How long is a piece of string?
(It is all down to customer expectations)
One of the most noticeable differences between the content inside a paperback book and an e-book is obviously the lenght. People who pay £6-£7 for a book in a store will expect it to be longer than 40 pages, even though that is the minimum number of pages for a perfect bound book.
Where as you would happily pay $47 for a 50 page e-book the same is highly unlikely to be true for paperbacks. If you are selling a technical or IT related book the book price expectations go up and the page numbers become less relevant. You can sell a 120-140 page book quite easily for £8-£9 on amazon, but at £10, you'll only receive £4 from Amazon per book sold as their advantage program demands a 60% discount.
With lightning source and lulu you set the discount but you still have to justify the price more than what you have to when you sell just an ebook. Which is another argument to use people like them rather than anyone else to get into the traditional book selling channels.
One of our books is a 124 square paged paperback and we sell it for £12.99 simply because we are the only one's providing relevant information from market insiders to this particular niche.
someone I know and respect posted on his twitter the other day that the easiest way to make $60,000 is to sell one item of something for that or more to someone desperately willing to pay that for what you have.
So the page count is really a calculation based on what your customers would expect and what sort of profit you would like to command on sales through the regular book channels.
I should say that lightningsource have told us that if you publish with them you can set the discount rates you are willing to offer to the distribution channels, and as such would not be at the mercy of the Amazon Advantage terms.
How true this is I don't know and I can only speculate on how this would impact your sales volumes.
Price
I suppose you have gathered by now that page numbers and minimum price is closely related. A 140 page book will cost £3.66 to print after the 28th of October. If you want to make say £3 profit on every book sold then that gives you a minimum wholesale price of £7.26 and then you'd need to double that to get the suggested retail price. £7.26 includes the 20 percent profit commission that lulu so graciously charges and in this example, it accounts for 60p.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Book Distribution channels
Book distribution is structured very similarly to how you sell your e-books.
There are publishers, wholesale distributors and retailers in both. If you compare paperback distribution to how ebooks are sold through clickbank there are quite a few similarities.
Putting your book on clickbank gives you access to more retail outlets (websites) and using Gardners or Bertrams similarly gives you access to more bookstores. Some bookchains even insist on using only one wholesaler and you would not be able to get your book in there unless the wholesaler took on your book. The same way clickbank takes a cut of every sale, the wholesaler will want to take their share of the profits too.
However that is where the similarity ends between the wholesalers.
The book wholesaler will insist on a higher discount than any retail outlet will ask for. Paperbacks will need to give a 55% to 60% discount (the book industry's version of "commission") before they will be accepted into the wholesaler's database. The wholesaler will tell YOU what discount you will give them where as YOU tell clickbank what the discount is. They hold the books physically in their storage. Clickbank simply diverts the sale to YOUR storage on your server.
Clickbank manages payments and pays you within 14 days of making a sale of your ebook. The book wholeseller will usually pay 3 months after the invoice date for any books they have bought. Although most notably, Amazon will pay you within 30 days for any books they have sold within a specified calendar month.
WH Smith operates their own wholesale operation, or at least used to, and buy books in large quantities all at once. It should be a priority for you to get into their systems. MBS titles work well for their airport range (Mind, Body, Spirit).
Now, the steps to get books distributed to begin with are pretty straight forward although there are country specific variations.
First of all you must have an ISBN number on your book.
If you use your own you have more control over the distribution than if you use one from Lulu.
Secondly you have to register the book information with a book database for your area. In the UK the Nielsen PybWeb Database is the "go to" place.
Their website is http://www.nielsenbookdata.com/pubweb/PubLogon
This is their service to add or edit your book information. You can register from that page too by downloading a registration form and emailing it to the address on the form. You can also receive orders through this system if you select to self distribute.
If you go for printondemand-worldwide then self distribution is really the better choice although they do fulfillment too.
The next step that most publishers do is to provide an Advance Information Sheet or AIS. This is the "sales page" that the publisher sends out to all the bookstores. Now this is not a place to include your typical “website sales letter”. The AIS sheet simply includes the factual information about the book. This means it has an image of the book cover, the suggested retail price & discount rate, the ISBN number, the name of the publisher and how the book can be ordered.
You should also include marketing information that is relevant to the bookstore. Why should THEY stock the book? This part of the AIS is still very brief and maybe a paragraph or two. If you can describe why a bookstore should stock your book in a single twitter message then that is the perfect length. This marketing part can include details of any traditional marketing initiatives to drive people into bookstores to buy the book as well as existing sales results from other outlets, customer feedback and if you have received press attention/reviews include that too.
