Publishing Books

Rather frequently, I get asked how I’ve published my books. I also get asked how I write my books. I’ll answer the latter first. Depending on the book:

• I think of things and I write them down
• I think about things, research them, think about them some more, and write them down
• I imagine things and write them down
• I sit with my fingers on the keyboard and think – I wonder what will happen today – and then something other than me writes them down.
• What I never do is write an outline

OK, that’s taken care of. How did the manuscripts get from there to HERE?

Through a Publisher

My martial arts books are published by Freelance Academy Press. This was a painless process, because Gregory Mele, the publisher and I were already acquainted. I do not recall whose idea it was, originally, but because he wanted my work, it was just a matter of collaborating. In this case, I provided him with the manuscript of each book (all three of them are revised and expanded editions), as well as the art work (he had to find better versions of some of the photographs, enhance their quality, and sometimes, secure the rights to publish). We agreed on a percentage for my royalty, he drew up a contract, we did a little negotiation and that was set. He then turned the manuscript over to a designer, who had to format for both print and eBook versions. She and I collaborated on the covers, which was the most enjoyable part of the process. It is quite exciting to try out various designs and then find one which, to my mind, exemplifies the book. I truly am fortunate in this regard – other authors, with no say in the matter, have been presented with absolutely horrendous cover art.

Cimarronin: A Samurai in New Spain, the graphic novel co-written with Neal Stephenson, Charles Mann and Mark Teppo was published by Amazon. We each received an advance but sales have not been high enough that we’ve received any subsequent royalties, and Amazon has not been interested in a sequel. Nonetheless, that was a wonderful process – we four individuals collaborated remarkably smoothly and further, had artists who so vividly turned our ideas into images that we ended up editing away ⅔ of the text.

The RAN Network I publish my translated martial arts books through Aikido Italia Network Publishing, through Simone Chierchini, who does the layout and design. He does beautiful work, we have a very equitable split of royalties and earnings between myself, translators and him  – and then the books are published through Amazon KDP. I will publish some books in English with them in the future.

Self-Publishing

Advantages & Disadvantages

I have self-published most of my books. The advantages of this is that, once production costs are taken care of, all profits goes to the author or authors. The difference can be huge. I know of many published authors who receive royalties that are 5% (and this can be split between co-authors). Getting 10% is considered great. With many of my self-published books, my return has been 70%.

On the downside, all publicity is my responsibility. I have a Facebook publishing page, and there is Facebook advertising (that’s when you get the annoying, unsolicited adds when you are on Facebook – note the word “annoying.” I’ve tried this and of a distribution of tens of thousands, I got maybe thirty or forty clicks, and maybe one or two purchases.). Some people pay for reviews – I cannot bear to do that. It seems tainted. Advertisements cost money. But few professionals review a self-published work, unless, rarely, it gets huge publicity elsewhere. One relies on Amazon reviews (more below) and Goodreads.

Design

Anyway, the first expense is design. If you can design your own book, properly format it as needed for print or eBook, the only expense is time. I cannot do this, so I’ve hired a professional designer – Soundview Design. Amy Vaughn is wonderful. For example, check out the covers of these books: The Accord Agent. and Words of Power. What I do is start thinking about the cover – what do I want the cover to say about the book. A ‘felt-sense’ comes to mind: for example, with The Accord Agent, I began to imagine something stable that masters chaos. With Words of Power, I began to think about what it is like to be an ordinary human, facing aggression, where you have no back-up or support. In each case, I’d start looking at Wikimedia Commons and sooner or later, I’d find an image. Images there are free – all you have to do is give credit to the photographer. Sometimes I couldn’t find what I wanted there, and I’d look in stock-photo sites, where one can get an image for a nominal fee.

In my case, my designer can only format print books – depending on the book, that has cost me $800 – $1400. The higher fees were usually when I wanted changes after the book was designed. Editing a PDF, with all sorts of inner formatting to justify text with photographs and the like, is time consuming. Do all your editing before design. It will be a costly mistake if you start editing text when the book is, for all intents and purposes, complete. To be sure, every once in a while, an egregious mistake will creep in – but edit, edit, edit – and have a number of readers do so as well.

Then comes eBook. There are several formats – ePub  works great for Amazon, iBook and Kobo. (Amazon used to use Mobi, but with some upgrades on their end, it is ‘wonky,’ and I had to replace all of the manuscripts with ePub).  Depending on the demands of your book (are there illustrations, lots of photos, etc., the price, in my experience, can be anywhere from $100 – $600. You may get a designer who can do eBooks too – mine does not – but she’s so good, I don’t want to change, even though it would be convenient to have ‘one-stop design’ for both print and eBook versions. I found a wonderful eBook designer – BooknookBiz – I believe they do bound books as well. What makes them great is they truly know the ins-and-outs of eBook design as appropriate to Amazon KDP (the upload can be remarkably troublesome if you don’t have someone who can truly address its quirks).

