I began as a publisher using ISSN numbers. The second S in there stands for Serials, the name for newsletters, magazines, and periodical publications. To this day, you can look up the ISSN for The 3000 Newswire and find a record of the publishing corporation, location, and dates of publication.

But why would you? That’s a great question to consider when you approach the ISBN part of the author-publishing dance. You get an ISBN for books that you intend to sell at retail, so that can be ebooks as well as printed and recorded books. ISBN is a find-my-book number, used by booksellers, librarians, and the publishing industry.

You’re only required to get a print ISBN for the books being sold at physical retail. A store with a door is the best way to think about this, or a library with a collections department. Your store-ordered book might even get served through Amazon. Bookstores order via Ingram, but now if the presses are busy at IngramSpark, Amazon’s KDP factories bring the paperback to the booksellers.

An ASIN is all Amazon requires to print and deliver any book after it’s sold to a reader. Some authors order up ISBNs to feel more legit. At $25 a book number, it’s not all that expensive.

Amazon-only books, the ones the are printed at the KDP factory in Coppell, Texas, do not need a separate ISBN number. However, if you want to publish using KDP as well as IngramSpark at the same instant of kickoff, then two numbers, please. And believe me, IngramSpark will find a way to get confused about whether your book is already published when you use that dual-printing all at once strategy.

A reason to avoid ISBNs

It’s the IngramSpark action which drives a lot of ISBN ordering. You could print outside of Ingram, or just add Amazon KDP printing to your order. Remember, KDP lets you avoid ISBNs.

Why would you print in two places? Because Amazon pays you twice as much per paperback as Ingram, and Amazon paperbacks are never returned. Or if they are, you don’t endure a returns fee. It’s just never happened to me across the seven books I’ve published.

You fill out lots of fields when you get an ISBN. Everyone who writes a book or illustrates it, or gathers stories for anthology collections, can be a contributor. As an author, you’re probably the only contributor. Your ISBN includes an entry for page count, book size, and pricing. And so much more. Librarians and detail-minded booksellers like a big ISBN file to read.

You don’t need an ISBN to publish, if you’re using Amazon’s KDP service. It helps, but the ebook you send to Amazon can have the same ISBN as the ebook for Kobo, or Apple Books, or Google Play. The ISBN is tied to format, not sales outlet.

Sometimes an entree that shows up on the diner’s signboard never goes away or changes. Lots of ISBN records are that way. But you can change your mind right up to publication time on most things at the ISBN registry, plus alter them (think price) after the book’s out, too. Bowker is in the data collection business. You are in the publishing business.

My strategy is to give IngramSpark a four-week exclusive on printing the paperbacks. Then on the 29th day, once the booksellers have ordered (and returned), you give Amazon the go-ahead to start printing your book via KDP. You load cover, interiors, fill in keywords and all of the summary and reviews, just like when you shipped off to Ingram. After a little while, the Amazon printed books will be the only ones Amazon delivers to your readers. Ingram can still fulfill bookseller orders, and that is all they will get.

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KDP printing saves you money per copy on the printing. KDP books are the equal of Ingram’s in quality, plus you don’t endure the odd printing errors that Ingram throws your way about perfectly good artwork. I’m working through one of those this month with the Sins of Liberty hardback edition. I have a Connect call booked at $25 to sort things out. (For us IBPA members, two of those $25 calls a month are free.)

Ingram, ugh

I wish I could like Ingram printing more than I do, but the love is unrequited. The worst book trim I ever endured came up at Ingram. By now, I learn not to push the specs envelope too hard on bleeds, edges, and sizing of covers. It’s much more of a factory than a press at that place, one where you don’t get to place an order without an ISBN in hand.

I’m down on Ingram right now. Every time I interact, I see needless complications and a press that’s already over-subscribed. They earn $50 an hour while they fix what is broken. The regular publishers don’t print at Ingram. They use distribution companies, and those companies don’t apply to stand in the line that author-publishers are forced to use.

If you can get distribution that doesn’t flow through Ingram, do it. Or add it via Amazon KDP and a new entry called Books.by.

Don’t be tempted to let Ingram produce your ebooks. You will have little control over pricing that way, if you want to run a store special for say, just Barnes & Noble or Google Play. You designer will build you an ebook file as part of their deliverable off of the InDesign work. It’s an easy export for the designer. Didn’t used to be that way.

Other important notes

• You are not required to establish a separate ISBN for exclusive author web-only-sold editions of any kind. ISBN is your ordering number for library and store purchasing. Your BookScan numbers for sales are attached to that ISBN, but few authors who publish themselves will be able to log BookScan figures that will impress a traditional publisher. The unicorns of genre books are the exception. Such books are advertised in some way by the author.

• Use an ISBN for every format of book you intend to publish via traditional distribution, including bookstores, Audible, ebooks. One ISBN is the only kind of ebook number you need to put onto the copyright page. Honestly, nobody but the publishers and agents ever look at that page. You enable your publishing, not Ingram. They enable fulfillment of your product through their printing and shipping engine.

None of this is absolute, but logging a detailed picture of the book’s heritage of sales, with ISBNs for everything, is only useful for the buyers from a store or a library. They order by ISBN. Those copies you’re selling via your website? You might deliver them through Books.by, which prints and ships books that are ordered because you’ve delivered the customers to the purchase moment at something like books.by/trampolinepress. Or just sign each web-sold copy and mail it using stamps.com and those swell U-Line Tyvek mailers.

If you assign a hardcover ISBN, then adding (Website Exclusive) to that number won’t mean anything to a librarian, unless you intend to fulfill their orders using your Website engine. Plus it signals to the bookseller you’re ready to undercut their sales via a direct sale. The copyright page is not a spot where a buyer should learn about your hardcover editions. I mean, it’s not a sales and marketing point.

I can see a picture where you keep Ingram out of the mix altogether. And there goes your need for ISBNs, so long as the libraries are not so important. You can hand-deliver consignment books and earn 60 percent of cover price. In that way, you get to know the bookstore and can size them up. Remember, some stores don’t sell a lot of books of any kind. Keep an eye out for a store that publishes photos of a countdown sign board reporting how many books have sold per month. Not a great trend. Don’t let the promise of the bookstore sale over-complicate your publishing and undercut your earnings. Sometimes it just doesn’t add up.

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Ron Seybold is director of Austin’s Writers Workshop, editing and coaching authors to sparkling books. Our bespoke publishing strategies help every author, too. Get your book a personal edit with professional results. Our publishing outfit, Trampoline Press, is new. Springboard your book to life. Give it the success it deserves.

Authors who publish need to make room for free books. There are the copies you send to your beta readers and your early review team, as well as your endorsers. You’ll get nothing that you can deposit in return for those books. If you’re lucky, the early readers will save you the $10 to print, accepting a digital file to prompt their praise.

Beyond the praising, though, there’s the purchasing. Libraries buy books, sometimes dozens at a time from a single author-publisher. That scale of purchase is more likely for a James Patterson or a Colleen Hoover title. Those are the bestsellers, after all, arriving with their quality confirmed by thousands of other readers. The rich get richer, whenever libraries add copies. We like them to add copies when we’re holding for a borrow.

Admit it: You borrow books from your library’s Libby lending app. Or if you don’t, your friends alert you to the sweet deal. I don’t even have to spend anything, your deep-reading pal says. They tell me when it’s ready. Sometimes I can renew the loan, all at no charge.

Well, the non-charging part of that arrangement is what pits the libraries against the publishers who are authors. We enjoy the attention from lending organizations. Sometimes the library borrows signal to us that we’re legit. In some instances, you can get paid when a library loans your digital book to a patron.

For many an author-publisher, that’s a rare payment. I had a novel that made its way to Hoopla years ago, somehow. Hoopla’s that digital lender better known for movies and music. It began as Midwest Tapes in the 1980s. I got more money off Hoopla borrows of Viral Times than from the book copies placed in local libraries.

Hoopla is out of the digital book copy lending business by now. That’s the land of Libby’s app, where a book is licensed and moves in and out of collections. No action on the borrowing of your digital titles, no matter who your publisher is? You’re out of there. Collections curation is a serious branch of librarian skill. A physical copy that went un-borrowed might hang around until the next used-book sale at the branch.

What’s the matter with free?

A 2025 study showed that library readers are most likely to borrow three times as many books as they buy. Books are this wonderful thing we purchase and promise ourselves we’ll enjoy. A To Be Read pile isn’t serious until it’s a pile.

Borrowing keeps the purchased piles smaller. Bookstores need to charge full retail for most books, so there’s a big cost gap between owning store-bought books and borrowing for free. You might buy four books a month. You’re likely to borrow a dozen, if you’re that kind of reader. At least six might’ve been purchases in the old days, before digital transactions with libraries.

I borrow books, plus I buy them. I borrow more than I buy, and that’s the pattern that could make us believe the library is our Sales Enemy. In truth, the library is our friend while it encourages reading, and our opponent when we need to be paid. We could be charitable and say the library is finding us new readers; nobody wants to recommend your book before they’ve read it. The library reduces the friction ownership to near zero. That’s only a little less than the average number of payments extended to indie library books.

