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Here are some facts about self-published books:
For a novel of circa 300 pages It will cost you on average around:
£350 to have a book cover designed; £300 – 400 for proofreading and copy-editing
(could be as much as £500 – 600); £40 to have it formatted for printing; £30 to
have a Print On Demand book set up; it will cost you around £15 for one proof copy.
So, we are talking a minimum investment of £850 before your book is
printed. If you have 100 copies printed it will cost you £4.25 per copy plus
£8.50/copy investment in setting up the book. If you only have 10 books printed
(£5.25/copy), it will cost you in real terms £90.25/copy. Six of these books
have to be deposited with the Libraries at your expense. In real
terms you are paying a minimum of £12.75 per copy to produce your book if you
invest in 100 copies. A reasonable margin added to the production cost leaves
you very little profit at a sales price unattractive in the competitive world of book sales (why
would anyone pay over £15 for your paperback when they can buy one from an
equally skilled or even famous author for less?) Then the book has to be
marketed, distributed, there are administration costs, tax considerations. . .
You can realistically expect to invest around £30,000 to promote your book and
get it into the distribution chain (if anyone will take it!). If you offer it to
Amazon.com they will want a discount of, at the best, 25 per cent but more
likely 40 per cent off the retail price;
if a bookstore takes it they will want a discount of up to 60 per cent of the selling
price. A bookstore will not pay you for four months and then they have the option
of returning all unsold copies to you (known in the trade as 'returns'). Returns
are often scuffed and damaged so you have to 'pulp' them. This is the true
meaning of 'pulp fiction'!
Whoever owns the ISBN (International Standard Book Number) – whoever purchased it – is the publisher of record, and
buying a set of ISBNs can be expensive, especially if you only want one or two! So,
if you pay to have your book published through one of the many Print on Demand (POD)
companies who offer to assign the book an ISBN; then they, not you, are the publisher of the book, on top of which,
many POD publishers do not let you set your own selling price, and many will not
allow you to assign your own ISBN to the book even if you own an ISBN
designation.
The next shock comes when you learn that self-published, or books published
by a vanity publisher (who will charge you £3,000 to £6,000 to produce your
book), are not stocked by
booksellers or book distributors – they won't touch them.
The average sales of a self-published or vanity published book is 150 to 175
copies (New York Times). If the above is still attractive to you, then by all means go ahead and
self-publish your book. However, bear in mind that if you have written a good book
you will find a publisher if you persevere. A publishing house knows when a book
is saleable or not, a book is read by many professionals and if it passes this
test it is a fair indication it will sell. Sadly, it is a fact that many
self-published titles are badly written and just not interesting. They glut an
already over-supplied market, creating too much ‘noise’ and preventing consumers
from finding quality material. They are increasingly better produced,
looking good on the outside but not delivering on the inside; this causes
consumer confusion as they can no longer judge a book by its cover and
they ultimately clog the system, supplying poor-quality information to
computerised retail book databases. Booksellers complain they frequently waste time hunting
for books that don’t show up on their systems. There are self-publishing success
stories, but to be honest, they are as rare as new writers who become
international best-selling authors.
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