The impulse for true freedom is within every living heart. It is a gift from the Divine Source that births all innate impulse and expression. Just as the strength of the wave breaking on a beach carries with it the mighty force of the vast ocean behind it, the impulse for true freedom within each being carries the greater power of the Divine Source of all Nature.

The desire for freedom explodes from within the being and claims precedence as expansive, full and exalted thought. This thought powers the force of action to transcend difficulties and limiting situations. It bubbles beneath the surface working its way through into the light. It has such power that the impulse for freedom alone can be a break through to new life. Know that this force for freedom is the action of the spirit within you and you can use it to create new life circumstances. How does one use a powerful spiritual force in every day life? Sometimes personalizing this force can make it easier to understand and incorporate.

Imagine that there are beings of Light that hold the spirit of freedom as their matrix energy. They represent a type of angelic being that uses this empowered force to assist humanity in breaking through the chains of limitation that bind the thought processes of mass consciousness. The more people think of themselves from the limiting view points of material living, the more constricted their energy fields become. This constricted energy results in thoughts of fear, doubt and attachment to the status quo. The depth of unhappiness this constriction causes human life is rampant. It is the basis for many forms of disease because it cuts off the flow of life force. Many times there is a desire in the heart for true freedom that can break these boundaries. It can bubble to the surface, but without knowing how to make the change happen, the impulse dies under the weight of living without hope.

If one can lay aside the need to know exactly how to change, and holds to the desire for freedom, a doorway is opened in the consciousness. This doorway opens to the Higher Power and the gifted beings of the Angelic Realms waiting to be of assistance. The Angel of Freedom is such a being, awaiting invitation to work with your soul, and this angel is available to clear away the darkness in the energy fields surrounding each person on the earth. There needs to be the willingness within your heart to ask for help, an open door in your mind to allow angelic assistance, and the desire to be free from the constricting chains of limiting thoughts. The power of your willingness opens the mind and heart so help can be received, and it is an essential first step in the process of profound freedom.

Visualize a future where you are free and happy; a future where all your needs are met with grace and ease; a future filled with health and wellbeing, as well as harmonious relationships. Now ask the Angel of Freedom to bless these intentions. Write them down and keep them in a sacred manner. You might make a special table with a candle and a flower to serve as a meditation focal point for you. Look at them frequently and ask for a blessing from the Angel of Freedom for your abundantly bright and happy future. These steps will lift your vibrational frequency in the present time and help to pave the way for the future you most desire to experience. Ask the Angel of Freedom to free your mind of doubts and fear, then set your worries aside. You have just released your future into the Life Stream of pure freedom, and became a co-creator with the angelic realms.

The energy of freedom exerts a pressure on every thought that constricts life.  This impulse for freedom is so strong that once it is given a place in your mind and heart, it takes on a life of its own. It is as if you are planting seeds of freedom that blossom and grow when allowed into your being. The energy of freedom carries genius. This can be used in all forms of creative expression and can open up surprising solutions to every day situations that were not evident from the constricted state of mind. This energy of freedom carries a passion that ignites the spark of hope in your mind, inspiring others to join you in a conspiracy of free thoughts and prayers that have the power to uplift all humanity. Explosive, loving energy magnetizes the joyous souls who believe they have the potential within their power to be free, and are willing to hold the light of freedom for all who live on earth. This spirit of freedom is an inherent gift from the Divine and is available to all those who desire to live from the place of this powerful truth.

Your willingness to invite the Angel of Freedom into your life can be your connection to this powerful force that is available to you. It is time to break the shackles that have bound you to constricted thoughts. Expand the boundaries of your mind and let your soul guide the way to perfect freedom. Let your heart and mind open to the spirit of this exalted state where all things grow in boundless potential. Allow happiness to bubble to the surface and live in the joy of true freedom.

And so it is.

Shanta Gabriel
For Archangel Gabriel
Copyright:  June 22, 2010
www.TheGabrielMessages.com

Shanta Gabriel is an inspiring teacher, healer and author of “The Gabriel Messages.” She provides clear, practical and effective suggestions and techniques for physical, emotional and spiritual balance. She conducts private sessions, in person and by phone, as well as workshops that powerfully connect you with your soul’s special journey. In addition, Shanta leads a highly regarded, results-oriented, experiential seven-month Archangel Study Program to assist you in understanding and connecting with the Archangels. For more information about Shanta’s private sessions or workshops and to read the inspiring messages on her blog, visit www.TheGabrielMessages.com

You have written endlessly about what DOESN’T make O Books sell. Reviews don’t. Agents don’t. Free copies don’t (they’re counterproductive).
Getting books into bookshops doesn’t (an expensive waste of time, they just come back). My extensive websites don’t, if you were wondering, at least not through clicks direct from there to Amazon.

And yet Head versus Heart is a steady, plodding seller, somehow. So is God without God, in the UK at least.

