Morris Rosenthal

August is vacation month in publishing, so I thought I go for a New York City type mail-it-in vacation post.

1) Form a Team

Forming a team is a good way to fail in almost any business endeavor, but in self publishing, it's failure by definition. The "self" part of self publishing isn't a marketing gimmick, it's really about you being the publisher. If you put together a team of coaches and advisers and try to come to a consensus, you've got the business model for a government grant or a new academic department, not a publishing business.

2) Write a Memoir

I'd have to guess that more people get involved in self publishing because they've written a memoir that New York isn't interested in publishing than for any other reason. It's a really, really bad reason to start a publishing business, but it's not a bad reason to self publish. You just have to understand up front that memoir isn't a business model unless you are famous or infamous, and ideally, good looking as well. As I just admitted in the comments, I spent quite a bit of time translating my great grandmothers childhood memoir which was published in Hebrew.

3) Hire a New York City Editor

Do not, I repeat, do not hire an editor because she has a New York City mailing address. Even if you should chance to stumble on a good editor that way, you're only paying more to subsidize her big city living expenses and expensive taste in hats. Self publishing is not a game of inches, where the slightest misstep makes the difference between success and failure. Self publishing is a game of miles, where you either get it largely right or largely wrong. Largely right means writing a book that has an audience and establishing a marketing platform that lets you reach that audience. Largely wrong means doing anything else.

4) Invest Heavily in Hats

I'm not talking about a couple of hats to wear to trade shows or handout as thank-you gifts. I'm talking about spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on a branding effort that's meaningless:



Investing heavily in anything other than your titles and marketing your titles is a waste of money. You don't need a new desk, or a lovely in-home office, and those things aren't write-offs until you succeed in selling books.

5) Blog

New York City has finally discovered blogging as a marketing tool for authors. The reason trade publishers love the idea of authors blogging is that it doesn't cost the trade publishers a dime. Many of the quality bloggers I know in the book business have already give up blogging as a waste of time. Unless you establish a large subscription base, it really is a waste of time because it's an incredibly inefficient way to attract visitors to your website.

So, that's my top five list for self publishing mistakes, and I want you to know I didn't put any time into thinking about it. Aside from the memoir warning, I sure I'm could come up with a gross of worse mistakes, or at least a baker's dozen. But I'm too busy admiring my new hats!

Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

I never used to get the point of HAM radio, a bunch of (mainly) guys hunched over radio sets trying to make contact with foreign radio operators and sending each other postcards for proof. But I started selling my ebooks internationally this summer with E-Junkie and PayPal, and I've been amazed at how fast the countries have stacked up. I've also been amazed to find that each new country I add feels like winning a prize. I finally broke down this week and created an alphabetized list (manually, so no surprise if I got the order wrong), which is up to 28 countries:

Argentina
Australia (15)
Austria
Belgium
Bermuda
Brazil (2)
Canada (4)
Chile
Cyprus
France
Honduras
Indonesia
Ireland (4)
Israel
Italy (2)
Japan
Mexico
Malaysia (2)
Micronesia
Netherlands (3)
New Zealand
Saudi Arabia
Spain
Sri Lanka
Switzerland
Taiwan
Trinidad and Tobago
United Kingdom (24)

English is the primary language in just three or four of these countries, so there are quite a few ESL (English as a second language) or expat Anglo ebook buyers living overseas. Aside from the strange satisfaction I get out of reaching people in so many countries so quickly, thanks to the Internet, there's potentially a grain of publishing knowledge in the data.

Why should Australia, with about a third of the population of the UK, account for two thirds as many sales as the UK? For some reason, Australians are about twice as likely to buy ebooks, or at least my ebooks, than UK residents. I can think of two possible reasons. First, if Australians live further from bookstores than people in the UK, there may be a natural tendency to buy ebooks online. Obviously the population density in Australia is much lower than the UK, but I don't know how it's distributed. If most Australians live in apartment blocks in large cities, it wouldn't be the case. Second, my books aren't easy to get in Australia without paying a lot for shipping and waiting a long time. The books are available in the UK through Amazon UK and several UK distributors.

Since I'm selling without DRM, I don't have to worry about international DRM issues. When Amazon first started selling ebooks supplied by Lightning Source back way back when, I would have sworn that they initially sold them internationally, then eventually cut back to US only. It may have had to to with customer support, local laws, or issues that generation of DRM software had with international platforms. Since my paper trail on those sales stopped at the distributor, I never knew where they were selling unless somebody dropped me a note.

I've been getting more correspondence and comments on the ebook selling subject lately, and I continue to be surprised by the dichotomy in the ebook publishing business. I don't doubt that new publishers following the various formulaic approaches to getting rich selling ebooks see it as being just as ethical than opening a new restaurant or clothing store. They do their market research and purchase advertising judiciously, then if the stars line up, they make a good profit. In a sense, putting the book last isn't that different from what the large trade publishers do, but there's something about selling people copy-written ebooks full of recycled Wikipedia content and Top Ten lists that bothers me as a business model. The best of those publishers are basically shooting for a finished ebook that doesn't leave the buyer feeling ripped-off. Aside from skirting the boundaries of ethical business practice, these publishers will never see any organic sales growth through word-of-mouth or free publicity. They'll always be locked into purchasing advertising from websites that have real content, and trying to make the dollars work out.

I do worry that shovelware ebooks give the whole ebook publishing business a bad name, and probably make international buyers extra wary of purchasing ebooks from a company they don't recognize. Maybe the fact that there are printed versions of my books for sale in bookstores gives some sophisticated overseas buyers the confidence to pay for the ebook version. It's the sort of thing I'd probably due a survey on if I were a corporation, but I hate getting "exit surveyed" after purchasing an item online myself, so I'm not going to force it on my own customers.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

Starting around 100 years ago, American Chestnut trees were infected by an imported blight which apparently originated in Japan or China. With no native resistance, the American Chestnuts, estimated at four billion strong, were wiped out. However, their root systems proved so resilient that they continue a shadowy existence under the canopy, throughout their native range. After sprouting from old roots, they out-compete the other young trees of the forest until they near maturity, when they contract the blight and die. Since they rarely mature sufficiently to flower and produce nuts, Darwinian mechanics has yet to produce a solution. While inspecting a property this morning near the Quabbin reservoir Massachusetts, I came upon a whole grove of young American Chestnuts, distinguishable primarily by their leaves:



One of the trees in the grove was surprisingly mature, I'd estimate the diameter nearly six inches, though you can see the blight cankers stretching vertically on the bark.



American Book Blight came along much later than the Chestnut Blight, and there's no blaming foreigners for this one. I'd suggest American Book Blight took off in the 1970's, grew steadily until the early 1990's, and then took a huge jump as book superstores, discount chains and Amazon changed the economics of the book business. Instead of tens of thousands of new titles reaching maturity each year from a hundred thousand seedlings, only a few thousand titles grow to maturity these days. The sales of those mature titles have become super-sized, with bestsellers routinely going over a million copies, but what's lacking are the tens of thousands of new mid-list or back-list titles selling in commercial quantities. Trade publishing is more of a lottery, winner-take-all game than it was a few decades ago, though part of this may be due to the decreasing influence of the library market.

