O-Books Author's Blog

“Just an idea for a future Hunt Blog And Ponder: what DOES make O Books sell?

You have written endlessly about what DOESN’T make O Books sell. Reviews don’t. Agents don’t. Free copies don’t (they’re counterproductive).
Getting books into bookshops doesn’t (an expensive waste of time, they just come back). My extensive websites don’t, if you were wondering, at least not through clicks direct from there to Amazon.

And yet Head versus Heart is a steady, plodding seller, somehow. So is God without God, in the UK at least.

How do they sell? Is it through Amazon? Is it through independent shops?
Is it through multiples? Is it through shops having them in stock? Is it through people going into shops and asking for them?

We know all about what DOESN’T sell books, and what increasingly WON’T sell books in the future. But who are these mysterious people who DO buy O Books (in the thousands) month by month? Who are they? You never seem to blog about them (or I missed it). How much do you know about them?”

That’s a good question Michael.

You’ld be surprised by how little I know (actually, you probably wouldn’t).

As far as the channels go, it’s through all those you mention. Amazon accounts for about 25% of our sales, increasing. Multiples for about 30% – but then it varies hugely per title, and when we get them in, in quantity, they mostly come back. Most shops order through wholesalers rather than direct from our distributors, so we can’t say which shops have which titles, whether they have them regularly in stock or whether they’re responding to people asking for them.

In theory, our knowledge of which books go where should be exponentially greater than in previous decades. Every single copy is tracked, everything is electronic, happens at the speed of light etc…..in practice it’s more like trying to figure out the new instructions on a complicated new TV/DVD/video thingmyjig. They’re designed to do so much stuff, so well, that for technophobes like me – it’s years since I’ve even tried to record a TV program. I could tell you where each single copy sale of yours has been over the last month, to which buyer, and how many they’ve bought before, and when, and probably what color shirt they were wearing at the time, but it would take me an hour to do it, if I’ve kept track of which passwords have changed for which distributors over the last month, which I probably haven’t, so I don’t. I felt closer to the market 30 years ago than I do today.

The same with our mysterious book buyers. I know they’re out there, because sales happen, I see proposals from new authors coming in saying “I’ve read a number of your books etc…”, and once in a blue moon I bump into people socially who are interested in the subject/have read books. So it’s not just selling to other authors. But I can’t say I know them. I don’t know the authors, let alone readers……

I see occasional signs, tracks in the wilderness of my ignorance- was coming back on the plane from the US a week or two back (very rare business travel, but we’re starting a new imprint based in the US) and reading a magazine I hadn’t come across before, New Writer’s Magazine, and there was a bit in the editorial;
“If it hadn’t been for indulging in a bit of serous market research one wet Irish afternoon, none of my three non-fiction books would have been under contract. The first publisher in the MBS genre was recommended by a friend who runs one of the more interesting bookshops in London. “Who’s the most popular publisher for my sort of stuff these days?” I asked. She gave me two names. One was O-Books, and despite the rather uninspiring entry in The Writer’s Handbook, I went to their website….and 48 hours later I had the emailed contract in my possession. Two months later I had the contract for the second book. The other publisher never even bothered to respond to either book proposal.”

I don’t know which bookshop is being referred to. But word seems to be getting out somewhere.

The key phrase for me in your question is “plodding seller”. I don’t know enough about maths or marketing to describe this in the right way, but most books I guess have traditionally followed a lopsided bell curve, where they within a few months they reach a peak, decline (increasingly) rapidly and reach a point in a year or two when the cost of warehousing/servicing them is higher than the income (depending on the scale of the publisher’s fixed costs), and they go out of print.

The heart of our business is more a “straight-line” kind of pattern. It’s books that sell pretty much the same every month, might be a few dozen or a few hundred, rarely more, year in, year out. We have one title that’s done it for decades, barely shifting more than 20% either way in any one month or year.

They’re not necessarily books that would appeal to Random house or Harper Collins, or get stocked regularly at B&N or Waterstones. There doesn’t seem to be any direct correlation with marketing, or with quality. I know we have to do all the stuff we do – getting good sales sheets, endorsements, selling to the multiples and independents and so on – but which bits of this work best, which we should do more of and which less – we play variations on it all the time and I’m no wiser.

But this steady business is the kind I want to develop. Most good books have a fairly small, widely-scattered audience. A discerning one, but hard to find. And hard to reach – the smaller and more international it is, the less traditional marketing is going to work. And social networking/blogs/websites/twitter etc… – it’s all very well, but so vast now that it’s just duplicating the real world. It’s no easier to catch the attention of someone on the internet than it is to find a stranger.