Printing

I am going to start talking about direct sales. You’ll need a website. Some people sell through a commercial site on Facebook – that didn’t work for me.  Anyway, you need an on-demand printer. There are two types of on-demand. There is ‘bulk on-demand.’ Here, you order a number of books that are shipped to either your own location (if you are going to ship them individually) or if someone is buying in bulk (in my case, a police or mental health agency, for example), you can ship directly there. Some companies have a set price for printing your book, based on color vs black-and-white, quality of paper and cover, number of photos, size of book, etc, no matter what the number. Others (I think the majority) charge less when you order more. I learned, to my regret, that this isn’t always a good idea. For example, one of my books is Guarding the Gates. Nice looking book, right? And there are exponentially more private security professionals than there are law enforcement officers. I thought this book would sell wonderfully. If I recall, two hundred books was about $1500; six hundred books was $2800. So ten years ago, I purchased six hundred, and stored them in a shed (which you have to make sure does not get humid, is not visited by living beasts that want to chew on them, etc). It took me ten years to finally sell all of them. To be sure, a discount on books is great, but consider both your market and your storage space.

The second part of ‘on-demand’ is single copy. There are far less companies that do this, particularly at a reasonable printing cost. I used to have one – they were great – but they just decided to phase out their single copy printing. I’ve not replaced them (I still use them for bulk orders). I  am now selling single copies through KDP Amazon and through Ingram Spark (see below).

Finally, you can set up a shopping cart, take payment directly and ship the books yourself. I did this for many years. Aside from direct sales, I also set myself up as an ‘Amazon Seller.’ Amazon is great in this regard. They manage everything – all you do is take the order, ship the book and bank the money they collect. However, I found it somewhat stressful. Customers in Asia, Africa and Europe were always unhappy about the shipping charges (that were sometimes more than the book!). And when I took a vacation, I had to shut off the shopping cart (many customers then don’t come back), or monitor purchases, and send notes to the buyers about expected delays. So, I mostly stopped direct sales through a shopping cart, and have almost completely shut down my Amazon seller account (what I’ve been doing is using the seller account to sell signed copies that I still have in my shed).

[Amazon and Ingram Spark both have printing facilities in Europe, Asia and Australia – therefore, purchasers can buy with local postage rates, so, using them, I no longer have to worry about packaging, shipping, or complaints about unfilled or late orders].

Kobo – eBook

Kobo is the direct competitor to Amazon in the eBook arena, and I do not know how they survive. They merged with Rakuten Overdrive, which is the main distributor of eBooks to libraries. On the surface, this sounds great – the way Kobo frames it, people anywhere in the world can ask a library to purchase your eBook and you get a royalty. Unfortunately, it’s not so simple – in my case, people have requested that libraries do so, and they say ‘no.’ [Hint to the reader – do me a favor: if there’s one of my books you are interested in, give it a try with your library.]

It’s up to the library to decide if they want a book in stock – they haven’t wanted many of mine. Kobo is far more popular in Europe and Asia – but even so, in my case, I’ve sold very few books in this platform. It’s pretty easy though, and other than the cost of formatting (see above), it’s free to upload manuscripts. Their royalties are quite generous – 66% – but sales, for me, have been minimal. There are surely ways to up sales with promotions, etc., but I’ve not yet taken advantage of them.

Apple iBook – eBook

This section, with the exception of the discourse on Overdrive (libraries) is pretty much the same as Kobo. Apple iBook is, reportedly, the 2nd largest purveyor of eBooks. Not mine. I have my books listed for sale, but they have been few and far between. Also, unlike Amazon or Kobo, it’s ‘dedicated’ as part of the Apple suite of services.

Amazon/KDP – eBook and Paperback

I am going to discuss two things here, as Amazon KDP is now publishing print books as well, both soft bound and hard cover – not just eBooks. Amazon is the giant. I wondered if I withheld a book from the Amazon market, if people would buy them, by default, through Apple or Kobo. What I found out is: No. Not at all. So, if you are a self-publisher and want to really sell your books, one bites the bullet and publishes through Amazon.

Amazon wants lots of sales – not only for the book, but under the reasonable assumption that some people will buy pool cleaners, shoes, groceries, or what have you, while on the Amazon site. Therefore, one gets a munificent royalty for eBooks of 66% ONLY if the book is priced under $9.99. Above that, you get 33%. They know that lower priced books generates more sales and this means more visits to Amazon. This is frustrating for the writer, however – for example, you have a four hundred page textbook selling hardcover for $35 and the eBook version is $9.99 or less. (There is a mysterious ‘text book’ royalty, but I’ve never met anyone successful in setting this up as a self-publisher).

With Kindle eBooks, you upload a document, just like with the above ebooks, I use ePub.