My first solution for the American book blight was given in my last post about trade publishing lay-offs. A new crop of publishers is what it will take to nurture and grow the next generation of blight resistant titles to a modest maturity. Large trades can't make a profit planning new titles that will sell on the order of a thousand copies a year, but a long-lived grove of such titles will keep a self publisher in nuts for the cold winters ahead. New independent publishers who adopt print-on-demand economics may need to sell a several times that number unless they charge astronomical cover prices, but a modest list averaging three or four thousand units per title per year can pay a couple salaries.

Scientists have been working for years to breed a blight resistant American Chestnut hybrid, hoping that a tree that is 15/16ths American (and 1/16th Chinese) may prove blight resistant enough to repopulate the East Coast range. I think a similar hybrid approach is key to beating American Book Blight, but I'd suggest more than a 16th of non-paper revenues in the mix. I'm currently trying to move my own publishing business to a 50/50 model, 50% paper books printed on demand and 50% electronic, from Ebooks or web revenue. If I can get there, it will be a model that allows even smaller market books to mature, flower and provide the publisher with enough nuts to last year-round. And remember, if you ever get into a conversation with a forestry type who gets on the subject of the chestnut blight, and you want to make a bad impression, interrupt with , "Oh yes, American Chestnuts. Them's good burning"Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

So you've been working at publisher X for the last ten years and the axe just fell. They're sorry to have to let you go, but your job has been made redundant through mergers and downsizing. The number of titles is growing but the bookstore business is stagnant and anybody who keeps a job at a large trade in the future will really be working for Amazon. Well, here's your chance to leave the dark side and join forces with the children of the light working in independent and self publishing.



I've known some really competent people who worked for trade publishers and I've known some real clowns, but one thing stands out. You can develop valuable job skills during a career in trade publishing, but unfortunately, most of them are essentially corporate get-along skills. Out here in the non-corporate world, dressing to impress, yessing to say "yes", making a great pot of coffee and giving good meetings are non-marketable skills. Wait, I take it back about the coffee. Mastery of spreadsheets can only get you in trouble and a fine appreciation of "the right way to do things" means you're a dinosaur, and not one of the scary ones.

But if you've watched your laid-off editor friends drop out of the industry one-by-one as they bang up against the invisible age ceiling, or if you're tired of going home to live with your parents every few years, it's time to get off the trade publishing merry-go-round. While I'm fond of pointing out to new authors and publishers that it's a tough business, that's where you have an advantage coming from the trade world. You already know that publishing is a business where only the strong make money, and you probably know quite a bit about market research. Let's face it, trade publishers excel at market research, if they were also good at acquiring and producing and marketing books that met that demand, you wouldn't be looking for a job right now.

As part of my outreach program to former developmental and acquisitions editors, I want to stress two points. First, you can't plan to replicate the business model that you're used to, but on a smaller scale. It's employees that are easy to downsize, not business models. You've rewritten or finished enough books for deadbeat authors, it's time to write one yourself. The great thing about being laid-off in America (so I hear) is collecting unemployment, so don't waste the chance by sitting on the couch and watching TV, or by blowing the money playing at being in business. Launch your publishing website today, and figure it out as you go along. Nobody is looking over your shoulder anymore, you can mess up all you want. But it's time to get out of corporate gear and shift up to self-employed gear, and if you can do it without coffee, you'll live longer.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

The received wisdom for most publishers using print-on-demand and selling primarily through the Internet is “never release a new edition.” It’s sort of funny, considering the low inventory aspect of POD allows for edition changes without creating a remainder headache, but the reason is brutally commercial. A new edition traditionally means a new ISBN number, and a new ISBN number means a new product page and sales history on Amazon. Publishers who focus all of their efforts on the Amazon platform (and those who simply end up selling most of their books through Amazon by default) risk losing their position in Amazon search and recommendation lists, along with accumulated reviews if the transfer isn’t seamless. The result may leave the publisher starting out from scratch all over again.

In some instances, such as college textbooks, new editions are simply a sleazy way to force students to abandon the old textbook, preventing them from purchasing used books, or accepting hand-me-downs. But many nonfiction books, especially reference works and successful how-to titles, go through regular editions as technology or conditions change. Yes, a well written book on preparing your Federal Income Taxes from 2001 would still be useful today, but not as useful as a well written one updated for 2008. A cookbook may live for decades without requiring a rewrite, but a restaurant guide may get revised every year. Most nonfiction titles fall between the extremes of “good for decades” vs “requires annual update”. The issue faced by POD publishers updating a book is balancing the visibility of the current ISBN vs customer confusion over what they are buying, especially when used books with a different interior are being sold alongside the new ones.

Earlier this summer, I updated the contents of my publishing book without releasing a revised edition. I felt comfortable doing this for a few reasons, but primarily because the book required little updating and most of those updates amounted to deleting descriptions of Amazon functions that are no longer in force. Until today, I don’t think I even mentioned on my own site that the book had been updated, though maybe I’ll add a note to my sales page. I’m comfortable that there can’t be many copies of the old version floating around for sale as new, because Ingram has cycled through their entire stock of the book twice since I revised it and Amazon doesn’t physically stock it. I simply didn’t make enough changes to the book to declare a new or revised edition.

In couple of weeks, I’ll be releasing a revised edition of one of my computer books, which I’ll publish with a new ISBN number and identify as a revised edition in the title and in the book information. I also intend to add a note to the annotation discouraging buyers of the original edition from buying the revised edition. In this case, while the revisions took quite a bit of work, they don’t bring any fundamental new knowledge to the reader, they simply deal with some newer technologies. But as a computer technology title, I do want potential buyers to know that the book has been updated since it was first released five years ago, a long time for a technology title. The reason I went with “revised edition” rather than “second edition” is because I think there’s less chance that buyers of the original edition will confuse it with a major rewrite.

Once I release the new edition, I’ll change my returns policy on the old edition and give stores at least three months to sell the old copies or return them. Maybe I’ll take the book officially out of print before New Years, but I’m curious to see what happens in the marketplace and on Amazon and will certainly report on it. Since my website drives the majority of the sales for my books, I’m not particularly worried about loss of place on Amazon, and the computer hardware book genre is rapidly dying off in any case. In an interesting twist, I think I’m in a decent position to be one of the last publishers standing in the field, since sales really don’t justify any new titles being produced. Just a couple of us issuing the occasional revision to an ever shrinking audience, but dealing with less competition as well.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

I've been getting fairly regular questions about publishing on Kindle so I finally decided to go ahead and publish my own Kindle ebook, just to be in a better position to respond. It turned out to be far more work than I'd hoped for a mediocre result, and a bit frustrating as well since the Amazon previewer doesn't test whether or not table of contents links are working. I asked a fellow publisher, Kim Greenblatt, to check it out for me since he owns a Kindle. That he needed to "dig it out" and charge it up suggests that it hasn't become is primary reading device:-)

The biggest problem I ran into was formatting tables. The reason it's a problem is that Kindle doesn't support HTML table tags. Since HTML doesn't support tabs or repeated spaces, my "fix" was to use underscore characters "_" and periods "." to try to line up the data, and then set the color to white. On the smaller tables it's not horrible with the default font, on the larger tables, the columns get pretty squiggly. There's also the issue with page breaks in the middle of tables, but rather than force page breaks for every table, I decided to repeat the column labels in the bottom row. The picture below is from the preview tool which apparently is a fair representation of the Kindle screen, from a large table that came out OK.



