ceciliatan: Author tips: buying/selling your own book

ceciliatan (

ceciliatan) wrote,
@ 2008-02-21 17:04:00

Entry tags:

author tips, books, white flames, writing advice

Author tips: buying/selling your own book
I ordered my own book from Amazon today, and I'm going to come out ahead on the deal when I re-sell them. Here's why.

Okay, so you have a book coming out. And you want to sell some copies to your family and friends at a book party. You've read the clause in your contract that says you get a discount of 40% (typically) if you buy them direct from the publisher. but that clause goes on to say that you won't get royalties on copies you sell yourself. (Aside: Why? I don't know. Publishers have an irrational fear that your own sales might somehow eclipse theirs and obviate the need for publishers in the first place? If only it were true!)

They'll also charge you to ship the books, usually. So say you buy 20 copies of your $15 book. You get them at 40% off, but you pay, say, $22 shipping. So you paid $202, or $10.10 per book. And you won't be making any royalties on them, so if you sell them at $15 each, you make $4.90 per book.

To avoid the no-royalties thing, I usually have Circlet Press, my company, buy the books through a book wholesaler like Bookazine. (I've also heard of authors in this area getting them via new England Mobile Bookfair. I've not done that myself though so can't speak about it.) Bookazine sells us the books at 40% off, does charge shipping (about the same $22 say), but at least I get the sales count toward my royalties. In my case that is a bit more than a dollar a book. So I'd be making like $6.20 a book. That's good!

But today I noticed that Amazon.com is selling the book for 32% off, WITH an additional 5% off if ordered in advance before the book is published. Well, that's 38% no? But of course if ordering 20 copies, I will be way over the amount needed to get Free Shipping. So I just paid $193.23 for 20 copies! I saved about $9 total over either of the previous methods, which adds another 45 cents a book to what I get to keep of the $15 cover price.

So look and see what kind of discount Amazon is offering before you nag your editor to put in an order for you at your publisher's warehouse.

--

Edit: It's been pointed out I never said what book it was. White Flames, published by Running Press. I made an info page about it: http://www.ceciliatan.com/whiteflames.html

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johnromkey
2008-02-21 10:35 pm UTC (link)

If you pay with an Amazon Visa card, you'll get 3% more back, albeit in Amazon gift certificates.

Amazon has an affiliate program... if you order through an affiliate link, the affiliate will get between 4% and 10% commission, depending on monthly volume (low volume will likely get 6% or 6.5%, it doesn't take many items to go from 4% to 6%).

You don't get commissions on purchases you make through your own affiliate link, but
if the affiliate link is registered to a different name than yours, say a business, and you personally buy things through it, the business will likely get the commission. Combined with using an Amazon Visa, you can probably wrangle 9.5% (of whatever you paid in the end) more back this way...

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	ceciliatan 2008-02-21 10:40 pm UTC (link)
	Actually, I have an Amazon affiliate account set up, but it's via me personally so yeah, I don't get the kickback on my own orders. Now that I think about it, I was browsing from a link on someone else's site... hopefully they get a piece! (Reply to this)(Parent)

	re circle23 2008-02-21 10:37 pm UTC (link)
	i have been toying with self publishing via internet (blurb.com) or going with a real publisher. my thought is that a lot of people only buy via online these days so what benefits do publishers ( say GOLIATH ) offer? besides books on shelves in bookstores which is romantic but is it necessary anymore? (Reply to this)(Thread)

Re: re

ceciliatan
2008-02-21 11:04 pm UTC (link)

Unless you have a very targeted way to reach your intended audience -- like say, your book is about Jane Austen and you can tap into a rabid fanbase for her through web sites about her, discussion lists, etc... and all *without* seeming like spam -- the truth is that the vast majority of books purchased are bought by people who browse a bookstore's shelves without knowing what they want to buy.

This is why in over 15 years of trying to "dominate" the book market, Amazon.com's market share has stayed quite steady at about 10%.

Anyone who CAN reach their audience without the big publisher I strongly encourage to self-publish and self-distribute. But if the book is generally a form of entertainment like fiction or humorous essays? All the Internet coverage in the world won't get you a fraction of what having the book in stores will.

