book reviews, shipping to bookstores, or any of the numerous details that are involved in selling books to the whole country. A fourth consideration, which was not in the article about the minister, but which I'm guessing is true, is that the minister was comfortable enough with computers to be able to successfully use a POD publishing solution. Either that or he got a church member to volunteer some time. My point here is that POD is, for the most part, a do-it-yourself approach and you need to be handy with computers and have access to a very good Internet connection.

Did I use POD for my book? No. After researching several POD solutions, such as iUniverse, BookSurge, AuthorHouse, LightningSource and Lulu, I decided it wasn't for me. In the next few sections I will share some general publishing issues that I considered when trying to decide what kind of self-publishing solution was right for my book.

- Large target audience. My book is a novel (a work of fiction) with a target audience in the 55 and up age range. The main character is a 58-year-old widow, and the secondary character, her romantic interest, is a widower in his early 60s. I wanted to reach my target readers everywhere in the country. How many people are we talking about? According to data from the U.S. Census, as of March 2002 we had 59 million residents in that age range, 33 million women and 26 million men. Even selling to 1 percent of that population would be 59,000 book sales. At that number, it is not economical for POD because the cost per book is relatively high compared to offset printing, which is the traditional way of printing books. Each POD publisher offers a slightly different deal, so it's important to read the fine print at the POD websites if you are researching this.

- The physical product. I wanted the book to look and feel just right. I initially had to decide whether to go hardcover or not. Most publishers will issue a new work of fiction in hardcover. However, if you browse bookstores you will see that many small presses issue new works in a softcover format known as "trade paperback." The difference between trade paperback and mass market paperback is mainly in size, paper weight, font and price. Trade paperbacks are larger, usually 8 or more inches high by 5 or more inches wide, printed on thicker paper, priced higher, have nicer covers, and are printed with more pleasing fonts. I decided I could live with trade paperback instead of hardcover.

The other important aspect of the physical product is the way in which it is printed. With POD, you are getting digital printing on a limited selection of paper stock. On the other hand, offset printing, because it involves real ink on paper instead of toner on paper, results in a more professional-looking product and offers many more options in terms of paper stock and sizes. Also, offset is cheaper in the long run. Remember, I was planning to sell a lot of books. After getting samples from different printers and educating myself on book printing jargon, I settled on the following specification: "5-1/2 x 8-1/2, perfect binding, 60 lb natural offset paper, 500 pages per inch for inside pages, and 12-point C1S (coated one side) cover with matte film lamination, four-color process on front and back, and spot gloss varnish on a portion of the front cover." Whew. That's enough to give anybody a headache. Non-fiction books, especially how-to manuals, can get away with less exacting standards.

- Distribution. My last reason for not choosing POD has to do with how books are distributed. I researched this topic by starting with bookstores. How do bookstores get their books? I learned very quickly one way that they DON'T get them – they don't buy books from authors who walk in the door and say, "Can you stock my book on your shelf?" Now, having said that, you can find small independent bookstores that will stock self-published titles on a consignment basis from local authors. You don't get any money until a sale is made, you will probably get between 40 and 60 percent of the sale price, and if you don't make a sale within a certain amount of time, like a month, the consigned books come back to you. The reality for bookstores is that shelf space is limited (compared to the number of books in print) and overall profit margins for a bookstore are depressingly low. Booksellers try to stay afloat by buying books on a returnable basis from major book wholesalers, of which there are two that sell to almost every bookstore in the country: Ingram Book Group, and Baker & Taylor. Aside from these wholesale relationships you'll find many other arrangements. For example, distribution of books to non-bookstore outlets, such as Wal-Mart and grocery stores, are often handled differently. And large bookstore chains, such as Barnes & Noble, may have special arrangements directly with publishers for some titles, especially big-volume titles. But, generally speaking, if your book is listed with Ingram and Baker & Taylor, then it will at least be available to almost every bookstore and library in the country plus many overseas outlets.

And now back to the POD distribution question. When I was researching POD publishers the only one that I found that offered any access to bookstores was iUniverse, mainly because they are partly owned by Barnes & Noble. I don't know if this means that an actual Barnes & Noble bookstore will place your book on a shelf. It might mean that it's "available" for order through B&N if someone were to request it, either in person or through the website. As far as distribution is concerned, POD publishers primarily rely on websites to help you sell your book. It used to be true that most of them have relationships with Amazon.com. However, this is changing right now. Amazon acquired one of the POD publishers, BookSurge, and now appears to be trying to limit access to its sales channels by other POD publishers. This has caused a great flap in the book world and is still unfolding as I write this.

So, in the end, I decided that POD did not have the kind of distribution options I was looking for, and I wasn't happy with the print options and I thought if I hit the kind of numbers I was shooting for that it would be too expensive. Bottom line: I didn't do POD.

If I didn't use POD, then how did I self-publish my book? Answer: I started a publishing company. I settled on this approach after learning how books get distributed and realizing that I wanted my book to be shipped through the big wholesalers for all the reasons described above. I learned that if you are a big publisher, like Random House, then you will most likely ship books directly to the wholesalers. However, if you are a small publisher you can work through a book distributor that specializes in small presses. By combining the output of lots of small companies, these distributors can ship enough volume to make it worthwhile for the wholesalers to represent them. You can become a publisher by forming a small company, like a sole proprietorship, and purchasing an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) from a company called R.R. Bowker. Each book that is published and marketed in the U.S. and many other countries has a unique 13-digit ISBN. I formed One Sock Press and purchased a block of ten ISBNs from Bowker. Then I contracted with a company in Ohio called BookMasters, which represents small presses and has distribution deals with Ingram, Baker & Taylor, and Amazon. In addition, BookMasters is an offset book printer. By working through them I was able to get offset printing to my exact specifications followed by distribution to virtually every bookstore and library in the country through the big wholesalers. I contracted with BookMasters to print 5,000 copies of my book for about $10,000, which is $2 per book. In publishing, 5,000 is a typical first run printing. Prior to the print run, I contracted for 250 Advance Reader Copies (ARCs) to send to reviewers and bookstores. Again, this is standard industry practice and I intended for my operation to at least look like a real publishing company. I thought my publishing career was off and running.

Part 2: Editing, layout and design

Part 3: Finding people to buy your book

Links:

Bowker ISBN Page

BookMasters, Inc.

Sea Changes, my novel, published by One Sock Press

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