A glimpse of HTML to accomplish this:



The reason I left table tags in there was so that I would have some way of aligning the columns in my HTML editor as I was working. It would be funny if Kindle started recognizing HTML table formatting one day, and all of a sudden my tables got even screwier. The other main formatting notes for Kindle are that you have to put in an HTML anchor for the Table of Contents itself, in addition for the links and anchors to all of the chapters, if you want a clickable TOC. There's a guy who's started a Kindle formatting site where I found the name of the pagebreak tag, "mbp:pagebreak /" (goes inside less-than greater-than signs like all HTML tags) which given the "mbp" was probably developed for MobiPocket.

One of the reasons I didn't bother publishing any books on Kindle when it came out is the business model. The contract Amazon requires publishers to sign for Kindle is pretty out-there. I wouldn't have signed if not for the clause allowing either party to opt out on 60 days notice, though I probably should have checked with my lawyer as well. The royalty to the publisher is 35%, which means, of the five ways I sell my publishing title, I earn the least on the Kindle version by a factor of at least two. I set the list price at $9.95, the same price for which I sell my PDF e-book version direct. Amazon discounts the $9.95 Kindle version by 20%, so they are now the cheapest way somebody can legally acquire an ebook version of my publishing book, though you do have to pop $359 for a Kindle to save the two dollars. Since I earn around $7.50 per copy on the paperback sold through Amazon, each Kindle sale to somebody who would have bought the paperback otherwise will cut my net in half. For the time being, I don't think it will break my bank.

While it would be nice to earn a higher share as the publisher, I assume that Amazon is paying a hefty fee to the cellular operators who host their Whispernet, and for all I know they'll lose more than I make on every copy they sell. But I see Kindle as part of Amazon's grand plan to compel publishers to supply Amazon with electronic files for all their titles for Amazon to package and sell as they see fit. I'm not on-board with that future, but I decided to go ahead with this one Kindle version just to learn what it's all about. If anybody is interested in how Kindle e-books are selling, see the comments from Steve Windwalker on my earlier ramblings about Kindle sales ranks.

A side note, I just noticed that Google has me at #1 for searches on Publisher TV, so I think that justifies my summer of video reruns!

Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

I got poked in the eye by a wire while doing some construction work a few days ago, sprung right past my glasses and got me. Since it was my "good" eye, the one that compensates for the defect in the other eye, it left me seeing double for a day and unable to read. That got me thinking about what I'd be doing if I couldn't continue as a self publisher. I know there's a lot of new whiz-bang reader technology out there that might help compensate for the inability to read books or newspapers, but I can't imagine doing heavy Internet work with all the skim reading and scrolling without the ability to read easily.

And that got me thinking about career options for self publishers in general. I know a few self publishers who have moved on to work for large trades, but the normal career path is the opposite, with trade authors fleeing into self publishing. Many self employed people, regardless of the industry, find themselves becoming "unemployable" with the passing of time. It's not just that our skill become aligned with self employment goals, it's also that our personalities develop, shall we say, eccentricities. I have to admit that my general reaction on hearing workplace complaints from friends and strangers alike is, "Why don't you quit?" But quitting twice a week is a tough way to develop a career.

If I couldn't make a living publishing anymore, either through some physical impairment or a loss of creativity, I suppose I'd try to limp by as a consultant for a while. Telling other people how to do things you can't do yourself is a common exit strategy for many a fallen expert, and unexpectedly, a common entry strategy for not a few publishing "experts" who've never published a successful book. But consulting is a pretty tough ABC (Always Be Closing) career and I don't think I'd enjoy it at all. There was a time that I might have thought about opening a used book store, but Amazon has done a pretty good job putting limits on that particular career path.

That I would stay self employed is a given. I haven't considered myself to be employable for the last fifteen years, but I'm flexible as to the work and the pay. The problem is, most of the ideas I come up with have to do with me doing something I enjoy rather than with making a living. That's where I've been lucky with self publishing, since I enjoy it most of the time and still make a living at it. Now I know what you're thinking, that I could get rich dictating novels and screenplays to an assistant by the pool, probably an attractive Ivy league girl who abandons her education for a chance to work with me. But somehow I just don't see it in the cards, and if you do, I'd recommend putting off the morning drink at least to after supper:-)Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

I'm officially back in the market for publishing business assets as of today. It's part of a two pronged plan to grow my publishing business through acquisition and to create a new marketplace for orphaned intellectual property. I also think it would be a lot more useful (and fun) way to spend my time for the rest of the year than running a fiction contest for self published writers.

The idea of aggregating the micro assets of authors and publishers who have either exited the business or exited this life has been tugging at my brain for years. I think it originally came to mind when I was doing some estate planning, and the idea became fixed last summer when I did a study of small publishers who went out of business and abandoned their websites.

The basic premise, in a nutshell, is that a tremendous amount of intellectual property built up in books and websites must simply dissipate into nothingness every year. People either give up on business and don't have a ready market, or owners pass on and estate executors either don't recognize the value or don't have any way to realize it. With the Internet and print-on-demand, fairly small grains of intellectual property can be added up to make a worthwhile business, provided there's a practical way to find and acquire the copyrights. Ten years ago, I don't know what you'd have done with a publishing business that only sold a couple hundred books a year, but as long as those titles have lasting value, it now makes sense for another publisher to keep them in print, and perhaps get them online.

Since I've blogged about this stuff for a couple years, I already rank at the top of Google for many phrases related to buying or selling a publishing asset. But most of the people who contact me have insanely unrealistic expectations. They think their businesses should be valued by the investment they put in, which can run six figures, rather than by the sales, which can run four figures for the same. I think the reason I never hear from the sort of people with the small niche assets I was talking about above is that they don't think selling those assets is practical. They just wind down operations, pay their bills, and put the leftover books in the attic and let the website registration expire.

For the time being, the next step is advertising, and I'll start with an Adwords campaign to test the waters before rushing into print advertising in the various publishing newsletters or magazines. I wonder if there's an organization of estate liquidation attorneys where I could advertise? In the meantime, I'm willing to talk to anybody who has ideas on the subject, so don't hesitate to comment on this post or get in touch by e-mail. I'm hoping that at some point I can build a directory or resource that would become well known, so that people with copyrights and intellectual property assets they figured wouldn't be worth the bother of trying to sell will list them. The original owners would get the benefit of the selling price and seeing the work remain in print, or even get updated, while the buyer have a new path for expanding a small publishing business.

And please feel free to link to this post from any publishing discussion group you may participate in. The more feedback I get now, the more likely I am to invest significant money in building a new website rather than trying to limp along with a one page directory on this site.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

Does relative scarcity translate into value? Not always, as self employed writers can tell you. Dozens of the books are published every year on the subject of selling articles and manuscripts. If we include books on writing effectively, promoting your work, or preparing screenplays, the number of how-to guides published each year may be in the hundreds. But the employment statistics for writers tell a different story.