Similarly with the formats – I see a dozen or so good articles/posts a day about all the new digital formats/channels, the ipads and apps, the one million or whatever it is new titles coming out this year (OK, about half are re-issues etc…, and they’re mostly going to sell about 3 copies, but then next year or two it’s probably going to be two million….). Amazon is astonishingly effective at making them all available, as are a number of new competitors coming up the track, but; quite literally; there are going to be more books to read than readers to read them.

So all the fuss and agonizing over digital, amazon, social networking etc seems to me misplaced. In that, sure, it’s the future, we have to be there, but it moves the conundrum along, rather than answers it. How do you still find the readers? It used to be through the “trickle down” effect. The bigger you were, the more clout you had with the few main buyers, the more books you pour into the funnel, which cascade down to the shops in different set quantities, where people go to make their selection, and hopefully enjoy what they buy so that it continues to spread through word of mouth. You work “nationally”, or even “regionally”, and if you want that duplicated in a different country, you have to sell the rights to someone like yourself.

But that “boom and/or bust” era of publishing is essentially over. It will always be there for big bestselling frontlist, for people obsessed with rankings and wanting to read what everyone else is reading, who read a few books a year, but most people are going to be buying books recommended by others they trust rather than how much has been spent on marketing them into this narrow retail funnel.

Shops are always going to play a part. The way I see it, shops that just put books onto shelves are going to fade away, however big they are, and are going to be too expensive to service for small publishers like us. Those that survive are going to be active in the community, talks/workshops etc., know their market, and be able to talk to customers. They’re the ones I’ld like to support, like the one mentioned above. We could get a section on the website headed “Retailers; 50% discount”. Explain it there to shops. Button for them to click if they want to take part. Buttons to press for which monthly newsletter they want. Boxes to tick on the newsletter if they want to order, or for them to do it from their regular distributor. Box to tick for one free review copy, whatever. Could have an “authors in your area” box, just a question of automating it from the address list, using authors who’ve ticked a box to say they’re available- “tick this if you would like any of these authors xyz to discuss a launch”. If you have one or two authors in a county, it’s not enough to make it of interest. If you have a couple of dozen, with a new title coming out locally every few months, it might be. We’ll have 1000+ authors soon, a lot of them are active, I’ld like to get it past 10,000 while I’m still here.

But the main route has to be letting potential readers worldwide know your book is available. At various points/times some of them will congregate in places, like conferences/workshops/events. Others will be looking at specialist magazines, regional or national. Or they’ll be working in associated areas, so it’s contacting university departments or organizations. How much of it works? I don’t know. Others here are much more clued up than me, and would say I’m talking twaddle, but I operate on the principle of Invincible Ignorance, “try everything, just in case”. One way or other, we do end up selling books.

To contact these people you need the information, have it regularly updated, and have enough volume of good quality titles coming through to persuade them to subscribe to getting information. I’ld guess there are about 100,000 such contacts we should have on the database, and we have about 10% of them. It’s an impossible task for one publisher, which is why the database revolves around author input (about two thirds of it comes from authors, one third from us). Which is why the more authors we have, the stronger it gets, which is why we work a lot on the systems to enable us to bring out a lot of new titles efficiently.

We’ll be making it easier to use, with all the results sorted in priority order – so for your book’s subject area, you can press a button and see, for example, which are the major magazines by circulation numbers anywhere in the world, and which are the ones we’ve had most success with (whether articles, or reviews, etc). You’ll be able to see which shops in your locality we mostly deal with, whether you live in Sydney or Vancouver, who’s had signing sessions there before, comments by previous authors on what worked and didn’t, who to contact, advice on parking, , etc. Hopefully we’ll have it in place later this year, though we’ve been working towards it for years now and a reverse form of Pareto’s law seems to operate with computer software – the 20% of stuff you really want to get done doesn’t get done because you can never finish off the 80% left over from the last time you did anything.

So to get back to your point, at last – “how much do I know about the readers?” Nothing. It’s a presumption I can’t begin to make. I can see a fair bit about the markets we’ve involved with, which review copies went out to who, which resulted in reviews, and so on through every aspect of marketing. I can see whether it had any impact on sales. In this respect, you can see and know as much as me.

Getting to know the readers, and helping them to know you, has got to be the next step for us, when we can get there…..

