The self publishing deception

by Stephon Rudd

The biggest deception on demand publishers present is that your book will be “made available at over 25,000 bookstores worldwide.” They give writers, who are unfamiliar with the industry, a false sense of success. Everyone wants their books inside Borders or Barnes and Noble…but it’s just not possible. Let me explain why.

Print-On-Demand (or Publish-On-Demand) books are printed as little as 1 book at a time. This means their unit price to print and buy is higher per book. Example. My novel, In The Blood, spans over 330 pages. Because of its length the unit price per book is around $7. Incidentally, the longer the book, the more you pay for each unit; the shorter the book, the less you pay. Following me so far?

That’s just the publishing. Now, there is a shipping fee for each unit…actually, there is a double charge on every shipping for each unit (printed book). When all the necessary fees are applied, the total cost to print and ship one book to anyone is about $13. A pretty shocking revelation considering that the retail price of the book is set at $14.97, which is the thriller markets cap for a softbound book. Anything over that would price the book out of the market.

Bookstores want a 55% discount off the retail price, sometimes 65%. Let’s say they want 55. The book costs about $15. That’s an $8.25 discount which means that the bookstore wants to purchase it for $6.75 per book. Well, it costs the publisher $13 so they would be losing $7.25 plus profits every time bookstore owners placed an order. On top of that, for some strange reason, Borders and Barnes and Noble thinks they’re in the business to make money. So they want profits on top of the $6.75.

Typically, bookstores want to make about a 5 to 1 ratio on all book sales. That means, if your book costs $1 to purchase from the publisher, they want $5 for each book. If it costs $2 to purchase, they want $10. Whatever leftover is divided between the publisher, the agent (if you have one) and the author…the author getting significantly less. Makes you nauseous, doesn’t it?

A book that is printed at $13 doesn’t stand a chance, seeing that there is NO way for the anyone to profit. If the bookstore purchased the book, even in bulk, they would be losing more money than they’ve earned. So where’s all this talk about being “made available at over 25,000 bookstores worldwide” coming from? Dishonest publishers who know the market, know it’s not possible, but also know that YOU don’t know either of these! So sad.

What that statement simply means is that your book will be placed in the catalogue that all bookstores purchase from (The Ingram Book Group, for example), making them “available” for order. But no bookstore in their right mind will make the gamble, even if the book has bestselling potential. Now, you have a few success stories but they are a vast minority.

The purpose of me exposing this myth isn’t to discourage self publishing, but to encourage you to approach it with realistic expectations. Use the self published book to gain attention from targeted audiences (the scope of that topic is another article). If you are already self published, you’ll do much better doing direct sales to customers than to try and get shelf space. If your book is any good, it will sell. You just have to be imaginative and sell outside of the box.