The 2007 census numbers estimate that just over 44,000 people nationwide are professional writers or authors, and that includes people who make their primary living in other professions. There are more technical writers, at 47,000, then mainstream writers, and tellingly, there are more editors at 105,000 than writers of both ilks combined. That suggests that a lot of editors are either composing their own copy from press releases, wire services and other sources, or employing large numbers of part-time stringers who aren't counted in the writer totals. Of course, as nobody sent me the survey I have my doubts about the accuracy:-)

So, I decided to try the REAL statistics guys, and after a while of digging around the IRS website, found the spreadsheet for Schedule C reporting for 2005 (the last tax year available) by business type. Note that this isn't the 711510 code for independent writers, artists, etc., it's 511110 code for Publishing Industries (except internet). Just under 92,000 business tax returns for sole proprietorships were filed as publishing businesses, which excludes giant corporations, LLC's, etc. The total net income of publishing businesses reporting a profit for 2005 was $942 million. Around a quarter of filers, 21,000 in all, reported a loss. The average sales of the profitable group was $27,000. The average sales of the unprofitable group was $14,000.

Looking at the profitable publishers only, the average net income for the entire publishing group was just $13,348 per business! It's also interesting to note that the $942 million in net income was on about $2.47 billion in sales, so margins are pretty good for publishers who have sales. The reported payroll for profitable sole proprietors filing as publishers was $200 million in 2005, meaning if every business had a single employee, the average salary would be about $2,800 a year, but of course, most self publishers and not a few micro-presses have no employees, so the average is higher. Not surprisingly, the average payroll at the unprofitable publishers was much higher at around $4,700.

So the average self publishing author who reports income as a publishing business is earning less than $10,000/year in net profit. In some cases, those publishers are simply smarter than me about generating more expenses so they have less net income. But on the whole, I suspect the equation looks more like

limited sales = limited gross income = limited net profit

But on the whole, the tax numbers offer a more encouraging picture than the labor statistics numbers, even though all sole proprietorships filing as publishers aren't self employed authors or writers. In fact, many self publishers probably file as 711510 code writers, but that's what makes statistics fun.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

A couple comments for a lazy Thursday about my "position" as a self publishing expert. In case you're wondering who voted me into the position, it has something to do with this blog, my publishing book and the video channel. It also has to do with the lack of competition for an unpaid position answering questions and keeping up with the publishing industry news, especially as pertains to book sales and markets.

On the advice of Jon Reed, the moderator of the POD Publishers group, I changed the comment settings on my blog this week to allow comments from anybody. The caveat is that I still moderate all comments, and I automatically reject comments on posts more than a couple months old. My main goal in comment moderation, aside from eliminating spam, is making sure that the comments have something to do with the posts.

If you want to ask me a question and you can't find a recent post related to the topic, just e-mail me direct. But please don't waste my time or yours with questions like, "How do I publish a book?" or "Will you publish my memoir?". The whole point of going to an expert for help is to ask specific, informed questions, and if you can stump the expert, it's a good sign. I love it when people ask questions that teach me something new.

Keep in mind also that I'm in the market for publishing assets, both websites and existing lists, but that's strictly business. I've heard from several publishers in the past looking to sell their title lists who have never made any money. Let me ask a question for a change. Why in the world would anybody want to pay a publisher to take over a list of titles that don't sell? The same goes for websites that don't get any visitors. The amount of money which you've invested in building something you think of as an asset is irrelevant. If it doesn't generate revenue, it's not an asset, it's an expense, and you'd have to pay somebody to take it off your hands. I'd much rather start buying Espresso POD machines and trying set up a leasing business:-)

Finally, despite the protective headgear I wear in a couple videos, I'm not a mind reader. If you check my blog twice a week in hopes that I'll write about some topic that I never get around to, drop me a line and let me know. But keep in mind that I'm not a "feel good" guy, I'm not interested in blogging about how you can work out your personal issues by writing a memoir or the like. As my readers occasionally remind me, this blog is supposed to be about the publishing business, which means, making money. If you aren't making money publishing, it's not a business, it's a hobby, and the IRS can fill you in on the details.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

If a publisher built a website that drew everybody in the world on one day, it would crash. Whether or not it would sell some books for the publisher before crashing depends entirely on why the visitors were arriving. The sell-through for most websites is a closely guarded number because publishers don't want their competition knowing what's hot or learning from the efficiency data for the book selling platform. That's because copying is a time honored tradition in the trade industry. New publishers have trouble building websites that attract any visitors at all, but experienced publishers have trouble building websites that sell books. When you're getting visitors to your website and not selling books, or not selling as many books as you'd like, the tendency is to redesign your order flow or shopping cart to see if a little tweak here or there will double sales. But I've found that online book buyers are willing to jump through modest hoops to buy a book, so a minor tweak in the sales pitch or process will rarely make much difference. The key to a publishing website with good sell-through is attracting the right visitors in the first place and not unselling them once they've arrived.

The graph below shows sales for my latest ebook plotted against the number of visitors per day for an online excerpt from that book. The normal organic traffic for that page, primarily from search engines, has been steady at around a hundred visitors a day for the past six months. But a couple weeks ago, somebody tagged it as a page of interest on StumbleUpon, a sort of social networking or collaborative page ranking service. The problem with visitors from sites like this is that they are almost never looking for the particular book or information that is getting attention, it's more of a passing interest, a sort of internet windows shopping. My websites occasionally get these surges in visitors from casual visitors on a guided tour of some Internet segment, and the sell-through averages out to zero percent.



The page that normally draws a hundred visitors a day started drawing thousands of visitors a day from StumbleUpon alone. On some days, these visitors outstripped the total number of visitors from all other sources to all of the topics on my website. But sales of the ebook actually went down during this period, which can hardly be the fault of window shoppers, since there weren't enough of them to get in the way of the real buyers by crashing the site. What happened in fact is an excellent example of polluted data:-) At the same time that this traffic surge was occurring, the paperback version of the book was released, and on 6/16, I began promoting it on the website. I didn't remove the "buy" links for the ebook, I simply channeled most potential buyers through another page that included information about the paperback. Ebook sales crashed, and after a week I gave up and went back to sending everybody who expressed an interest in the ebook directly to the ebook ordering page. Sales jumped right back to the long term average of between two and three ebooks per day.

Selling visitors on the idea of buying an ebook for instant download anywhere in the world and then distracting them with a more expensive paperback that would take days or weeks to arrive is not a minor tweak to the ordering process. I was literally unselling some visitors who had made up their minds to purchase the ebook. The right visitors are a precious commodity for publishers, which is why it's important that somebody in your publishing company keeps an eye on the server statistics as well as the sell-through for order pages. And don't jump to conclusions based on raw data without understanding the context. If I was a manager running the fonerbooks website and didn't know about the paperback being released and promoted, I would have assumed that casual visitors were somehow depressing sales, rather than just the sell-through. Remember, sell-through depends on the total number of potential buyers, and by including a huge number of window shoppers in the total, the sell-through number is artificially brought low.

The only real measure of how well your website is performing its marketing function in selling your books is to keep an eye on the bottom line. This may be frustrating to webmasters or hired SEO guns who can "prove" to management that the website is humming on all cylinders, but if it's not selling books for the publisher, it's just another expense. I talked about this in a video last winter, which I'll embed here again for anybody who missed it.

Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

Time for another update on my new and revised ebook business. As I reported in an earlier post, my initial problems with customers not seeing the download link on e-junkie and sometimes losing the confirmation e-mail to spam filters was my fault. The fix was letting e-junkie show their "Thank You" page which includes a download link, rather than my own thank you page, which I'd set up years before for selling books direct with PayPal. Since I made the change last month, the sales process has been nearly flawless, I think I've only had to send one follow-up asking why the customer hadn't downloaded the ebook yet.

