Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

If this week’s news column were an episode of The Simpsons it would consist entirely of Bart, standing at the board, endlessly repeating the line “Ebook sales are not in crisis.” I want to devote most of the column this week to this one topic. That might sound excessive. After all, every month or so I dutifully report on the Association of American Publishers’ figures and I add the same caveats each time, and carry on as before. But this time is different. Because this time the mainstream media has got in on the act in a big way. And that has been brought home to me by the fact that several of my friends from outside the indie community have been sharing stories with me. In other words, the disinformation has breached the indie walls – and that means it could be doing real damage to people’s writing plans.

OK, let’s get back to the news. This week, following similar figures from the Association of American, the UK Publishers Association announced a 17% fall in ebook sales in 2017. The media leapt on it. The Guardian called it “screen fatigue”. They even ran a piece about how e-readers had become “clunky and unhip”. The national broadcaster had a slightly different take, but even they simply took the figures on board. Even CNN picked it up in the USA.

But is it true? Many of us have been querying the “downfall of ebooks” narrative for a long time now. The thing is it may or may not be happening, but these figures don’t tell us – these are figures from selected big publishers for books with ISBNs. That leaves a *massive* hiatus, a mass of ebooks that just aren’t being counted. We *can* be fairly sure that the positive things we are hearing about paper book sales are near the mark. But when it comes to the negatives on ebooks, the same isn’t true. And the prevailing narrative, that one format’s success is another’s failure, is certainly not clear. I will leave the last word to the ever-brilliant Nate Hoffelder, who takes down the “ebooks are failing” narrative coruscatingly...

“I just wanted a story with a nice guy.”In late 2012, author H. M. Ward had an experimental manuscript collecting proverbial dust on her computer. It starred a woman named Sidney and a man named Peter—an impossible nice-guy combo of handsome, strong, smart, patient, and, oh, super wealthy.

Ward had been writing since 2010 and had been down the traditional publishing route before, finding an agent and shopping her work around. Her instinct told her that publishers would have no interest in Peter. “If you take a nice-guy book to a traditional publisher,” she says, “They’re like, ‘That’s weird. Nice guys are boring.’”

So in April 2013, she published her manuscript online on her own. “I just put it up out of curiosity to see what would happen,” she says.

Despite reports that e-books are dying, Ward’s chance paid off, and continues to pay out today. According to the author, Damaged shot to No. 6 in Amazon’s Kindle store within a few days and held the No. 1 spot for several weeks. It spent a month on the New York Times bestsellers list for combined print and ebook. It was the first in two series of nice-guy books that would go on to sell 12 million copies in three years.

Publishers took note. In the year after Ward published Damaged, she was offered a series of deals from various publishers totaling $1.5 million, by her estimate. She turned them all down, and by the time she said no to her last contract, she was making eight figures as a self-published author. “It would have been a colossal mistake to sign with them at that point, financially,” she says....

With the growing popularity of self-publishing, there is one recurring question I get from almost every aspiring author: “How much should I budget?” This is a really hard question to answer because the term “self-publishing” encompasses a wide range of very different possibilities.

For example, let’s say you’ve written a first draft of your novel and just uploaded it to Amazon via Kindle Direct Publishing. Technically, you’re “self-publishing.” And your only monetary cost is the formatting to get the required .mobi file, which can be done for free via several online tools.

Now, if you want to have a chance of selling that book, you need to replicate at least some of the steps of traditional publishing and ensure a certain level of quality and professionalism. This means having your book properly edited, typeset and proofread, and hiring a designer to create an eye-catching cover. Depending on your genre and your writing ability, these can cost more or less.

It’s impossible to say, “Self-publishing your book with cost you $X.” However, it is possible to find average costs for the different steps that go into producing a book: editing, design and typesetting. And this is what the data and infographic below focus on....

For many authors, self-publishing is a first option instead of a backup to traditional publishing. Two years ago I broke down the costs to self-publish a high-quality book. The costs covered how much a traditional publisher typically spends on a book.

The book publishing industry is one of the last industries to go digital, and things are constantly in flux. What worked yesterday might not work next week.

Putting together a quality book involves not just writing it, but getting it edited and formatted, designing a cover, and having a marketing strategy around it.

The rise of new tools, platforms, and new entrants to the publishing space have made it even easier and faster to get a book out into the world. As a follow-up to my first piece, I’ve written a piece on how to publish on a budget....

Last night, Julianne Moore won the best actress Oscarfor her role as a university professor whose descent into dementia due to early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease was portrayed in the filmStill Alice.

The amazing backstory behind the award is that all the big publishing houses had rejected Lisa Genova, the author of the novel Still Alicefrom which the movie was based....

Amazon’s new Kindle Unlimited e-book reader subscription program caused a real commotion in the publishing industry last month. But how will this “Netflix for books” model affect the self-publishing industry? Is Kindle Unlimited the best, or should self-publishers join the Scribd or Oyster programs instead? How do you get in? Read on for a comparison of these top three reader subscription programs and best recommendations for self-publishers who are looking to add these channels to their revenue streams....

At every writers conference or self-publishing panel the question that almost always inevitably comes up is: “How much will self-publishing really cost me?”

Because the book publishing industry is one of the last industries to go digital, it’s going through a quick transition. As a result of this shift, authors no longer need to go through the traditional gatekeepers to publish high-quality books and are instead moving toward self-publishing. Launching a book is like launching a startup.

Putting together a quality book involves not just writing it, but getting it edited, then formatted, designing a cover, and having a marketing strategy around it.

Below, I break down the costs of how much professional services will cost you for a high-quality book....

Today’s short-run printing companies cater to self-publishers by offering easy-to-use book design templates and astoundingly quick service.

Here is a review of the companies from which you can get a PDF-formatted proof, approve it, and order 1, 25, or more books. "Because these services do not lock you in, you can print with whomever you like, changing print and distribution vendors at will."...

Last week, my seventh book, Philadelphia, was released. In many ways it is the best writing I have ever done, particularly in terms of fiction, and I thought the concept — a collection of short stories, a few op-ed essays, quotes, and lists, all relating to my beloved city of Philadelphia in one way or another — was interesting and appealing.

Clearly, very few people agreed because, well, it didn't exactly do Harry Potter numbers.Don't get me wrong. I'm not naive. This is my seventh time going through this process of self-publishing a book, so it's not like I wasn't prepared. I know the figures. I know that the average U.S. book is now selling less than 250 copies per year and less than 3,000 copies over its lifetime and that over 60% of self-published authors make less than five thousand dollars per year from their writing....

At every writers conference or self-publishing panel the question that almost always inevitably comes up is: “How much will self-publishing really cost me?”

Because the book publishing industry is one of the last industries to go digital, it’s going through a quick transition. As a result of this shift, authors no longer need to go through the traditional gatekeepers to publish high-quality books and are instead moving toward self-publishing. Launching a book is like launching a startup. Putting together a quality book involves not just writing it, but getting it edited, then formatted, designing a cover, and having a marketing strategy around it.

Below, I break down the costs of how much professional services will cost you for a high-quality book....