Book Publishing

Options for First Time Authors

It is the dream of most first time authors to be a best selling author. Yet the sobering statistics about the book industry provide a painful reality check that the probability of achieving that goal is very low.
It is estimated that about 1 million new books are published each year worldwide. United Kingdom appears to lead with over 200,000 new titles being released each year, followed by Unites States (172,000), China (136,000) and Germany (96,000); Canada is averaging close to 20,000 new books per year. While best selling authors count their numbers sold in millions, over 90% of the new titles end up selling less than 1,000 copies. A large percentage of new titles hit the market through the self publishing route and hence lack any sizeable distribution infrastructure. Printing companies who service self publishing authors are often reluctant to do business with the larger book stores mainly because when unsold books are returned to them they are forced to absorb the printing costs.
First time authors generally have few options available to them in the publishing industry. After finishing the manuscript, the next step is to write a brief synopsis which can then be used to find a publisher. Some authors opt to get a Literary Agent to represent them to publishers. There is no guarantee that this approach will work and it could cost about $500 or more. Publishing companies with established distribution network rarely take the work of first time authors, especially if the manuscript deals with autobiography. Consequently, the next logical step is to find a printing (small scale publishing) company and proceed with the self publishing option. At this point some authors chose to engage the services of an editor (at costs ranging from $500 to $1,000) to position the manuscript to be market ready. Next the printing company will supply a formatting specialist (at a cost of about $500) to prepare the manuscript to be print ready. Decision at this point can be costly. Some printing companies may advise the author to print 1,000 to 2,000 copies of their book right at the start in order to reduce the printing costs by approximately 50%. For an average book of 6,000 to 8,000 words the printing may still cost up to $5 per copy, hence requiring the author to invest $5,000 to $10,000. A self publishing author without a large scale distribution network is likely to sell about 500 books during the first two years. Many authors who have taken this route freely admit that they still have boxes of their book in the basement!
Another option for a first time author is to print initially 200 copies at a higher cost such as $10 each (investment is reduced to $2,000), then sell each book for $20 and recover the investment during the first year with a modest amount of profit. Following that, the printing costs of 100 copies each time can be covered from the profits of previous batches. This approach provides an efficient option for “testing” the market and if the sales start to increase then the author can start printing larges batches to reduce costs. I used this option with an Ottawa publishing company (Baico Publishing www.baico.ca ) and have found it highly cost effective.
A relatively new phenomenon that is available to authors is to make the manuscript available as eBook through a company that is linked to major international book sellers. I explored this option with www.lightningsource.com and my first book “Dare to Take the Next Step – Adventures of a Refugee” is now included in the catalogues of several major eBook distribution companies (e.g. website: http://www.booksonboard.com/index.html Search: Hegyi). This option requires a relatively small amount of investment (less than $100), the eBook can then be purchased online for less than $10 and still yielding the author approximately $4 per book.