Looked at monetarily, if you can sell 500 copies of a book at $15 each (which you probably paid a P.O.D. printer $5 to print for you, so you net $10/book), you are keeping $5000. That's about equal to what a lot of fiction authors get in advance from a traditional publisher. But as a career-building step? You've gained 500 readers. Versus the 3500-5000 the traditional publisher would have probably reached. And if the book took off and was championed by the bookstores? Suddenly you could be selling 50,000 and looking at $50,000. And if the publisher sells the translation rights? Another $1000 to $2000 each language. And if they sell the movie rights? Etc. Etc.

With most traditional publishing, you get your $5000 advance and you never see another dime, the book does what it does, and that's it. But at least it is a stepping stone. The publicist at the publisher mails the review copies. The accounting dept. foots the bill for mailing them. The rights department tries to sell the rights. Etc. meanwhile, all you had to do was write the book and take the check.

Meanwhile, if you go the self-publishing route, selling 500 copies via a web site or on the street corner, what have you, takes work. What do you do to create interest in the book? How to you convert the interest to buyers? Here's a stat: Circlet.com, my bookselling website, gets about 50 visitors per day. Before our shopping cart broke and started skewing the results, we were selling about 5 books per month to those visitors. So that is one book per about every 300 customers visiting the site. So to sell 500 books, we might be looking at having to attract 150,000 interested visitors.

Of course, you can make deals to sell through places that take a cut--typical retailers get 40%, you get 60%. But now you're looking at having to basically double the number of books sold to hit that same income goal. Getting visitors to the site might have costs, too, as would doing things like selling the book at conventions, fleamarkets, book fairs, etc. which charge a vendor fee.

Meanwhile, if it takes you say 500 hours of work to sell the 500 books, you've just paid yourself ten bucks an hour to do the work that a publisher would have done to earn you the same money. Plus the publisher also paid the designer, the proofreader, the editor, the cover artist, that's all work you'd need to put in, too.

This is the reason traditional publishing is still attractive on top of it being "legitimizing"--but also why if you CAN reach that audience through self-publishing, it can be equally lucrative, too. (You still have to write the book either way...)

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

Re: re

circle23
2008-02-21 11:39 pm UTC (link)

wow thanks!!
we are doing an art/erotica book of bondage which typically wont make it inot the mainstream stores anyways. and the experience i have had with tachen and others of the like they want a prototype book sent to them so all the writing /designs is already done by me. I see your point about the type of books with writing/fiction, but do the circumstances change when its a image based book of "dubious" content that like Borders and such will not put on their shelves??

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

Re: re

ceciliatan
2008-02-23 07:15 pm UTC (link)

Well, the interesting thing is that Borders does put a lot of very racy books on their shelves (including from Taschen and Goliath and such) but they are less likely to do so from a small company. And not so much bc of the content, but it is difficult to get into their buy if you have no clout.

The good thing about a bondage-related book is that there is a community to try to sell to and there are conventions you can vend and speak at, newsletters to advertise in, etc...

Have you picked the brains of folks like Michael Rosen, who self-published several volumes of his photos, or Mark Chester, who did one also? I am sure the economics of an art book are quite different from a text book, too. Is POD good enough for art-heavy books yet? I have no idea.

Yr moving in the right direction by talking and asking though. And if you do a book that is successful at the self-publisher level, there is nothing to stop you from selling the rights to another edition to a bigger publisher later, too...?

(Reply to this)(Parent)

	Good idea! ysabetwordsmith 2008-02-21 10:54 pm UTC (link)
	This is clever. I'll link to it from my blog. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	Re: Good idea! ceciliatan 2008-02-21 11:05 pm UTC (link)
	Thanks! (Reply to this)(Parent)

	annesible 2008-02-22 01:17 am UTC (link)
	Great tip, C. I'll keep it in mind. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	ceciliatan 2008-02-23 07:18 pm UTC (link)
	Yr welcome! (Reply to this)(Parent)

	yakshaver 2008-02-22 01:54 am UTC (link)
	So, for those of us in sufficiently loose contact with you that we don't know what your forthcoming book is, you might want to add a link to it on amazon.... (Reply to this)(Thread)

	ceciliatan 2008-02-23 07:18 pm UTC (link)
	Laugh Fair enough. Here: http://www.ceciliatan.com/whiteflames.html (Reply to this)(Parent)

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