I always give the same answer: typos.

Few types of business offer as many opportunities to mess up as publishing. After all, in addition to the gross issues of production, distribution, sales, and marketing, there’s the fact that every book is composed of tens of thousands of words, all of whose myriad letters must be correct and in the right order. 

At First Contact went out with two instances of the name for a character being wrong. We fixed it, but not before we’d sold our first fifty copies (and ordered a couple dozen copies for ourselves).

Our very first book, the first Rediscovery volume, had several typos; there was even one instance of an entire paragraph fragment being repeated (it was at the bottom of a page and thus easy to miss).

The second Rediscovery volume doesn’t have any typos, so far as I know (yet), but the first 100 copies went out without its dedication to Dr. Lisa Yaszek! Talk about embarrassing.

Why am I airing our dirty laundry? For a couple of reasons. The first is that every business makes mistakes, especially when it’s starting out. If you’re an independent publisher or a self-publishing author, you’ve probably made some cringeworthy mistakes. You may have even felt overwhelmed by them, to the point that you worried that you’re just not cut out for this biz. That your reputation is forever sullied.

The fact is that every mistake can be fixed. With Ingram and Amazon being our main printers, we were able to upload new copies of Rediscovery and At First Contact immediately as soon as we knew there was a problem. Our personal copies of At First Contact? We printed out a bunch of little labels with the right names and fixed the books ourselves. And the dedication on Rediscovery 2? Well, there are other ways to let everyone know who a book is dedicated to.

Believe me, other publishers, bigger publishers, have done much worse. A friend of mine had a book published, and the first 500 copies had the freaking editing notes by both editor and author included in the intro! Even the Big 5 routinely produce titles with typos. To err is human.

And the reading public doesn’t just forgive. They forget. Or they email you with helpful annotations (“Page 47 has a typo”) and then they have the pleasure of being part of the solution. A mistake isn’t the end of the world.

That said, it’s better not to make mistakes, right? And that’s the second reason for this week’s article. The only way to ensure fewer errors is a process that detects and deters bugs before they happen.

We have two levels of error-checking, one in the editing process, and one in the production process.

For editing, two things are vital:

• You must get multiple eyes on a manuscript. The ideal number is four: the initial writer, the beta reader, the editor, and a final reader. The final reader only gets the manuscript when the other three are sure it’s “done”. Going in cold, they will find the issues that have entered the blind spots of the first three.
• Read it out loud. Seriously. Not a single word of your manuscript should stay inside. You will not only shave off awkward corners, you will find the bad typos, the repeated phrases, the continuity errors, everything.

For production:

• You need a spreadsheet template with every single step of the production process, no matter how trivial, listed. 
  • We’re talking things like: author contract, cover, book webpage, first draft, final draft, ISBN procurement, etc. Our sheet has ~30 items on it. Including “have each proofreader make sure every section is in the book!”
  • You’ll want a column listing the progress of each step: ot Started, Started, Completed. 
  • You’ll want a formula such that each task has a due date dependent on a publication date you can change. 
  • Every week or month, as appropriate, you’ll review the template and see what tasks you have to take care of.
• Build in lead time. If you don’t cut yourself slack, you will end up on publication day with a major problem.
  • For instance, the first version of Sirena had a wonky cover. Not on Amazon, but on Ingram. Turns out you have to be particular re: color profiles. That wasted a couple of weeks.
  • I Want the Stars went out three weeks later than we wanted because of the whole “Ingram won’t work if you accidentally clicked Expanded Distribution on Amazon”.

Thanks to our templates, Rediscovery, Volume 2 was ready on time, even with hiccoughs in production. And the dedication issue was fixed within 48 hours of the official launch date.

Most importantly, don’t beat yourself up. Each error is a learning experience. Find out how to fix the error and make sure it doesn’t happen again. That’s the best you can do.

Eventually, your work will be prefect, without any mitsakes. 

P.S. Your work will never be perfect. But at least you’ll make new mistakes rather than repeat old ones…

In previous Path to Publishing posts, we’ve talked about how important it is to make your book “Returnable” if you’re marketing it to bookstores. But what, exactly, does “Returnable” mean? And do you want the “Deliver” or “Destroy” option? When will the returns show up in your numbers? Will you be on the hook for them? Read on — all of your questions and more will be answered!

Most industries don’t allow stores to return goods that were purchased wholesale; the book industry is unusual in this respect. The practice began during the Great Depression when publishers wanted to encourage booksellers to take more chances on new authors, rather than relying on tried and true known winners. These days, traditional publishers consider a 20% return rate a fine number, and make predictions accordingly. For the self-publisher or small press, suddenly getting a large number of returns can be demoralizing and potentially crippling to one’s cash flow. 

That’s how we felt about it, until we figured out the trick to turning lemons into lemonade.

No Returns?

The first choice you need to make regarding returns is if you’ll allow them at all. On the Ingram Spark website when you’re entering the price for your book, you’ll see three options under “Return”: 

• No
• Yes – Deliver
• Yes – Destroy

“No” simply means that you will not allow returns of any kind. Once Ingram sells your book to a bookstore, they cannot get their money back. Sounds good for you, right? 

Not so fast! Making your book “Returnable”, as noted previously, makes you a much more attractive prospect to bookstores. Why would they take a risk on a new, unknown author if they fear they’re going to have to eat the cost of the book if they can’t sell it? It was true in the Great Depression and it’s still true today: giving bookstores an out makes them more inclined to take a chance on you. Indeed, our experience has been that bookstores simply won’t carry anyone who doesn’t offer returns (and full discount on the retail price).

So, what about the other two options?

Yes – Deliver?

“Yes – Deliver” means that returns will be shipped to you. You will be charged the wholesale price (the amount that was refunded to the bookseller) plus an additional two dollars per book shipping cost. There’s no way to know how many books will be returned until Ingram ships you a box, at which point you’ll suddenly see a dip in your numbers as you’re charged for a bunch of returns plus shipping. It might even bring your numbers negative, and Ingram might even ask you to pay them to cover the cost! 

Sounds pretty scary, right? If you’re a small press on a shoestring, it definitely can be. But if you’re good at hand selling, these returns are also an opportunity. 

When you order author’s copies from Amazon or Ingram, you pay the print cost plus shipping. The wholesale price is often not much more than this. Essentially, you’ll be receiving a bunch of copies at the same discount a bookstore would purchase them at. And when you subtract the publisher’s compensation that you’ve already received, the result is that you’re only paying the print cost plus two dollars shipping per book. 

Since returned copies don’t cost much more than author’s copies, hand selling them can make you good money – a lot more money than selling through bookstores! (Why not just sell author’s copies all the time, then? Because it’s hard to scale hand selling. You make less per copy selling to bookstores, but your book is out in the world, being discovered and purchased in cities all over the country.) But for a return shipment, hand selling the returned copies is a viable option, especially if you have a local convention coming up that doesn’t charge too much for table space.

Will the returned copies you receive be in saleable condition? Yes! They should be in brand new condition, and if they aren’t, contact Ingram and let them know. You’re buying the books the bookstores don’t want, but you shouldn’t be receiving cast offs or seconds. 

The disadvantage to accepting returns is that you can’t control when you get them. Journey Press was in business for over a year before it received its first return shipment from Ingram! That first shipment will always be a shock when it shows up in your numbers, and it can be an unpleasant one if you need the cash. Since you’re paying for the books, the cost could be high, maybe even more than you’ve made from Ingram so far. 

You also can’t count on the returns coming when you might want them. You can’t say, for example, “I have a convention coming up; Ingram, please send me my returns before I buy some author’s copies!” It doesn’t work like that – Ingram will send the returns when they send them, and you don’t get a say. You’ll want to squirrel away a fair amount of cash to cover any returns you might unexpectedly get – enough to cover 20 to 25% of the books you’ve sold based on the wholesale price (not just the compensation you received). 

Yes – Destroy?

Given the downsides of the “Yes – Deliver” option,“Yes – Destroy” may sound like a better way to go. It’s actually not much more cost effective. In fact, it can end up being more expensive! “Yes – Destroy” doesn’t charge the publisher the $2.00 shipping fee for each book, because Ingram doesn’t ship the returned books to the publisher. Instead they — you guessed it — destroy them. Here’s the catch, though: the publisher is still on the hook for the wholesale price of each returned book. So you’ll end up paying the wholesale cost, but not receiving anything for it. You’ll pay less out of pocket, but you won’t have any books you can hand sell to cover the loss, either. It’s simpler and less expensive up front, but in the end, it can cost you more out of pocket. It’s also not great for the environment. 