I just did a quick scan through my e-junkie account reports, and I can already count ebook customers in 18 foreign countries. The list now includes: Japan, Bermuda, Australia (8), Mexico, Sri Lanka, Netherlands (3), Ireland (3), Cyprus, France, United Kingdom (13), Italy, Honduras, New Zealand, Canada, Chile, Brazil, Austria and Saudi Arabia. It seems to me that in my first month selling ebooks, the split between the US and overseas sales was around 50/50. It's now running around 75/25 in favor of the US. I'm not sure what caused the change, perhaps statistical insignificance, perhaps a change in the wording of my sales links.

The business model of publishing ebooks is remarkably similar to publishing print-on-demand books in one obvious way. While publication takes place when the first copy is sold, or made available to potential customers, the publishing process doesn't involve the creation of stock or warehousing. A single electronic copy is all that the publisher need produce, after which the customer copies are generated by electronic reproduction or printed on demand. Since the books I publish are nonfiction how-to books, rather than literary keepsakes, I'm not married to the idea of killing and grinding up trees for the sake of being a book publisher rather than an ebook publisher.

In the case of my latest book, the ebook is priced at $13.95 and the 191 page paperback (8.25" x 11") at $24.95. An attempt to promote the paperback version immediately led to a crash in ebook sales. I only pushed hard for a week, but I easily lost two ebook sales for each paperback sale generated. That doesn't jive well with my previous ebook experience, where the ebook sales and the paperback sales seemed to be tapping two distinct markets. But there are some fundamental differences with this book as compared with my previous ebook releases. First, the ebook and paperback aren't priced the same. Second, the paperback version on Amazon falls just under the free shipping amount, so customers who are initially attracted to Amazon may get halfway through the buying process and then decide to put it off (forever) because of the shipping cost. When I went back to emphasizing the ebook sales over the paperback sales on my website, the ebook sales bounced right back to where they left off. But the relative shortage of paperback sales may also be influenced by the Slow Tail sales cycle, the idea that a good proportion of customers simply take time to make up their minds. Maybe I'll see a handful of paperback sales this week based on last week's promotion.

Another interesting point about ebook sales vs print-on-demand or offset published distribution sales is the additional visibility into the customer base. My print-on-demand books sales are generally more trackable than regular offset printed sales would be, yet I can only estimate where the books are selling by comparing Amazon and BN.com sales ranks with Ingram sales reports. With the ebooks, I know where each and every copy is going and with a little more work, I could determine exactly which page on my website generated each sale. Unless things change, I can heartily recommend e-junkie for publishers looking for a download solution for their ebooks that ties in easily and painlessly with a third party payment system, like PayPal.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

Passion for a subject is a great reason to write about it and all the reason you should need to launch a website. But if you see writing and publishing as a path to financial independence or a second income, it's important to consider how far you can go before you start the journey. New or planned publishing websites can be categorized by their potential into four loose groups, which I'm labeling: obsession, niche, commercial and the next big thing. Assigning your planned website and book to one of these four categories is tricky, and certainly doesn't guaranty that you'll fail or succeed in your goals, but should help you manage your expectations and investment.



Writing about your obsession serves an end unto itself, but if nobody shares that obsession, it's hard to see how you're going to draw readers. There may be rare, rare cases where your personal attributes or writing are just so superior to the run-of-the-mill that people would sign up in droves to read about your summer watching a snail move down your garden path. Maybe once a month somebody in the world hits it big for a day with the equivalent of snail TV out of the millions who try. If you search the web for the subject that you're writing about, and the most popular sites related to that subject don't show a dozen incoming links, it's the opposite of popular.

Niche subjects are those that draw enough interest to support a couple of titles on Amazon, but which don't draw tens of thousands of visitors a day as websites. A small niche site may draw a hundred or so visitors a day, and if the site is compelling and the subject is commercial, can help a publisher sell a couple books a day. But niche subjects are also tricky, as a topic that can draw serious traffic on a website may fail to convert into significant book sales due to the subject or reader demographics. Niche books work well when the subject is perceived as having depth, as being worthy of purchasing a book. But take a niche subject like airport parking options. It might work great as a website, drawing people from all over the country or the world checking the parking situation at their departure airport, but a very limited audience would be willing to buy a reference book on the subject.

Commercial websites for publishers are those that can draw enough visitors that they create their own business opportunity. If you have a very popular website, you can sell advertising, sell merchandise, even sell subscriptions to walled-off resources. You don't need to bring out a book to monetize your web publishing efforts, and in some cases, that book would have very little chance of selling. Any site that shows up in the top 10,000 on Alexa or Quantcast, or draws 10,000 visitors a day from Google, can usually be considered a commercial website.

If I knew how to create a website that would be the next big thing, I'd be working on that rather than sticking with this self publishing blog, which is more of an obsession than anything else. Creating a website that will draw hundreds of thousands of visitors a day has more to do with knowing people than with knowing the web. My suggestions about using the available tools to estimate the potential for a website just don't apply to the next big thing, which has no related sites until after it arrives and establishes itself. But that makes doing your homework all the more important, because if you dream is to create the next big thing, you aren't going to do it with something that a hundred other websites have already worked out.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

You've been around the publishing block a few times, working with trade publishers, subsidy presses, and an agent. What's got you looking at self publishing for your tenth title?

Control.

Like it or not, once you sign a contract with a trade publisher, you lose control of your own work. Authors-to-be will often naively ask how that can happen; after all, it's your book. Publishers, however, go through the mechanics of getting a book published and will typically have a better idea of what needs to be done in getting the book from manuscript to publication. That's why, at least for your first book, I'd subscribe to the idea of NOT self-publishing. With one book under your belt, and with the publisher sort of holding your hand during the entire process, you have a better idea of what to expect with your subsequent efforts. For a new author, it's a learning experience. Take the disadvantage of not being as savvy as a trade publisher and turn their experiences into a positive publishing event, a learning experience for you.

If you have a couple of books in you and you're still uncomfortable with striking out on your own with book two, I'd hesitantly suggest that you try a subsidy press, something that's usually described incorrectly as a POD publisher...1st Books, something like that. There comes a point however, where you'll begin to see what it really takes to sell a book, whether its through a trade publisher or a subsidy publisher. It's really the efforts of the author---especially aggresive marketing--- that makes the difference. At that point, true self-publication, going through someone like Lightning Source, is the next logical step. You've given up control of your earlier efforts; now it's time to regain control of your efforts and use the learning experiences of your initial fling(s) with a trade publisher or a subsidy press. You could jump right into self-publishing, but if you don't know what you're doing, your not helping yourself by trying to be independent, to have control. You might even hurt your book sales by blindly plodding through the process of getting your book to market.

I think some seasoned authors will never try self-publishing because they get too comfortable with having a literary agent shop their manuscript and become content with the agent getting them a nice little negotiated advance. From then on, the publisher still makes most of the decisions on the book, not the author. If the authors are lucky, they'll also enjoy a brief window of marketing efforts by their publisher and then realize that the acquisition editor or the marketing contact isn't calling like she/he used to. You're on your own.

With self-publication, how-to guide books written by people like Morris Rosenthal, and companies like Lightning Source, experienced authors have the opportunity to make the next logical step in doing a self-publishing approach and regaining control of their efforts.