John

Mike Shatzkin (www.idealog.com/blog) is a publishing consultant/strategist whose blog I follow. Interesting series of articles he’s posted over the last couple of weeks on (What I Would Have Said in London (at the London Book Fair, if the Icelandic volcano hadn’t neatly spread the ashes of the country’s economy over Europe).

Ii think what he says boils down, as far as we’re concerned, to;
Bookstores as they are now, prime locations for delivering wide ranges of new titles, disappearing in 20 years (with smaller, more focused ones surviving)
“Books” being primarily digital files rather than “printed”
The price for the content that books represent will be coming down
Successful publishers will be the ones who can connect with and deliver to authors an online community rather than those who rely on selling books into shops (““the idea of a “General Trade Publisher” will have no meaning””)
Territorial rights will disappear, and publishing worldwide is not only possible but the most profitable and author-friendly way to publish

I think he’s right. And it might happen faster – it doesn’t seem more than a few years ago since I celebrated 25 years of going to the Frankfurt Book Fair by deciding that was enough; back then we still had to follow up by fax, emails hadn’t taken over. Hard to believe now. Though it seems ironic that he intended to deliver his speech in the most old-fashioned, expensive, limiting kind of way – flying across the Atlantic to speak to a relatively small group of people at an industry jamboree. And was then prevented from doing so by a good old-fashioned earthly belch.

And it might be more extreme than he suggests. I don’t find infinite choice particularly helpful – it gets bewildering. The more TV channels there are, the less TV I watch. The wider the range of religions I know about, the harder it is to settle into any one of them. The more bombarded with supermarket offers or new credit cards, the more inclined I get to shop locally or pay with cash. And the wider the choice of books, the more I rely on personal recommendation.

Perhaps that’s just starting to get crotchety. But meetings and book fairs – giving those up was one of the better decisions in my life.

John Hunt

We’ve sent out thousands of review copies over the last couple of years. Not blindly – every one has been asked for, in response to an email from us asking if the media contact wants to see it. We’ve had hundreds of reviews.
It seems a positive side of the business. I don’t know how many review copies other publishers would send out on our kind of titles. My guess would be nowhere near as many. The number we send varies hugely, anywhere from a handful to a thousand, depending on who the author has also been in touch with on the database to see if a copy is requested.
But it has its disadvantages. I (and the authors) can see the sales of the book each month, compare to it when the review(s) appeared – I’ve never really seen a discernible difference in the sales pattern. Maybe a handful of copies, a dozen, it’s obviously hard to tell, but it’s not like there are huge spikes.
And what happens to the review copies themselves? I suspect a good proportion go to the secondary user markets on amazon. A couple of authors have complained about their books being pirated, because as soon as they’re available there are used/brand new copies for sale on amazon marketplace (or earlier still on eBay and others). There are more copies around than can be accounted for by our initial print quantities and sales.
I tell them they’re not being pirated. It’s only worth pirating printed copies and going to that degree of risk, trouble and expense if you know it’s an author you’re going to sell loads of. It’s got to be review copies getting out there.
One answer is to stamp the books with “review copy, not for resale” or similar, or only send out proof copies before publication, or galleys, but all these add a lot to the cost (and binding up galleys/proofs and posting them is out of the question for any but potential bestsellers). And you still have the problem of later review copies. And there’s always the muddle of “is this for review or is it a complimentary copy to someone who has endorsed the book” etc…which then needs to be sorted.
And when it comes to the cost – that’s between £5 and £10 if you include the warehouse cost, cost of the book, postage, time spent. So, conservatively, 100 review copies sent will cost you £500+. When you only have about £0.50 per book to cover marketing, overheads and profit, you need to generate 1000 sales to cover it. I’ve never seen that happen. 100 would be more realistic, on the grounds that on 100 review copies you might get 10 reviews. But then 50 of those review copies might be resold, losing you 50 of your own sales.
Which puts the sales impact as nil, or negligible, and the impact on profitability of books that are likely to sell in hundreds or thousands rather than tens of thousands as catastrophic.
We’ll have to look at this in more detail, get more actual examples. But it’s why at the moment our policy is to send out PDFs rather than hard copies, with a note saying we’ll send a hard copy if requested. Many magazine editors prefer it, ebcause they can forward that rather than have to wait for a hard copy by post and then post it on. But roll along the time when all this is redundant and we’ll just be downloading books to reviewers’ ereaders instead.