The one big advantage of the “Yes – Destroy” option is that it registers the return as soon as the book is sent back to Ingram and destroyed. This means that the returns are spread out over time, showing up a few each month instead of a bunch all at once out of the blue. But they can still take a significant bite out of your bottom line — and you miss the opportunity to recoup the loss!

Summing up

Making a decision regarding returns is a tough choice. Do you mark your books as non-returnable and make yourself a less attractive prospect to bookstores? Do you mark them as “Yes – Deliver” and be ready to pay a large chunk of cash for a bunch of returned books at a time you have no control over? Do you mark them as “Yes – Destroy” and be prepared to pay a smaller, but still significant chunk of cash on a monthly basis for the privilege, with no option to make that money back? 

Journey Press made the choice to mark their books as “Yes – Deliver” for a number of reasons. Firstly, because we are a print-on-demand press, bookstores only order the number of copies they think they can sell. Rediscovery had a return rate of just 8.5% (which still meant two giant boxes of returns!) and our other books were under 5%. Given that 2020 was a pandemic year, and we lost several dozen stores we were in, those numbers are even more amazing.

Beyond that, we like hand selling, attend lots of conventions, and believe we can recoup the loss. 

But your situation may be different. You may not have sales opportunities. You may not have space to store lots of books. In that case, the “Yes – Destroy” option may be better for you. The important thing is to understand the risks and costs going in, and choose the best option for your situation. 

(Welcome to the latest installment of The Path to Publishing, a series on starting a small press aimed either at the writer who wants to improve their stature or the editor who wants to run an independent publishing house. If you missed any of the prior posts, you can find them here.)

I’ve mentioned in previous articles how important it is to forge connections with booksellers. The average bookstore owner is inundated with emails and calls every day, and unless they are very extroverted (and some are — those are gems), you’ve got about a ten second window to get and keep their interest before their ears glaze over and you’re lumped in mentally with the folks calling about the student loans they never took out or the warranty on a vehicle they never owned.

What this means is every time you have an excuse to set up a welcome point of connection is an opportunity to improve the relationship. But how much is there really to talk about? That’s what this article is about: the ways you can pique a bookseller’s interest not just in your book(s) but your identity as an author/small press runner. I’m focusing on the bookstores who have already carried one’s prior works for this post (I covered cold calling new prospects last post).

Things to discuss

In general, something less than six months old is on “the frontlist”. Bookstores are eager for new material, so calling about a new title is easy. Keep this in mind when you choose your publication date. 

New release

So, first and foremost, you call a bookstore to talk about your newest release. What I usually do, after making sure the bookseller remembers me (if they don’t, I make sure “you’ve carried all of our titles so far” is in my script) is ask if they’ve got their Ingram ipage open. 8 times out of 10 they do, and 1 out of 10, they can make it open in short order. If the title is easy to spell, I give them the title; otherwise, I give them an ISBN. In other words, I cut right to the chase. Maybe the bookseller is chatty, maybe they want to swap weather stories, and that’s ideal. But even the most friendly bookseller often has a line of customers, so time is short.

Once they confirm they’ve found your book (which means they’re just a click away from adding it to their cart), I hit them up with how awesome the release is. The keywords, or a big review. Something that makes it clear they’ll want the book. 

But what do you do if your title is older than six months? At that point, it’s a “backlist” item, and stores aren’t necessarily as interested in stocking those. This is a shame since books don’t spoil, but new ones are coming out all the time. Here’s how you can make your backlist look like new to keep it on the bookstore shelves.

Older releases

I’m currently making calls regarding The Eighth Key, and I often preface the pitch for the new book with a mention that Kitra just got featured in a bookshop.org newsletter. This both makes the bookseller proud of me and reinforces their wisdom in carrying the title. If I have time, I’ll mention that Rediscovery was our best selling title for February (because of Women’s History Month) and that I Want the Stars has recently gotten a raft of great reviews. 

You can tailor this strategy to your own particular circumstances, with anything from “This book was just listed on Tor.com’s must-reads for the year!” to “This was just reviewed by XYZ Review blog!” The important thing is to reference a recommendation by somebody. It will carry more weight if it’s an entity the seller recognizes, but even if it’s a tiny one-person review blog or a quote from a particularly nice review on GoodReads (don’t mention Amazon!), it will still have more credibility than just saying, “I liked this book, you should sell it!”

It’s also good to namedrop previous releases just so they remember them. Often, they’ll have sold out. And if they have, shouldn’t they get more?

Feelies and Freebies

If all you have to offer is books, then you pretty much only have books to talk about (unless weather at your location is particularly interesting). Luckily, it’s pretty easy to make some bennies bookstores will love.

Bookplates

A bookplate is a label that goes on the inside cover of a book. It usually has some kind of artwork and is either a place for an author’s signature or for a “From the Library of “OWNER”. Your bookplates will be of the former variety — a way to let bookstores that carry your book have signed copies!

(Thank you, Read-it-Again Books in Suwannee, GA, for pretty much demanding I make bookplates. When bookstores tell you what they want, listen.)

Bookplates are great for so many reasons. They add urgency to a pitch (i.e. “I’m sending out bookplates this weekend if you’re ordering!”). They let you know how many books a bookstore is ordering . They add value for the bookstore and constitute another “touch” between you and the bookseller. When they get their bookplates in the mail, it’s a reminder that they need to order your books (if they forgot, which happens). Unused bookplates are reminders to restock (I always send a couple extra).

Sure, it’s an added cost and effort for you. You have to make the art, print the bookplates, sign them (or have the author do so), and mail them. But the cost per bookplate is pretty cheap to you, and the added value, plus the information about a bookstore’s buying habits, are worth a lot, especially if you keep track of it.

Shelf talkers

At supermarkets, featured products/products on sale are made to stand out from the rest with their own mini-displays. Bookstores do the same thing. And nothing makes your book stand out more than a nice shelf talker!

I wouldn’t recommend making your own physical shelf talkers. It’d be more expensive than printing bookplates, and they probably would get crumpled in the mail. Instead, I email .pdf shelf talkers with my order confirmation emails. The bookstores can use them or not as they wish (probably printing them out on full page labels and reusing old shelf talkers). Either way, it gives you something else to talk up, especially when the bookstore is not interested in bookplates. (Thanks to Four-Eyed Frog in Gualala, CA for this suggestion.)

And Beyond

Other topics of discussion:  If your books are doing well, consider seeing if they want to engage you for a show, either in-person or virtual. I personally have not found that events are great for business, but they are fun. You might inquire if they have a book club or subscription service; that’s often a great way to get your book spotlit. 

With these repeated “touches” to engage and keep the attention of a bookseller, chances are you’ve established a good working relationship. It won’t always be easy. Some booksellers will be rude (even ones who carry your books), some will be in a hurry, but some will be an absolute joy to talk to. That’s half the fun of publishing, making connections with like-minded literary folks. They’re part of your audience, too. One bookseller in New York thanked me effusively for having written Kitra, presses it on everyone who walks into his store, and fairly begged me to hurry up on the sequels.

It doesn’t get much better than that!

(Welcome to the latest installment of The Path to Publishing, a series on starting a small press aimed either at the writer who wants to improve their stature or the editor who wants to run an independent publishing house. If you missed any of the prior posts, you can find them here.)

In my last article in this series, I talked about how great bookstores are, and how important it is to make them part of your marketing strategy. Earlier in the series, I talked about some of things you can do to ensure you get taken more seriously by bookstores so that your call can be a successful one.

I’m on a first name basis with a thousand booksellers in the United States, and I now have an understanding of what life is like on their end of the phone. So in this article, I’m going to break down the phone experience for them to spotlight the hurdles that exist for you. They are absolutely clearable, but most don’t manage to do so. If you can do it, as we have, then you have an excellent chance of success in the physical bookstore arena!

The phone life of a bookseller

Your typical bookseller, especially in these days of pandemic, is on the phone a lot. They’re taking orders from customers. They’re handling various logistical and maintenance crises. They’re talking to the sales reps for the big publishers and distributing houses.

And then you call.

More generally, a bookseller gets lots of calls from self/small press published authors wanting to be featured in the store. This is essentially “the slush pile” for bookstores. The fact is, many booksellers are harried, busy people who just want the guaranteed sale. Their inclination is to stick to the bestsellers, especially when times are uncertain. Those are going to be the hardest to persuade. But even booksellers who genuinely want to feature authors off the beaten track often find themselves hard put to make it through the aural slush pile because most self/small press published authors are doing it all wrong.