Press Attention
We always try to get press attention BEFORE we send out the AIS for one simple reason - You can't add press reviews until you've received some! This fact seems to escape quite a few small publishers. If you have media contacts, use them.
The best place to start is your local paper. Most of the larger city papers or regionals actually syndicate their articles and on the back of one interview in the Portsmouth news we have had one piece in a ladies weekly, two articles in the broadsheets and three in the tabloids and we were approached by a publication in Belgium for an interview with our non-existent writer (that's the risk of pseudonyms for you)
If you are approaching the newspaper, make sure you tell them about something newsworthy. At the moment that would be that you have turned the financial crisis into an opportunity and has decided to publish books etc etc. Take the human interest angle as my wife would say. And that is as much publicity advice as can give.
Beyond this all you have to do is apply your ebook marketing aptitude to generate more book sales.
There are publishers, wholesale distributors and retailers in both. If you compare paperback distribution to how ebooks are sold through clickbank there are quite a few similarities.
Putting your book on clickbank gives you access to more retail outlets (websites) and using Gardners or Bertrams similarly gives you access to more bookstores. Some bookchains even insist on using only one wholesaler and you would not be able to get your book in there unless the wholesaler took on your book. The same way clickbank takes a cut of every sale, the wholesaler will want to take their share of the profits too.
However that is where the similarity ends between the wholesalers.
The book wholesaler will insist on a higher discount than any retail outlet will ask for. Paperbacks will need to give a 55% to 60% discount (the book industry's version of "commission") before they will be accepted into the wholesaler's database. The wholesaler will tell YOU what discount you will give them where as YOU tell clickbank what the discount is. They hold the books physically in their storage. Clickbank simply diverts the sale to YOUR storage on your server.
Clickbank manages payments and pays you within 14 days of making a sale of your ebook. The book wholeseller will usually pay 3 months after the invoice date for any books they have bought. Although most notably, Amazon will pay you within 30 days for any books they have sold within a specified calendar month.
WH Smith operates their own wholesale operation, or at least used to, and buy books in large quantities all at once. It should be a priority for you to get into their systems. MBS titles work well for their airport range (Mind, Body, Spirit).
Now, the steps to get books distributed to begin with are pretty straight forward although there are country specific variations.
First of all you must have an ISBN number on your book.
If you use your own you have more control over the distribution than if you use one from Lulu.
Secondly you have to register the book information with a book database for your area. In the UK the Nielsen PybWeb Database is the "go to" place.
Their website is http://www.nielsenbookdata.com/pubweb/PubLogon
This is their service to add or edit your book information. You can register from that page too by downloading a registration form and emailing it to the address on the form. You can also receive orders through this system if you select to self distribute.
If you go for printondemand-worldwide then self distribution is really the better choice although they do fulfillment too.
The next step that most publishers do is to provide an Advance Information Sheet or AIS. This is the "sales page" that the publisher sends out to all the bookstores. Now this is not a place to include your typical “website sales letter”. The AIS sheet simply includes the factual information about the book. This means it has an image of the book cover, the suggested retail price & discount rate, the ISBN number, the name of the publisher and how the book can be ordered.
You should also include marketing information that is relevant to the bookstore. Why should THEY stock the book? This part of the AIS is still very brief and maybe a paragraph or two. If you can describe why a bookstore should stock your book in a single twitter message then that is the perfect length. This marketing part can include details of any traditional marketing initiatives to drive people into bookstores to buy the book as well as existing sales results from other outlets, customer feedback and if you have received press attention/reviews include that too.
Press Attention
We always try to get press attention BEFORE we send out the AIS for one simple reason - You can't add press reviews until you've received some! This fact seems to escape quite a few small publishers. If you have media contacts, use them.
The best place to start is your local paper. Most of the larger city papers or regionals actually syndicate their articles and on the back of one interview in the Portsmouth news we have had one piece in a ladies weekly, two articles in the broadsheets and three in the tabloids and we were approached by a publication in Belgium for an interview with our non-existent writer (that's the risk of pseudonyms for you)
If you are approaching the newspaper, make sure you tell them about something newsworthy. At the moment that would be that you have turned the financial crisis into an opportunity and has decided to publish books etc etc. Take the human interest angle as my wife would say. And that is as much publicity advice as can give.
Beyond this all you have to do is apply your ebook marketing aptitude to generate more book sales.
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