John Hunt

The number of books I’ve bought in my life must be at least 5,000. I suspect it’s twice that, but thinking about the cumulative total spent then makes me feel slightly ill, so I’ll take the conservative figure.
My wife’s number is not far off that. Then there are the times our parents have downsized to smaller houses, then flats, and we’ve added theirs. Add to that Christmas and birthday presents. Books given as presents by others to the children. 20,000?
If the first 20 years were mostly collecting, the last 20 years have been more “redistribution”. Because we don’t have 1000 feet or so of shelf space. There’s a spring clean every few years, weeding out a number for charity shops. There’s a continual migration of books in boxes to the attic, because how can you bear to give these ones away, you’re bound to want to reread them sometime.
But now the attic is full. And there’s all the other stuff that needs to go up there. The kids possessions/sports equipment/toys that surely must be needed by another generation sometime. There’s that baby chair that takes up a disproportionate amount of space, and the sledges, but they’ve come down through three generations….
And there’s the disturbing thought, given what a nightmare it’s been moving my mother over the last couple of weeks, having to fit everything (she really didn’t want to give anything up) into one quarter of the size, is this something you want to inflict on your own kids in decades to come? Shouldn’t we start sitting a bit more lightly on the earth now, rather than weighing it down?
If only someone could invent a way of getting all the books of the world into one, some kind of tablet where you could click on a button to find anything and read it. Never mind Gutenberg, it would be the biggest step forward since Moses bought the commandments down from Sinai.

John Hunt

Still getting the hang of this blog thing. Had a couple of comments from bookshops after the 29th January blog, my own comment in return got filed under a different name – so will restate things up here.

I see posts every day with comments like this one by Andrew Zack 4th Feb in the Huffington Post;
“I wouldn’t recommend anyone more than a decade from retirement invest in starting a bookstore. We are experiencing the beginning of the end of paper books right now. The brick-and-mortar store and the paper book will disappear faster than you might imagine.”

And it’s obvious that things are going to get tougher. But the end of the brick-and-mortar store and printed books completely? I just don’t believe it.

A lot will go, sure. Maybe the big chains will go – the shareholders will want somewhere more exciting to put their money. For independents not overburdened with debt, who happen to be in the business because they love books rather than retail, it could be different. People want to congregate, to browse, to talk to someone who knows their subject area, or them personally. They want to meet and listen to authors. Authors want to meet readers. Annual festivals aren’t going to take over this role.

Maybe we’ll be right back down to the number of shops and amount of shelf space that I referred to in the first blog. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Just means that bookselling gets back to being more intimate again, as the norm rather than the exception.

We publish a lot of authors, and encourage them to set up signing sessions in their local shops (too many of them happen for us to be the intermediaries in that). We want those bookshops there. They may evolve into something a little different, like libraries are. But whatever, they’re going to be part of the landscape, and we need to support them. Put our money (??) where our mouth is (got enough of the latter, not so much of the former). Just doesn’t seem right that shops are better off ordering stock from their main competitor. And what isn’t right we should at least have a try at changing.

So if any other independent in the UK (can’t work it in North America yet) is interested in taking up an offer of 50% discount on firm sale only, just contact Catherine.harris@o-books.net, and she’ll arrange it.

John Hunt

“One of the most exciting publishing events of 2009 was the emergence of the new imprint Zero Books. It publishes short, intelligent polemics on politics and culture, packing a lot of punch into about 80 pages and they are masterclasses in how supposedly tough theory can be made accessible and help us to understand society. The latest of these is Capitalist Realism by leading radical blogger Mark Fisher who has been blogging under the name k-punk for the past few years. It’s a sharp analysis of the post-ideological malaise that suggests that the economics and politics of neo-liberalism are givens rather than constructions. “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, Fisher spits, and his book takes in film, Baudrillard, Kurt Cobain, science fiction, mental health, bureacracy and economics. Zero Books are sadly absent from bookshops, but they are must reads.” Rowan Wilson, Verso Publishing and ReadySteadyBook blogger

This lovely and very gracious comment in “The Bookseller” (here’s hoping that lots of booksellers are reading it) on our new sister imprint, Zero books, prompted this second blog on the subject of bookshop sales.

Being sales manager (I think, have had no direct contact) of Verso, the leading political publisher from a left-wing perspective in the UK/USA, Rowan Wilson knows vastly more about bookshops than I do.