Here’s a list of common mistakes authors/small press reps make when calling stores:

• Not doing their homework: Every bookstore has a website these days; if it’s not their on their own domain, it’s on Facebook. If you’re calling a queer-owned store with science fiction/fantasy as its focus, don’t try to sell them memoirs.

• (Everyone is trying to sell memoirs. Good luck with that.)

• Trying to sell a book that’s not distributed by Ingram/local distributor of choice: Ingram is how virtually every bookstore in the US gets its books these days. Other countries use a combination of Ingram and other distributors. If you’re hoping to buy author’s copies off of Amazon and sell them on commission, that will usually only work with stores local to the author, or if you really hit their niche perfectly.

• Referring bookstores to an Amazon page: Amazon is the enemy of independent bookstores. Booksellers hate them. Don’t ask them to buy copies off of Amazon (they won’t make money that way). Don’t ask them to leave reviews on Amazon. Don’t ask them to leave reviews on Goodreads (owned by Amazon now).

• Being unprofessional: Sales is hard. Telemarketing is even harder. Unless you’re good at it, you will quickly tax a bookseller’s patience.

• Selling a book on Ingram on less than ideal terms: standard discount for bookstores is full discount, around 42%. If you’re trying to sell a book at 5% or 20% discount, forget it. They can’t make money and they won’t take you seriously to boot. You also need to make your books returnable (note: bookstores almost never return books anyway, so that’s no big deal).

• Pricing a book too high: You may think your 500-page memoir is worth $39.95, but it won’t move at that price.

• They’re talking to the wrong person: Most bookstores have a single person who does the buying. Sometimes it’s the owner. Sometimes it’s the manager. Giving your pitch to a non-buyer can be fun, but it won’t generally get your book sold.

Now if you’ve got the book buyer, if you have a good pitch, and if you’re available on Ingram, and if you’re selling something they want, at the right price point, then you’ll have their attention. Then it all depends on their current economic situation, their interest level, whim, etc. I’m in about 60% of the bookstores that carry new science fiction and fantasy books. If you can get a 30% sales rate, you’ll be doing well.

What to Say

Getting your foot in the door for a new store is tricky, but a winning pitch will do wonders. Firstly, make sure you’re talking to the book buyer. You can either do this directly, or you can make a brief pitch and then ask if the person you’re talking to is the one who buys books. When I started, my pitch was something like this:

Hi! I’m Gideon Marcus, a Science Fiction Hugo Finalist out of San Diego. I run Journey Press, and we have a new title you’re going to want to carry. If you’ve got Ingram open, it’s called Rediscovery, Science Fiction by Women (1958-1963).

Short, sweet, to the point. If you’re not Hugo Finalist, you’re probably something. Either way, I was lucky in having a title that sold itself. That got me into hundreds of bookstores before I even got to book 2. One thing I never do is say, “How are you?” somewhere in the pitch. If you want to sound like an annoying salesperson, that’s the way to do it. Save “How are you”s for when you’re actually friends.

When I had a few more titles, the pitch became more like this:

Hi! I’m Gideon Marcus, a Science Fiction Hugo Finalist out of San Diego. I run Journey Press, and we have new titles you’re going to want to carry. If you’ve got Ingram open, I’ve got three covers to show off.

Whereupon I’d let them know about the newest one and why it was awesome and then explain why the titles on the backlist were really just as good as frontlist items (great reviews, continued good sales, etc.) It’s vital you get the bookseller to their ipage. If they see the cover, the price, and the terms, they have a chance to fall in love. This is why, by the way, you need a good cover, a competitive price, and a full discount. Otherwise, you’ll likely be out of luck.

Becoming a Regular

Remember how I said that booksellers are often on the phone talking to reps? Reps are people who are doing what you’re doing, only they represent a bigger, more established outfit. But once you’ve gotten your foot in the door (i.e. gotten a bookstore to buy your books from Ingram), you’re on your way to becoming a welcome guest rather than a cold call. After a few books, and if you’ve got a set release schedule, you can set up regular phone calls. You can email periodic press releases. You are essentially on the same level as Penguin or TOR or whomever.

Getting there is a lot of work, and beyond that, it’s a lot of prep work. But if you do your homework beforehand, if you avoid the above mistakes, if you are always pleasant, and if your writing is quality, you can make it onto bookstore shelves.

by Gideon Marcus

by Gideon Marcus

The Thousand Fan Rule

Most writers dream of making it big. Of getting on the New York Bestseller’s List or Amazon’s Top 100. Being feted across the country on big tours and appearing on late night talk shows. Getting movie deals and theme park adaptations. Getting adulation and applause from coast to coast.

I’m not going to knock that dream. I’ve got it, too.

But the odds of getting that kind of success are essentially zero. A few dozen authors at any one time ever achieve it, and there are tens of thousands of writers bucking for those scarce slots.

That’s okay — I’ve got a more attainable goal, and a more reasonable definition of success. In fact, all you need to “make it” as a writer is 1000 fans.

A fan is someone who buys and reads everything you put out. Through a mix of quality, marketing, and personal appeal, this is someone who will stick by you no matter what, eagerly looking forward to your next published work. Someone who will pay an average of, say, $2 net profit for every piece you produce.

If you have 1000 fans, that’s $2000 for everything you publish. If you publish something every month, whether a book or a short story or whatever, you’ve made $24,000. I recognize $24,000 isn’t much to live on, but it’s around minimum wage, and you’re doing what you love. And if you get more fans/increase your profit margin, then you make more money.

So that’s it! You don’t need to sell 100,000 copies of a title. You don’t need to be a household name. You just need 1000 people that you’ve sold on the quality of your work.

Getting there

Accumulating 1000 fans can still be a daunting task. After all, adding up your family and close friends, that probably maxes out at around 20. Most writers top out there and give up.

Getting to 1000 mostly depends on persistence. You don’t have to get your fans all at once, and by definition, once you’ve gotten a fan, they will stick with you. So as long as you’re always building your fanbase, you will eventually reach 1000.

Last time, I talked about a key way of meeting and securing fans: your blog. Producing interesting content on a regular schedule will get you consistent readers. And while some may balk at giving you money once you start offering works for sale, many will not. I’m not sure what the ratio of regular readers to paying fans is, but 5:1 isn’t a bad guess. So if you’ve got a blog with 2000 distinct readers, then you’ve already got 400 fans. Yay!

As you produce for-profit works, word will get around either by direct recommendation or reviews, and people will become your fans that way. You’ll know you’ve hit one of the milestones of your career when folks you’ve never talked to are raving about your books. When I first heard that book clubs were choosing Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958-1963) as their read-of-the-month, I was overjoyed (and of course, I still am!)

Beach Town Books in San Clemente, CA

Bookstores as Superfans

Most writers don’t ever sell their books at bookstores, instead remaining exclusively available online. There are a lot of reasons for this. One is that fully half of the physical books sold every year are done through Amazon. Let’s face it — if you know what you want, and you’re in a hurry, sure…Amazon is great (though you might consider the newly created Bookshop.org — same titles, often cheaper, and proceeds go to bookstores, not Amazon. Plus, the people who run Bookshop are super nice).

Another is barrier to entry. You have to check off a lot of boxes to have a bookstore even consider carrying you, things like having a distributor, an ISBN number, and some degree of respectability. I talk about these issues in Part Two of this series.

Unless you invest the time, money, and energy into checking off these boxes, you’ll never get into bookstores. But it’s totally worth it. Here’s why.

Once you’ve convinced a bookstore to buy your book, they generally don’t buy just one copy. I mean, they might start with one, but once they sell it, they’ll buy another — because they know they’ve got something that sells!

Plus, a bookstore that knows your stuff sells will generally want more of your books. So bookstores are fans. Fans that buy multiple copies of everything (or at least everything of book length) that you put out.

It doesn’t stop there. Remember that bookstores are selling your books to actual people. If these readers like your work, they might become fans, purchasing more than just what’s available at bookstores (if you offer such.)

Bookstores are your Superfans.

Artifact in Encinitas, CA

But aren’t Bookstores Dying?

No.

There is a myth that bookstores are dying, thanks to Amazon and (more recently) COVID. It’s not true. While COVID has impacted a lot of stores, just as it has hit a lot of retail sectors, bookstores are, by and large, surviving. Some are even thriving. COVID has mostly just paused the establishment of new stores. I’d say maybe 5% have gone/will go out of business. And it will probably be over by next summer.

As for Amazon, that has never been the bane of the independent bookstore. Rather, it’s been the bane of big box bookstores, which had been the biggest competitor of the independent bookstore. Over the last decade, the number of independent bookstores has grown by more than 50%.