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Okay, to be fair, author-publishers can usually sell one copy of a paperback to a library. Get popular and you might be at several branches. Nonfiction does better than fiction. Patrons will need to borrow it before that sales number gets to two. If you’re in a library as an author-publisher, you could advise your reading friends to check your book out. There might be a second sale in there for you — after three have been skipped because the borrowing was there.

Nothing works different for sales

No matter whether that purchase flows through a bookseller’s checkout till, out into your Amazon account, or off the author’s own website, it’s still a net-plus transaction. Authors who get borrows at libraries, after those books are bought, have done promotion. Call it marketing if you want, but librarians don’t buy books any differently that readers do. Books well-written, well-regarded, and priced well enter the library sales ecosystem. You have to get good reviews. You have to enter contests and win.

Since every publishing article today needs an AI interlude, here’s one: AI-generated books don’t get reviewed by the sources the library uses to determine a purchase.

Reader reviews are the one library borrowing element that’s missing, most of the time. If your reviews from legitimate high-flying reviewers are good, that helps a librarian’s purchase, and so a borrow. Libby’s app has got a spot where the readers can look over a book’s service reviews. You just touch the “Publisher’s Weekly” or “Booklist” entry, and there’s the proof this will be a good borrowing experience for you.

Your library is probably stepping in your way to capture some of the author-publisher’s book sales. Like the weather, there’s not much we can do about this. You can argue we shouldn’t change things, either. Libraries were founded to give readers with less life means a way to enjoy books. Patterson and Hoover are giving readers pleasure millions of times a year, happiness to people who can afford to purchase — so it’s not absolute that library access is giving books to the poor.

Readers are spending money on stories. It’s hard to keep up with all your streaming subscriptions, or even the Kindle Unlimited borrows (20 at a time!), plus pay for a Libby book service. But we’ve learned to pay for Kindle Unlimited, and perhaps there’s a future for a paid subscription to Libby. Author-publishers could come in for some library payments there, even if just a dollar a subscription could be funneled to the non-Patterson authors.

Libraries don’t charge patrons. That’s the tradition that remains in our modern day. Acknowledge your success and factor for the freebies. That’s what being in the publishing business as an author requires.

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Ron Seybold is director of Austin’s Writers Workshop, editing and coaching authors to sparkling books. Our bespoke publishing strategies help every author, too. Get your book a personal edit with professional results. Our publishing outfit, Trampoline Press, is new. Springboard your book to life. Give it the success it deserves.

Which writers do the bots best serve? A recent report says that more than one book in five on Amazon’s KDP genre fiction shelves, the shelves that are millions of titles deep, is generated using AI text of more than 25 percent. Non-AI books earned 71 percent of sales. You can establish a spot in genre fiction by publishing AI-heavy books. It’s a small spot in sales.

It’s difficult to prove that a book has deep AI roots. Publishers are canceling contracts even while they’re also relieved that the AI proof is evasive. Anthropic, the AI group which just started to fork over billions in punishment payments for stealing content, now inserts a digital watermark into its bot-generated writing output.

That might constitute proof that the author has done some copying and pasting, too, rather than run a robot creating session. You don’t know where that copied prose came from, do you? Cut and paste is a staple for nonfiction writing, but it doesn’t fit for novels and memoirs. Once you see a memorable sentence or metaphor in a book, you don’t expect it to show up again. Ever, unless it’s a character tic. Even then, you can go awry. You might see the speech pattern of ending sentences with the same package. A bad guy could use every chance to wrap up his line with a comma and “right?”

That’s a sound choice and something a bot would cling to for dear life. Where it falls down is when every single spoken sentence uses that combo. How much to dial it back, and when, falls in the realm of a human editor’s experience.

The bots will give you their best shot, right? You need to pay close attention, right? Nobody rides a tic that hard, right? To be fair, the character I saw saying things this way was too smart for his own good, whatever that means. It’s another phrase that the bot-authors will find in endless supply, then use. And use some more.

The bots are supposed to help author-publishers create a series more easily. Publishers who play this way tell an author to sketch out the characters in some genuine heavy lifting first. Establish motives and fears and outlandish dreams for everybody. Comprehend the motives that make humans take a chances, whether a Hail Mary or a slam dunk.

It might all flow faster at first off the bot’s pen. There’s a good chance the time spent is about the same, once you wade in to correct the oversights, right? The prompt might read, “Only use the , right construction every 12th line.” Works, until you get into a three-page conversation. This will, though, get a book written quickly.

At some point in your publishing adventure, you’ll be tempted to believe the readers don’t care about these things. Some do. Hobbling a book with bot-lit is what you’ll get without some serious oversight.

Series me

A great remake of a classic film showed how tawdry automation can make things look. The Front Page is about a couple of newspapermen covering a murder trial. Jack Lemmon is the talented writer. Walter Matheau is his editor, urging him on. Lemmon’s bashing away at the typewriter keys, going good.

“Cigarette me!” he shouts to his editor. Like a robot given a command, Matheau pulls a smoke from a pack, lights and puffs it to a glow, then slips it into Lemmon’s mouth. The writer’s in a hurry and can’t be bothered with the business of finding a smoke, making good actor business of the lighting, then doing the take of inhaling and rolling his eyes closed to enjoy the drag.

The point of choosing that bit of automated business is to show how much deeper the relationship between editor and author is, longer-standing than the one with Lemmon’s fiancee, who watches aghast. Intimate, and reflexive. That’s the bot author, serving the needs of rapid fire language creation. The scene’s action draws to its climax in silence as we watch two characters who are in mid-stride, riding the riches of performance, costume, and set, all on display.

Publishers say it’s better to sell a book when it’s got a couple of sequels ready to read through next. Those publishers believe you’ll never push them out fast enough without a bot to help cigarette you. This might be true for most authors. Lots of publishers would like a Jacqueline Winspear, writing the 18 Masie Dobbs historical novels across 21 years, is an exception to dream for. Using a machine has its advantage at output, until you peel apart how much “do it faster” can make a difference.

Is it about all you can eat?

Authors who publish can look at what’s hot on the Amazon sales sheet using Publisher Rocket. The software reads the sales rank for each book to determine how many copies have sold. Big sellers are supposed to draw big audiences.

This is the same concept that drives viewership for television series. It removes the equalizer of quality, turning over the linchpin to whoever acts in the show. Oh, it’s got [hot new actor] in it, the viewers say, then they keep their subscription to the streamer paid up to see the next season. When producers pick up a series to sell, often the conversation doesn’t go past who’s starring.

If your books are as well known as that hot new actor, the strategy holds up. You really only need a hero who’s got some grit already established with readers. People gotta rave, and there’s good news there: today, there are plenty of places to shout out the praise.

Chain-smoking your books into the reader’s air is no guarantee of success. There is no guarantee in publishing. It would be unfair to think nothing could take off without great quantities of it. Yes, Tana French wrote eight books in her Dublin Murder Squad series. Those were also published by a company with plenty of resources to push a well-written book into higher orbit. Was it the chicken, or the egg of high quality that came first? The first 20,000 books would be about the chicken-publisher, laying out one book after another. The writing caliber convinces the publisher to take a bigger chance.

It’s the next 20,000 copies and more that rely on the insides of the eggs. The book’s caliber of craft keeps it going after the publisher loses steam to promote it. Now, if the books are of such a state of quality that you only need to spend $13 a month for Kindle Unlimited service to read them, now it becomes easier for readers to come and go, wading through the bot-lit for the next event in the saga. There’s a lot of sampling of books offered through a subscription. Having a ready book to move on to satisfies the sampling reader.

This is the What branch of storytelling, not the Why-based. People used to like Pringles chips because there were so many to a can. There’s good profit to be made with many-book series, but just for a few author pen names. Nobody will admit they seek the riches of art if they’re supposed to be making a lot of profit off of books.

Author-publishers might get both the art and the money by leaning on the icebreaking choices of AI bots. That choice will still require humans to weed out the weak choices. How weak? The totals for sales dollars give us a clue. That report on KDP genre says that AI-heavy books only make up 12 percent of sales.

When books are read for the why, rather than the what, then making that bot-prose sound surprising and sensible all at once still needs a human hand. It’s AI-plus-edit, if an AI book gets a shot at making measurable sales. So long as there are penny-a-word editors available to the author-publishers, the bots will work well enough to deserve their own byline. Somehow, “A Claude Book” doesn’t seem to make it any more special than millions of others.

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Ron Seybold is director of Austin’s Writers Workshop, editing and coaching authors to sparkling books. Our bespoke publishing strategies help every author, too. Get your book a personal edit with professional results. Our publishing outfit, Trampoline Press, is new. Springboard your book to life. Give it the success it deserves.

As authors, and author publishers, we have to conjure all of the elements in a scene: the sensations in addition to the feelings. Why do we try? Writing about sex in a story can be a powerful way to tell a hidden truth about a character. Your scenes have a better chance of succeeding when you take care of more than just the act. You also want to write the run-up, as well as the aftermath. Sometimes that’s an afterglow,. Other times the aftermath is the smoking cinders of a wildfire.