The books are never going to be in all bookshops though. And I do try and pin stuff down to what we can realistically do where. There are 20,000 bookshop accounts in the USA/UK etc. If we had one in each shop, and each copy sold through, being replaced by one more, our sales reports would show 40,000 of each sold, and Nielsen, which tracks bookshop sales, would show 20,000 of each.

But that’s quite unrealistic. From the info in “Our publishing process” on the website; Looking at the latest Bookseller analysis of sales in 2008; in the kind of non-fiction specialist areas that we mostly publish in, a sale of 3,000 copies in, for example, “popular philosophy” (rather than academic philosophy, where good sales are in the hundreds), would easily get you into the top 20 titles in the UK in 2008, into the company of authors like Julian Baggini, Alain de Botton and Bertrand Russell (yes, he still sells).

In comparison to this, the sales on the first two titles on Zero books (published late last Spring) are in the 1000-1500 bracket. Keep selling steadily. The more recent ones, more in the 500-1000 level.

Which is not all through bookshops in the UK. Roughly one third in the US, and amazon account for nearly half, on average.
Which is not getting them up into the top 20 in the UK, but then the authors aren’t writing to be popular, they’re not for everyone, and it doesn’t seem to me to be completely out of line with expectations for that kind of book. In fact, seems to be going well, given that it’s a new list.

The wholesalers have been kept in stock; the bookshops have had the info; which is not to say we shouldn’t be doing better – looking back, we seemed to have loosened up on Foyles, Blackwells, and not kept those sales going. On the other hand, they’re mostly in the Waterstones core stock list, or on their way there, and we’ve started to do more in the USA, and we haven’t had too many returns. The more recent “One Dimensional Woman” has sold more in the US than the UK, for some reason.

The more troubling questions are the broader ones. There are always going to be no more than 20 authors in the top 20, in any particular subject area. But if the sales in one major market like the UK are going to bring a few thousand copies at best, the vast majority are going to be in the hundreds, or dozens. So how do you publish good books in this area without pricing them at the academic £30-£100 range? And how many shops can you afford to ring/visit?

What more should we have done? There have been two major launches. Hundreds, thousands of emails/phone calls. Over 200 review copies sent so far. These have been in response to requests, rather than just blanket mailings of review copies, and the results have been;
Militant Modernist; 62 review copies sent, 4 reviews
Fear of Music; 74 review copies sent, 4 reviews
One Dimensional Woman; 33 review copies sent, 4 reviews
Cold World; 20 review copies sent, nil reviews
Capitalist Realism; 36 copies sent, 2 reviews
The reviews have all been great. But it’s an expensive way of getting them, about £10 a time by the time you add in warehouse charge, packing, post, paperwork, cost of book, arranging it.

We do need to strengthen ties with the most suitable bookshops, who specialise in political/literary/cultural theory, no doubt about that. But then, for that to work for both parties, you need a regular stream of good titles. So it’s pushing uphill on the sales while the cash is running downhill, with the investment in new, first time authors.

And the one thing I know, is that there is no necessary correlation between good books and sales. Doesn’t matter how hard you try you on the marketing, and on getting them into shops. Was just looking at our figures on a fiction title of last summer – good book, glowing endorsements from credible people, four articles related to the book on publication and one magazine extract, half a dozen book signings, two magazine reader competitions, twelve radio interviews, two TV ones, and we’ve sold 250 copies, with 155 extra going out as free for review
Squaring the circle of effort/time/cash/return with wanting to do the best for the author is what we wrestle with every day. On the first zero books, I’ld guess we’ve got the balance about right, though clearly can’t sustain quite the same level of effort across all new titles. But I post this up here in case anyone has any better answers.
John Hunt

Back in the 1930s Depression publishers started to put books into shops on sale or return, as the shops didn’t have the cash to buy stock to sell to customers. This time around, seems to me that the publishers are going to run out of cash to put the books into the shops.

It’s tough for the shops, I know. We stopped using a freelance sales team in the UK this time last year. They were running out of accounts they could call on and sell to. We publish a lot of titles in the religion/spirituality area; most of the few dozen SPCK shops in the UK closed down a couple of years ago. The more evangelical Wesley Owen shops were never quite our market, but they’ve mostly gone as well over the last couple of months. Borders closed down before Christmas, though we always found it difficult to get a foot in the door there anyway. So we visit Waterstones (the equivalent of B&N), some independents, wholesalers like Bertrams, Gardners (equivalents of Ingram, B&T etc), – for a dozen accounts you don’t need a sales team taking 15% of the margin. Our sales haven’t noticeably dipped in the UK as a result. Would they have done better with the sales team? Doubtful.