That’s because bookstores are awesome. They smell like books, they often have comfy seating and coffee, all of their wares are attractively displayed so it’s like walking into a public library, except you can own the books if you want them. The people who run them know their titles and can recommend ones you’ll like.

Sometimes there are cats.

The Book Bin in Corvallis, OR

Bookstores are the literary hubs of your community. They have author events, themed displays, book clubs, coffee klatches. Forget Starbucks — your local bookstore is the “third place” made just for you and people like you.

To some degree, Barnes and Noble offers that, too, but since they were bought out in 2018, they’ve closed several stores, centralized their frontlist (new title) buying, and reduced title diversity. If you want that friendly neighborhood bookstore experience, local bookstores deliver it better than B&N, and they carry a more diverse selection.

Like your books.

Florey’s Book Co. in Pacifica, CA

Getting there: Bookstore edition

Right now, Journey Press titles are in more than 500 bookstores across the country. That means, in any state in the Union, a person could walk into their favorite local spot, see Kitra or I Want the Stars on a shelf, and decide to take it home with them. There’s a nonzero chance that reader will turn into a fan, whether of me, or Tom Purdom, or Journey Press…or all three.

It’s essentially advertising I don’t have to pay for. In fact, the bookstores are paying me!

I didn’t build my nationwide network of stores by snapping my fingers. It took a year of hard, persistent work, just like the accumulation of any fans. But if you’re willing to put in the hours, contact the stores, make friends of booksellers, it is worth your time.

by Gideon Marcus

A Cautionary Note

Last time in the series, I took a step back from the nuts and bolts of publishing and talked about the time you’ll need to dedicate to writing just to produce your first salable book. Becoming an author is hard, or everyone would do it (not just talk about doing it). Or, as one writer friend put it:

“I feel that many of us have this ambition and glamourise the lifestyle of being ‘an author’ without appreciating how much of ourselves we need to invest into the process. Also, how much of ourselves we are able to give, determines how long this will take. “

So if you’re coming into this series with starry eyes and your very first, probably not seriously edited book, you’ll definitely want to take a look at Part 4 of this series before you go on.

But let’s say you have paid your dues, sweated blood, etc. and you’ve got a bonafide actual decent book. It’s been edited by a professional, or at least someone of professional quality. You’ve circulated it amongst discerning readers, and they all love it. It’s free from embarrassing spelling and grammar mistakes. You’ve decided not to go the traditional publishing route for all the reasons I discussed in part one of this series. Now what do you do?

Getting lost online

Whether you decide to self publish, create your own small press, or go for a traditional publishing route, you’ve got to build an audience. If you stick your book on Amazon or other distributor, no one will find it buried deep under millions of other titles. People need to find out about your book. That takes marketing. Presumably, you don’t have the thousands of dollars required for an ad campaign on Facebook or Amazon, which is what it takes to get your book ranked above all the other authors and publishers pumping money into ads.

That’s all right, you think. Social media is free! Just set up accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and folks will beat a path to your door.

This generally won’t work.

Take your average Twitter member of the #writingcommunity. They’ve generally got a slightly larger following than followed count, promote their self-pub book in half their posts and make vain attempts at interaction in the other half. Their tweets are riddled with hashtags. Sometimes their posts are relentlessly hopeful, announcing their 436th query submission or the fifth sequel in a series no one has read; other times, they are filled with despair: a savage rejection (or more commonly, no answer from an agent/publisher at all), or a plaintive wondering if all this tweeting will ever result in a single sale.

Probably not. The writers who follow each other usually don’t buy each other’s stuff. If they did, the #writingcommunity would be a lot more successful than it is. So if most of your followers are just other hopeful writers, who followed you in the hope you’d follow them back to buy their stuff, you’re not going to get much action.

Instead of social media being where your presence is, social media needs to be an extension of your presence. And your presence does not begin and end with your book. It begins with you.

Selling yourself

I’m going to start with a cynical-sounding statement: Assuming a basic minimum threshold of quality, people don’t buy books because they’re good. They buy them because they were told to, or because they personally like the author.

At any given moment, a reader has millions of books to choose from, thousands of which were written this year. Even if they’re very picky about genre and style, said reader probably has more titles available than they have time to read. If your book is just another in a long list, even if it’s great and well pitched, it’ll get lost in the shuffle.

So you need to acquire fans, folks who have a reason like you and thus want to support you and read your stuff.

You need to establish a presence.

The best way I’ve found to do this is to blog. Not necessarily a book-related blog, or one on how to sell books or about how your writing is going. Just something you put consistent free content into. What do you write about? Anything you’re passionate about! The passion is the key. That energy is contagious and will get fans and friends. Plus, if it’s not something you’re really into, you will run out of steam.

As long as you can write decently well (see the last article), and as long as you keep it up, you will amass an audience. A few examples:

• I started Galactic Journey in 2013, writing about the late 1950s in science fiction magazines and space shots. It made sense: my wife had requested story recommendations, and I was already a space historian with an expertise in the era. Over time, the site blew up and gave me the fanbase and prestige to make trying to market books not completely ludicrous.
  

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• My friend, David Portree, is also a space historian writing on the what-ifs of spaceflight. He’s done work for big outlets, but he also has maintained a spaceflight blog in one form or another (currently No Shortage of Dreams”) for more than a decade. He now has a huge following on Twitter, a lot of loyal fans, and he’s about to start writing books. You can bet they’ll do well.
  

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• Cora Buhlert, who runs Pegasus Pulp Press, has been selling her fiction for several years. But long before that, she’d already become an esteemed name in the science fiction community. She still is — last year she got her first Hugo nomination in the category of best Fan Writer! Her case is interesting in that none of her books is, by itself, an outstanding seller, but in aggregate, she’s moved a lot of titles. And books don’t spoil — every new fan she makes is another person who might buy five or ten or twenty books in the back catalog.

The Rewards of Fame

Aside from amassing a fanbase, there are two other big reasons why producing consistent free output is important. For one thing, all writing is useful, helping you to hone your skills. Heck, someone might spot your work and offer you a job — it happened to me after I’d written several wargame reviews on Board Game Geek.

The other reason is it’s a heck of a lot easier to break into the bookstore market if you’re somebody. Whether you go the small press route or simply self-publish, you’ll have a lot more credibility if you can call up a bookseller with some sort of prestige on your c.v. you can lead with.

But bottom line, you build up a presence because, in the end, you’re selling you. People will buy your books because they like you and want to support what you’re doing. That they get an amazing read in the process is a bonus.

That, of course, is why the quality of your books need to be high — goodwill only goes so far. But if you write great books and have enough fans who read them, then they will recommend them to others (tell them to buy them), and the whole thing will snowball.

Things to Come

Next time, I’ll be talking about bookstores: why I love them, how they’ve been essential to the success of Journey Press, and why you should consider them as a significant avenue for distributing your works.

See you then!

by Gideon Marcus

When I started this series, it was with the assumption that my audience would already be experienced writers. Starting a small press is definitely not what you do near the start of your writing career. I was lulled by the activity of the #writingcommunity — with all the talk of querying and #pitmad and submissions; it seemed like there were tens of of thousands of folks right on the edge of success who just needed that break to make it.

I’ve since befriended many folks in this community and I’ve come to a startling realization:

Most of you are not ready to publish a book, much less start a small press to market and distribute it.

This is how the timeline usually goes:

• 1) Aspiring writer with stars in their eyes wants to give up their day job and Make It as an author.
• 2) They pour their heart into a novel, often during NaNo because that’s What You Do.
• 3a) They throw it up on Amazon, often unedited (sometimes because they don’t feel the need, often because they can’t find a good editor)and/or
• 3b) They submit half-baked queries to agents/post half-baked #pitmad tweets.With the result that
• 4a) They sell three copies of their books to family membersand/or
• 4b) Get no answer to their queries (never mind an agent actually writing back).
• 5) Hopes dashed, they give up. The End.

Is this you? I’m glad you’re here. Was this you? You’re probably nodding your head sagely, perhaps wincing in empathy.

So if the above timeline is a recipe for failure, what is the recipe for success?

You Have to Pay Your Dues

Our 16-year olddaughter is a wunderkind. She is an accomplished illustrator, a talented singer/songwriter, a fine dancer, and a good human being. Her friends often exclaim, “You’re so talented. It’s not fair.”

NONE of those things happened without years and years of effort. All skills take time and sweat to develop. Sure, some folks have advantages: wealth, perfect pitch, loving families, an innate sense of rhythm. But no one develops into a good artist, a talented singer, or a compelling writer without a whole lot of effort.