Did you have a career in brewing before moving to journalism, or did you jump into writing immediately after studying brewing technology?

I studied brewing in order to build a background for the opening of a brewpub. I knew I also needed restaurant experience. After completing my studies and establishing a small deli in Chicago, dealing with 70 hour work weeks, meeting payroll and trying to pay vendor bills on time, I came to the conclusion that it might be cheaper to write about beer rather than making it on a professional level. I had already established industry contacts during my "beer school" tenure so starting out my writing profession, centered around the themes of beer and brewing, seemed to be a logical step.

Your websites, and magazine journalism give you great head start a platform for self publishing, but you've also been successful at getting TV and radio exposure. Have you been able to work out which of these has done the most to help sales of your previous books?

I'm a firm believer in using well-written news releases in generating interest in what I do. I say "news releases" because too many people use press releases to blatantly promote their efforts rather than truly offer the media what they really want---news. I also like to piggyback one book on another work. If customers like one of your books, they might be willing to invest their time and money in something else you've done.

Do you actively seek to opportunities to do interviews or offer expert commentary in broadcast media, or do you just respond to media requests? If you do market yourself to media, do you pay for a listing in one of the subscription resources for speakers and experts, or do you work your contact directly?

I've never paid for publicity. My first book was about Chicago's old brewing industry, taking a wide historical approach of how the brewing industry influenced Chicago's economic, political and social developments. That approach gave me crossover with people interested in Chicago's early history. Since my Chicago history approach was so unique, and because I'm the only one to have written about the brewing industry, I've got a list of future speaking engagements at local libraries, historical societies---including a stint with a traveling program by the Smithsonian---that broadens my appeal beyond people simply interested in the old Chicago brewing industry. I've also done consulting and organized focus groups for advertising agencies that work with breweries that are trying to stimulate sales in the Chicagoland area. Because I also took a historical look at past beer advertising and marketing efforts in Chicago, I was the person to turn to for a historical analysis of what has worked---and not worked---in beer advertising in Chicago. I did a follow-up edition called "BEER: A History of Brewing in Chicago" that has solidified my reputation as the "Chicago beer history guy" and this book is my ticket to local lectures---paid lectures---where I also sell my books.

I also did two books a few years ago that had widespread commercial appeal. These were deliberate attempts on my part to go beyond the niche of Chicago beer history or Chicago history in general. I broadened these two efforts towards the then hot low-carbohydrate trend, and using my brewing industry contacts, gathered the carbohydrate content on more than 1,000 beers, 400 wines and scores of liquors and liqueurs. Along with a strong news release campaign and a lot of follow-up e-mails and telephone calls, I found myself on ABC's "The View," ESPN2 and the FOX News Channel as the "beer guy" or the "Low-Carb Bartender," reflecting a title of one of my books. I must have done 100 radio interviews in a peiod of about three months, many of them national, some with Canadian programs and even a few in Europe. I even received a call from brewer Anheuser-Busch to fly out to St. Louis. They were about to go public and correct the misleading assumptions about beer, promoted by a famous diet book author, and wanted my input on beer, carbohydrates and how to work the moderate consumption of beer into a low-carbohydrate diet.

I used this momentum at the time to become a columnist for a glossy-page national magazine, adding this job to my pile of freelance writing jobs for the "Chicago Tribune" and national magazines like "Draft." When you're "hot," one thing leads to another. I still get calls or e-mails a few times a month for one-on-one interviews about beer or booze in general, or as a contributor in a boozy story that utilizes input from a number of people. I recently was asked to comment on a story for CNN.com, for instance.

During the research of my last book, "Beer & Food: An American History," I sent an e-mail out to The Boston Beer Company for some beer-related food recipes and wound up with brewery owner Jim Koch doing a book intro for me. It's amazing what can happen if you simply ask for some help.

I've tried trade publishers, subsidy presses, and publishing with an agent and without one. I now have the kind of established platform that has encouraged me to put the finishing touches on another book with nationwide commercial appeal. I've kept a record of all my media contacts, and when I release this new book in the fall, the news releases and upcoming Internet efforts will pave the way in creating buzz about the book.

I also have a blog, www.beerinfood.wordpress.com that links back to other websites that I've let fall into disarray, but their presence on the Internet still keeps my name out there. In preparation for the new book, I'll be spinning off another website that will be heavy on instructional video presentations (vlogs) and podcasts.

I just wish that I had begun my writing career twenty-five years instead of getting started with an article in the "Chicago Tribune" back in 1997. It was this 1,000-word piece that gave me the impetus to jump full time into writing.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

In an earlier post about the publishing jungle, I made it clear that I'm in no position to judge the legality of corporate actions. An argument can certainly be made that in today's global economy, with sovereign wealth funds, public pension funds and private equity firms wielding cash like a weapon, a large corporation that fails to establish a dominant position in its industry can expect to be bulldozed. This weekend's news that the largest publisher in the UK is now pushing back against Amazon's pricing demands is being read by many as a sign that Amazon may have advanced a bridge too far. But I've been following Amazon for ten years, and have probably written as much about their growth and numbers as anybody. So for those who are trying to read the tea leaves for what's in publishing's future, I think I can declare that the leading Amazon expert and analyst is - Jeff Bezos.

I believe in the cowboy movie line, that sometimes, if you just listen carefully to what a man says, he'll tell you exactly what he's going to do. This has certainly been the case with Steve Riggio's drive to vertically integrate Barnes&Noble by publishing a growing share of the books that they sell, and it's always been the case with Jeff Bezos. Jeff has always made clear that Amazon was first and foremost about growth, and he's been prescient, as the growth numbers for Amazon North American Media Sales the last five years show:

2003 +14%
2004 +14%
2005 +18%
2006 +15%
2007 +23%

Jeff has also been saying for years that Amazon is "comfortable being misunderstood" which is another way of saying, he's not afraid to break a few eggs. Lately, Jeff has been talking about the centrality of Kindle to the future of books and Amazon, and I don't think he's kidding. Reading between the lines of both recent Amazon actions and their earlier run of acquisitions, I'm more convinced than ever that they want to become that dominant player in the publishing world whom none can gainsay. That would be a great thing for Amazon shareholders if they can pull it off, but how it would affect the rest of the publishing ecosystem depends on whether or not you think that central electronic storage, reproduction and sales of most trade books is somehow inevitable. I don't think that it's inevitable, but I do think it's probable if Amazon manages to divide and conquer any trade publishing opposition through a misunderstood application of carrots and sticks.

Many small publishers feel their hands are entirely tied by Amazon, which they rely on for the majority of their income. My own publishing business doesn't have that reliance on Amazon, part by plan and part by fortune, and I have as much sympathy for the medium and large trade publishers as for my own peers in this dust up. Publishers that have multi-year leases on buildings, large payrolls, bank debt and even stockholders to whom they must answer, can't make business decisions based on feelings or hunker down in the basement. With a few notable exceptions, like Microsoft, large corporations can't drop a customer that makes up 20% of their business and not immediately cut 20%+ of their employees and operations to compensate. Large companies are all about scale, and loss of scale often means loss of an independent existence. A large publisher who shuns a shotgun marriage with Amazon may disadvantage itself amongst its own peers to the extent that it becomes lunch. Amazon is the world's largest book retailer, and that's saying something in an industry with a limited number of large players. If the large trades want to stand up to Amazon without breaking the law by colluding or forming a cartel, they'll have to do it based on faith in a common goal and the sort of follow-the-leader tactics airlines use to raise seat prices.