There hasn’t been the same relative level of closures in the USA. Maybe they’re better run, maybe book sales are holding up better – but I suspect it’s mostly a question of scale. With 600 or so superstores you have more room to cut and manoeuvre than you do with 60 or 6. In this case, perhaps what’s been happening in the UK is in front of the US.

More worrying though are the tactics used to stay afloat. Buying space is one thing, but you can take that or leave it. What is hard to affect is the rate of returns. And here, the hurt is probably headed more from the US to the UK.

From what I hear returns in the US average well over 30%, significantly higher than in the UK, and have done for years. With some accounts often running at 60% or more. When the returns come back to the warehouse, the big publishers tend to just put them to one side for pulping. Others give options, you can choose to send them for pulping, at about 15 cents per book. Or you can have them returned to stock, which is 45 cents per book, or 60 cents, or more. Some have a minimum charge of $3 to $4 to put a book back into stock. The books are inspected individually to see if they’re OK to go back into stock, and some are “improved” to get them back to their original condition – a smear touched up, a bit of glue added.

All books can be returned, often after a few weeks, even bestsellers, if that month’s stock levels in relation to sales need to be hit. It doesn’t hurt the bestsellers too much, because there’s enough “pull through” on the sales for the returns rate to be relatively low. For new authors, it’s different. People buy names they know.

I don’t blame the shops here, there are too many books for them to stock, the sales have to turnover fast enough to cover their costs. It’s just that the system seems unworkable.

It’s a downward spiral. The less likely a customer is to see the book they want in the shop, the more likely they are to order it online. Unless they want to browse a relatively small selection of fiction and feel the books by hand (and maybe then still order online to get a better discount) they get out of the habit of visiting the shops. Most sales come through word of mouth anyway, and if you’ve heard of what you want, you don’t need to browse for it. Whether ebooks (and their successors) get to 10% of the market in a decade’s time, or 50% (the most common estimate), or more, it’s going to further contribute to declining shelf space. And they’re going to push the price of printed books down, which increases the relative unit cost of handling them in the warehouse.

In the town where I grew up and first started buying books 40 years ago, there was one small independent that had been there for a century. New books on the tiny ground floor, second hand books on the four rickety floors above. Then came the new large airy malls, and the bookshps with them; one that later became Waterstones, Ottakers (which later became a second Waterstones), and what turned into Borders (now closed). The space given to selling books in the town was multiplied by factors of 10. I can see it going all the way back down again. There will be the occasional quality book that you buy off a shelf, but there will be more browsing of books online to see whether you really want to invest the time in reading; you will buy more, but at half price or less, you will read more, but put half of them down unfinished.

In the meantime, for the publisher, it gets harder to justify the cost of trying to get the books into the shop in the first place.

Our own returns rate in the USA has been relatively steady at between 27-35%. The steady overall rate has been disguising widening variations amongst the accounts. I realise that with a relatively specialist list we’re not representative. But Amazon as a % of our sales have gone up steadily from around 12% a few years ago to approaching 40% today, and they have no returns.

On the other hand Barnes & Noble have gone in the other direction, despite the efforts of the sales team. And the returns rate has gone up to 80%.
So for every 10,000 books sold in, 8,000 are coming back.
For a sample $100,000 worth of initial sales, or 10,000 books at $10 ($20 retail), the costings look like;
Distribution +sales cost at approx 25% of $100,000; $25000
Returns at 45 cents a book, for 8,000 books; $3600
2000 books sold; Revenue $20,000
Authors royalties $2500
Print cost of 10,000 books (some of which can be sold again); $20,000
Which leaves a loss of $31,000, before catalogue costs, marketing costs, pre-print costs, overheads etc.

It’s a lot of work to put in to achieve such a negative return. Particularly if authors then complain you’re not working hard enough to get books into shops. In fact, the harder you work, the quicker you go bust. At 50% returns it’s still unworkable. At 30% it’s marginal, and pushing trolleys in the supermarket car park looks like a good career move. OK, that has its problems, occasional wobbly wheels, rain, but less stressful, healthier, and leaves you time to read what you want.

There’s an obvious answer of course. Publish more commercial books. Fewer of them. Market them harder. Only bring out those you think there’s a chance of being picked up for store promotions, and invest everything in that.

