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Adventures in Self-Publishing, Part 4

by Marc Zeedar macopinion@designwrite.com

Last time I wrote about how I am fulfilling orders for my new book myself, ordering printed copies in bulk from Lulu and personally mailing them out. No, I won't get rich selling books this way, but it is kind of fun and I like the control I have over the process.

This is where the self-publishing process gets interesting. There are many ways to publish a book, and even within the narrower field of self-publishing there are multiple approaches you can take. I had to answer many of these questions as I developed my book project, so let me share with you my experience and thoughts.

Fulfillment is one aspect to consider. As I mentioned last time, I chose self-fulfillment because of the increased control I have even though it's more work and can be more complicated to set up. If you're not interested in that, you can just sell books directly through the store Lulu gives you on their site.

Here are some things you should consider when mulling the fulfillment and self-publishing questions:

How many books are you hoping to sell? If it's hundreds, self-fulfillment's an option. For thousands, it may not be. You might not know the quantity of books you'll sell. It could be ten or a thousand; you have no idea. The type of book makes a huge difference. Fiction, for instance, is a hard sell via self-publishing. Unless you're already established as an author or have a fan-base of some sort, it's tough to get word out about your novel. Books that teach how to do something are easier to promote, but no matter what, unless you're really good at self-promotion, self-publishing isn't going to sell as many copies as traditional wide-market publishing (but it could be more profitable). The bottom line: it's a total guess. My advice is don't count on a certain number because you'll probably be disappointed if you don't reach it.

What's your schedule like? I work from home and already handle orders for my other businesses, so shipping out a few book orders is not a problem at all. If you're working full-time already, self-fulfillment might be more of a hassle than it's worth.

What kind of publicity do you have planned? You should factor publicity timing into the equation: after a promotion or other publicity, you might be deluged with orders and it could be more than you can handle yourself. Of course that's a nice problem to have, but you don't want to alienate customers, so keep such things in mind.

What's your profit margin? This is the key question with self-publishing. With traditional publishing, you're paid a small percentage of the total price -- as little as ten or twenty percent! That means for a $20 book you'll earn a mere two bucks. With a traditional publisher putting marketing clout behind the product you might actually sell thousands of copies and make a little money -- but there are no guarantees. With self-publishing you can keep the bulk of the profits yourself (say 50%). Making $10 on that $20 book sounds a lot better, doesn't it? Even if you only sell 500 books, that could be more money than the traditional route. In terms of self-fulfillment, you can increase that profit market even higher -- at the cost of more labor for you.

Do you have start-up money? To do the fulfillment yourself, you need to buy books in advance. While that sort of spoils the point of print-on-demand (POD), you do have the luxury of being able to buy books in much smaller quantities than with traditional printing. With traditional printing you need to print several thousand books to be cost effective, and more will bring the per-book cost even lower. With POD you can print a mere 25 or 100 books and reorder as needed. Your cost-per-book is much higher than traditional publishing, but it's less money up front.

As you can see from the following table, when the quantity reaches a thousand, you might be better off with traditional printing. (Note: these prices are not official, but proportional to real numbers, and don't include things like shipping.)

	Quantity	Cost Per Book	Total Cost
Traditional	1,000	$5	$5,000
	2,500	$3	$7,500
	5,000	$2	$10,000
Print-on-Demand	100	$7	$700
	500	$6	$3,000
	1,000	$5	$5,000

For my purposes, POD seemed like a good way to go as I could dive in without a lot of start-up expense. I have no idea what the interest in my book will be. It's a hot topic -- weight loss -- so if demand caught on, it could sell a lot of copies. But it's a hugely competitive market, I'm not exactly a household name, and I'm not very good at marketing, so it's equally possibly I'll have trouble selling a couple hundred copies. Who knows?

The nice thing about working with Lulu is they let me easily test the water and gauge interest. If the book is a hit (so far the people who have bought it have liked it) I can always switch to the traditional publishing route and order a few thousand copies on faith that they will sell.

Don't forget facilities. If you want to handle fulfillment yourself, keep in mind your working environment. Do you have storage facilities for all those books? How are you set up for printing mailing labels and shipping products? Such tasks are not difficult, but they can be annoying if you don't have a convenient area to work with all your supplies handy.

More to Consider

Of course there are still other options to explore, in particular the idea of selling your book in retail stores or via online sellers such as Amazon. We'll explore that next time.

Next Time: Marc explores the retail and Amazon approach

(Since I am shamelessly promoting my book in this series, I'm offering a special discount: you can save $2 on my book via promo code macopinion.)

macopinion@designwrite.com