For a long time my life’s goal was to work in the publishing industry. My first job was at a library, I worked at a Barnes & Noble for a few years and a local bookstore for less than that. I also worked for a small publishing house. Here are some scattered thoughts on the book business.
Sales, Sales, Sales
Publishing business in brief: authors pitch to agents, agents pitch to editors, editors pitch to marketers, marketers pitch to sales reps, sales reps pitch to buyers.
At many steps of the chain it helps to employ this process. Start talking to one editor. Go to another editor and name-drop that you’re talking to the first editor, in an attempt to start a frenzy built solely on the fact that you’ve called a lot of people.
Don’t Write This
‘Cause no one will buy it.
- Poetry
- Short Story Collections
- ‘Family’ cookbooks
- Christian Fiction
Book Covers
People in the publishing world debate about covers endlessly. A primarily green covered is assumed to be death, etc. People DO judge books by their covers, and my observation is that successful covers do the following:
- Tell you the author and title. A surprising amount of books don’t, which irritates me.
- Have a very iconic image on the cover, to spark your interest in the book.
- Give you a vague idea of the genre of the book.
Beyond that, I’m pretty open.
If an author doesn’t like a cover mock-up, they should: Calm down. Call their agent, not the publisher. Publishers hate hyper-involved authors just as much as they hate authors who won’t promote their own books.
Where the Money Goes
- If the average retail price of a book is $10, the average wholesale price is $5.
Note: after paying rent, employees, and such, bookstores probably make at most $.50 for this example title. - The cost of printing the book is about $1.
- Author’s royalties (15% of retail) are $1.50.
- Publisher’s costs (including design & layout, marketing, sales, warehousing, distribution, etc.) are close to $2.
- Leaving a publisher profit of $.50 per title.
It starts to get insanely complicated from there, but it’s a very balanced equation. This is why people worry when Amazon, B&N, or Ingram swallows more market share – changes in the balance of power can upset the whole industry.
Royalties
One of the many reasons all authors need agents. A confusing mess, and getting more so all the time. Click here for a good summary: [Link]
Sales
Books are promoted about 6 months ahead of their release date, divided into three seasons: Spring, Summer, and Fall. Sales reps sell books to buyers at major bookstore chains: Barnes & Noble, Borders, Books-a-Million, Chapters.
To aid in this process, publishing houses provide their sales reps with sales kits. Sales kits typically consist of:
- A cover sheet unique to the account with very basic information and the book’s subject code. Big store buyers specialize in one subject area, or an area of the store covering a few subjects.
- A generic fact sheet. Title, author, ISBN. Marketing information, quotes/blurbs, copy, and comps provided by the publisher. A ‘comp’ compares a new book to a previously published book by the same author, or a book with a similar subject, format, on-sale season, etc. to help predict the new book’s sales.
- A color copy of the book’s cover.
The sales reps then meet with buyers and they determine how many they will initially order. This could change between the initial order and the release date. The sales reps job is to convince the buyer that the publisher’s expectations for the title are correct.
For Barnes & Noble or Borders, a 1,000-2,000 copy order is a good order, 3,500-6,000 is really good.
Publicity
The industry calls this system ‘co-op’. Co-op is the process by which publishers determine with bookstores which titles will get special marketing in the form of placement at the front of the store, on endcaps, or in special displays. The book publisher pays for this in the form of a set amount of money or a percentage of each title sold. Co-op is tremendously successful at moving books, and benefits the publisher and bookseller. Every book you see on display in a chain bookstore is paid placement, basically.
The bookstore comes up with a calendar. They decide they want a paranormal romance table for Halloween, a diet & exercise table for new years, and a father’s day table for, y’know. They send that calendar with prices attached to the publishers.
The publishing company looks at their list of upcoming titles and starts matching things up. A small fraction of their titles will get co-op promotion, and they pick the ones that have the best chance of reaching a large audience. They send that list back to the bookstore, and the bookstore picks which books they’ll accept for the table.
What does this mean for the author? Once your book is picked up, your success has a lot to do with how much your house believes in your book.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Very interesting. Is there much of a difference between the book industry and the popular Christian book industries?
No… most of the major Christian trade houses are structured the same way as the rest of the industry.