20 years ago, 10 years ago, even 5 years ago, that would have been the right answer. Though then why not work for one of the Big Six publishers who has the clout to do it properly? Now, I can’t see it. It’s locking you into the downward spiral. Readerships are expanding, fragmenting, communicating differently. They’re more international, more local. More online, more diverse. With more choice, at more prices, in more formats. They can even publish their own book in the time it takes to read one. Why would a publishing company invest its future and that of its authors in single 3 for 2 or half-price promotions in one bookshop chain in one country that is struggling to keep its own head above water?

So, paradoxically, we’re better off not trying to sell books into (a lot of) shops.

So, given that an author can put a book up on Amazon themselves, what’s the point of a publisher?

Going to have to leave that for a future post.

John Hunt

I laughed my head off over the weekend. I was around with a bunch of relatives at my mothers. She has one of those old fashioned phones where you put your finger in the dial numbers and turn the wheel round (remember them? She is, after all, in her late ’80s).

One of my nephews, aged 10, who has his own picture-taking, all-singing and dancing mobile phone, was thrilled by it.
“What’s THAT?”
“ A phone.”
“Wow. That’s really COOL.”

We’ve been thinking a lot about gadgets, systems and digital books recently, trying to figure out the best way of handling it all on small budgets. How to get the efficiencies that speed and scale can bring whilst keeping things friendly and personal. How to handle more information whilst giving everyone enough time. How to square the circle.

It’s impossible to get exactly right of course. Depends in part on how fast you reckon things are going to change. One significant book retial chain, and online seller, and wholesaler in each country by the end of next year? Or in 5 years time? Are ereaders cutting edge, or allready dinosaurs in the path of more flexible, smaller, smarter gadgets? What’s going to be the “point” of publishers, and how far will their role be taken over by forward-looking printers, or retailers? That would indeed be turning the clock back a century or two.

The only certainty, surely, is that those trying to preserve the status quo will lose out. Publishing in the last couple of decades has looked increasingly like trade across old national boundaries used to be – several barriers from content to reader, a toll tax at each point, increasing the price at each stage but often diminishing rather than improving value. The next generation will look back on the days when the author got 10% or so of the eventual price, with 90% being lost to middlemen along the way, as medieval.

John Hunt
ps free ebook on how how many thinkers see the priorities for the future at

Seth Godin

Our own standard contract starts at 10% of income (receipts) for the author royalty, going up to 25% on quantity. Which I think is slightly above the norm (more in the help icon against “Sample contract”).

I guess keeping 90% might seem unreasonable. Self-publishers and vanity publishers make play of their more generous arrangements, author gets to keep 50%, or 80%, or whatever.

On the other hand, the average quantity sold of a self-published book is around 10 copies. The cost of getting books through the system, and marketing them, accounts for most of the 90% that the traditional publisher keeps. Publishing is not a particularly profitable business, at the best of times. It’s relatively small, miniscule compared with manufacturing or energy or finance, and most people in it are there because they like books rather than because they see a way of making serous money. If it was otherwise, and easy to make money publishing books, then it would be easier to get published.
Things will change though. You’ll get author collectives working together for marketing muscle, digital is going to lead to a higher author share however much the big guys fight it, sales online with their lower transaction costs will increase as a %, etc. At O-Books we’ve been driving down the publisher share of the cost over the last few years, through using this database of ours, which, for the author, has advantages and disadvantages. It enables the author to see what is happening, it gives them access to vastly more information than they usually get, but it also puts some onus on the author to use it. It reduces the “one-to-one” time.

So our cost-per-book has come down. We’ve used that to publish more books, which in turn helps to drive the cost down further (in dealing with design, print etc.). Our overall cost hasn’t decreased much, because about half our overhead in time/cost goes into developing the database itself. But it does set up the possibility of setting up a different kind of revenue-sharing.

Could we, for instance, move to a 60/40 split, rather than 90/10 (or 80/20)?

In theory, we should be getting there, as a possibility. There are two main problems. The first is that we don’t really make anything on the first 1000 copies. Not at the kind of retail prices we have. Too much info to process to get the book into the systems and through them. The second is that with the average first-time book 60% doesn’t cover the sales and distribution costs which we get charged for when you count in the returns, and the cost of printing those titles, let alone leave anything for overheads and marketing. Not at the moment anyway.

