I am still working on the publicity so 'publish it not' as the saying goes, but the preliminary website is underway at www.villainofsteam.com. I am the project manager, and am busy working on the three websites related to the launch (part time two days a week).
Publicity for a book should ideally be done six to nine months in advance, especially if one is even thinking of attracting book shops to stock the book, as this is the time frame in which bookshop owners operate, however May is now only ....well, it's quite soon. Far too soon. Scarily soon and nothing is ready. All my suggested deadlines are way off kilter. But at least it will be out there living and breathing in the real world. The thing is, none of the people I am co-operating with really understand the urgency of this, and although many many people have helped the project in really amazing ways, none of them really share my dream or see the project the way I do, so it can be very frustrating sometimes. Most books make almost all their sales within a few days of the launch and are never heard of again, so it is vital to have your marketing and pre-ordering in place well before the launch. Magazines and news programmes, for instance plan and even print future issues months in advance.
Our next problem is the problem of how to get an ISBN. Not a problem at all! I hear you say. You can write of to Nielsen and they will sell you ten for nearly the same price as one. Or you can publish something practically for free on Createspace and they will give you one in five minutes. Job done, bingo, published. Hah! Thanks folks, but I have examined all these options and it seems to me that the matter is actually far more complex than it appears. And urgent. The main difference between a successful book, which is usually one published by a major publisher, and a niche one that is sold on a table to a few friends, lies in media liaison, marketing and distribution. There are 10,000 new books published each year, and getting anybody's attention is quite an exiting challenge. Big companies have an established network of suppliers who trust them and they send out their brochures to bookshops and library suppliers all over the world and the deal is as good as done. They spend large amounts of money on publicity and advertising. No retailer or book reviewer wants or needs to bother looking much further than that for their suppliers. Moreover, getting a book well placed on the online booksellers, in effect Amazon, and publishing in formats that people want to buy, such as Kindle and ebook, are crucial factors in attaining success. How does one get a book on to Amazon and into libraries? is a question I hear over and over again amongst my budding indie publishing author friends.
On demand publishing through Websites Lulu and Createspace produce excellent quality paperbacks and if you just want to sell some items to your friends, or even if you want to publish your book online for all the world to access, these are an excellent way to proceed. I've tested them out and the quality of production is really excellent. (Yes, so excellent that I am repeating myself I realise. Pretty excellent then.) However as I understand it bookshops will never buy on demand books because they do not offer the 35-40% discounts that bookshops need to make a profit. They do not even offer the discounts that publishers need to make a profit. Hence Amazon are the only people making much money out of these print on demand books, it seems to me. Professional press book reviewers won't touch a book either if it smacks, thus, of being self published. So there are some pretty good reasons not to go with Createspace or Lulu.
The traditional way to publish a book is for the publisher to give the manuscript to a printer and then it gets sent to a distributor, such as Gardners, Bertrams, Central books etc. in the UK, Ingrams in the US, and bookshops order them from there. If you aint got an account with a distributor you can forget it, mate, as far as bookshops are concerned, as I understand it. Which is fine, and my publisher can do that. But that still does not solve the problem of how to get the book onto Amazon or into bookshops.
This is where it is useful to know some things. For instance, Ingrams, the distributor that I mentioned, are owned by the same company as Createspace. So in fact you can get createspace to publish your book and then distribute it through Ingrams apparently. You still won't make any profit if you are going to do it print on demand though. YOu have to do a chunk of them at once, 300 or 500 to make a reasonable profit on a book with a reasonable cover price that someone might actually want to buy. But you'd still have to combat the prejudice of reviewers who turn their noses up at self publishing.
A better method for indie publishers, I've been advised, is to go to a branch of the distributors Ingrams, namely IngramSpark, which is related to to the printers Lightningsource. This is similar to Createspace but is a company that is actually used by many publishing firms and is well respected. There is a review about it here for instance.
UK publishers face another problem. In order for a book to be legally sold in the US the book has to be registered to a company with a US address, for tax purposes. This includes, as I understand it, US Amazon, so UK indie publishers who succeeed in getting their books onto amazon.uk are often not aware that their books are not being promoted directly on US Amazon. There are complicated licencing laws relating to which world markets books can be sold in. UK publishers spend a lot of time negotiating rights with foreign publishers.
It seems to me that if a UK bookseller wants people in the US to buy the book, the best sort of ISBN to buy would be the Ingramspark Universal ISBN for $99. If you publish, with Ingramspark, as with Createspace, you can get your book entered into the all important 'books for print' publication and database, which is what booksellers use to select their stock and where they find out where to order it from. All the information a bookseller needs is sucked out of this database when they scan your ISBN, as is all the information on an online website, including the images. Hence it is vitally important that you are as careful as you can be when entering the information relating to your book when applying for an ISBN. Fortunately, in Britain at least, publishers can register with the ISBN Agency (Nielsen here) and update their information afterwards.
Another vital stage in the publishing process is attaining the 'look inside the book' facility. Books offering this sell in far higher quantities than books that don't. I think Ingramspark offer this facility free, or cheaply, to their users, whereas if you were going to approach the software company involved independently you wd be looking at a charge of $450 or so. This is another reason to go with Createspace or Ingramspark. To get the benefit of all advantages one should use Ingramspark AND a local printer in unison, I concluded. You can imagine my horror, then, when, having carefully thought through the entire process above, I, as project manager designated by my Irish publishers with all power to act on their behalf, dared to approach the hallowed confines of the Ingramspark website and, credit card in hand, tentatively clicked on the 'select ISBN' option. What was my horror, you can imagine, when I discovered that the universal ISBN option had been greyed out, and was only available to American publishers. Arrgh. Where am I to go from here? Thus you see my plight. Further adventures will no doubt follow this cliff hanger....... (and no, don't quote me on any of these details at all as they are probably all entirely wrong.)
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