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It might have started as protective measure, that shutdown of a seven-figure book contract. We don’t often see agents cooling the jets of publishers who’ve already forked over $400,000 to an author, a tidy sum that nets the agent $60,000. That will be money returned from the agents who auctioned off Jerry Falade’s debut crime novel for $2 million.

For the new publishers out there, a few practices must be explained. First, there’s the auction, which is just a series of emails to interested publishers. “Here’s the book we showed you, and you have until next Monday to make an offer.” Nobody slams down a gavel.

Next, the $2 million is paid in installments. Delivery and acceptance are the moments when an author says, “I shipped it” and then the publisher says, “We think it’s good enough to publish.” These usually each have a payment attached to them.

There may even be a signing payment. Five payments are not unusual. For one payment, it might just be the moment the book now has a paperback edition. The breakdowns are designed to let a publisher see sales arrive that will fund the royalty advance. Agents need what’s called a “draw” to meet obligations at their firms. Let’s just say that this August’s draw for some agents is going to be five figures lighter, thanks to the diligence of those agents who cranked up the sale in the first place.

So there’s no debut for Falade this month. The author has retained counsel, because his agents say the book was created using too much AI. Falade disputes this. At the same time, publishers elsewhere are mining their authors’ back-listed books for feeding to AI engines. At the same time as that, the AI titan Anthropic is almost ready to start sending a few billion dollars to publishers, who will pass on a portion to their authors, to compensate for stealing books. Copyrighted books only.

It’s messy, and this is the nature of business. Publishing is not a jukebox kind of commerce, where you drop in a coin and music floats into the air. Creations like debut crime novels get excitable agents, and then publishers are pulled into the vortex. Then there’s a counter-current, where the whole float threatens to get swamped because AI is suspected, but not proven. Why would you care about all of this, unless you’re a publisher?

This is about you

You’ll care about Jerry’s novel because this is now how publishing works, and you aspire to be an author-publisher. More than a self-publisher, the author-publisher is like the player-manager of old sports days. Yes, you pub your own books, and you pub the books of others if you can.

Those authors join your flock not because they are sheep, but because your profile on the crest of the hill looks legitimate. Claims of AI use are resolved at your desk, as a publisher.Your authors, even if that’s just you, will be tempted to use AI tools at many moments of the publishing day. You want a practice you can expect authors to follow, and a practice that you know your publisher will follow.

Everyone makes promises in business. Sometimes, promises are the only things that publishing spits out. Ask the publisher looking at the empty spot where Jerry’s novel was supposed to be. Just a broken promise there, until the lawyers sort it out. There are charges of racism. AI usage might be easier to prove.

It gets harder when the promising elements, and the agents, are so fluid. Spellcheckers are the everyday tools of authors, editors, and publishers. The line is now fuzzy between the checkers and the creator tools. The enforcement is coming from Pangram, for now, and that’s like hiring parking lot valets to police a heavy metal concert. Better than nothing, but the results will be certain to cause as many problems as they seem to resolve.

We want this chance

Pangram will check this Substack column to see if it’s been written by a human. It’s a flawed check. There is a created work to check, though, and that’s the world we want to live in. Not the one where the checking is required. The world where there are created things, crafted by humans. Checked by humans, if you can manage it.

You can manage it with enough trust in the process, bolstered by experience. As it turns out, a gut feeling is all that some publishers have to go on once they decide your book wasn’t written by a bot. There’s way too many bot-books out there already. Write yours yourself, hire an editor to improve it, then get it out there. When the humans get some momentum, the bots won’t stand a chance. We have an infinite number of mistakes we can make, as humans, all of which count toward publishing a book that’s lifelike, instead of lifeless.

What you can do

Get a good boilerplate chunk of AI language in your publishing contracts. The Authors Guild has a great sample regarding AI on its website, and you don’t even need to be an AG member to pick it up and use it in a contract, or propose it for your book’s contract.

If you’re publishing other authors, insert something like this into your standard contract. Or create an addendum to your existing contracts that you can offer to interested authors. Bring it up at your next meeting, via Zoom or otherwise. It’s a very human thing to do, this promising to use tools for good, instead of using them otherwise.

Don’t use AI without permission from the owner of the created work. Make it clear if AI generated the work. Cigarettes with filter tips used to be sneered at. Maybe AI will turn out the same way, although the metaphor falls down if you consider tobacco to be literature. You could write a short story about that prospect, or an essay. Be sure to write it yourself.

Ron Seybold is director of Austin’s Writers Workshop, editing and coaching authors to sparkling books. Our bespoke publishing strategies help every author, too. Get your book a personal edit with professional results. Our Trampoline Press is new. Springboard your book to life. Give it the success it deserves.

So, what can you call on? If it’s only your time and talent and nothing else, then you’re self-publishing. You might tap fellow authors who are going to write your promotion copy for you, trading you promotions work among a group of authors.

You could use AI to create sales copy. People do. Publishers do. Traditional publishers use AI to create sales copy. It’s nonfiction writing, in a sense, although it can only give you a spin you may not be able to cook up yourself. Somebody in the group’s got to decide if the AI copy is good enough. Someone’s going to be prompting one of those AI engines.

You’re also going to be learning about how to use ISBNs. Also, how to create barcodes for the backs of your books whenever you need barcodes. You don’t need to put a barcode on a book cover that’s never gonna get into a store. So if you’re creating an Amazon book, and that Amazon book is never going to get into a store, you don’t need a barcode.

Going bespoke for flexibility

If you have a modest budget, you’re probably a good fit for bespoke publishing. You’ll get covers, and designs and editing inside of a bespoke arrangement. You’ll get sales posting services, onboarding for sales so people can actually buy the book online. You’ll get printing and e-book management, so your manuscript turns into a book. You get sales writing for online outlets, because all of these outlets demand that you describe your book, and sometimes within a very particular word count, or even character count. One advantage the bespoke arrangement will get you is flexible payment schedules. It’s not a package arrangement, all paid up front.

For example, in order to list anything in IngramSpark for print on demand sales to websites and stores, the description’s gotta fit within 4,000 characters. While that sounds like it might be a great deal, you’d be surprised how fast you run out of that.

Also, bespoke publishing looks for media opportunities for you, can prepare you so that you’re ready for a podcast. It can research to find out which ones might want to talk to you.

Being hefty enough for hybrid

You’ve got a hefty budget? You’re a hybrid press kind of author. You’ll get what you need to produce that book, and it will be shaped by the processes that the hybrid press uses. So, “We do it this way, and this way, and this way.” Flexibility is not nearly as great with a hybrid press solution. But they do a lot of books.

That’s one thing to consider when you’re deciding whether you want to engage with the hybrid press. How many books do they do a year? Because if you sign up with a press and they do 300 books a year, it’s a pretty good bet there won’t be a lot of specific attention paid to the book after it’s produced and put up for sale.

You do get proven people, but not a lot of customization. Once in awhile, a hybrid press can offer you distribution to get you into bookstores. Distribution is the nirvana of bookstore-bound publishing. You only can get it once you have a marketing track record and a plan for marketing a book.

Next time out, we’ll have a look at what distribution amounts to. Publishers crave it, and they see how much it can cost versus its returns.

Ron Seybold is director of Austin’s Writer’s Workshop, editing and coaching authors to sparkling books. Our bespoke publishing strategies help every author, too. Get your book a personal edit with professional results. Our Trampoline Press is new. Springboard your book to life. Give it the success it deserves.

I packed the paperbacks with care. This was a contest, after all. Not an expected review from a critic, like in the theatre days of my 20s. My latest novel was headed for an office in SoCal, to take its place alongside hundreds of others. They were all unpacked with care, too. A trio of critics were waiting, and there was little more I could do. I’m a publisher, as well as an author. We sit in two different seats, although the shift is more in my mind than in my office.

Somehow, being judged for my art by another human seems less personal, here in books. In a play, we knew the exact night the critic was coming. We even knew the critics, because their photos appeared above the reviews. The pictures gave the reviewer a personality, because that’s the way everybody wanted it. Their editors. The critics, and yes, even us actors. This was personal, because we were in-person.

During those 70’s and 80’s, nothing was online, not even our hearts. There was no online, just the paper that ruled us and the surfing onstage we did with our bodies and and souls. It might all sound a little spacey by now. The ability to appear, in show after show, building a career, felt a lot like being an author producing books, novel after memoir, after novel after nonfiction.

Who ever gave those critics their powers? Publishers, and the separation of church (the writing) and state (the business) can be swept away today. We can be our own publishers, and when we publish, we have to set aside the emotions after we are judged. Contests are not reviews, and reviews are not endorsements, and endorsements are not blurbs. They all sum up our afterparty of author-publishing, though. Even though you’re thinking the party is at the time of publishing, in secret we hope the party is the acclamation. Such a good book. Silver medal winner. Top 10 for the year.

