Entries tagged with “self publishing” from Tools of Change for Publishing
"None of this is good or bad; it just is"
Mac Slocum
January 22, 2009
| Permalink
| Comments (3)
|
Listen 
Lev Grossman takes a pragmatic look at the changing state of authors, readers, and the definition of publishing:
Self-publishing has gone from being the last resort of the desperate and talentless to something more like out-of-town tryouts for theater or the farm system in baseball. It's the last ripple of the Web 2.0 vibe finally washing up on publishing's remote shores. After YouTube and Wikipedia, the idea of user-generated content just isn't that freaky anymore.
And there's actual demand for this stuff. In theory, publishers are gatekeepers: they filter literature so that only the best writing gets into print. But [Lisa] Genova and [Brunonia] Barry and [Daniel] Suarez got filtered out, initially, which suggests that there are cultural sectors that conventional publishing isn't serving. We can read in the rise of self-publishing not only a technological revolution but also a quiet cultural one--an audience rising up to claim its right to act as a tastemaker too.
"None of this is good or bad; it just is"
Mac Slocum
January 22, 2009
| Permalink
| Comments (3)
|
Listen
Lev Grossman takes a pragmatic look at the changing state of authors, readers, and the definition of publishing:
Self-publishing has gone from being the last resort of the desperate and talentless to something more like out-of-town tryouts for theater or the farm system in baseball. It's the last ripple of the Web 2.0 vibe finally washing up on publishing's remote shores. After YouTube and Wikipedia, the idea of user-generated content just isn't that freaky anymore.
And there's actual demand for this stuff. In theory, publishers are gatekeepers: they filter literature so that only the best writing gets into print. But [Lisa] Genova and [Brunonia] Barry and [Daniel] Suarez got filtered out, initially, which suggests that there are cultural sectors that conventional publishing isn't serving. We can read in the rise of self-publishing not only a technological revolution but also a quiet cultural one--an audience rising up to claim its right to act as a tastemaker too.
The Crowdsourced Cat Book
Mac Slocum
August 19, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (1)
|
Listen
Amazing but True Cat Stories is a 38-page coffee table book born from the combined efforts of Mechanical Turk contributors. The creator/editor of the book, Björn Hartmann, describes the genesis of the project on his blog:
The idea for this book was born in Terminal A at Washington Dulles, where I was stranded for some hours in late July 2008. To spend my time, I posted the following two tasks on MTurk:
1. What's the craziest thing your cat has ever done? Write at least one paragraph about a funny, unbelievable or otherwise memorable incident involving your cat. This should be a real story that happened to you or your family.
2. Sketch a cat. With or without an environment and toys. The cat can be drawn in software or on paper. Do not upload photographs of cats. Have fun!
Before I got out of that terminal, it was already clear that the submissions were too good to keep to myself. My fiancee Tania suggested turning the stories into a book. So, after a few days of collecting, I selected about 25 stories and 20 images and spent an evening doing a nice layout for a Blurb book.
The book can be previewed here.
(Via the Reading 2.0 list and Boing Boing)
Lulu Adding WeRead's Social Networking Tools
Mac Slocum
August 6, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Listen
Lulu is teaming up with weRead, a book-centric social network. From The Bookseller:
The agreement would combine Lulu.com's free self-publishing tools and distributions capabilities with weRead's independent ratings and reviews and readership communities on social networks.
Budding Authors Use Espresso Book Machine to Publish
Mac Slocum
July 17, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (3)
|
Listen
The future of print on demand might lie in personal expression. Customers at Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, VT are using the Espresso Book Machine to produce their own titles. From Vermont Public Radio:
Since it was installed, some of the store's customers have been using the machine to produce hard-to-find books from a huge online database of titles in the public domain. But the store has discovered that the machine is most popular with would-be authors who want to turn what they've written into a book.
The full audio feature goes into more detail.
Book Reading Down, Book Writing Up
Mac Slocum
April 29, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Listen
In a New York Times Sunday Book Review essay, Rachel Donadio notes the interesting discrepancy between book reading and book writing. Namely, people aren't reading, but they're certainly doing a lot of writing.
