Book Publishing: Can You Really Do It Yourself?

Posted on May 7, 2005 by Chris Mitchell

Couple of good responses to my post about Self Publishing and the new Macmillian deal. First off, Hugh MacLeod from Gaping Void said it was "groovy" which made my morning. I've got a lot of respect for Hugh's "How To Be Creative", and the book that's going to be coming out of it will probably become a best-seller precisely because of all the interest his ideas generated on his site.

POD Girl provides a fairly decisive argument for why POD books should be reviewed as a standalone category:

"That said - there is a need to review good POD books and here is why:

(1) No one else will ever review them. Ever. And the Midwest Book Review does not count.
(2) 99.893% suck. Truly suck. And finding that gem inside is nearly impossible.
(3) They will never be seen in a bookstore or elsewhere (for now) and that makes the chance of discovering one on your own nil. "

Given her blog is dedicated to finding those gems, I will simply shut up and see what she comes up with. (Actually, I can recommend Frederick Pitts' Things Are Different In Africa as a great POD book that I've read this year).

Meanwhile, Peter L. Winkler (who has a refreshingly bitter and twisted publishing blog ) says this in the comments:
" 'It's an increasingly false distinction - readers don't care who published a book, they care what's in it.' True, except that readers won't ever find a POD book in their local bookstore, which is the be all and end all of the whole shebang. Bookstores and reviewers are the gateway through which any book must pass before the reader has a chance to see it. The gateway has a filter labelled POD that's 100% effective. Amazon.com sells only about 10% of the total number of books sold. So hoping to bootstrap your way to success solely through online sales is a dream. When are people going to realize this? 'A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence.' Richard Dawkins"

It's a good point, but it's flawed in its logic. Because Amazon only accounts for 10 per cent of total book sales doesn't mean that each book published only gets 10 per cent of its sales from Amazon. A huge amount of books only get their sales from Amazon, and so online sales count for 70 per cent or higher of their total sales. (It's the Long Tail effect in action).

My father's experience is a good example - when he first started selling his self-published books about Devon shipwrecks, he and my mother would spend afternoons driving round bookstores in Devon asking them to stock the book. Now he sells everything online. And, tellingly, many of the booksellers can't deal direct with him anymore because they are tied into distribution houses that wipe out their own autonomous initiative taking on local titles.

Here's another: I recently wrote on scattered about the book Whale Sharks: The Giants Of Ningaloo Reef. This is a beautiful hard back book that, for various reasons, is now only available direct from its author, Dr Geoff Taylor, who lives in Western Australia. I blogged about what a shame it was that this book wasn't readily available through Amazon etc - but if it wasn't for Dr Taylor selling it through his own site, it wouldn't be available at all. So this is a book that is almost wholly reliant on Internet sales.

On top of that, the argument that a book needs to appear in a bookshop to get 90 per cent of its sales is simply wrong. Thousands of books appear in bookshops each year and sell virtually no copies. Getting a book into a bookshop is no guarantee of success. It's not a global panecea for sales and visibility. If anything, it's the final humiliation for a writer when they realise that even when their book finally arrives in the shop, it still doesn't sell.

Any writer is obviously going to be thrilled to get their book into a bookstore. But to assume that sales and readers will necessarily follow is crazy. Unless the writer has got a guarantee of full marketing behind their title, it's unlikely it will do anything. Hence why an author has to take responsibility for marketing their own title and finding ways to push it - and why, if a writer doesn't have that marketing backup, marketing and selling online could be the key to real sales and readership. Because no one else is going to do anything else for your book.