The bottom line on this father's day is how the big trades will respond to the question: "Who's your daddy?"

I suspect the answer for most will be "Amazon".Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

I just took a moment to search all of my recent blog posts, and was surprised to find that I haven't been writing much about the reasons to self publish lately. Maybe it's because I spend so many keystrokes writing about how to self publish, or the drawbacks of self publishing. The funny thing is, in person, I usually recommend self publishing to working trade authors. But when writers contact me through my website with their questions, it's frequently apparent that self publishing is unlikely to be the solution to their particular puzzle. It's rarely a road to fame and riches, and the energy spent trying to achieve fame and riches through self publishing might be more efficiently applied elsewhere.

The best reason to self publish books is because you've studied the publishing industry and decided that self publishing is the path that will most likely bring you a steady income and satisfaction in your work. It's also the least common reason people cite when asked why they decided to self publish. In fact, the few authors I can remember telling me that they had studied the publishing industry and decided to self publish because they would make the more money for less hassle were basing their arguments on the advertisements of author services companies!

Not surprisingly, the authors in the best position to weigh the pros and cons of self publishing against signing a trade publisher contract are authors who have already worked for trade publishers. But most authors who write for trade publishers earn advances and develop an "I get paid upfront" attitude that makes self publishing look very unattractive to them. I can't make an argument in favor of bestselling authors self publishing their literary fiction or nonfiction because I don't think it makes much sense. Bestselling literary authors get the best book contracts and other perks that should discourage them from going to the expense of setting up their own publishing companies, unless they aim to publish other authors books as well. An unhappy bestselling author is probably better off changing publishers than changing careers.

The authors who would likely benefit the most from self publishing are those who are in the worst position to give it a try; the hand-to-mouth writers who rather than advancing in their careers are spinning a squirrel cage to keep up with the bills. The problems keeping those authors from breaking through with some titles that would have a reasonable shelf life and contribute to the author's income and peace of mind over the long term are sometimes their publishers problems. Assigning or accepting book projects that have limited market opportunities because the publisher is risk averse is a major issue. Trade publishers have a need for product, and they will stick with reliable (ie, deadline meeting) authors whose books don't embarrass them, but which rarely sell enough copies to earn the author more than the advance. It's a tough way to make a living, and because such authors aren't all that difficult to replace, a single misunderstanding or shift in publisher personnel may leave the author out in the street.

Laying aside all of the complications of going into business for yourself and all the downsides of working for "the man", the question comes down to how much the publisher is really doing to sell the author's books. If the publisher's marketing effort is limited to listing the books online and getting them a brief stint on some chain shelves, the author is giving up the majority of the title's revenue for some design and editorial services that could be outsourced to freelancers. If the publisher is employing the author for titles in strongly branded series that pay five figure advances, it may be that the author has benefited greatly from the association. But it's important for trade authors who aren't advancing in their careers to at least look at their options in self publishing. If they're afraid of trade publishers noticing and adding them to a blacklist, I've never heard of such a thing, but there's always the mighty pen name.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

I've been thinking about running a contest for web published fiction, so I've been doing a little research. If you want to have some fun, try Googling "fiction contest" and "canceled" or any variants thereof. It seems that launching fiction contests online and them canceling them for a wide variety of reasons is at least as common as continuing them through to the prize awards. The reasons for cancellation vary from prosaic (lead judge required back surgery) to the failed next generational plans of the major trades and agents. Some educational institutions run contests for young writers that are paid for by grants or endowments, and special interest groups may do the same. But when it comes to a straightforward, submit your manuscript and compete for a prize competition, there aren't as many legitimate looking contests as you'd think.

The main fault I see with the majority of writing contests is their business model, which is they are run for a profit. It's not the profit motive in itself that renders them suspect, but the impression that the profit motive is the only motive. In other words, collect fees from a bunch of hopeful rubes that cover not only the prize amounts but also the overhead and a generous allowance for the time of the contest managers, and if enough fees aren't forthcoming, cancel the contest. I'm highly suspicious of anybody whose business model doesn't include a substantial risk in terms of time or money. Some people would call elimination of risk in business wise - I call it stealing.

Another type of contest which I've mused about running in the past is one where the prize is an advance payment on the manuscript, which the publisher running the contest acquires for publication. Arguments about whether a given author is best served by a given publisher aside, I think that's a clever way to drum up interest for submissions, provided there aren't any fees involved. As soon as the publisher starts charging authors a fee to submit their manuscripts, it turns into a scam, even if the winner gets published.

I have several concerns about running a contest, but the primary concern is getting electronically buried in manuscripts. I can justify a contest as a business expense, so giving out some modest cash prizes isn't going to break my bank, but I can't justify hiring help to vet submissions. The main trick used by other online contests is to require the authors submitting manuscripts to rate one or more other manuscripts, in order to thin the field. My own modification on the process would be that I'd only accept entrants who followed (or follow) my advice and publish their fiction online. That would help cut down the potential pool of contestants and save a lot of file management overhead on my part. I'd just post a daily list of web addresses, perhaps on this blog, and come up with a way to count votes before reading a handful of finalists cover-to-cover. Speaking of cover, I'd probably draft a few friends to read the finalists so I wouldn't be the sole buck stop.

Whether or not I'd want to get involved in actually publishing a winning manuscript, assuming the writer wasn't already published, is another matter. But running a contest for nonfiction doesn't strike me as very interesting, and despite making a living as a nonfiction author and publisher, I don't feel that I could judge other author's nonfiction works in an objective manner without being conversant with the subject matter. Judging fiction is much easier in that it's strictly subjective to start with, though stories set more than a hundred years in the past or the future are objectively better than contemporary tales:-)

Another issue, at the risk of shocking the better half of my readers, is that women and men tend to like different books. Or to put it a little more bluntly, I'd define about three quarters of the novels that pass my way as "women's fiction", though I wouldn't be surprised if women make up over 75% of the fiction reading public. But I suppose there would be some educational value in reading past the first page for a change. If you have any thoughts about running an online fiction contest, feel free to comment on this post or drop me a line. It's a thought in progress.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

All publishers want to get more visitors to their websites. Sometimes, they are sophisticated enough to follow top SEO related blogs, like Google's lead Webspam detective, Matt Cutts, but they get often lost in the technical details. Google drives the majority of English language search traffic on the Internet, and they are very, very careful to be vague about exactly how they rank pages in their results. I've written a lot about search engine optimization and website design for publishers in the past, and it continues to come down to a couple basic principles. Write and publish high quality content and get relevant links. If you need an SEO company to write your content for you, it's not clear why you should be in the publishing business.

So what can a professional SEO company actually do for a publisher? For starters, it depends on how bad a job you've done for yourself. If you've published your website with a content management system or web authoring package that doesn't take search engine visibility into account, they can point that out to you and help you migrate your website to a different platform. Of course, you can figure that out for yourself as well by just checking if your pages appear in Google and looking at your page titles. An SEO professional can certainly point out if you or your designer has done things that search engines consider bad practice, and which get you penalized. But some SEO professionals follow bad practices themselves, to get their clients a short lived bump in the search rankings and prove that they've "earned" their pay.