In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, according to the industry tracker Bowker, which attributed the sharp rise to the number of print-on-demand books and reprints of out-of-print titles ... In short, everyone has a story -- and everyone wants to tell it.
Measuring Success on Self-Published Titles
Andrew Savikas
April 23, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Listen
Over on his blog at Adobe, Bill McCoy comments on the numbers used in a Wired article to demonstrate "success" for a self-published book:
No insult intended to author Zeraus nee Suarez who "is planning to release a sequel". It may be great stuff. But [1,200 copies sold] are not stats to write home about, much less to hang a "who need Random House" thesis on. Per an established literary agent: "Less than 5000 actual sales, result: misery ... A solid midlist novel would reap on the order of 3,500-7,000 hardcover sales and 10,000-25,000 paperbacks in the US."
Bill is absolutely right that as measured by the yardstick of trade publishing, 1,200 copies can't rightly be called a success. But do self-publishing authors use that yardstick? Let's build a simple scenario and run some numbers. Of course every author is different, but I think it's fair to say that for many authors, two big goals for writing a book are to (1) make money and (2) elevate their reputation.
I'm assuming that for #1, most authors interested in self publishing are modest enough to not expect to get rich from their first (and self-published) book. Instead, they'd like merely to earn the equivalent of a fairly standard advance on royalties. And for #2, let's assume that the marketing outreach needed to sell that modest amount (through, for example, blogging or bootstrapped book tours) will effectively elevate their reputation enough to be counted as a success. That ties the two goals together so they can both be measured via sales numbers.
To make things easy, I'll use my own book, Word Hacks, as an example. In order for me to earn out the advance O'Reilly paid me, the book needed to sell roughly 8,000 copies. Certainly not a blockbuster, but according to Nielsen BookScan data, only 2% of the 1.2 million books sold in 2004 (the year my book was published) sold more than 5,000 copies.
If I'd instead gone the self-publishing route, based on the cost structure of working with Lulu.com, how many books would I need to sell to earn the same amount as that advance? Roughly 500.
Number of copies needed to earn equivalent of publisher advance.
|
Traditional |
Self-published |
|
8,000 |
500 |
Granted, selling 8,000 copies and having the association with a well-respected brand like O'Reilly is certainly going to do more for reputation than something self-published. But the recognition I'd have had to build with bloggers and their audience to sell those 500 copies would arguably put me among the top choices if and when a publisher like O'Reilly goes looking for their own author.
If you accept my generalizations, the numbers above suggest that in terms of author income, selling one self-published book is roughly equal to selling 16 through a publisher. Getting back to the Zeraus nee Suarez book (that's a pseudonym, btw), 16:1 is the conversion factor needed to make a (somewhat) more accurate comparison with trade sales. Self-publishing and selling 1,200 is therefore more like selling almost 20,000 through a traditional publisher. Not too shabby.
There are some flaws in a rough comparison like this, but my point is that if publishers use their standard sales measures to judge the performance of self-publishing authors, they are underestimating the "success" of those authors.
Does Skipping Publishers Mean Skipping Libraries?
Andrew Savikas
March 31, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Listen
When I speak to an audience of publishers, I use Getting Real as an important example of how popular bloggers who want to publish can easily skip publishers all together. 30,000 copies of a self-published PDF @ $19 (with no incremental unit cost) implies some enviable margins.
Tim Spalding over at LibraryThing brings up an unintended but important consequence of skipping publishers, especially when the resulting book becomes culturally important: right now it's also skipping libraries:
OCLC's WorldCat records exactly three copies—MIT, California Polytechnic and the University of Nebraska. That's three copies of one of the top tech books of the 00's in most of the US libraries that matter. The Library of Congress? New York Public? Harvard? None of them. For comparison, WorldCat contains 619 copies of Solitary sex : a cultural history of masturbation.
- Stay Connected
-
TOC RSS Feeds
News Posts
Commentary Posts
Combined Feed
New to RSS?
Subscribe to the TOC newsletter. 
Follow TOC on Twitter. 
Join the TOC Facebook group. 
Join the TOC LinkedIn group. 
Get the TOC Headline Widget.
- Search
-
