In America, Hachette (the world\u2019s #2 consumer publisher) is spending $240 million on a good-sized independent, Workman. In France, the two largest corporate publishers are merging. Globally, Penguin Random House (PRH) is buying Simon & Schuster, its #5 competitor.<\/p>\n
A US investment banker, commenting on these changes, said it\u2019s \u2018all about market share.\u2019<\/strong> His implication: that the big will continue to eat the small, and the small \u2013 lacking the resources of their bigger brethren \u2013 will struggle to maximise the potential of their books and their authors.<\/p>\n Well, that\u2019s one view. Here\u2019s another:<\/p>\n Markus Dohle, CEO of PRH, says: \u2018I\u2019m not worried about consolidation. It is the smallness of publishing that matters. It\u2019s one book at a time. There is no scale.\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n Now, you\u2019re entitled to be cynical about that. If a giant, whose diet is largely composed of hobbits, gnomes, halflings, and other small fry, tells you that size doesn\u2019t matter, you probably want to nod politely then run as fast as you can into your burrow.<\/p>\n At the same time, you\u2019re not a publisher. You are an emerging author and the thing you really want to know is: What kind of publisher do I personally need?<\/p>\n And look: that\u2019s a good question, and I\u2019ll try to answer it, but I don\u2019t know your exact situation. So whatever I say in the rest of this email needs to be supplemented with your own knowledge, your own wisdom. That said \u2026<\/p>\n When size matters<\/strong><\/p>\n Let\u2019s say, like me, you write police procedurals. There\u2019s clearly a mass market for that fiction. It\u2019s the sort of thing which can potentially sell a ton on Amazon, but also fill the shelves of supermarkets and specialist bookstores too.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s just assume, for now, that you want to sell a lot of books and you want to be present in print as well as digital (we\u2019ll talk more about the digital-first option in a moment.) In that case, yes, you want a Big 5 firm or any independent that can muster the firepower needed to compete.<\/p>\n To give you an example: when I sold the first of the Fiona Griffiths books, the leading offers I received (in the UK, that is) came from Hachette, a giant, and from Faber, a first-class independent, with global revenues roughly 1% of Hachette\u2019s.<\/p>\n Put like that, Faber doesn\u2019t sound like a real competitor, except that the tiny little company has published no fewer than thirteen Nobel laureates, a fistful of Booker winners, and plenty more besides. It\u2019s an outstanding publisher \u2013 just smaller. I was flattered to get an offer from them.<\/p>\n What\u2019s more, the key question for anyone with real ambition in commercial fiction \u2013 or any non-fiction with a chance of making mass sales \u2013 is simply this: does the putative publisher have the financial resources to compete in the mass market?<\/p>\n So let\u2019s say Faber had persuaded a handful of supermarkets to go big on the book. To make that work, they\u2019d have needed a hardback print run of 30,000 or more books (many more if you\u2019re looking at big sales in North America), plus a ton of promo spend \u2026 and the whole deal would be done on a \u2018sale or return\u2019 basis. That is, if the books sold worse than expected, Faber would have had to take them all back and pulp them.<\/p>\n Really small publishers just can\u2019t take that financial risk: the cost, if the venture went wrong, could be crippling. So, if you want to play in the mass market \u2013 genre fiction, bookclub fiction, any non-fiction with front-of-store sales potential (eg: The Tipping Point <\/em>or Educated <\/em>or A Brief History of Time<\/em>) \u2013 you must pick a publisher that has the ambition to gamble big and the resources to do so. Faber (with $30 million in annual revenues) was comfortably big enough to take those risks.<\/p>\n Below the $10-15 million revenue figure, you need to get a lot more cautious. If you pick a micro-publisher, they can still publish in print, but they can\u2019t afford to enter Supermarket World. Media attention tends to chase books that are already selling well, so your total potential sales will be much lower than if you picked a publisher with more heft.<\/p>\n In short, when it comes to any mass market book, there comes a cut off point below which size really does matter. You don\u2019t have to be on the Penguin Random House scale to win big, but you do have to be able to spend properly in support of your book.<\/p>\n When size doesn\u2019t matter: digital<\/strong><\/p>\n If you don\u2019t care about the whole print market, then digital-first publication is unquestionably an option to take seriously. The current model for such publishing was pioneered (brilliantly) by Bookouture, a UK-based outfit that has since been eaten up \u2013 but also left well alone \u2013 by Hachette.