Take me, for example. I can whip out a non-fiction essay in no time. Plots fly out of my head endlessly. If I sit down at the keyboard, I’ll have my 500 word daily limit for fiction done in 30-60 minutes.

I’m so talented, it’s not fair, right?

I’ve been a published nonfiction author for 15 years, and I’ve been putting out a dozen articles a month for seven. It’s muscle memory now, but it didn’t start that way. I look at the articles I wrote for the newspaper near the start of my career, and I cringe (though they were good enough; people liked them and I got paid). Heck, I go back over old Journey articles and I cringe! Luckily, I can go back and edit those.

As for fiction, I’ve been writing science fiction since I was 14. I co-wrote my first fantasy novel when I was 22…and garnered an impressive number of rejections. I started writing short stories in earnest in 2015, and I didn’t get published until 2018, didn’t make my first pro-rates magazine sale until 2020. Five years.

Five years of first getting form rejections, then custom rejections, then making it onto the short list, and finally getting into print.

I’ve got lots of friends, very good writers, who spent the better part of a decade trying to get into Fantasy and Science Fiction before finally succeeding. I still haven’t and may never — I’ve since moved away from magazine sales now that I have my own press.

As for my success with Journey Press, that didn’t come out of nowhere. It started with Galactic Journey, which started from zero. The first year and a half of its existence, I was happy to get 30 hits in a day. It took consistency, persistence, and the quality of writing I’d learned from eight years as a professional nonfiction writer to grow the Journey into a thrice Hugo-nominated outlet. Getting recognition from some major names helped. (James Davis Nicoll and Charlie Jane Anders: thanks, you two. I won’t ever forget it.) But that recognition wouldn’t have come, like a lightning bolt from the blue, if I hadn’t been creating something they felt was worth their time.

If you want to become a concert pianist, you need to play a lot of scales. If you want to become a professional artist, you need to draw a lot of circles. And the greatest writers all say the same thing: if you want to be a writer, you have to write a lot of stories. So if you’re trying to hawk your very first novel, which also happens to be the first thing you’ve ever really written, and you haven’t paid your dues…

Well, get ready for three sales on Amazon and/or a lot of radio silence from agents.

You need an Editor

I’ve written thousands and thousands of pieces in my life. I compose almost as effortlessly as breathing.

I always have an editor go over my work. Sometimes several editors. You should too.

Here’s why:

When you have an audience of one, you know exactly where your characters are, their motivations, their traits. You’ve got a clear idea of the universe. You know what you’re trying to say. Until someone else reviews what you’ve written, you don’t know if someone else knows what you’re trying to say.

So for anything you want to publish, and especially stuff you expect to get paid for, you need an editor. And not just any editor. You need, at the very least, an experienced writer to bounce your ideas off of. Otherwise, the best you’ll get out of them is a vague, “I liked it!” or a “It needs something, but I don’t know what.”

It may be tough finding the editor that works for you, someone who 1) you can work with, 2) offers good advice, and 3) is affordable. I’m still reeling from the loss of one of my favorite editors, who is coping with a chronic illness. But when you find the right editor, your work will ascend to the next level.

Finding the experienced editor (or several) is the first hurdle. The second is your ego.

No one likes to be told that their magnum opus doesn’t work. No one likes to spend months pouring themselves onto a page only to have to rewrite the whole damned thing.

Let me tell you something: when starting out, you will spend more of your life in editing than writing. If that bugs you, you’re in the wrong business.

Sure, eventually you’ll get good enough that you can work out a lot of your bugs prior to the editing process, but that first book? It’ll go through the wringer.

Kitra, for example, essentially went through four drafts until it was good enough for the public. It’s doing pretty well. Folks like it. If I’d released any of the earlier drafts?

Three sales on Amazon.

Setting expectations

Most authors don’t reveal their sales numbers, either because they don’t know them (somehow, publishing houses always seem to be behind in their reporting and opaque about things) or because they don’t want to share. Those that do share their numbers skew expectations — 30,000 sales in a year for a bad book? Wow! This Amazon thing really works!

I’ll happily share my numbers. Before COVID, 200 sales a month of a title was standard. This summer, I was lucky if I sold 70, though things are on the upswing again.

200 sales a month is both a respectable number (the average sales for a book is 250 for its lifetime) and a tiny number (compared to 30,000 per year). That it’s at all respectable is the result of years of working to produce a good product and months of work promoting said product. That it’s tiny reflects that I’m at the beginning of my professional career. I have confidence that if I stick with it, once the crisis fades I’ll be back into happy numbers now that I’ve built my bookstore network and my reputation, but it’s a slog right now.

So take my advice for what it’s worth. I’m not wildly successful, but I have gotten some success. Perhaps my being at this intermediate stage makes my advice particularly relevant to you, who is presumably earlier on in the process. Or perhaps you only want to take the advice of a superstar. Up to you; I suspect they will have similar things to say, if they remember this stage in their development.

What’s Next

This ended up being a lot of tough love. Let me soften the blow a little bit. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably already completed something, even if it’s not ready for prime time. Congratulations — most people don’t even get that far. If I had a dollar for every person who told me they had a story they wanted to tell if they could just find the time, I wouldn’t need to write for a living.

I’m not done with my suggestions, not by a long shot, but I don’t want this article to get too long, I will save talking about the difficulty of making even an objectively good book a success for next week. Suffice it to say for now that it’s a rough gantlet you’ll have to run, and you probably won’t make it, at least not out of the gate. I’ll be discussing that process in the next post.

But before you even think about the query or self-publishing (and definitely the small press!) options, you need to have a good book. That takes time in service, and it takes editing.

You can do it. Just know what you’re getting into.

by Gideon Marcus

If you’re here, it means you’ve decided that you want to start your own publishing company or are at least interested in applying the lessons I’ve learned in the process of running Journey Press to your career. You’ve already learned why you might want to do it (boiled down: frustration with the “traditional” process) and how to get your books before the eyes of readers.

Today, let’s talk about the actual infrastructure of your business. It’s important to establish a good, expandable framework from the beginning, one that can grow as you grow. While it means extra work and costs up front, in the end, you’ll save a lot of time.

Name and Logo

If you’re starting your own press, your press needs to have a name and some kind of identifying image. These will end up on your book spines, on your website, your stationery. While logos can be changed, names are harder once they’re established.

Think hard about your press name. I chose Journey Press both for its clear connection to Galactic Journey (my three times Hugo-nominated web presence), because it’s easy to say, and because it sounds reasonably professional. I can’t imagine having to call bookstores and introducing myself as something silly like “Recalcitrant Panda Productions.” I know such names are in vogue, and you can do whatever you want, but goofy names are both difficult to remember and smack of amateurism.

At the same time, keep in mind that you’ll want to establish a web presence and register the name in as many places as possible. There are sites which can tell you if a chosen name is available across a number of platforms. However, even if the name you want is unavailable, sometimes there are workarounds. I’ll discuss this further in the Web Presence section below.

As for logo, our avatar is the Pioneer 1 space probe, and a wonderful artist did a great adaptation for us. Again, this is a connection to Galactic Journey. I also really like Pioneer 1.

We also have a simple comet-based logo we use for spines and emails. Any good marketer will tell you to keep your brands consistent and not have multiple logos. Oh well!

Legal Structure

You do not need a formal entity to do business as a writer, or even as a small press. We made the decision early on to establish an LLC for a couple of reasons. For one, we’re preparing for the future. It’s best business practice to have a business separate from its individual owners, not just for liability reasons (insulating you from potential suits), but also for continuity. You’re creating something that has value that you may want to sell some day or hand off to someone else. The less it’s attached to you, the better.

Also, having a separate business means you can apply for lines of credit in the business’ name. Some credit cards offer competitive cash back rates, hotel or airline points, or other perks, so if you can afford to pay it off each month, an additional card to pay your business expenses can offer real benefits. But this only works if you’re not planning on carrying a balance and paying interest, and if you can get greater value from the benefits than the annual fee. If you aren’t confident about those two things, it’s better not to play the game at all.

I can’t offer a primer on how to form your own entity; every state has its own procedures and costs. That said, states make it easy to establish entities — they want your money, after all! A quick internet search will get you going. Keep in mind that you don’t have to establish the LLC in your own state. In fact, it’s often desirable to look for a state that has no yearly fees and low or no corporate taxes. We chose California for personal reasons, but California charges $800 per year to keep your LLC open, so it isn’t great if you’re an entrepreneur working on a shoestring. A little research in this area can go a long way.

