Tag: the business of publishing

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Publishing Pulse

Don’t Let the Industry Dehumanize You

If you are an author, a human being writing for other human beings, you have been blessed with a precious ability. If you write fiction, you have the unique gift of storytelling. If you write nonfiction, you are no less creative, because you have devised ways to describe and explain truth to make it understandable and compelling. Don’t let it go to your head, but also don’t deny the importance of the  role you play in the publishing industry.

I feel the need to make such a warning because the publishing industry can tend to dehumanize us (a danger I suspect is found to some extent in most industries). But book publishing wasn’t always this way; the artistic and creative interaction between authors and publishers tended to keep the human factor at the forefront. It’s only in the last couple of decades that the publishing industry—or I should say, certain elements of the publishing industry—began referring to the person who writes the words as a “content provider.”

It all came about innocently enough. With the advent of ebooks (and to some extent, audiobooks, computer apps and other derivative products), publishers started realizing that they were not the purveyors of books, but of content. The author’s words were what had value, and the medium—paper and ink, a text file, or an audio file—were merely the window dressing. In a sense, they made an about-face from the 1960s chant of Marshall McLuhan that “the medium is the message” to see that the value was in the message, regardless of medium. The new refrain has become “content is king.”

I appreciate the sentiment. Of course, the content is what makes the book, the ebook, the audiobook a sellable product, but where does the content come from? It comes from the mind of the author, not from a computer with artificial intelligence, and certainly not from an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters. They really have it all wrong—the author is king, and always has been. Your words are the commodity that is for sale on the marketplace. The rallying cry of “content is king” attempts to divorce the product (the content, your words) from the creator and owner of the content—you, the author.

Consider the attitude of Amazon’s publishing arm toward authors and content. They claim to have the most content of anyone—and that is true, except they don’t own that content, they did not create that content, and (unlike most traditional publishers) they do little or nothing to develop and polish that content.

A lot of authors think it is wonderful that Amazon allows them to publish their material with little or no editorial “interference.” But the better authors, the ones that succeed, realize their creation needs polishing, and their creative ideas need an editorial sounding board—the feedback of a first reader, who may see problems that the author is blind to. You get that polishing, that sounding board, at a good traditional publisher, but you won’t get it at a self-publishing provider such as Amazon. It is unlikely that you will even have any interaction with a human being—the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) system is computer-automated. Talk about dehumanizing!

So don’t let the “content” mongers dehumanize you. Demand (or if you are self-publishing, pay for) a real, live editor who will work with you creatively to hone your manuscript into the best book it can be.

David E. Fessenden

Literary Agent, WordWise Media Services
Publisher and Proprietor, Honeycomb House Publishing LLC

David Fesseden has degrees in journalism and theology, and over 30 years of experience in writing and editing. He has served in editorial management positions for Christian book publishers and was regional editor for the largest Protestant weekly newspaper in the country.

Dave has published seven books, written hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, and edited numerous books. He is a frequent speaker at writers’ conferences. Two of his books, Writing the Christian Nonfiction Book: Concept to Contract and A Christian Writer’s Guide to the Book Proposal, are based on his experience in Christian publishing. The Case of the Exploding Speakeasy, Dave’s first novel, reflects his love for history and for the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan-Doyle.

Dave and his wife, Jacque, live in south-central Pennsylvania and have two adult sons.

Websites/Blogs:

www.fromconcepttocontract.com
www.davefessenden.com
www.thebookstore.info

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Publishing Pulse

The Economics of Publishing

I don’t think many authors have a clue about how rugged the economic terrain is for the average publishing house. Publishing is changing (again and again and again!), and with every change it seems that it’s even harder than ever for a publisher to make an honest buck (or even a dishonest buck, for that matter).

When a publishing house contracts with an author to publish their book, most authors look for some upfront money—an advance on royalties, which is usually the amount of royalties a publishing house expects to pay out in the first six months of publication. Smaller publishers, and even a lot of bigger publishers, are not so quick to give advances anymore—it’s just too risky, and too much of a cash flow issue.

Still, even if the the publishing house does not put out a royalty advance, they still have to put out a lot of money well ahead of getting any income from book sales. The whole company starts working on the book, so chalk up the salaries of the editors, typesetters/page designers, cover designers, marketers, and so on. This process can take a year or more, and remember the book hasn’t made the publishing house a single dime.

But finally, the book gets published, it is sent out to distributors and retailers, people buy the book, and the revenue gets back to the publisher—eventually. Distributors are notorious for delaying payment of sales for several months.

The publisher puts out all the money up front to edit, typeset, design, print and market a book, and then has to wait for months for the sales revenue to come in. And far too often, the sales are not enough, even after a year or two, to pay for the investment. So what do they do? Well, they bleed red ink! Thanks to print on demand, the initial investment for printing can be lower (you don’t have to print a large quantity all at once), but since the per-book printing cost is higher, their profit margin gets cut down. So print on demand helps you cut your losses if the book doesn’t sell, but it also cuts into your revenue if the book is successful.

