I’d like to ask a really pointed question:
Given the difficulty of producing a book yourself, with the attendant business issues (purchasing an ISBN, setting up a relationship with a printer, trying to get it into stores) and the mechanics (editing, formatting, cover design), why does anyone who probably is going to produce at most one or two books elect to “do it yourself?”
I suppose I can understand the desire to “be in control” or to “bypass the gatekeepers” of the publishing industry. I can also understand when someone has a book that is for a very niche market, or simply for personal use, such as a family genealogy. But I’m afraid that a lot of people think that they can just jump into publishing and be successful. That’s about as likely as just jumping into a pool full of sharks and surviving. Sure, you might be able to do it, but chances are….
(By the way, I’m not talking about the individual who goes to a legitimate subsidy publisher and has his or her book published. That, to me, makes a heck of a lot more sense. The subsidy publisher handles the grunt work: cover design, page layout, getting the book printed, etc. Sure, you pay the publisher, but it’s an exchange of money for services rendered. You probably do the same thing with getting your car repaired, your heating system fixed, or getting your teeth filled: you pay the expert, so you don’t screw it up yourself.)
As someone who works in the industry, and who once upon a time self-published a book, producing a book of good quality and that looks appealing, can be a much more difficult than it appears!
I asked the opening question above specifically because of a discussion going on in an online list where I am a member. There an individual is seeking an affordable POD printer for a hardcover 200-plus page book, letter-size and full of color photos. The person in question was shocked to see that the wholesale cost of such a book when printed-on-demand is about $50 or more per copy. The author has already devoted almost a year to the project, has release forms in place for all the color photos, and is only now realizing the financial realities of printing such a book, whose ultimate retail price would approach $100 per copy.
Don’t people who are thinking of self-publishing ever stop to investigate the true cost and trouble associated with self-publishing? It takes planning, investigating the options, putting numbers down on paper and asking yourself, “Can I do this? Do I want to go to all this trouble? Can I even afford this?”
I’m not talking about the content. Obviously that has to be good or the book usually won’t sell (unless it’s written by someone famous.) I’m referring to the business aspects and the mechanics: setting up relationships with printers, gaining a distributor, marketing and promotion, cover design, book layout, editing, etc.
For example, covers are enormously important for commercial viability, but I see a lot of self-pubbed books with covers that are really, really ugly. For example, the current trend in fantasy and sci-fi books toward using 3D modeling software to produce “people” on the cover who look like characters from The Sims is just sad. And many people don’t realize that the colors on their monitor are not the same colors that will show up on the printed page… they might be, but most likely they won’t match, unless you have a monitor-calibration device. So that lovely blue sky may look purple, or sort of greenish when you have the book in hand. The fresh skin tones in the original design may actually print out as a glaring-red blush. Having a tacky-looking cover will not be an encouragement for a browsing customer to even pick up your book, much less to buy it.
Format and layout are important, too. I’ve seen self-published books where the individual made the text too small to read in order to save on printing costs, or so large that it looked ridiculous, to up the page count and make the book look thicker. I’ve seem one printed it all in Courier, without proportional spacing, so it looked like someone’s bound typewritten pages—and it wasn’t done for effect! I’ve seen self-published books where the individual used cheesy graphics from a clip art book, mixing them with poorly-composed photos, or photos that were at too low a resolution for successful printing. If the book looks amateurish inside or out when I look at it, I’m not going to buy it. I’d venture to say that is the way many, if not most, readers think.
Each book needs an ISBN. ISBNs can be purchased individually (rather expensive) or in groups of ten, one hundred, one thousand, and up. If the book is going to be in a store, it must have an ISBN and a barcode. If you don’t have the software to produce an EAN-Bookland barcode (the approved barcode for books), you have to pay someone to produce it for you, unless your commercial printer will do that for you.
There are so many small details about producing a book, more than I have listed here, and getting any one of them wrong can make your project less than acceptable. I know, there have been people who have successfully and happily self-published their books. That’s great, and I applaud them. But for every one of those, there are ten or twenty more who are left with boxes of books in their basement, that nobody wants.
Self-publishing reminds me so much of Amway, Shaklee, and other multi-level-marketing businesses. The very few people who are making lots of money with Amway (or similar plans) are very appealing, and convince thousands of others to go for the brass ring, when the chance that those thousands will do as well is very, very small. We hear the stories of the author who self-published and has been offered a $500,000 contract with Simon and Schuster. But the thousands of people who self-published and sold only ten or twenty copies of their book… nobody trumpets those names to the world.
It’s too much reality, and reality bites.