Accounting

I cannot stress the importance of this. Maybe you hate math. Maybe numbers terrify you. The fact is, if you’re making your own money, you need to keep track of it. For taxes, for tracking the success of your efforts, for ensuring the proper payment of any other writers you may be publishing, for making sure you haven’t missed anything.

We’ve used a couple of bookkeeping programs for our business, Xero and Quickbooks. Both are online applications these days. Janice, our accountant, greatly prefers Xero — it’s simpler, more streamlined and intuitive. Quickbooks has been around a long time and tries to be all things to all people, and it probably has features you don’t need. In the end, either will do the job.

If nothing else, importing all your bank transactions into your accounting software, making sure your account total matches your bank statement, and categorizing your transactions can make a huge difference for the future of your business. Having all of your information in your accounting software means you can easily make reports on the profitability of your books. If you’ve got other writers you’re publishing, it’s easy to figure out what you owe them. Come tax time, you’ll have no trouble giving the IRS and state authorities what they want, and you’ll have the data to back you up if they ever come auditing.

Speaking of taxes, business expenses are deductible. Are you glad you’re keeping track of them in your accounting software?

Bank Account

Hand in hand with business accounting is getting a business bank account. It’s much easier to track income and expenses when they aren’t commingled with everything else your personal finances. Plus, there are often benefits associated with opening business accounts, like cash bonuses or frequent flier miles, if you can meet certain minimum requirements.

Contracts

In the course of your business, you will inevitably have to deal with contracts. I’m not talking about the contracts you’ll see when working with Amazon or Ingram. I mean the ones you’ll be drafting for use with your contractor. Some folks will work without them, but they’re always good to have.

Some examples of people you’ll be dealing with where contracts are desirable/necessary:

• Editors
• Cover designers
• Illustrators
• Authors (publishing contracts)
• Foreword/introduction writers

While there are templates online, you really want to consult with an attorney, particularly for publishing contracts. I’ve taken a year of contract law, and I was senior law clerk at a firm for several years, and I still consulted a professional.

Yes, it costs money, but you’re setting yourself up for the future. Once you’ve got your base contract, you can use it any number of times.

As for what rates you should pay or what terms make sense for contracts, that’s its own article, which I’ll eventually get to.

Web Presence

If you want people to know about your books, they have to be able to find you. That means a website and social media. How you use them will be the subject of a whole other article, but in terms of infrastructure, you want to get your online real estate as soon as possible.

Website

While you can avail yourself of free website providers like Blogger or Dreamwidth, you really want your own domain, preferably with a .com ending. It’s just way more impressive and memorable than “someindepedentpress.blogspot.com”

Of course, we didn’t take a .com, and that was dictated by a number of circumstances. Journeypress was already taken for most endings, and we didn’t want to use .org, which suggests a non-profitmaking organization. Ultimately, because of the popularity of Galactic Journey, we decided on galacticjourney.press — then, in one breath at conventions and such, we could say, “Come to the Journey at galacticjourney.org and to Journey Press at galacticjourney.press”

Using a .press domain has been mostly fine. The only downsides have been booksellers occasionally forgetting that it exists and putting in .com by accident, and I’ve found mail can take a little longer to receive (Journey Press emails to editor @ galacticjourney.press are actually rerouted gmail addresses).

Social Media

The more the merrier, but you’ll find certain ones are better for different things. We”ve found that the sweet spot between professionalism and engagement is Twitter. Journey Press has a Facebook account as well, but it’s much less trafficed and harder to expand its audience. Some folks like using Instagram for business, and even Pintrest and Tumblr. Whatever works — just get your name quickly, or a memorable alternative. And it’s best if you have the same name across all platforms.

Physical Infrastructure

Don’t neglect the tangible items you’ll need for your business. They include:

An office

This can be a 3’x3′ space in your bedroom or a rented space downtown, but it’s where you keep all your business-related stuff handy. The more organized you are, the faster operations will run. Also, dedicated space can be tax deductible.

The Journey Press office is a 10’x15′ room in our house with a lovely bay window looking out on our backyard. Janice and I both have adjustable standing desks. We don’t deduct the space because we also use it for leisure.

A filing cabinet

You’ll want a place to store those contracts and other legal documents. Trust me — you do not want to have to dig for these things, or worse, not be able to find them at all.

A printer

A workhorse black and white printer is invaluable for printing drafts, contracts, bookplates, you name it. I recommend HP Laserjets — we have a 4200.

A good color inkjet is useful, too, but in my experience, the cartridges are expensive and never full when you need them.

A scanner

Contracts need to be signed. Sometimes you can do it electronically, but often contractees (and organizations) want wet signatures. So a decent scanner is useful.

Where next?

With your infrastructure in place and distribution channels chosen (and books written, of course!) you’ll next need to find ways to process sales. We’ll be talking about that in the next installment.

Thanks for tuning in!

Welcome back to “The Path to Publishing,” a series detailing all that we’ve learned in the last two years of running a small press. If you missed installment one, where we discussed our disenchantment with the traditional publishing process and why we founded our own press, you can find it here.

There are a million directions we could go from that decision. Publishing is a multi-faceted business involving:

• Creation of content (i.e. writing books)
• Formatting of content for sale
• Scheduling of releases
• Distribution (getting your books in the hands of readers)
• Sales mechanics (setting up the ability to get money from readers — overlaps with Distribution)
• Marketing (getting readers to want to read your books)
• Outreach (for reviews, to bookstores, to collaborators)
• Accounting
• Infrastructure (web presence, social media, business structure, etc. — overlaps with all of the above)

This may sound counterintuitive, but I’m going to start by talking about distribution. How you choose to distribute your books will have a strong influence on how you handle all the other facets including infrastructure and even the types of titles you’ll want to release. Plus, if you’re reading this, you probably have some idea how to create content (or, if you’re primarily an editor/manager type, where to get it). But don’t worry; there will be articles on all of these subjects, and probably multiples for some of the more involved ones.

So let’s talk distribution, the way a book gets from your completed, edited manuscript to a physical or electronic work in a reader’s hands.

(please note that this series is focused toward folks who live in the United States of America; the game is different in other parts of the world).

Electronic Books

The easiest and cheapest way to produce a book is electronically. There’s no paper involved. Delivery is instant. Logistics are dead simple. If you are planning to publish titles, either as a self-publisher or as a small press, you must have an avenue for e-books.

With e-books, you want as a wide distribution as possible. Readers go to lots of places to find books, so the more distributors you’re registered with, the more likely you are not to miss a sale. In order of importance, the distributors you want to list your book with are:

Your own site

No, I didn’t start with Amazon. They’re next.

The fact is, every single distribution site is going to take some kind of commission for listing your book with them. The only one that won’t is your own site. There, you only have to worry about processing fees (credit cards take a small percentage of every transaction) and the cost of your payment processor (we use e-junkie, which costs $4 a month).

In return, you get every penny of the cover price of your book.

In our experience, your own site is where you’ll get the majority of e-book sales from people you know personally. That first launch surge from your biggest fans will be a nice influx of uncut sales.

Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing

Most self publishing authors begin and end with Amazon. It’s easily the biggest distributor of e-books, and they dominate google results when people look for your titles. Uploading a title is easy and you don’t have to worry about payment processing.

Normally, you’ll receive 70% of the ebook sales price for USA-based sales, and a smaller cut for overseas sales. If you don’t mind being an Amazon-only shop (using KDP-Select), they offer certain additional benefits (higher royalties for overseas sales, a chance to be part of their ‘lending program’, etc). If you genuinely have no interest in selling anywhere but on Amazon, go ahead and enroll your book in the program. Beware, though – if Amazon catches you selling through your own site or others, they may ban you. And it may be harder getting out of the program than it was getting in.

Remember that you keep 100% of the money from e-books you sell from your own site, and the commissions tend to be higher on non-Amazon sites. And as big as Amazon is, there are a lot of non-Amazon sites, and they are becoming more and more popular, especially as folks get tired of Bezos’ shady employment practices.

Needless to say, we chose not to enroll in the program.

Ingram Spark

The other big player in the e-book distribution world is also the biggest American player in the physical book distribution world. Thus, if you’re going anywhere besides Amazon, you’ll want an Ingram account. E-books uploaded to Ingram become autopopulated to a lot of other outlets, including Barnes and Noble and Kobo, the latter search engine being used by a lot of independent bookstores. For a little more, you can also get your titles populated to iBooks (and even to Amazon, but that is kind of redundant since you’ll want an Amazon account anyway).