Try not to bet it all

There’s a mental practice to pursue to get through all of this. You hold some of your competitive capital back for the next game. You might have entered a big contest with hundreds of opponents. We’re told not to think about them like that. It’s good advice, and yet, we have to visualize something. We don’t have many photos of the critics, and the competing authors have websites (or should) where they’re looking their best for the camera.

Hundreds of historical novels arrived in the Independent Book Publishing Association offices in January. Mine was among them, for $99 in entry fees, the publisher’s cost of the paperbacks, plus shipping. The venture amounted to about $150 including something for the postal carrier.

By now, you might be seeing where this is headed. Sins of Liberty did not win third prize, or second, or even first. It might have come close, but the critics in the theatre didn’t have to rank any actor or show they reviewed. Neither do most contests in publishing. Still, you enter and hope, especially if you are publishing authors beyond yourself. As publisher of others, you sometimes have to rely on artists and designers and editors who are not of your choosing. Let’s hope so. Publishing isn’t a monarchy, it’s a democracy.

If your book doesn’t have an author bio in it, or the book section (HISTORICAL FICTION printed in the barcode block, or a motivation that’s unclear to the judge, you will be dinged. As publisher of Sins of Liberty, I saw the judging reports. There’s no score that is compared in a place a publisher can see. You’re simply told the category was crowded and the very best books stand out.

It’s your production and show

You get used to this kind of experience, even when the judges are nameless and faceless. I wouldn’t want to be a judge, reading several dozen books and asserting my influence and wielding a vote. Believing in the best of a book is a publisher’s luxury. Two reviewers from the paid services can have widely different criticism about the very same book. The IBPA assigns two reviewers for a book’s writing and one for the book design. When a cover character doesn’t hit with a judge, because the model that became an illustration looks more light horror than historical, it can cost you points. This is based upon taste, and every judge or critic has earned the right to inject tastes into their judgements.

We size up the surf of all of this, the moment when another human might look at the story and wonder if a man could ever turn over wife and child to a replacement husband, because they love them and have failed, and we have learn to shrug. Not that it doesn’t matter, because it does to us as authors who publish. We learn to surf the waves of accolades because the judgement comes down to a handful of humans, not everyone who’ll read the book and rave, or fail to finish.

We still run into the waves with our boards of books, title after title. Some readers might be moved by a prize of third place, not to mention second or first. We’re lucky, as author-publishers. We get to get in line for judgement in plenty of places, not just one stage for a limited time, playing for a single critic.

We’re also in command of which production will slip under the curl of the waves of contests. We hang tough while we hang ten. That board might slip from underneath us, but publishers want to be in the surf. We can climb back on, with new authors and new books. It can be hard to say, but in the end, they’re only contests, and they’re only reviews. We’d say, “It’s the play that matters.” It’s just as true for a book, especially when we’re players as well as publishers.

Ron Seybold is director of Austin’s Writer’s Workshop, editing and coaching authors to sparkling manuscripts. Our publishing strategies help every author, too. Get your book a personal edit with professional results. Our Trampoline Press is new. Springboard your book to life. Give it the success it deserves.

If you have no budget at all, and all you want to do is write your book, you’re a traditional publishing kind of author. You role is to write-and-revise, in the same manner as the traditional companies break out their deadlines into submission (latest draft arrives) and acceptance (an editor pronounces your book completed). You’d revise that book anyway, if you’re an author-publisher.

Trad-pub levies its costs in time. After you write your book, you’re pitching, then waiting on agents—and then editors, if the agent gets happy enough with revisions to put your book out on submission. In a hurry, or even just in a moderate rush? Whatever your time barrier is, traditional publishing takes the longest.

It doesn’t take as long as it used to, but it still takes the longest — in part because you wait for the companies to decide if they want to invest in you, since the extent of your investment is creating the book. People perform these examinations and the line is long. The agents, at first, looking at all those pitches. The editors, looking at the pitches from all the agents, or the pitches directly from authors.

Years can pass, but it’s all done for you. Except for the revisions, requested by the agent, requested by the editors. Except for the ongoing marketing. You’ll be in for some expense on that marketing. Per book, trad-pub is probably the least lucrative way to make money, because you don’t invest anything. Without an advance, these are the arrangements that amount to building a house on spec. If you spend some money to market and advertise, then you’re into a different kind of compensation. Greater sales, but further behind on return.

Deciding on a strong path

You decide how much you want to back yourself. The investment determines which publishing path is strongest for you, and which ones you step away from as you begin.

If you self-publish your first book and it does pretty well, traditional publishers can become interested in publishing that book, maybe in another language. Or in another format that you haven’t considered. They might talk to you about an audiobook.

You can move back and forth between traditional and self-publishing, and there are a lot of authors now that do several of these paths at once. They tend to do better when they’ve already built some kind of a platform, a following. To be able to successfully self-publish, it’s a lot easier if you have traditionally published, or gotten close to what looks like traditional publishing with hybrid publishing.

Investing anything?

Bespoke custom publishing gives that kind of TradPub profile, too. When you go with bespoke, you are choosing yourself because you say, “we’re gonna publish.” A bespoke publisher is not going to take a look at what you’ve got and see if it’s suitable. A bespoke publisher will work with you to produce a professional-grade book, no matter where your book is.

If you’re still needing a development phase, a bespoke publisher will go through development with you in order to get to the point where your book is suitable for showing off to beta readers and advanced readers, so that it can get some advanced praise and people can enjoy it.

Avoiding the investment means you’re waiting longer and getting less money per book sold. You do have something more to do while you wait. You’re writing the next book, then having it beta read by other authors and fans of your genre.

Wading through the pool of entitlement surrounding literary education can feel daunting. That bookstore audience filled with readers who got MFAs and literature degrees? As it turns out, a bookstore operating in a town where a Seven Sisters college grew up can feel like an exclusive place. No place does this exclusion thing better than the Northeast, unless it’s East Texas.

Even if the store has a high-toned crowd, your book has an opening to teach them. Maybe about how families open up and close down. About how whoever you believe that you are at heart, that can turn out to be different. Being exceptional comes in many forms. It can be a simple as being a beekeeper and letting that hobby rescue your sense of hope.

There’s a consignment program, like the one at Wellesley Books, in lots of indie stores. The stores take books on for a 60- or 90-day run, and if they sell a few, they will reorder and then pay for what they’re sold. You might need to live in a area where the store require authors to reside. There’s a good reason for this: the store figures your readers will drive a reasonable stretch, and they also figure your friends live nearby, too. Maybe so, maybe not, but the store makes the rules.

In a consignment the store owners will pay you 60 percent of your list price. The store’s 40 percent cut on consignment leaves print on demand publishers with about $4 profit per 300-page book. It’s a better deal than if the store buys your books outright via Ingram. You get less than $2 a sale that way, plus the store can return your unsold books. You’ll always get a consignment sale book back to use again at a show or another store.

The bookstores need you to turn out a crowd, because they can only go so far whenever they won’t schedule you for an event. Still, their calendar might not be so crowded that the store would give an author-publisher a flat no. Where does your tribe buy its books, other than Amazon? Getting the readers into a store they already know is an easier task. What’s the parking like at that indie store?

What your audience wants to know

You don’t have to be formally trained in writing to be an author. The same thing goes for the evening’s events whenever you get a night out for your book. We don’t read from our books very much anymore. Questions are the most fun anyway, first from your in-conversation partner, then from the audience. When many of the questions in a book event are about craft, you know there are aspirants in the crowd. People will tell you they write, sure. Do they have the drive to make a book? You did, and now you’re living the life that those literary people might want to ask about at your event. What was it like for you being published? How did it change the way you feel about yourself, and the prospects for the world around you?

Questions about the book’s story, and the story behind it: those are the queries you will enjoy answering, on podcasts and in bookstores, and even at the local libraries. Some libraries even permit consignment sales of books. Austin’s Central library sold my historical novel with an 85 percent return to me. Asking about these opportunities is one way to make them appear. Booksellers are creative and imaginative people.

Austin’s Writer’s Workshop creates publishing strategies to help every author. Get your book a personal edit with professional results. Our Trampoline Press is new. Springboard your book to life. Give it the success it deserves. Get coaching to finish sparkling manuscripts. Developing for character and content, line-editing for powerful language, plus graceful and hawk-eyed copy editing — you can have it all.

“And we gave her a blog tour” could turn out to be an education for you, even though a publisher is paying for it. It’s very hard to show how any blog tour sells books directly off the content on the blog. Success depends on how many people read that book blog. At last, the book bloggers can find themselves being quoted in sales endorsements copy. That helps an author imagine a sale, at least, when the blogger’s name appears in the opening pages of the book.

You are including those blogger raves in the front of your book, right? A good publisher will reel those in for you. You can be that good publisher, with a little advice and assistance.

These blogs sometimes want an author to answer a Q&A, and together we can work on answers to those questions. The Q’s will be about your book and perhaps your writing and inspirations, because that’s what the blogs are promoting. One typical book blog tour stop is Texas Book Lover. The phantom power of blog tours is part of an article on 9 Myths About Book Publicity.

Instead of leaning heavily on blogs, you can pitch for podcasts. The Author’s Guild taught a great hour of how this is working in our modern world. 