But beneath it all, the main thing a search optimization company can do for a small publisher is get you more links. A cheesy SEO expert will get you a lot of worthless links, perhaps from his other clients websites, or paid links from grey area neighborhoods and link-sharing networks which will likely do more harm than good. A quality SEO expert will use research and tools to identify the appropriate websites to solicit links from, and then do it in your name.

Just a week or so ago I got a particularly persistent link request from a legitimate site in one of my publishing areas. So I took the time to reply and tell them I don't trade links, something I don't bother doing for the more incoherent or dicey link requests. To my surprise, I got back an e-mail from the individual offering to write a whole article about me and link my site from it in return, something which I again, politely denied. Then I happened to notice in the e-mail header that while the return address was for the well known site, the real originator was an SEO company. It was a legitimate SEO company using a return address identified with their client's site to make it look like the link request was an internal mom-n-pop affair, rather than a professional search engine optimization effort the client had purchased.

All of which is perfectly legitimate, but it struck me as kind of funny after I checked up on the SEO company, a business that's been around for a few years and claims offices in a half dozen countries with a large staff. I'll bet they pitch their clients on their in-depth knowledge of how search engines work, with all sorts of graphs and technical gibberish, but in the end, the real value of their service is based on getting relevant links for their clients by asking for them, persistently, and trying to barter for them if asking fails. Because after getting your content right, it's all about the links.

There is another way to get incoming links without going through a drawn out process of begging for them or paying for an SEO firm to do the begging for you. If you're a nonfiction publisher, publish some of your best material online, and if that doesn't do the trick, the odds aren't very good that a book will do much better. Despite all of the competition for eyeballs, there's always a shortage of quality content, and most websites have no way to generate that content internally. Increasingly, companies count on social networking, blog comments and forums to get their customers and visitors to generate free content for them. Some of it is actually pretty good, but as a professional publisher, hopefully you can do better. And sign up for Google's Webmaster Console to find out what Google really thinks of your site.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

Most writers today see an agent as an absolute necessity for getting their manuscripts considered by literary fiction houses. To what extent is that really the case?

There are always exceptions, especially today when a self-published book or blog can attract a publisher's attention and lead to an offer. But the rule is pretty much that you have to have an agent. Publishers have vacated the responsibility for discovering new talent and left it to the agents. Most trade book publishers will not consider a solicitation that does not come from an agent.

Nonfiction publishers have been on an "author platform" kick for years, seeking authors who can sell their own books. Have fiction publishers gotten the platform bug? Is it easier to get a novel published if you have a popular blog, newspaper column or MySpace page?

If a publisher has to ask "Who's that?" when an agent pitches a novelist, the game is half lost before it begins. If an author doesn't have a platform, he/she or the agent must create one that will at least give the illusion of familiarity when an editor reviews the author's work. At the very least an author must have a website.

Do agents typically lend value to manuscripts by creating a marketing plan and an irrefutable proposal, or does it come down to knowing what particular publishers are looking for and maintaining personal relationships with the editors and executives?

Agents have an advantage in that they can get in the door by relying on their relationships with editors. But once they're there, it still comes down to a good book. Marketing plans don't usually help sell the book, but, once sold, a good marketing plan will be welcome by the publisher.

What has been the greatest change to the title acquisition process of publishers you've seen in your 30+ years as a literary agent? Was it a turn for the better or the worse?

It used to be that if an editor liked a flawed manuscript, he or she would say, "I'll buy it and we'll fix it." Now editors say, "Fix it and we'll see." That's bad enough, but usually when the author fixes it, the editor rejects it anyway.

Richard Curtis Associates, Inc, is a leading literary agency representing over 100 authors.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog

I’m concerned with my new reader-friendly ebook publishing model, thanks to a post I read on William Patry’s blog. That post, titled “First Sale Victory in Verner”, describes a U.S. district court ruling which challenges the enforceability of certain software license agreements. I don’t have the legal knowledge to determine whether or not it will affect my ebook click license agreements, the comment thread of the post does touch on renting, physical copies and the idea of a “sale” in addition to a “license” version being available. Perhaps if there was no physical package involved, the opinion would have been different, though I couldn’t explain why myself. Patry ends his post with a quote from another blog about books and DRM, which reads, “To any publisher who sees the wisdom of DRM: don't.”

I’m worried about this direction, and that worry is coming from somebody who writes and publishes as living, rather than somebody who writes as an adjunct activity to an otherwise profitable career. I’m pointing this out because for many, especially academics and consultants, the writing of books is a necessary credentialing process for their careers that doesn’t usually generate a significant portion of their income. They often stand to win by wider distribution and fame, without regard to payment for the books. Just as there are two worlds of ebook publishers, the “book” crowd and the “get rich quick” crowd, there are two worlds of authors, full-time and part-time, and we don’t always see things the same way.



Back in the 1960’s, libraries in America may have been the largest customer for published books. I’ve spent so much time in libraries myself that it’s surprising I haven’t turned into one, though my taste in literature is solidly fixed in the 1800’s, meaning the books I read are well beyond their term of copyright protection. Even though libraries have lost some of their importance as a market for trade books as they expand into providing other services for their patrons, I don’t know anybody who argues that they shouldn’t be able to buy books from publishers and loan them out as long as they last.

Now fast forward to the Internet Ebook Library, which doesn’t yet exist. The Internet Ebook Library can serve the entire globe, the ebooks it holds don’t wear out after ten or twenty readings, they don’t take days or weeks to reach their patrons through inter-library loans, and they don’t get lost through improper shelving. The ebook library is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Everybody knows about the Internet Ebook Library, just like everybody knows that Google is the place to go to search the web. It’s that successful.

The Internet Ebook Library pays to license a copy of one of my ebooks, which are printable. I’m a publisher who saw the wisdom of DRM, but decided to gamble on the honesty of people and the validity of my license agreement which holds the ebooks nontransferable. The Internet Ebook Library loans out the ebook, the patron hits “print”, the ebook is returned as soon as the print buffer is empty. Maybe five minutes, maybe fifteen minutes, depends on the speed of the printer. If another patron shows up at the Internet Ebook Library seeking the title while it’s out, they get a message like, “Your expected wait is three minutes.” The copy of the ebook sold (if “licensed” is turned into “sold” by the courts) to the Internet Ebook Library represents the only revenue I earn, barring those individuals who actually like reading ebooks on the screen and decide to buy one from me as an act of charity.

As a publisher and as an author, my reaction would be the exact opposite of the blogs quoted above. I would implement restrictive DRM, the kind that marries an ebook to a particular computer and causes the customer all sorts of headaches if the computer crashes or is upgraded. On the other hand, I might just stop publishing ebook versions of any new titles available and stick with killing trees. And if the library doesn’t completely wipe out the market for new copies, a secondary market could easily spring up places like eBay, where nobody other than the seller would know how many copies of a single paid-up ebook were being resold.

My understanding of why copyrights are granted is that they encourage the production of useful and original works. As I’ve commented before on this blog, few of my favorite authors were aristocrats with trust funds, they wrote for a living and couldn’t have produced a body of work without the protection of copyright law. Perhaps I’m conflating the concepts of copyright and licensing, but I’m not a lawyer. I’m just a crazy guy with tinfoil on his head trying to predict the future of ebooks and DRM.Copyright 2007 by Morris Rosenthal From the Self Publishing blog