This is the first in a season of emails on how to sell a book. Today\u2019s email will cover the shape of the industry as it is today. Further emails will cover things like traditional sales techniques, Amazon\u2019s algorithm, Facebook ads, Amazon ads, mailing lists, non-fiction, and other topics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What\u2019s the point, mate \u2013 I mean, honestly?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019ll be a large group of you for whom this kind of information may seem redundant. Those folk may be inclined to think, roughly:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cLook here, you Cheerless Charlie, I haven\u2019t even finished my book, and I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s any good, and certainly don\u2019t know if any literary agent will be keen to take me on. And all that mailing list and Amazon ad stuff? Isn\u2019t that something that publishers are meant to take care of? I have zero interest in self-publishing a book and a couple of emails won\u2019t change that.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, yes, I hear you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yes: selling a book may seem a distant dream, and the information that follows may feel theoretical. But that\u2019s not the right way to look at it. You are, all of you, seeking to create and sell a product to an industry<\/em> \u2013 or, for indie authors, perhaps it\u2019s more accurate to say that you\u2019re looking to create a product that you\u2019ll sell direct to consumers via some well-established industry structures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And to do that, yes, you need to write a good book. You\u2019ll know me well enough by now to know that I\u2019m a craft-first kind of guy. I\u2019m all about hard-writing and easy-marketing, not the other way round.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But understanding the industry always helps<\/em>. Always.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes, it helps in very direct ways. If you sell your book to a publisher, and you\u2019re at some industry event supported by that publisher, you\u2019ll know who performs what role \u2013 and who you ought to be out charming. Good knowledge about the industry will change the way you think about Twitter\/X. It\u2019ll change the way you think about your book cover. It\u2019ll change the way you present yourself as an author.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But more than that, I think you grow up in less definable ways. All fiction projects start out in a kind of dream. A story pops into your head and you think, wouldn\u2019t it be fun to write this down? That\u2019s perfectly fine \u2013 it\u2019s how I started, too \u2013 but your aim has to be to become a truly professional author. Yes, you will always need to satisfy your own creative spirit (what a waste it would be if we didn\u2019t do that), but you\u2019d be plain dumb to think that your creative spirit doesn\u2019t need to work hand-in-hand with an industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What\u2019s more, for all the mwah-mwah-darling nature of the (very pleasant) publishing industry, it is at its heart as ruthless about income and profits as any other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So:<\/p>\n\n\n\n You need to remain creative, but you also need to build a product for a shamelessly profit-seeking industry. These emails will tell you how books get sold and that in turn will tell you a lot about how agents, editors, publicists and everyone else thinks. Get to grips with these emails and your odds of success go up. Got that? Good. Allons-y<\/em>!<\/p>\n\n\n\n The doom loop that wasn\u2019t<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n For a few years, it seemed credible to argue that the traditional books industry could simply collapse. Bricks-and-mortar booksellers were near-bankrupt. E-books were booming. Print-runs were getting shorter. It seemed possible that shorter print runs would drive up print prices, which would force the collapse of Barnes and Noble (US) and Waterstones (UK), and that in turn would create a doom loop for the rest of the regular bookselling industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That didn\u2019t happen. A couple of big book chains went bust (bye-bye, Borders), but the flagship chains recovered their spirits, their profitability, and their charm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meantime, e-books (and audio book) did in fact turn out to be the Next Big Thing \u2013 a vast new way of reading and marketing and selling books \u2013 but that new thing has added to, not replaced, what was there before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The invisible publisher<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The publishing industry, as it exists today, divides into two (messily defined) chunks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One chunk is \u2018traditional\u2019 publishing. The company names are essentially the same as they always were. The imprints are often the same, too. The firms they sell to are largely the same. The products they sell have shifted \u2013 but only a bit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thus, a modern trad publisher might sell roughly 70% of its books in print form, roughly 20% as ebooks, and roughly 10% as audiobooks. If you look at value, not volume, then ebooks drop back to more like 10% and that chunk gets added onto print instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, for most modern publishers, ebooks are and have long been secondary. It\u2019s true that ebooks play a bigger role in adult genre fiction, but that means they play a correspondingly smaller role in kids\u2019 books and adult non-fiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This summary \u2013 70 print \/ 20 ebook \/ 10 audio \u2013 is often presented as though it were true of the books market as a whole, but it\u2019s not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Talk to indie authors, and you\u2019ll find they barely think about print at all. My own self-published books sell at least 95% of their copies in digital form \u2013 ebook and audio. I really only sell in print because it\u2019s easy to do so, and because it\u2019s nice for readers who prefer lovely, lovely paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Virtually all self-published authors are like me: we sell digital products. Our print sales are little more than decorative. Yet because mainstream media has long, deep connections with trad publishers and essentially no connection at all with indies, the self-published part of the industry is essentially invisible \u2013 perpetually forgotten, perpetually surprising to those from trad publishers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But, collectively, these indies are hardly negligible. The self-pub industry is at least as large as Penguin Random House and probably larger. If you add in the digital-first publishers \u2013 who are quasi-traditional in that they are selective, but still very ebook dominated \u2013 then the ebook-dominant publishers are collectively way bigger than PRH.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yet \u2013 still invisible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Selling in print and selling in bytes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Now all this matters to you because selling print books is radically different from selling ebooks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Take ebooks first:<\/p>\n\n\n\n So that\u2019s ebooks: instantly flexible, price-adjustable, online-linked, direct to consumer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n None of that stuff is true of print books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why this matters<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n This matters to you because print sales techniques are utterly different from digital sales techniques. You need to know how the whole print selling process works, because you may end up working with a big publisher and you need to know what you can influence and what really matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But you also need to understand, in depth, how the ebook selling process works, because if you have a trad publisher, they may well cock it up. (Though they\u2019re less hopeless than they used to be.) And if you don\u2019t end up with a trad publisher, your alternative will be selling digitally in one form or another, so you need to know all that side of things, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As we go further with this series of emails, I\u2019d love to know what you think. What\u2019s useful? What isn\u2019t? What do you want to know more about? Comment below to let me know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ***<\/p>\n\n\n\n FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Publishing and selling Q&A<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Simple one this week. Just tell me what your publishing \/ selling plans are, and what questions you have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Premium Members only, please. If you\u2019re not a PM, then this could be the time to Do The Right Thing<\/a>\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ll give as many responses as I sanely can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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