And how often is a book financially successful? It used to be that about one-third of all books published lose money, about one-third break even, and about one-third make a profit—hopefully, enough of a profit to make up for the losses. Today, I suspect it’s more like 25% lose money, about 50% break even, and about 25% make a profit. One of the old jokes of publishing is that we should only publish the books that make money—then we’d really be successful!

The sad truth is, publishing houses usually expect all of their books to be profitable—which means these “experts” in the publishing industry are wrong about most of the books they publish! No one has a crystal ball to predict which ones are going to succeed and which will fail. There are innumerable stories out there about how this or that best-selling book was rejected by a lot of publishers, but the other side of the coin is that there are at least ten times as many stories about how a book that had everything going for it, that looked so promising, got published and lost a lot of money.

So next time you’re tempted to accuse publishers of being stingy, remember the economics of the industry, and shake your head in amazement that they manage to survive in this crazy business!

David Fesseden has degrees in journalism and theology, and over 30 years of experience in writing and editing. He has served in editorial management positions for Christian book publishers and was regional editor for the largest Protestant weekly newspaper in the country.

Dave has published seven books, written hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, and edited numerous books. He is a frequent speaker at writers’ conferences. Two of his books, Writing the Christian Nonfiction Book: Concept to Contract and A Christian Writer’s Guide to the Book Proposal, are based on his experience in Christian publishing. The Case of the Exploding Speakeasy, Dave’s first novel, reflects his love for history and for the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan-Doyle.

Dave and his wife, Jacque, live in south-central Pennsylvania and have two adult sons.

Websites/Blogs:

www.fromconcepttocontract.com
www.davefessenden.com
www.thebookstore.info

Categories
Publishing Pulse

Publishing as a Business

Today’s book publishing market can be a dangerous place, with a lot of scam artists spouting confusing terminology. I applaud the efforts of legitimate author groups who try to dispel the confusion, especially about different types of publishing business models. And yet, in an effort to simplify, it’s easy to become simplistic. Some of the explanations I’ve seen about traditional (commercial) publishing versus so-called self-publishing (subsidized publishing), even from industry leaders, are sometimes inaccurate and do not seem to take into account some basic business principles.

Like any business, book publishing involves a capital investment (the purchase of raw materials, labor, tools and/or equipment) to produce a product or service that is marketable (able to be sold for a profit). But unlike most businesses, the “raw material” of book publishing is content—an author’s words. And this is where the disconnect between author and publisher usually begins.

Most authors are uncomfortable with viewing their creative work as “raw material” — they prefer to think of their work as a finished product. Rather than being paid a standard industry rate for their raw material, they believe they have a marketable, finished product, and so they should receive the profits.

It’s an attitude that seems to make perfect sense—until you remember what profit really is. Profit is the revenue over and above the capital investment. In writing a book, has an author made a capital investment? Not at all! As an author, you may feel you have invested your heart and soul into your book, but if you haven’t invested any cash, it’s not a capital investment that will generate profits. Certainly you should be paid an appropriate amount (in royalties) for the value of your “raw material” — or, if you prefer, for your hours of labor in writing the book. But if you haven’t paid out the money needed to publish the book, you are not entitled to the profit on that investment, no more than you would be entitled to the interest income on someone else’s bank account!

And like it or not, it costs money to publish a book. The word publish has the same root as the word public, because when you publish a book it means taking those words sitting in your computer and putting them into a form that can be distributed to a waiting public—and it costs money to do that.

Rather than limiting themselves to the role of content provider (or “raw material” supplier, if you prefer), some authors choose to wear the hat of capital investor (supplier of the cash) and publisher (doing the work involved in preparing and distributing their words to the public). The common term for this is self-publishing. Next month, I will discuss the pros and cons of this process, and why there really is no such thing as self-publishing.

 

David E. Fessenden

Literary Agent, WordWise Media Services
Publisher and Proprietor, Honeycomb House Publishing LLC

Dave has degrees in journalism and theology, and over 30 years of experience in writing and editing. He has served in editorial management positions for Christian book publishers and was regional editor for the largest Protestant weekly newspaper in the country.

Dave has published seven books, written hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, and edited numerous books. He is a frequent speaker at writers’ conferences. Two of his books, Writing the Christian Nonfiction Book: Concept to Contract and  A Christian Writer’s Guide to the Book Proposal, are based on his experience in Christian publishing. The Case of the Exploding Speakeasy, Dave’s first novel, reflects his love for history and for the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan-Doyle.

Dave and his wife, Jacque, live in south-central Pennsylvania and have two adult sons.

Websites/Blogs:
www.fromconcepttocontract.com
www.davefessenden.com
www.thebookstore.info