If the book was to turn into a strong, regular seller, it would be different – the returns come down, the print cost comes down. So here’s a suggestion; what if we left the current contract as one option, and had option B) a contract with no royalty on the first 1000 copies, but 40% after that, less the cost of sending out review copies (about $8 per book) and less the cost the warehouse charges us for returns (about $0.50 a book).

Would anyone go for it?

Note; I’ll put this up on the blog I’ve got now on the new website. I’ll probably start sticking general meandering stuff like this up there so we can keep the forum for proper questions and answers.

John Hunt

When we first started publishing in O Books 5 years ago, with about one title a month, we were pretty ignorant about scheduling in the trade/retail area. Having mostly prior to that been producing color books for other publishers, you got their books to their warehouse, and the responsibility ended.
It took us a couple of years to realize how important it was to get the information about the books available for the trade 6 or 9 months before publication. Which in turn meant having the details of the book (cover, page extent, price etc) firmed up in time for that.
It took us another couple of years, whilst coping with the rapidly growing number of titles, to get the systems in place to enable that to happen.
Compared to three years or so back, when the majority of titles tended to miss their targeted release dates, now they virtually all hit them. Our main effort is directed not so much as getting books in print for publication, as having them ready 4 months before publication, so there are advance copies to send out to the kind of media that want 4 months notice.
Not that everything now runs through smoothly. There’s still the odd one that misses the date altogether, for one reason or another, which creates more hassle in terms of re-scheduling and responding to queries than 10 other titles put together.
And the bulk of our work is not actually on the key stuff like working on the manuscript or the sales, it’s shuffling changes around in the year or so between getting the manuscript and publication. It’s like the old Heineken ad, there’s always another database in a corner somewhere that you can’t reach.
Every few years main accounts seem to want information a month earlier than before. Exactly why that schedule is extending when everything else in life is getting faster, and when “just in time” is the mantra to which everyone except for the Ministry of Defence, pharmaceutical companies and similar work, is a mystery to me. I suspect it’s got something to do with the fact that people running book chains nowadays and buying books for supermarkets have had nothing much to do with “books”. They’re retailers. Imported from groceries, or stationery, or retail consultancy, to run a chain of bookshops. They’re used to seasonal buying patterns. The orders for autumn oranges are placed at Christmas. The orders for Christmas cards are placed in the spring. Buying and sales budgets accordingly are fixed 6-12 months ahead. Makes it easier to plan for the bonuses.
So if you miss these extended schedules on books, it’s a reason for them not to buy. Doesn’t seem to make a difference if there really is a hot book though; our title with the largest pre-sales this year is coming out in November and we didn’t know anything much about it till August, and got the manuscript in October.
So it’s a mechanism that works for the main accounts, feeding everything else through a slow funnel, but it doesn’t actually help the vast majority of authors.
Because, frankly, if the orders through bookshops are going to be very modest, (and a shop stocking a few tens of thousands of titles is unlikely to stock any new first time author unless they have some really heavy backing behind them), is it worth adding 6-9 months on the schedule to make it available? If it’s going to be in the mega-category where the trade magazines are talking about it in their “major hits for 2011” through to December 2011, and that comes out in December 2010, so the whole package of information is needed some months prior to that, in early Autumn – an 18 months schedule from finished proofs, or 2 years from finished manuscript – then fair enough. But most authors I reckon lose heart when faced with a prospect of publication 12-18 months after they’ve finished the book (or double that for most publishers). The momentum goes. Unless they’re a professional author churning them out regularly, life moves on.
So having just got to the point of being able to meet these schedules regularly, I reckon it’s time to abandon them. Most of our working time is spent servicing a system that doesn’t deliver. The future is not here.
We should move to a 6 month schedule. 6 months is what the wholesalers need. But we have to do it from when the finished proofs are ready, for text and cover. Otherwise it would be chaos trying to get all the changes notified around in a shorter time frame. We’ll schedule the book firmly when we have it ready to print, for 6 months ahead. That means we can get advance copies 4 months ahead of publication in time for the national media etc.. who want it.
It means we miss out on the schedule the sales rep at NBN work to. So they won’t be taking the book around 6-9 months before publication. We’ll figure out ways around that. It’s going to be our main challenge over the next year.
We’ll not be changing the schedules on titles that are already up on the website (too many people to notify, and half of the time they won’t go through, so will end up in confusion). But for titles that haven’t been firmly scheduled yet, it’s 6 months from approved final proofs. It’s simple, straightforward, and means we can stop flaffing around with changes all the time and work on the sales instead.
John Hunt