The Truth About The Publishing Business

The Truth About The Publishing Business

Publishing has been a glorified business far too long. Agents, editors, book publishers and the rest of the industry have created a mystique in which only a chosen few are deemed worthy to participate. For every John Grisham or Steven King out there, there are 10,000 authors just as talented whose work will never see the light of day because they can’t breach the walls the industry has built around itself.

Consider the steps involved in getting a book published. First you write the book, then rewrite it again and again to make it the very best it can be. Then you send it off to a few dozen agents, hoping to entice them into at least giving it a quick glance. Some will. Others will toss it in the trash, or if you are lucky, send it back to you at your expense. Let’s clarify the position of the literary agent. His job is to work for you. To place your books in front of editors at the publishing houses. He (or she) works for you! Yet you have to beg and cajole an agent to just to get him to consider looking at your work.

So let’s say you get lucky and you do somehow catch an agent’s attention. He then, if he is good, floats your manuscript in front of the various publishing houses. Most readers and editors at these houses won’t give it a second glance. There is just too much competition out there for your work to demand more than a quick look at best. The numbers are decidedly against you.

But let’s go one step further and say your book does get bought by a publisher. Now what? You may or may not get a small check up front from the publisher, of which your agent will take a percentage. You will also get a ton of rewrite instructions, and once those are finished and submitted, you can usually expect more. Finally, a year or two after your book is first accepted it will get into print. Then what? Usually nothing!

The publishing house will give it to their sales representatives to present to book stores, and maybe a few thousand will sell. The publishing house will do little or no marketing of your book. If you want it to sell, you must take it upon yourself to contact book stores and set up book signings, to contact reviewers, and seek out interviews. The traditional publisher is too busy promoting the “big names” to give an unknown author much attention or promotion. By the time all is said and done, if you are lucky, you will probably make about minimum wage when you factor in all of the time you have invested in writing, selling, and promoting the book. Don’t forget, whatever you make, it will be a very small percentage of the cover price, and your agent will get a portion of it. So you do all of the work to research and write your book, you beg someone to look at it, you rewrite it again and again, and then you have to do all of the promotion work yourself. And for all of that, you get a few cents for every copy sold. The publisher, your agent, and the book store make most of the money for your hard work.

That’s why I say forget agents, publishers, and all the glorified crap surrounding the publishing industry – write and publish your own material, market it, and keep all the profits!

There was a time when self-publishing a book demanded a very high investment. The minimum press run with the traditional printing process was usually somewhere around 10,000 copies, requiring an investment of several thousand dollars, and you needed a lot of room to store the books when they were printed. That has all changed these days.

With today’s computerized Print on Demand (POD) technology, anybody with a home computer and a couple of relatively inexpensive programs can write a book, format it in house, design a cover, and publish their book for under $200. Then they can market the book and keep all of their profits, not share them with agents, editors, and publishers. Because you don’t have the high up front costs, the risk of bringing out a new book is negligible.

Print on demand books cost more per single copy than printing with traditional methods, but the extra cost is more than offset by not having to spend a huge amount of money up front, not having to store thousands of books until sold, and the speed with which you can get a new book out. Once you are established with a POD house, the turn around time from submitting a manuscript to having a proof in hand can be less than a week, and once the proof is approved, you can order as few as a single copy or as many as several hundred copies and have them printed and shipped within a week.

Publishing is a very simple business. Think of it as a recipe based upon a simple mathematical equation - you buy paper for $3 a pound, printer toner for $5 a pound, mix in some free information, put the toner on the paper, and resell it for $50 a pound! I think you will agree with me that that is a nice markup!

Your father was wrong, money does grow on trees! Because trees make wood, and wood makes paper, and paper makes books, and books make MONEY! LOTS OF MONEY!