<\/p>\n That model, now widely copied, is this:<\/p>\n Any ambitious genre author should take any digital first publisher seriously. Financial heft really doesn\u2019t matter \u2013 digital publishing is cheap. It\u2019s not just cheap, it\u2019s also brilliantly democratic. Bookouture still allocates the exact same marketing budget to all its debut authors. If a book does well, its budget is upped. If a book does badly (and some clever tweaking can\u2019t fix it), then that book will be left without further support.<\/p>\n In the end, it\u2019s readers, mediated by Amazon, who decide what books to support. That\u2019s how it should be. The one thing you do want to check is the company\u2019s sales record. Have they built big authors? Do they have a credible plan for you? If the answer to both questions is yes, you don\u2019t need to worry about scale.<\/p>\n When size doesn\u2019t matter: self-pub<\/strong><\/p>\n And if size doesn\u2019t matter in terms of digital publishing, it certainly doesn\u2019t matter in terms of self-pub.<\/p>\n Indie authors need to allow proper budget for the book itself (editing and copy editing; those things are no longer optional.) They also need to buy a proper cover (for, say, $300-500.)<\/p>\n Thereafter, a marketing budget of as little as $500 will still do something. If you have a few books already published, and a mailing list established, you might want to throw an ad budget of (say) $1500-5000 at a launch, but those sums are within the reach of many authors, especially if there is real income coming in each month already. (I\u2019d never recommend a $5000 launch budget for a debut novel, though. Start small, build big.)<\/p>\n In short, quite small amounts of money will allow you to build a real platform as a self-pub author. If you write plenty and write well and are professional in the way you publish, there\u2019s nothing to stop you building a six- or seven-figure career. Plenty of indie authors have.<\/p>\n When size doesn\u2019t matter: niche non-fiction<\/strong><\/p>\n If you\u2019re writing niche non-fiction – The Big Book of Dressage Exercises, The Complete Beginners Guide to Knitting, How to Tame Lions Without Losing a Leg<\/em> – you aren\u2019t going to appear on supermarket shelves and you\u2019re never going to ride high on Amazon bestseller lists either.<\/p>\n That book on dressage exercises is a real book. When I checked, it was (not surprisingly) #1 for the search \u201cDressage books\u201d but came a mediocre #83 in \u201cAnimal and Equestrian Sports\u201d and only just made the top 50,000 on the overall Amazon bestseller list.<\/p>\n This is where Markus Dohle is right. It\u2019s one book at a time and all publishing is small.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re writing that kind of book, then simply pick the publisher with the most passion for your book. An equestrian publisher will know what to do with a book on dressage.<\/p>\n Niche non-fiction will never sell a lot in any one month, but if you\u2019ve written a book that hovers, more or less permanently, around the 50,000 mark on Amazon, you have a little goose that will go on laying eggs for a long time to come. I\u2019ve written books like that and, over ten years or so, they pay out very nicely.<\/p>\n When size doesn\u2019t matter: literary fiction<\/strong><\/p>\n Challenging literary fiction will almost never sell a lot, but passionate attention from a team skilled and experienced at selling small, difficult books will do fine. A big corporate publisher has budgets and profit expectations to deal with, so small, hard books are seldom taken on in the first place.<\/p>\n One of the striking ways that the publishing landscape has changed in recent years is the way that micro-publishers have scored huge successes with literary novels: winning prizes and, occasionally, hitting bestseller lists too. At times that success has stretched a company beyond its breaking point, so a book has moved from the original publisher to a larger one. But that\u2019s good. That\u2019s still success.<\/p>\n But have we had any fun?<\/strong><\/p>\n And in the end, you shouldn\u2019t make a choice only on the basis of probable sales and total advances.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s also about where you feel the passion and the energy and the chemistry. A couple of times in my career, I\u2019ve made a decision based on the chemistry I felt with the people making offers. That matters. You\u2019ll spend the money, but the memories stay with you.<\/p>\n That\u2019s it from me. My children and I have built the biggest squirrel obstacle course in North West Oxfordshire. The squirrels love it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In America, Hachette (the world\u2019s #2 consumer publisher) is spending $240 million on a good-sized independent, Workman. In France, the two largest corporate publishers are merging. Globally, Penguin Random House (PRH) is buying Simon & Schuster, its #5 competitor. A US investment banker, commenting on these changes, said it\u2019s \u2018all about market share.\u2019 His implication:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-harrys-friday-email"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n