How to sell a book

This is the first in a season of emails on how to sell a book. Today’s email will cover the shape of the industry as it is today. Further emails will cover things like traditional sales techniques, Amazon’s algorithm, Facebook ads, Amazon ads, mailing lists, non-fiction, and other topics.

What’s the point, mate – I mean, honestly?

There’ll be a large group of you for whom this kind of information may seem redundant. Those folk may be inclined to think, roughly:

“Look here, you Cheerless Charlie, I haven’t even finished my book, and I don’t know if it’s any good, and certainly don’t know if any literary agent will be keen to take me on. And all that mailing list and Amazon ad stuff? Isn’t 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’t change that.”

Well, yes, I hear you.

And yes: selling a book may seem a distant dream, and the information that follows may feel theoretical. But that’s not the right way to look at it. You are, all of you, seeking to create and sell a product to an industry – or, for indie authors, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that you’re looking to create a product that you’ll sell direct to consumers via some well-established industry structures.

And to do that, yes, you need to write a good book. You’ll know me well enough by now to know that I’m a craft-first kind of guy. I’m all about hard-writing and easy-marketing, not the other way round.

But understanding the industry always helps. Always.

Sometimes, it helps in very direct ways. If you sell your book to a publisher, and you’re at some industry event supported by that publisher, you’ll know who performs what role – and who you ought to be out charming. Good knowledge about the industry will change the way you think about Twitter/X. It’ll change the way you think about your book cover. It’ll change the way you present yourself as an author.

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’t it be fun to write this down? That’s perfectly fine – it’s how I started, too – 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’t do that), but you’d be plain dumb to think that your creative spirit doesn’t need to work hand-in-hand with an industry.

What’s 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.

So:

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!

The doom loop that wasn’t

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.

That didn’t happen. A couple of big book chains went bust (bye-bye, Borders), but the flagship chains recovered their spirits, their profitability, and their charm.

Meantime, e-books (and audio book) did in fact turn out to be the Next Big Thing – a vast new way of reading and marketing and selling books – but that new thing has added to, not replaced, what was there before.

The invisible publisher

The publishing industry, as it exists today, divides into two (messily defined) chunks.

One chunk is ‘traditional’ 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 – but only a bit.

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.

So, for most modern publishers, ebooks are and have long been secondary. It’s true that ebooks play a bigger role in adult genre fiction, but that means they play a correspondingly smaller role in kids’ books and adult non-fiction.

This summary – 70 print / 20 ebook / 10 audio – is often presented as though it were true of the books market as a whole, but it’s not.

Talk to indie authors, and you’ll find they barely think about print at all. My own self-published books sell at least 95% of their copies in digital form – ebook and audio. I really only sell in print because it’s easy to do so, and because it’s nice for readers who prefer lovely, lovely paper.

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 – perpetually forgotten, perpetually surprising to those from trad publishers.

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 – who are quasi-traditional in that they are selective, but still very ebook dominated – then the ebook-dominant publishers are collectively way bigger than PRH.

And yet – still invisible.

Selling in print and selling in bytes

Now all this matters to you because selling print books is radically different from selling ebooks.

Take ebooks first:

1. If early sales data says that your cover isn’t working quite right, you can change the cover instantly. Or the blurb. Or both. Aside from the new design itself, it’s not even costly to make the switch.
2. If you want to tweak the price, you can. Want to drop a book from $9.99 to $0.99 or even $0.00? You can do so, easily and instantly.
3. Supposing you want a reader to visit a website, with an ebook you just offer an ordinary, regular link and say, “Tap here.” Done.
4. One more thing: ebooks are sold (almost exclusively) via Amazon and Apple, two of the world’s largest companies. Those companies don’t hand-curate their bookstores. They just sell everything, no matter how good or bad. So that means you, the author, aren’t really selling your book to Amazon for them to on-sell. You are selling via Amazon direct to the consumer.

So that’s ebooks: instantly flexible, price-adjustable, online-linked, direct to consumer.

None of that stuff is true of print books.

1. Yes, in theory a publisher can change a cover – and often does from hardcover to softcover, or for an anniversary or TV-special edition. But for that process to operate cleanly, the old stock has to be recovered and pulped before the new stock is issued. Consequently, the process is slow, rare and considered.
2. Price tweaking doesn’t really work with print. Because there’s a hard cost (in materials, printing, warehousing, shipping) to get a book to a bookstore, a publisher can’t just chop the price and expect the same margin. So price cutting happens less radically (“3-for-2”, say, not $9.99 to $0.99) and less frequently.
3. Visiting a website direct from a print book? Good luck with that.
4. And, finally, print books aren’t sold to consumers. Not really. Print books are sold to retailers – often huge companies (such as supermarkets) for whom books are all but irrelevant.

Why this matters

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.

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’re less hopeless than they used to be.) And if you don’t 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.

As we go further with this series of emails, I’d love to know what you think. What’s useful? What isn’t? What do you want to know more about? Comment below to let me know.

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FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Publishing and selling Q&A

Simple one this week. Just tell me what your publishing / selling plans are, and what questions you have.

Premium Members only, please. If you’re not a PM, then this could be the time to Do The Right Thing…

I’ll give as many responses as I sanely can.

Post your plans and questions here.