Note: Ingram charges fees every time you want to modify your titles, and you will modify them a lot. Sometimes the cover is wrong. There are always typos. Those fees can be terrifying. However, we have always found promotion codes that waive the fees. I’m pretty sure Ingram just keeps the fees as a way to make a quick buck from suckers. The lack of ethicality bugs me, but now that we’ve got the workaround, it’s only a minor irritation.

Small Fry

There are lots of other places you can host a book with, such as DriveThruFiction, SmashWords, Draft2Digital, and StreetLib. The latter ones cater specifically to the self-publisher who doesn’t have a formatter and just wants to get a book out there. You can also sign up direct with Kobo and Barnes and Noble, but there’s no need if you go with Ingram.

We haven’t really bothered with the small fry — they aren’t worth the time for us in part because we’re so much more oriented toward physical books. But if you’re going primarily/exclusively e-book, then widening your potential audience by maximizing distribution can work for you. Especially if you don’t want to go Amazon exclusive.

Physical Books

With all of the advantages of e-books, why would anyone in our modern day read a physical book, much less produce one?

Turns out that, given a chance, the majority of folks prefer to read physical copies of books. E-books are convenient, and they don’t take up space, but physical books are easier on the eyes and to navigate. Plus, physical books have that book smell. There’s a reason that independent bookstores have been on the rise for a decade now (though COVID has definitely put a crimp in their success).

If you live in the United States, there are basically three ways to get books into the hands of readers.

Your own production

This is the analog to your own website. You find a printer to produce a run of books — 250, 500, 1000, 10,000. Then you contract with a physical distributor to get those books into bookstores. They’ll warehouse the books for you, too. This is the way all publishers did things until the 2000s.

We don’t do this.

Don’t get me wrong. We might do this some day. There’s a certain sales volume you have to reach to make it worthwhile, to get the economy of scale of printing that maximizes return on each copy sold. Call it 500 copies of an individual title per week. We’re not quite there yet.

There are downsides: you lose a lot of flexibility with this model, and you run the risk of ending up with hundreds or thousands of books in your inventory that don’t sell.

Moreover, putting your distribution in the hands of a distributor is necessarily going to lose you sales. No one can sell books as well as you, and a distributor doesn’t just sell your books — they sell everyone else’s books, too.

On the other hand, being represented by a “real” distributor can open certain doors for you. More on that later. So in the end, it’s a decision worth considering when you get big enough, but I definitely wouldn’t start out this way.

Amazon

Amazon’s Createspace allows you to produce printed copies of books “on demand.” It means they get listed on Amazon’s website, folks can order them, and Amazon will print a bespoke copy and ship it to the reader. They’ll even give you an ISBN (book identification number), although this number will list the publisher as “Independent Publisher” and will only work with Amazon. Still, pretty cool!

Amazon offers an “Expanded Distribution Option” that supposedly allows retail stores and libraries to order your books, effectively making Amazon your distributor. If you have any interest in selling to bookstores, you do not want to choose this option. Expanded Distribution locks you into Amazon just like the KDP Select e-book option does. And no independent bookseller actually wants to work with Amazon. Plus, if you select the Expanded Distribution Option, it’s hard to extricate yourself.

Just don’t do it.

What you can use Amazon for is ordering larger numbers of “Author Copies.” These are books Amazon will produce for you at much lower than the cover price, though still higher than if you got a dedicated print company to make them for you.

For example, we can get copies of our $14.99 Rediscovery for around $5 apiece. We will often buy a box of twenty copies or so to hand-sell at shows. The profit margin is quite nice.

Some bookstores that don’t work with a distributor (there aren’t many, but they do exist, particularly stores focused on used titles), and you can ship these Author Copies to such stores directly. Generally, we’ll accept payment from the bookstores via PayPal at 40% off the cover price. So for Rediscovery, it means we buy the book for $5, sell it for $9 (making $4) and the bookstore then sells the title for $15, making $6.

Essentially, we, facilitated by Amazon, are our own distributor. The profit margins are good, better than we could get with a conventional distributor (see below), but it’s cumbersome. So we only do it for a handful of the stores we work with, and only for orders of a certain minimum number of books.

Ingram Spark

This is the biggie. If you want to get your book into bookstores, you have to get an Ingram Spark account, period. Ingram Spark bought Lightning Source, a print on demand publisher, which means they’re the only one-stop publisher/distributor in the U.S. They are also the one distributor virtually every bookstore will have access to.

Quick detour. Do you even want to sell to bookstores?

Maybe you don’t. Maybe you are satisfied with e-book sales and don’t want the hassle. Maybe you want your print books available, but listing them with Amazon is good enough for you. All I can do is tell you why we sell to bookstores.

There are around 1200 independent bookstores in the United States that sell new books. When we started Journey Press, we did not expect to get a lot of bookstore sales. After all, we were a brand new publishing house competing with the big companies. Who would want to take a chance on us?

Then we announced the impending release of Rediscovery, and a nice fellow at Horizon Books expressed his desire to stock the book. Our first instinct was to (as described above) ship him some Author’s Copies on a commission basis.

We quickly realized that this was not scalable to other stores in any practical sense. Most stores don’t do commission basis sales, it smacks of amateurism, and it’s a pain to micromanage your distribution.

On the other hand, virtually all of those 1200 independent bookstores have an account with Ingram and often have the purchasing portal (“i-page”) open on their computer. If your titles are available via Ingram, you are available to these stores.

Here’s what your title looks like to a bookseller on i-page:

And here’s the thing. If you sell your books to bookstores, and they sell their copies, chances are they will order more books. That’s how it works, right? If you have something that sells, you want to keep selling it. Once you’ve got a bookstore as a customer, you now have somewhat guaranteed repeat sales.

So then the question becomes “Can you get bookstores to buy your books?”

That’s worth a whole other article, and I promise you’ll get it, but suffice it to say, there are currently 500 bookstores that carry our titles. If all of these bookstores sell just one book a week, that’s more than 2000 sales a month. For a Random House or a Penguin, that’s not much. For a small press or an individual, that’s pretty darned good.

Note: 80% of our book sales are to bookstores.

All right, back to Ingram. Working with Ingram for physical sales is pretty much the same as with e-books. You upload your title, and it becomes available. Moreover, it autopopulates to Bookshop.org, which is pretty much the anti-Amazon. Every sale made through Bookshop supports independent bookstores who are part of their network. Also, individual bookstores have their own Bookshop digital storefronts.

Bookshop came about just in time for the pandemic, and it saved the bacon of many a bookstore during the period they couldn’t have their doors open. We like them.

Ingram also produces author copies at roughly the same price and quality as Amazon. We tend to buy from Amazon because it’s slightly more convenient, but you could conceivably have a completely non-Amazon strategy, if your inclinations are to do so.

To Bowker or not to Bowker

Ingram, like Amazon, will give you an ISBN number for your physical book. Like Amazon, the ISBN will only work for Ingram, so if you list on both, you’ll be juggling two different ISBNs for the same book: the Amazon version and the Ingram version. And as with Amazon, when someone looks you up, the publisher name will be listed as “Independent Publisher.” Any bookstore will look at that, read it as “self-published,” and their eyes will glaze over. Good luck getting them to carry you.

The solution is to buy your own ISBNs. Now, Bowker literally has the monopoly on ISBNs, and as a result, they are really pricey when purchased one at a time: $125 a pop! But you can also get 1000 of them for $1500, which is only $1.50 apiece. It’s a system that definitely favors big publishers and shuts out small ones.

We bought a whole bunch – not 1000, but more than 10. It’s worth it for booksellers to see “Journey Press” when they look up our books, and we had the investment capital to do it going in. If you can’t afford to outlay that kind of cash for your first book, one possibility would be to find other authors and go in on purchasing a batch of ISBNs together, or look for a small publisher who’s purchased a batch of numbers and see if you can buy one from them directly. The only catch is that the ISBN will list whoever owns the account as the publisher and imprint. That can get complicated if a group can’t decide what to call themselves, or if there’s a falling out in such a group, or if the small publisher whose name you’re using goes under. Amazon and Ingram are potentially less hassle – but the number won’t really be ‘yours’.

Yet another decision for you to make.

An imperfect solution

If you go with Ingram Spark, know that they aren’t going to print and store your books. Like Amazon, it’s print on demand. This can cost you some bookstore sales. Every bookstore has a “primary warehouse” from which they order their Ingram titles, usually in a batch once every few days. If a book is not available in their primary, they can order from a seconday warehouse, but unless they buy 15 titles at a time (doesn’t have to all be the same book), they get hit with shipping fees. Bigger stores don’t think twice about ordering from secondaries. Smaller ones do.