You can also upload a PDF and publish a bound book – softbound as well as hardcover. The quality is pretty good. Using my on-demand printer, I can get a better quality book with 14 pt cover paper, and a heavier weight paper. With Amazon, it is 10 pt. But that is good enough. They did a particularly beautiful job with my book, Body and Soul.  NOTE: You either have to be good at design yourself, or have a good designer, because the template for uploading is a little fussy, and it has always taken me several tries to get a book uploaded properly.

I have a number of books on Amazon, and one of them, Words of Power, I deliberately priced it low, not only with the Kindle version, but the bound version as well. The reason is the Amazon algorithm: if an author sells one book, his or her other books pop-up more in customer searches. Furthermore, books purchased along with your own book are now ‘sticky’ – to a certain degree, when someone buys ‘book x,’ your book or another one of your titles will pop up.

What also helps if if you get reviews. The two main reader review sites are Amazon itself and Goodreads. The latter is for book-lovers (some of the reviews are really literate as well). I don’t know how well Goodreads reviews sell books, but reviews on Amazon certainly help. [Another hint to the reader of this article, not only for myself, but for any authors you like or respect. A powerful review on Amazon is actually a tangible way to express your gratitude for the work the author provided].

Specialty Publication

I have also published one book to ‘spec.’ This is Threat De-escalation: : How to Effectively Assess and Diffuse Dangerous Situations (Book & DVD). This was a project for the United States Concealed Carry Association. The book, itself, is much like Words of Power, but beautifully designed, and the DVD that accompanies it illustrates a lot of the strategies in the book. It was a lot of fun to make – we have some pretty wild scenarios. In one, we have a road-rage scene from the perspective of the ‘rager’ – the video-guy (Mike Hughes) was in the back of a hatchback, half-hanging out of the car, with his feet lashed in place with the seat belts, holding himself up with his abs as he filmed, while Butchie Sapp was swerving down the road, howling all the while.

IngramSpark

IngramSpark is great, with two exceptions: 1) the royalties are not nearly as high as some of the other options, above. 2) If the purchaser returns the book, you are on the hook for the price of the book. You can lose money fast if there are many returns. (With one of my books, I had a run of people return the book after purchase, so I ended up closing it down and pulling it off the site – this hasn’t happened with any other book). On the other hand it is a one-stop service. I have published most of my books in hardcover through them, and others in perfect bound (quality paperback) edition. They are distributed to book stores, (30,000) when ordered, and a number of retail outlets, including Amazon.  Finally, they will format your PDF into ePub, as an ‘aggregator,’ will distribute to Kobo, iBook, Kindle (and elsewhere). (They are less expensive than many independent formatters). Once a month, you get a combined statement/royalty check from all the eBook venues, and another one for all bound book sales, both softbound and hardbound.

If you go on my book website, each book with an Ingram Spark edition has the ISBN for that edition there. You can ask your bookstore or library to order it. I very much like the idea that my work can be purchased in bookstores, rather than just Amazon.

Two book beautifully done by Ingram Spark are The Coordinator and The Accord Agent.

One thing – the template for uploading the bound book is incredibly, frustratingly finicky. Can take a number of tries.

How About an Agent?

I had an agent for Girl with the Face of the Moon, one of the most prestigious literary agents in the country. She really tried to get the book published, but the publishing companies couldn’t pigeonhole it in a particular ‘type’ of book. It was praised by several editors, but no one picked it up. So I published it myself. One thing about an agent – you are product. If you are not producing, they are not like your friend in your writer’s collective who is interested in your ideas. Rather, where is the next manuscript? Is it sellable, or will it be a waste of time. It took me a while to realize this – I’d write a note about ideas for fiction or progress in other areas (non-fiction) about which she had no commercial interest. After awhile, I realized that I was getting the same reception as would any manufacturer who isn’t delivering product to the customer.

I’ve terminated with my agent. When I finished a second novel, Lost Boy, I got a sense from her that she read it only for its commercial value (which is, to be fair, quite reasonable from an agent’s perspective). It’s a novella of 40,000 and there are very few publishers that have any interest in this type of writing. At any rate, I am proud of the work, and I think she’s mistaken.  I was unsuccessful in getting a new agent, after 40 letters and submissions, for my third novel, Little Bird and the Tiger. So, it too, is self-published. I’ll be happy to answer any questions the reader may have on this subject.

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Purchase Ellis Amdur’s Books Here

Note: If any of my readers here find themselves grateful for access to the information in my essays, you can express your thanks in a way that would be helpful to me in turn. If you have ever purchased any of my books, please write a review – the option is there on Amazon as well as Kobo or iBook. To be sure, positive reviews are valuable in their own right, but beyond that, the number of reviews bumps the algorithm within the online retailer, so that the book in question appears to more customers.