Offer yourself as a guest on a podcast that you’ve listened to, one whose listener base aligns with your audience. Here’s one interesting tip from the Authors Guild: if you write under a pen name, you can still “appear” on a podcast — and sometimes you use a cartoon-ized head shot of your real self to protect your identity, if you need it.

But I don’t want to be hidden in the bookstore

Genres are a part of the book world for a reason. They help readers identify what kind of story is being offered. Expectations and formulas fall into place. But genre can run to a wide range of labels. Novelists sometimes worry that their story will be diminished and dismissed when it’s published as genre fiction.

A novelist who I’ve edited pushed back on a genre suggestion. “I don’t want to be hidden away in the [fill in the blank] genre section of the bookstore,” she said. My reply was that bookstores aren’t as strong a factor by now, and in fact, you’d need to be a beeline reader, headed for your favorite section, to find something new without a genre guideline. (When you can even spot that genre book, shelved cover-out.) It’s hard to see a future where any bookstore’s sections play a big role in how readers discover a book.

Here’s one certainty about readers who buy in bookstores: About half of them show up to buy a book they’ve already heard about. The other half came in to browse, so the hidden nature of landing in a genre section might apply to their purchases. But where do these explorers browse first? Off the store tables right up front. Genre books sit up there, too. Not hidden at all.

This begs a point that novelists must consider: how many books go into readers’ hands through a bookstore register? How often did you buy a paperback last year at a bookstore? How many, compared to your library e-checkouts, or the online paperback alternative markets, or ebooks?

This is distribution attention, for most books.

Authors getting published are promised distribution. And they get it, even when a hybrid house is doing the publishing. Today the names of distributors like Simon & Schuster are bandied about. Real sales do arrive through those distribution deals betwixt publisher and distributor.

And yet, not all distribution is the same. Ask an author to see.

To be even-handed about all of this, everyone intends to sell books. The paperbacks only get into a store two ways: through some kind of distribution, and via a deal or sale on consignment. But even when S&S is on the road to discovery, there’s still the matter of how crowded their bus is, day after day.

A call of some kind, either via Zoom (often the case) or in person (oh so rare at most levels of book market ourreach) is one distinguishing mark, as the authorities say about a suspect at large. If there’s no sales call, authors have wholesale distribution. Order fulfillment, tied to production. No sales but what the publisher makes itself. Even more likely, what the author can make. Your book is forever a darling to you, so you take steps to keep it looking lively enough to be discovered.

This is where the body count comes in. When the number of sales people is above zero, it’s a start at traditional distribution. When the book gets a place and 30 seconds in a distributor call, there’s another step up. Eighty percent of books, perhaps more, don’t get those seconds. Ask a publisher about that half a minute, if you’re ready for a hard truth.

Your book’s distributor might use a pitch deck, a PowerPoint like the ones you build in corporate meetings, to highlight some of the select books. A deck from the latest London Book Fair — for example, DK Books — used a deck with 45 books, some of then 12 to a page. On the deck slides. The handsome catalog that DK handed out had 42 to a page. DK did not publish just 45 books for the season starting next month. However, all these authors did “have distribution.”

Most books are headed to the backlist. This is the spot in a distributor’s map that some might call housing in the projects, to be unkind. Again, everybody wants a book to sell. But there are not enough bodies in S&S, or any other provider, to give hundreds to thousands of titles per season resources forever.

Over at Jane Friedman’s fine website, two hybrid publishers with such distribution weighed in on how it works. They did not agree, once you made your way to the comments where they bickered. One is an S&S client.

Explaining distribution is tricky, to be sure. One of the publishers admitted it was confusing while they wrote their explainer. By the time the comments rolled in, it was apparently still tricky.

I couldn’t help myself, asking unaddressed questions. They are good questions for every publisher, from traditional to hybrid, from custom bespoke at affordable costs, down to the noble efforts of self-publishers. That last category gets the warehouse distribution, which is a little like living in an office building. The rain won’t drench you and everyone knows your address. Making new friends is harder after dark, when your book isn’t yet printed until the moment of a POD transaction, and the sales force body count is zero.

Hard truths come from hard questions. One good question to ask your publisher rep is what they use to position your book so booksellers see it in a favorable light. (A favorable light rides on reviews, of course.) The stores order though things like Ingram's iPage, or marketing and comp services that a publisher purchases like Edelweiss+. The latter connects books in a comp type of comparison, so a book in Edelweiss that's doing well in sales or reviews gets offered for a bookseller's consideration. Edelweiss does not have a sales force.

Friedman reported to me that “Distribution is used as a carrot by so many, and while authors do need to know the difference between ‘availability’ and having a sales force, even having a sales force doesn't amount to a lot, unless there are many other things working in the book's favor.”

It’s obvious. Does every book on a Barnes & Noble shelf get an active sale from its publisher, all the time? The 3,000 new books a season from the gaggle of a Big Five’s imprints all get a mention somewhere where a bookseller is listening? Readers are told that brick and mortar distribution “is an established process involving a proactive salesforce.” Seems impossible, when I look at my local indie’s shelves.

The process is established, sure. The attention is often scant once a book goes onto the backlist. Write a series and keep feeding it, so your distributed books are new and reflect on those which are on the backlist. Then you’ll be in midlist, a category that’s disappearing fast.

Simon & Schuster went into the business of distributing 50 percent more presses about the time it went into venture capital ownership. Great brand name for recognition, S&S. I wish we’d hear some testaments about how it’s beefed up a publisher’s infrastructure.

The trouble with trying to examine any of this closely is you never get to measure the caliber of the pipe, because its distributor’s owners can say that particular book wasn’t good enough. Sales = distribution, beyond the logistics. Reviews play a role, but that’s changing, too. Harder to get, harder to vet as a reader, harder to find.

A distributor can point at an overall sales number, a great one. The overall always looks good, because the success is built upon new titles and evergreen bestsellers each quarter, right? I’d love to hear reports and success stories about staying evergreen.

Saddle up for the ride of author marketing. I haven’t heard constant stories of continued pushes across a book’s lifespan by distributor marketing. There aren’t enough bodies on a distributor’s org charts to service all books published.

Some days, this feels opaque by design. At least publishers at all levels can count the bodies. A friend who was traditionally published picked her winner at auction by counting sales bodies. The advance itself that she accepted wasn’t the biggest of the bids. That’s how much distribution matters. Doing this correctly, with the right distribution, eats into a publisher’s profits.

In my 30s, we never slagged Sears. Some might have sneered at the corporation with stores everywhere and mail order where it didn’t have doors to open. As teenagers and urban professionals, we enjoyed malls that built themselves around Retail Anchors like Sears. On its aisles sat Craftsman tools, above-ground pools, and clothes your parents wore.

We never once accused the store of squashing commerce and trading unfairly. With Amazon, starting with its book trade, that injustice siren sounds everywhere. Still, I wonder. There are its no-bathroom-break jobs and the open markets for hand-crafted goods like rosaries, and novels that come from authors everywhere. Maybe it’s a matter of advantage instead of privilege. Amazon flexes and all retailers have to step back.

Nowhere is the outcry louder than in the book trade. While this web retailer offers anybody a place to sell a book, however lightly-edited and underfunded, the edge always goes to an Amazon-published book. Not even Big 5 corporations like Penguin Random House make as much profit. When the store owner manufactures the goods, or pays a company to build branded implements from Craftsman, there’s always an advantage.

We didn’t gripe about Craftsman tools. We stocked up because they were a lifetime purchase we’d use until they wore out — then replace for free. Sears was undercutting tool makers like Stanley. That didn’t keep Stanley off the shelves any more than an Amazon 47 North book keeps John Scalzi or Ray Bradbury out of an Amazon cart.

Watch out for clutching pearls

There’s a tendency these days to equate fairness with equability. No place does that fall down faster than in business. When you move into the world of commerce, the rules change. That’s because in publishing we chase after the loose change, that 10 or 20 percent of cover price we can deposit in bank accounts. It’s a competition when you do business. Authors do not like doing business. They consider it all art, where nobody is supposed to have an advantage.

Would that it were so simple and everyone’s book got the footprint that the Amazon imprints enjoy. Sears didn’t care much if the Black and Decker drills sold as well as the Craftsman models. Amazon doesn’t care about the fact that it employs editors, marketers, and designers on its own publishing companies like 47 North, something an indie publisher won’t ever be able to match. Not without more investment, anyway. We have to play on the court Amazon built. It’s not a public park.

Get over it and release those pearls. Yes, Amazon is going to make rules for the store it operates. It will have practices that you don’t benefit from, because you don’t have a marketing maven on staff, or budget for the Amazon ads, or even the know-how to build an A+ graphic for a book page. Publishers who can provide these and do that artwork will have a justly-earned advantage. It’s not equitable, and that makes publishing a lot like sports. Sometimes you get fouled, but the refs miss the offense. Keep the ball in play. Find another store if you don’t like the rules, or build your own.