Ingram Spark only produces print on demand books from a couple of their facilities, mainly the one in Tennessee. That means that, for the majority of bookstores, your titles will only be available from secondary warehouses.

Worse yet, that i-page snapshot I showed you? These numbers are lies. If you go print on demand, there are no books at the warehouses. Ingram just puts numbers in the report to give booksellers a false sense of security that if they order books, they’ll get them.

You will lose sales at some bookstores if your books aren’t available at their primary warehouse. You’ll also have a slightly tougher time making sales if a bookseller knows your titles are print on demand — there is a stigma of cheapness attached to them, even though the quality is just fine. In my experience, however, the breakage is pretty minor, say 10-20% of stores you call will turn you down for being print on demand.

It’s still worth it to go this route rather than printing your own run and getting a dedicated distributor, particularly early on. Again, the flexibility can’t be beat, and you don’t have to sink thousands of dollars into producing stock.

Final thoughts

There’s sure a lot to chew over, isn’t there? Don’t be intimidated by your wealth of options. You don’t have to pursue them all, and certainly not all at once. Even if you do, it’s not so bad. Building a website is easy, signing up with Amazon and Ingram are easier still.

Just please, please, please don’t click on “Amazon Expanded Distribution.” You have been warned…

We are now nearly two years into this enterprise we call Journey Press, and there’s no sign of stopping. Along the way, we’ve learned lots of lessons, made a few mistakes, and had a rollercoaster of a ride. As a member of the #writingcommunity, I see the thousands of aspiring and current writers hustling to make their passion work for them: the traditionally published, the small press published, the self-published.

I’ve had several requests recently to share our story, so starting today, I’ll be putting out a weekly article detailing an aspect of our business and how it relates to yours. The knowledge we’ve gotten of the publishing world and how to get books into the readers’ hands is not widely available – at least, I haven’t read a lot of what you’re going to read on anyone else’s blog. You’re going to learn all our best tricks, and we’re not even going to charge for them.

After all, a rising tide floats all boats!

This first article will set the stage. How I started as a writer and what led to the decision to create my own publishing house. It may inspire some of you to do the same. Or, as you read on in the series, you may quickly determine that publishing is not for you. That’s valuable, too.

Nevertheless, I can guarantee that, even if you go the traditional publishing route or the self-publishing through Amazon, etc. route, there will be tips of value to you.

So without further ado…

In the beginning

I’ve been writing science fiction since I was 14. I turned in a piece for extra credit in math class one morning, a story about premonitions of doom being based on neurons communicating via tachyons rather than electrical impulses. As the day wound on, students kept coming up to tell me how much they enjoyed it, which confused me because how could they have read it? Turned out my teacher liked it so much, he’d read it aloud to every single subsequent class.

Lesson 1: Your audience grows one at a time, and you never know which ones will be the superspreaders of interest in your work!

The work for which I’m possibly best known is my science fiction review site, Galactic Journey. Started in 2013, it’s got a unique gimmick: we all write on the science and science fiction of 55 years ago, day by day, as if we live in the time. In other words, it not a retrospective view; it’s in the moment. We do our best to keep a then-current perspective because viewing the past in context is important, though we occasionally throw winks to the modern audience.

Folks seem to like it. The Journey’s been nominated for the Hugo Award (the Oscars of science fiction) three times running. Perhaps a few thousand people are familiar with it (based on Twitter/Facebook numbers) and it’s got a few hundred regular readers.

Small steps

In 2015, I started writing short SF stories with an eye toward publication in one of the many science fiction monthlies. After all, I covered the mags of 55 years prior, and since that was the way one broke into the business back then, that was the avenue that made the most sense to me.

It took three years to make my first sale, and five years before I made a pro-rates sale. I understand that’s a pretty common timeline. It takes time to learn how to write. I was also hampered by the fact that I didn’t and don’t read modern SF magazines; I simply don’t have time what with all the reading I have to do for The Journey. So I write whatever I feel like writing, and if it doesn’t mesh with what editors are looking for, oh well. Marie Vibbert, who is much more successful at having her stories published, has a great article on how to get into mags.

Nevertheless, some of my stories did get published, and even the stories that didn’t eventually got to the short list one place or another. As I produced, revised, and honed, I objectively became a decent writer.

Lesson 2: Persistence pays off. Don’t give up because of a savage rejection or because it seems to be taking too long to make it. Success comes in its own time, and it never comes to those who don’t do anything.

Big dream

In 2018, I wrote Kitra. It just poured out of me, 1000 words a day, until it was all done. Then I gave it to a Beta reader. It had to be rewritten. I gave it to another Beta. Another rewrite. Then to a professional editor – lots of rewriting.

Lesson 3: You always need an editor. I don’t care if you’ve published 10,000 pieces and are the most acclaimed author in the world. If no one reviews your work but you before it goes live, it’s not going to be the best it could be.

When it was done, I did all the things you’re supposed to do with a book: pitch to agents, submit to publishing houses, participate in #pitmad. Yadah yadah. I got a lot of rejections, and the one publishing house that did want it didn’t inspire confidence.

Along the way, I discovered something about publishing from new friends who had “made it.” Folks with real contracts with “real” companies.

First and foremost, they’d busted their asses to get agents. It’s what you’re supposed to do. Agents are middle-men between the author and the outlets. Ideally, they provide productive feedback on a work, offer marketing suggestions, navigate legal contracts, and open doors that otherwise would have been closed.

In reality, agents are this side of worthless.

Yes, I know that’s going to be an unpopular opinion. I don’t care. In my experience, agents are the literary equivalent of headhunters/recruiters. They don’t care about their clients, they offer negligible expertise (especially when it comes to legal contracts), and they’re only interested in “a sure thing” – someone whose writing will be broadly popular enough that it will be worth taking a cut from their profits.

“But I love my agent!” you cry. Great. You struck gold. I didn’t. Neither did my friends. What they got was rapacious publishing contracts that earned them a pittance up front, nothing on the back end, no real promotional support, and indifference (or outright hostility) from their agents when the authors had the affront to be unhappy about the result.

“But I love my publisher!” you object. Wait – does anyone actually say that? I mean, I hope folks say that about us, and some small presses have certainly earned loyalty, but the big companies? The ones that expect you to do your own promotion? That take three quarters of e-book sales even though it costs them nothing to distribute? That lack the flexibility to navigate the existential crisis that is 2020?

Phooie.

Lesson 4: Neither agents nor big-name publishers have your best interests at heart. They’re concerned about their bottom line, not yours. (And at the very least get a copyright lawyer to look over a contract before you sign it!)

Another way

In November 2018, I ran across A.J. Howells at Loscon. He told me how he’d wanted to publish a reissue of Fredric Brown’s The Office so he licensed the rights from Brown’s heir and formed his own little publishing company to do it, Makeshift Press.

I was gobsmacked. I mean, I knew that self-publishing was a thing – my friend Doug Richards (great, great guy) had made himself a millionaire using Amazon to sell his technothrillers, to the point that he didn’t take deals from traditional publishers because they’d amount to a pay cut – but making your own publishing house?

Turns out it’s actually pretty easy to do all the things you need to do to not just get your works out there, but to build a foundation that will improve the salability of your works. It’ll also allow you to publish other folks’ works (and even if you don’t care about publishing someone else’s works right now, there are reasons to buddy up). As this series goes on, I’ll tell you all the reasons why starting a small press might be the way to go for you, and how to navigate the process.

Anyway, back to November 2018. As I sat there listening to A.J. describing his journey, the wheels started turning around in my head. It made sense to me. After all, I’d been running businesses for years, and I’d spent years as a copywriter so I knew how to market. Heck! I didn’t need a publishing company to not make me any money. I could not make money all by myself!

And if things worked out, the money I did make would be all mine…

Beyond that, by 2018 I’d already established a name for myself. I’d been published. I’d gotten my first Hugo nom. I’d won the Serling Award in 2016. It seemed a natural outgrowth of Galactic Journey to make a publishing house dedicated to publishing science fiction. It made sense to call it Journey Press.

With that, we were on our way…

Things to Come

In the next installment of this series, I’ll talk about the nuts and bolts of establishing a small press. It’s not a path for everyone, but it’s not as hard as it sounds, especially if you have any experience in bookkeeping or operations. At the very least, I hope to give you the tools you need to determine whether starting a small press of your own is desirable, or even necessary, in your situation.

Until then, thanks for joining me for this series! I hope you find it useful.