In the previous installment, I emphasized that authors had better be prepared to publicize and promote their books if they expect to sell any. Even authors lucky enough to get published by one of the big companies have to do this, and it is especially true of self-published books. Well, since the previous installment, this is what I've been doing, with the two new books I have out now, one of them published by a different publisher than my first and the other one by Moonshine Cove Publishing, my own publishing company. I've spent a lot of time on a lot of different web sites posting notices, summaries, descriptions, excerpts, cover images and anything else I could think of about the two books. My major emphasis has to be on the Moonshine Cove book, Blood Scourge, since 100% of any profit goes to me rather than 25%, or even worse, the 10% from my first book. The way it's actually worked out is that I've devoted pretty much equal time to them, since while I'm on a particular web site and familiar with the procedure, it doesn't take that much extra time to repeat the process to enter the information for The Last Lion of Sparta.
I ended last time saying that a new technology, print on demand or POD, and a new company, Lightning Source International, are completely transforming the publishing business. I have more to say about both of them in this edition.
Nowadays, it seems we do everything on a computer, or even a smart phone. POD is the technology that brings computer generated books to the publishing industry. Up until just a few years ago, all books were produced by modern versions of a really old technology, printing. Printing, of course, goes all the way back to Gutenberg and his invention of the printing press around 1440. The first book to be printed this way was the famous Gutenberg Bible. The technology quickly spread and books rapidly became much more affordable. Once all the setup process was completed, which took a lot of time and effort (and expense), a single book could be produced in a few hours or minutes, instead of perhaps a year. That's how long it might take an experience scribe to copy a book. Of course, this varied with the length of the book and how experienced the scribes were as well as how diligently they worked. For a thick book like the Bible, a year would have been about right.
Modern printing technology doesn't bear much resemblance to the Gutenberg press. Books were, and still are, printed on what are called offset presses. They work by transferring an image of the pages being printed to an inked plate. The plate than transfers the image to a roller which actually prints the pages. Presses like this come in various sizes, but the largest one are automated and huge. They cost millions of dollars each, use giant rolls of paper and print sixteen pages of a book at one time. A far car from setting each letter by hand using a piece of moveable type, the earliest form of printing that Gutenberg pioneered.
Nevertheless, offset printing still shares something in common with the earliest printing presses, most of the expense and effort goes into the setup process. Once that's done, it's very easy to produce a lot of books. Therefore, it's going to cost a whole lot more per book to print just a few, but much less per book to print many. There are a number of book printing companies on the web that publish their price lists. What is striking is how dramatically their charge per copy goes down with the more books the customer orders. This works well for the big publishers. They can order tens of thousands for a single press run and pay next to nothing per book. But self-publishers are out of luck. The price to print, say ten or fifty books, would probably be as much as the publisher could hope to sell them for. The result? The big publishers corner the market.
POD changes the equation. The publisher prepares the book, both the interior (the words) and the exterior (front cover, spine and back cover) as digital files. Generally pdf files are used (invented by Adobe, pdf stands for portable document format). Their big advantage is that once produced, they stay the same and look the same on any computer, whether pc, mac, ipad or smart phone. The publisher submits the digital files, prepared to the printer's required specifications. The printer stores them on a computer connected to large automated printers. The process of printing a book, whether a single copy or fifty, simply requires a technician to send the digital file to a computer along with the number of copies to be printed. The process is really just an automated industrial version of what ones does at home when printing a letter or some other document using a computer.
So, with POD, it's no longer necessary for a publisher to print up a huge number of books to get the economy of scale. When an order comes into the printer, the book is printed. No warehouses are needed, no problem of having a lot of unsold books and no returned books from bookstores that they can't sell. A small publisher can compete with a big publisher, at least in theory. In practice, it's not so simple (is it ever)?
The problem is that for a publisher to actually sell books, they must be distributed nationally in order to be available to a wide market and that requires a wholesaler. The largest wholesaler in the U.S. is Ingram Book Company. To deal with them, a publisher had to establish a relationship and sign a contract, not a terribly hard thing if you're a large publisher. If you were a self-publisher, forget it. Ingram never had any interest in dealing with you. This is where the new company enters the picture, Lightning Source International (LSI).
There are many POD printing companies today. LSI is one of them, but one with a most important difference. LSI is a division of Ingram Book Company. Because of that, Ingram carries every single book printed by LSI. This automatically gets your book listed on Amazon, the world's biggest book seller, and Barnes and Noble, the second biggest. Any book store can order the book. In short, LSI is a game changer.
More on that next time.