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Keep this in mind, too. Harm can be in the eyes of the victim. If you don’t know publishing all that well, because you’re new to it, learn the rules. “They pulled my book from their store for no good reason” just won’t fly. Look at the Amazon Terms of Service when trouble like that surfaces. Then, make a friend with an offshore help worker, once you fight your way past the robots. Amazon makes the rules for its store. It was never any different for the days of Sears and the malls.

When we publish, we can’t imagine saying, “That book wasn’t successful because it didn’t sell enough. If someone stole it, at least we’d prove it was worth the cost to steal it.” Do you call the police department and report a theft of your book files?

If that’s the rule, I’ll set out my old, tarnished jewelry on the front porch so I can feel better about buying it many years ago. Maybe put out some copies of my Viral Times paperbacks, too. At 14 years ago, that thriller was so long ago that I released the ebook 90 days after I published the paperback. Bookbaby did that ebook production, and I have no EPUB file of it after spending $295 to have it created. There was no print on demand for those paperbacks. An Austin printer did a press run like a university publisher. Smaller, but not a lot smaller. One author who I coached had a college press tell her that her 1,250-book press run was one of their biggest of the year.

The pirates are not supposed to matter to us. I’ll say that if you’re selling less than 500 books a year, as most indie and small-press authors do, any lost sale feels big. Not as big as the costs to market a book. People overlook that cost when they say, “Market better.” Not much of marketing makes an impact big enough to make a difference when you can’t invest in giveaways, ads, mailing list costs, publicity and more. There’s lots you can do to self-promote without an investment, but it often comes down to time available. I publish authors and tell them it’s an investment journey we’re starting. I’m in on a new assignment now, helping promote a book that I had no role in creating — not even the production setup work with IngramSpark and KDP.

It also helps bridge the gap in fiction when you write in genre. Thrillers look like the simplest books to write, since the characterization work is the easiest there. A story with a driver of “he’s gotta keep that calamity from happening” lets you use an antihero, even. They only need to have a code. You gotta be clever with the story. Horror, sci-fi, mystery, romance: all require deeper characters. When you do a thriller with deeper characters, it stands out.

In nonfiction, you’re faced with competition from AI. Even a memoir can be automated, I hear. Good thing, because our ancestors are probably not up to the task of chronicling their lives.

If you sold 5,000 copies a week for six weeks, books that you published yourself, you’d not only have the $120,000 in revenues before expenses, you’d also be on the NYT Bestseller list on numbers alone. Of course, it’s a fact proven in court that the NYT list isn’t a report. It’s opinion, backed with cherry-picked sales numbers.

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Proof of infringement sounds like a matter to try to wring come kind of payment from the infringer in a very-best case. Mostly you want to stop the theft if you can. No, China sales won’t come up for the author of a five-book thriller series. It’s not in Chinese, but the pilfered books will be in English.

Something that I’ve never seen is hand sales of a pirated book. Any kind of hand-selling at a book fair is a low volume enterprise. You can make money as a bookseller at a fair if you sell a wide range of books. But even Bookpeople here in Austin, who will sell at next month’s WLT agent conference, won’t rake in a lot of cash.

I must say, I don’t see AI playing a meaningful role in hand selling. I do see books for sale at airports in vending machines. I just never spotted anybody buying one.

You might have run out of relatives. You know how to do Kindle enough to get your book onto Amazon. What you don’t know is if that’s all you want for the book.

We consider this when we’re examining our book budget. We’re measuring our level of investment. We publish.

Some people play golf. And they get a set of clubs that they can find on Amazon, and they enjoy golf. They don’t aspire to anything except the experience of having the sun at their back. And the trees moving, and maybe their score fluctuates some.

Some other people gotta have Those Clubs.

Here’s the difference. When you’re in a ski boat, or you’re swinging a golf club, you’re not making anything that’s gonna outlast your experience. Not authors, though. We are making things that will outlast our experience. So when I say extra investment, how you back yourself is the best way to think about it. How do you back yourself? With what kind of help? Do you pay a company $200 to do your interiors and another $200 to do the cover — or do you move further than that?

Does it make a difference to anyone? How does it make a difference to you when you look at it in 10 years or 20, or when your family looks at it? When your friends who are younger, that they look at it — will they enjoy it more and be more likely to finish it and recommend it?

All of that effort carries a cost. It’s worth it. We work on our writing and storycraft, an editor and author together, because we want people to finish our books. We now live in a world where it’s easy to give up. Better stories get finished by readers, and that’s important. The best stuff is often right near the end.

When a reader finishes your book, they can recommend it. Nothing sells books better than the recommendation from a friend. Your book can have friends it hasn’t even met yet. First, it must get into the air.

You want people to read it. Certainly, you want to write it. That makes sense, because an author learns something about themselves as they try to tell a story. If you’re paying close attention, even that experience of storytelling can lift up your book, too. People want to know about the life of a creator, because they often can’t give themselves permission to create something to be shared.

You have that permission. It can even be enlightening to look at your reflections on that, written for a Substack or an author newsletter. It’s a very personal touch. But you have to reach out to your dream. Take your swings.

The Write Stuff is brought to you by Austin’s Writers Workshop. Our Trampoline Press is new. Springboard your book to life. Give it the success it deserves.

We all endure the demands of print on demand. It’s a wonderful thing to have paperback publishing ability, printing that’s only triggered after the sale. Way back in the Aughts, a miracle called the Espresso Book Machine actually printed paperbacks right in the bookstore. It was a marvelous toy, and a few of the Espressos still exist in the wild.

Today the technology is churning out millions of paperbacks. The engines of this printing tsunami operate in factories. One up in North Dallas, in a town called Coppel, does Make On Demand builds of one or more books at a time. The Amazon MOD only works accurately when the cover and interiors are just so. A simple book squeezes through. Anything with photos needs more attention, just in case.

Amazon is mighty, but IngramSpark might be mightier. The delivery engine at IS, the favorite of author-publishers who need bookstore sales, is called Lightning Source. An LS book gets a chance at being ordered by a bookstore. IS handles the fulfillment, shipping a box of books, including yours, to a store anywhere in the world.

When trouble crops up, the massive mill of Print on Demand at IS needs a kick. Changed artwork used to cost extra at IS, but the company stopped charging for changes last year. You can change your mind at IS all you want. Changing things because your book has mistakes keeps your book from rolling off the line and into a shipping box, destined for an indie store. Or even a Barnes & Noble, when you encourage a local buyer to order up a few. You have reviews to help that happen. Right?

IS can be frustrating, like getting an ebook into the Apple Books catalog. So much care must the taken, although it’s a mystery why the Apple way is so hard. For one thing, it doesn’t sell paperbacks. But snarls with ebooks at Apple can happen. I experienced one with my memoir, which was for sale for six months at Apple until it wasn’t. Not even an advanced tech call could remove the roadblock. Apple standards are high. IngramSpark can be the same way. Better get that ISBN number right.

To the rescue at Apple: Draft2Digital, handling my newest book, Sins of Liberty. My Apple ebook sales go through D2D. I’ve had no Apple problems for Sins.

Online bookselling platform Bookshop.org now offers a partnership with D2D. If you print books and distribute them through D2D, you can now sell paperbacks through Bookshop.org. No IngramSpark interface is required.

Another way into reader hands

This is a fresh way to distribute. Bookshop.org can take orders for your paperback, sales that help out a bookstore. It doesn’t work the way IngramSpark does, and sometimes that’s good. A Bookshop.org order goes right to the reader. The store they choose gets a taste of the sale. There are no returns. IngramSpark books come back on you.

D2D has to select your book through the new connection; it’s not automatic. For a guaranteed Bookshop connection, you need a direct account with IngramSpark. Even still, the new partnership is a fresh example of Draft2Digital growth. It’s been building out services since its 2022 merger with Smashwords.

D2D’s CEO says the company has been adding up to 15,000 new titles a month to its catalog. If you’re keeping score, more than 2 million titles are published each year. But that’s across many continents, languages, and formats. D2D wants to make a dent in paperbacks. It’s aiming to produce 1.2 million ebooks from 300,000 authors. Now there’s a print option which includes a well-known sales point.

The new arrangement can improve your starting point for publishing paperbacks. It used to be from your IngramSpark account to Bookshop. Draft2Digital will now stand in for IngramSpark.

The deal matters to author-publishers who want to support bookstores. Bookshop.org cuts in your favorite store for a small share of each sale. Most indie books never see bookstore sales, unless a publisher or author goes store to store to gather orders.

Bookshop.org gives bookstore readers a good vibe, because Amazon cuts nobody in for a book sale. Bookstore support can be a foundation of your business practices, especially if you’ve got readers who don’t like Amazon. Until this month, though, the only way to get paperbacks into the Bookshop.org sales site was through IngramSpark.

Some author-publishers are weary of using IngramSpark, too. Ingram has become the paperback supplier who you endure whenever the seasonal load is highest. The company running presses and shipping around the world is not the kind of job-killer that Amazon can be. But IngramSpark is overloaded. Everybody now wants to offer a book, and today’s engines of author-publishing deliver the means and access for print on demand books.

The catch is that D2D partners with the Ingram Content Group for the printing jobs. Your book isn’t being printed on new presses. But author-publishers now don’t have to connect directly with Ingram. D2D, accustomed to the high author populace, will take care of the details. The Ingram system can have trouble handling trouble for author-publishers. Ingram can solve problems easier when you add in a $25 service call fee.

The D2D + Bookshop arrangement keeps some money out of Amazon’s pocket, too. As convenient and quick as Amazon’s sales are, some readers hate the ‘Zon. They can now order paperbacks through Bookshop.org while the author-publisher steers clear of both Amazon and IngramSpark. It might be a great step toward tangle-free publishing.

This publisher says, we don’t need your blurbs

On the pages of Publisher’s Weekly, the publisher of Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint pumped the brakes on blurbs. Sean Manning said that S&S will stop requiring authors to scrape up these bits of praise from other authors. What part of our author career involves finding praise from our colleagues? Apparently not the part where we are published by the S&S flagship. That old publishing flag has floated over Cher, the author of Dune Frank Herbert writing his computer how-to, and Psycho, all riding in the S&S cargo bay of literature. It’s historic.

For the rest of us, publishing in the rest of the worldwide fleet, it’s business as usual. But now we can harbor our doubt about how much difference a blurb can make. We do this blurbing for one another as authors, hoping that our audiences can help the new author get introduced.

You find an author who you admire and ask for their help. “Gathering a nice audience for the book,” I’ve been saying to the authors who I’ve been asking. Sins of Liberty was published with nice, generous blurbs. The four authors have been gracious, and I remain hopeful for their affirmations.

Yes, things are changing a little. It’s not as much reversion as I want. Back to the powers of reviews? Well, not really, not from trusted media companies. In the year that I decided journalism would be a safer exploit than literature for this young veteran of 22, paid professionals reviewed books. They could write a pan, or a rave, or something in between.

I was accustomed to reviews, since I was an actor in small companies. We lived for the review, that little bit of printed, durable recognition of our craft. Yes, there was always the applause, sometimes ringing onto us through a curtain after an act, or beyond the show’s finale always, but in varied measure. Sometimes during a show we’d know our creation, the character, would land well during a scene when we heard laughter — so long as we were performing a comedy. We could stun them into silence with the drama, but that sound was the same as an audience bored and not gripped by the acting or the play.

Reviews to our rescue

The durable part of the praise that most creators crave? We needed reviews and reviewers for that, like the restaurant on the TV show The Bear needs a review to keep drawing diners to the house. People want to know how good something might be, a thing they want to taste for themselves.

So post-drama school, I began to review plays. Not books, not yet. That kind of thing was for the literature students at the University of Texas. Even across our five days a week of newspaper that we published, book reviews were ghetto-ized into a Friday arts section.

But there were reviews in the ecosystem, back when endorsements (the fancy name for blurbs) were not so crucial to gathering an audience. Reviews were harder to get but not easier to write. Your average endorsement can’t really run much past 50 words, and even Kirkus Reviews will sell you twice that many about your book, along with the Kirkus summary of what your book is about. Kirkus is fussy, so there’s still some accountability being practiced. A reviewing pro is being paid. Author-publishers are part of that transaction. You might only win praise that is wan. The truth is being served there, review by review.

Without reviews, there’s nothing but the blurb to decide what books are worthy of attention. Lincoln Michel explains in a Substack column the true purpose of blurbs.

Blurbs are one way to help everyone sort out which books to pay attention to. Blurbs aren’t necessarily for readers browsing a bookstore, although I’ve known readers who buy based on blurbs. They are more important behind the scenes. Blurbs are frequently used in publicity pitches to book reviewers.

He goes on to note the blurb is a unit of praise. Those reviews have always been units of evaluation. The good and the wanna-be-good, that’s what reviewers gave us. When they were working. Critique isn’t as much of a career as it used to be, and those newspapers and magazines that gave way to websites now spend energy to track the non-artistic but oh-so-absurd current events of our lives.

Where publicists will send their pitches for book coverage remains to be seen. But a list of 25 papers with regular book coverage can’t be assembled anymore. Readers and authors can ask one another and scan social media feeds for endorsements. Social media is what passes for real media these days. Books usually get read through a personal recommendation anyway — or the release of a movie or series based on the book. Sometimes films get made from indie-published books, too.

Not to get all curmudgeon-like on you, but I recall when writing about the arts was a fine trade that made consuming them more pleasant. A reader either confirmed what they’d already learned about a book, or discovered something from the mouth of a writer who was not bound to praise you. That’s the blurb contract when you fold in author praise. It’s an honorable one, so much so that publishers always want your blurb list as part of your bona fides.

Not anymore, at least not at one of the most famous imprints in the book world. Well, fine. Resetting the blurb mission at S&S was start, anyway, and Manning’s photo that goes along with his announcement tells us even more about this decision. He’s wearing a chest-length hairdo. And carrying his imprint’s strategy back to the days when that hairstyle said something about hippies and counterculture. Things are changing — maybe for the better. You’ll still see blurbs on S&S books. But maybe some authors who they want to publish will sign a contract, once they learn they don’t have to go hat in hand to ask for praise first. We never had to do that in the theatre. We invited in the critics while we gathered our audience. Nobody stood outside barking praise at the door.

A store’s rack might not sell as well as Colleen did.

People like to talk about what they intend to do. Yesterday I fielded a call from a retired finance guy who has a habit of writing. “I can make a book for nothing,” he said with pride. Making a book that people will want to read costs more than that. Factor in the 2.5 million books a year that get into the world, and you’ll need extra-polished skills to gain anyone’s attention. When the editing becomes free, the value of the book goes down. Guaranteed.

Our financier wants to sell your book if it’s written about Texans, for just $100 a year, by stocking it in displays at small groceries across the state. Think Brookshire Brothers in Salado, Texas and you get the idea. They sell yo-yos in a display there, he adds. It’s a little uncertain how yo-yo sales prove that bookselling is a strong trade, although it’s certain there are already books sold at Brookshire’s stores. The stores operate in towns too small for our benevolent statewide chain HEB. It makes sense you might buy a book to read at the grocery, so long as you don’t use the Internet and there’s no indie bookstore within a half hour, a store which orders books which an author has sold to the store.

Those grocery books will be sold on consignment, so the author won’t start to earn that hundred dollars back until they sell some books. I’m a little unsure how all of that turns a profit for an author, when they’ll have to split the book’s $16 with the store owner, plus pay $6 to print each book. My paperback earns me $1.90 every time it’s sold in a bookstore. I’ll have to raise that price soon, because Ingram’s printing prices are rising in February. Amazon sales are a better deal for an indie author-publisher, every time. It’s hard to compete with the convenience.

Consider how much any store helps

We can assume that the small-grocery sales point might be better than a bookstore treatment. The biggest bookstore in Austin carries my latest novel, but it’s stocked spine-out on a low shelf, thanks to the bad luck of author alphabetization. As an author-publisher, you’ll get to decide how much value your book gets from spine-out display in a store.

Let’s assume the grocery model displays all books cover-out. At least the books are sold nearby. A reader could spend 45 minutes of driving to a bookstore in any town of a moderate size. There’s the prospect of not having the book in stock that the reader is seeking at the store. Your book can be new and getting a few more reviews every week. Then the bookstore moves it off off that swell table in front after a while, making room for the newer contenders.

What’s it worth to you, receiving the bookstore love? Is it that author credibility, is the Legit label on your career, all worth earning less than half per book in royalty? Maybe so, if you can take the right steps.

To get the foot traffic into the stores, so the reader sees you on a table, you’ll need somebody to take steps to trigger interest in your stunning story or masterful instruction. Of course, I’m talking about marketing. I prefer to call it discovery — because in the aisles of that bookstore, your new title is surrounded by a rain forest of books. Or in the model with groceries, yo-yos and corn chips.

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We all need to write well, but doing the math is important to an author, too. This morning I read an example of Book Math that didn’t show its work on why Amazon chaps the hide of one author. She’s got a new book for sale and wants to explain where a reader’s purchase money goes.

Amazon, she tells us, takes about $7 out of every $27 that her full-color paperback costs. Okay, that’s probably sound math. Color books now earn less author royalty at Amazon, down to a 60 percent share after being at 70 for years. Instead of shopping at the Big A, she invites us to purchase this book from her publisher.

Well, the only publisher-only option would be from the publisher’s website. Even while buying from a publisher site, there’s a chance the books are shipped from a warehouse run by a distributor. In that case, a distributor takes a cut. You should be on watch for who’s distributing your book, and who’s printing it. The best pairing is printing + distribution. That might mean two different companies anyway.

Our author shares generously. Lots of authors have a Top Secret, nuclear codes approach to money reports. She says her difference in royalties is $1.27 via Amazon, instead of $3.85 for a book sold through the publisher. Here’s the part that doesn’t add up: That publisher book is still being distributed for an extra fee whenever it goes through Amazon, according to the accounting, an extra deduction off the author’s payment calculations.

Huh? Well, there’s a smart way to publish a book that Amazon will sell, and an easy way. That separate distribution fee during an Amazon sale suggests that the distributor is taking a cut of that book’s money. Easy to do. For example, IngramSpark is the usual way to print and deliver a book, so long as bookstore sales are important. Ingram will collect its fees — even when no bookstores are delivering that book because Amazon is doing the selling. The fees are for the warehouse. Face it, that Amazon book purchase will flow through an Amazon web page and be shipped through an Amazon warehouse. You know, the place where all the blue Big A trucks park every day.

So the easy way to sell a printed paperback through Amazon is to allow IngramSpark — or some other printer who’ll ship a book to Big A warehouses — to print all books. They’ll handle it all, including the moments they send your books from their press to the Big A warehouse for customer delivery. That slows down delivery, something an Amazon reader cares about a lot.

The smarter way is to let Amazon print that book. Authors and publishers can print from both at the same time. Anything is possible these days. That author’s book might be printed at a short run press, then shipped to a warehouse that sends the book right out to the customer. That’s only possible if the publisher sells the book through its website. Or in a miracle, that the distributor helps out the sale. You’re probably not selling much through a distributor site.

This is where I remind us all that Amazon always displays your book cover-out. Step into a store and see what share of the books are forced to sell themselves spine-out. The favorites of the staff, plus the best sellers and newer books, get face-out displayed on tables or shelves. Sometimes there’s the prized recommendation card. Amazon has no way to match that.

Where it prints: Important

Both Amazon and Ingram would like full control of the book’s printing. Amazon’s got Extended Distribution, an option that’s supposed to get books delivered to bookstores. But the stores hate Amazon, so the only real extending that happens is to make your book harder to get into a store.

See, Amazon doesn’t need Ingram to print books, and Ingram won’t make any use of Amazon’s printing. Well, Ingram can use up some of your profits, if you didn’t give each company the power to print the books they sell. It’s going to cost you extra each time Ingram sends a book to Amazon for delivery. Both companies take a cut.

So here we go: If you’re printing smart, it’s the distributor who’s going to earn less. A distributor who doesn’t print books is so 1998. Sure, Amazon and Ingram print the books they sell. The Amazon books ship from a half-dozen presses that it operates. Look in the back of a book to see who printed it. Ingram and Amazon both leave their mark.

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What an author doesn’t want is to see Ingram’s mark in the back of a book sold through Amazon. Those Amazon presses will do a fine job compared to Ingram’s. On some days, better, and just about always, faster.

Ingram presses will still get their shot. When the order is store-bound, it makes sense. And when the Amazon presses are too busy, Ingram gets the printing order to deliver to Amazon. You are charged as if Amazon printed the book — a fee that’s always lower than Ingram’s cost to print.

Here’s what you don’t want: to be published and take a small royalty for a book that your publisher can’t get into stores. It’s lovely to have a book from a small press, even one that is notable for the awards and shortlists that its authors earn. But when your distributor earns $4.79 per book sold into the Amazon store, that press distribution needs to push your new book onto shelves in retail stores. Even if your paperback isn’t available on Amazon, because your publisher held it out of there, standard distributor contracts will charge that fee anyway. Selling a book through Amazon doesn’t reduce your royalty any further if the distributor collects its fees — no matter where your book is sold.

The final calculation left Amazon with five times as much money as the author’s royalty, according to the cartooned math. It’s easy for a publisher to let the print-and-distribute money stay in one place: Ingram. It’s smarter to let the seller and shipper of each book do the printing, whenever you can. And if you can’t, because your book needs to be printed elsewhere, try not to let your small press permit a distributor to dip into your profits in the same way as if it controlled printing.

I know, I know. This is all insider stuff, but understanding who’s on the payroll is important once you become an author-publisher. Not many distributors can offer a book and sell enough extra copies to offset the cut they take.

To be fair, full-color books are a special case, because Amazon might not print one as well as an offshore printing company, or even a private short-run printer. Your first obligation is to sell a well-printed book. Whenever you see a lovely, color-filled book, there’s a good chance that beautiful book started on a continent other than yours.

Where’s the hate?

What the authors hate, under the surface, is that any company could get so dominant that it becomes the rule-maker for business choices. They also hate that a book purchase at the Big A gets queued up alongside and right behind a dozen other offers. That’s correct in both cases. We can do little about the first dilemma, and just shake our heads at the second one. Distributors are losing the Big A battle, too. Libraries are starting to buy books through Amazon. Longtime favorite Baker and Taylor’s distribution to libraries is no more.

Is the reader hatred of Amazon about being a corporation owned by a man who builds rocket ships? Your books are never going to get on the same budget sheet as astronautical components or oxygen. Your readers want the best price and the fastest delivery, unless they’re willing to carry the hated right beside the author. You can hate Amazon if you want. The hate’s not going to profit you, if you’re letting that easy print-plus-distribution elude you. Our author started by pointing out her lower profits, so those earnings must be important.

Sins of Liberty is printed at two presses: Amazon’s and Ingram’s. This novel of mine costs me nothing more to set up at Amazon, after Ingram has gotten its first shot. Ingram, responsible for my bookstore sales, really prefers to be the first to print + distribute a book. My $18.95 paperback earns me $1.95 though a bookstore-Ingram sale. I get twice as much when a printed copy sells via Amazon.

Hating is a real thrill, but author-publishers need to look at their books: the accounting ones along with those pages delivering stories. Ingram and outside distributors have their place, but fewer sales happen via spine-out display at stores. Ingram wants a clear field at first to serve the bookstores. After a few months of slower delivery and lower royalties, though, enough is enough. Let Ingram have its bookstore sales. Selling through them will make the book available on Bookshop.org, after all, a pretty good Amazon alternative for the haters. But be smart and take every advantage you can to keep such distributors from taking your royalties. It can be as simple as having your book printed in the place that’s best for each sale.

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Upon its release, Sins of Liberty went up for sale at Amazon, Kobo and Barnes & Noble. To serve Apple Books readers, I also posted the ebook for sale through Draft2Digital, a publishing service that does aggregation wholesaling to all online outlets. When you use one company to wholesale your ebook to many others — routing book purchase income to you after taking a share — this is aggregation. It's not distribution, because there's no sales effort except what you do yourself.

I picked Draft2Digital to save time, but I also chose it because Apple's requirements have become finicky. Years ago, my memoir Stealing Home slipped out of the Apple Books store after being for sale inside it for six months. Apple had changed requirements on how much you could say about your book in a description. It was complex to have a book cover among your photos of listings which had summary copy on its back cover. Apple never could resolve the issue, not after a series of calls that got escalated to upper support tiers.

Draft2Digital warns author-publishers about the Apple briar patch. D2D also collects everything you need to pass Apple's inspection. The very next day, Sins of Liberty appeared in the Apple Store. I could turn over Stealing Home for D2D aggregation, but Apple hasn't sold a book of mine across that six months. To be honest, beyond Kobo for overseas ebook sales, and Barnes & Noble just to be complete, Amazon is all you'll need for ebook sales.

IngramSpark can add a sales point for your ebooks, but it takes a much bigger share of each sale. What's more, there's no way to limit IngramSpark ebook wholesaling to just its trading with bookstores. Yes, bookstores do sell ebooks, sort of. A purchase up at Bookshop.org now includes an option to buy your ebook for reading within a new Bookshop app. Not many ebook readers use multiple apps. You can go to look for a book you thought you purchased for Kindle and discover it's not there. Where is it? The search begins.

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Readers who hate Amazon probably make up the biggest share of Bookshop.org ebook sales. There's no discount advantage and the delivery is no more instant than into a Kindle account. Then there's the caliber of the alternative reading apps, several levels of functionality lower. For me, the IngramSpark wholesaling begins and ends with paperbacks and hardcovers, sold into physical bookstores.

Draft2Digital doesn't charge anything by the month for its aggregation service. It does take a share of your profits off each book sale. A few years ago, Draft2Digital joined with Smashwords. The merger gave Draft2Digital better reach, while Smashwords got better web interfaces for author-publishers and readers.

These aggregate listings used to pose a potential problem when you wanted to discount your book for bargain sales. The bargain email book sites like BookBub or Early Bird Books let you offer your book for 99 cents for a short while. These sites ship your offer to millions of email addresses. But they won’t process this email ad order until every outlet falls into line. Amazon wants to sell at the rock bottom price. Any outlet that sells for less will just get its price matched by the 'Zon. That means adjusting your website pricing at all of your outlets.

For example, at BargainBooksy, your book only needs to include a link on Amazon to qualify. You may add additional links to Apple, Google, Nook, or Kobo.

The way you do this kind of adjustment, well, nothing is simpler than using Draft2Digital for aggregator sales. You plug in your metadata, your cover, then you choose your sales outlets. You make decisions about your discounted price and length of the sale. My strategy has me set my own price and publishing data at the three major ebook sites of Amazon, Kobo, and B&N. I then let Draft2Digital handle the rest of the sales.

This is all invisible to the readers buying your book. As an author-publisher, though, you make these choices and manage the metadata. Your cover remains your most crucial marketing tool.