How do they sell? Is it through Amazon? Is it through independent shops?
Is it through multiples? Is it through shops having them in stock? Is it through people going into shops and asking for them?

We know all about what DOESN’T sell books, and what increasingly WON’T sell books in the future. But who are these mysterious people who DO buy O Books (in the thousands) month by month? Who are they? You never seem to blog about them (or I missed it). How much do you know about them?”

That’s a good question Michael.

You’ld be surprised by how little I know (actually, you probably wouldn’t).

As far as the channels go, it’s through all those you mention. Amazon accounts for about 25% of our sales, increasing. Multiples for about 30% – but then it varies hugely per title, and when we get them in, in quantity, they mostly come back. Most shops order through wholesalers rather than direct from our distributors, so we can’t say which shops have which titles, whether they have them regularly in stock or whether they’re responding to people asking for them.

In theory, our knowledge of which books go where should be exponentially greater than in previous decades. Every single copy is tracked, everything is electronic, happens at the speed of light etc…..in practice it’s more like trying to figure out the new instructions on a complicated new TV/DVD/video thingmyjig. They’re designed to do so much stuff, so well, that for technophobes like me – it’s years since I’ve even tried to record a TV program. I could tell you where each single copy sale of yours has been over the last month, to which buyer, and how many they’ve bought before, and when, and probably what color shirt they were wearing at the time, but it would take me an hour to do it, if I’ve kept track of which passwords have changed for which distributors over the last month, which I probably haven’t, so I don’t. I felt closer to the market 30 years ago than I do today.

The same with our mysterious book buyers. I know they’re out there, because sales happen, I see proposals from new authors coming in saying “I’ve read a number of your books etc…”, and once in a blue moon I bump into people socially who are interested in the subject/have read books. So it’s not just selling to other authors. But I can’t say I know them. I don’t know the authors, let alone readers……

I see occasional signs, tracks in the wilderness of my ignorance- was coming back on the plane from the US a week or two back (very rare business travel, but we’re starting a new imprint based in the US) and reading a magazine I hadn’t come across before, New Writer’s Magazine, and there was a bit in the editorial;
“If it hadn’t been for indulging in a bit of serous market research one wet Irish afternoon, none of my three non-fiction books would have been under contract. The first publisher in the MBS genre was recommended by a friend who runs one of the more interesting bookshops in London. “Who’s the most popular publisher for my sort of stuff these days?” I asked. She gave me two names. One was O-Books, and despite the rather uninspiring entry in The Writer’s Handbook, I went to their website….and 48 hours later I had the emailed contract in my possession. Two months later I had the contract for the second book. The other publisher never even bothered to respond to either book proposal.”

I don’t know which bookshop is being referred to. But word seems to be getting out somewhere.

The key phrase for me in your question is “plodding seller”. I don’t know enough about maths or marketing to describe this in the right way, but most books I guess have traditionally followed a lopsided bell curve, where they within a few months they reach a peak, decline (increasingly) rapidly and reach a point in a year or two when the cost of warehousing/servicing them is higher than the income (depending on the scale of the publisher’s fixed costs), and they go out of print.

The heart of our business is more a “straight-line” kind of pattern. It’s books that sell pretty much the same every month, might be a few dozen or a few hundred, rarely more, year in, year out. We have one title that’s done it for decades, barely shifting more than 20% either way in any one month or year.

They’re not necessarily books that would appeal to Random house or Harper Collins, or get stocked regularly at B&N or Waterstones. There doesn’t seem to be any direct correlation with marketing, or with quality. I know we have to do all the stuff we do – getting good sales sheets, endorsements, selling to the multiples and independents and so on – but which bits of this work best, which we should do more of and which less – we play variations on it all the time and I’m no wiser.

But this steady business is the kind I want to develop. Most good books have a fairly small, widely-scattered audience. A discerning one, but hard to find. And hard to reach – the smaller and more international it is, the less traditional marketing is going to work. And social networking/blogs/websites/twitter etc… – it’s all very well, but so vast now that it’s just duplicating the real world. It’s no easier to catch the attention of someone on the internet than it is to find a stranger.

Similarly with the formats – I see a dozen or so good articles/posts a day about all the new digital formats/channels, the ipads and apps, the one million or whatever it is new titles coming out this year (OK, about half are re-issues etc…, and they’re mostly going to sell about 3 copies, but then next year or two it’s probably going to be two million….). Amazon is astonishingly effective at making them all available, as are a number of new competitors coming up the track, but; quite literally; there are going to be more books to read than readers to read them.

So all the fuss and agonizing over digital, amazon, social networking etc seems to me misplaced. In that, sure, it’s the future, we have to be there, but it moves the conundrum along, rather than answers it. How do you still find the readers? It used to be through the “trickle down” effect. The bigger you were, the more clout you had with the few main buyers, the more books you pour into the funnel, which cascade down to the shops in different set quantities, where people go to make their selection, and hopefully enjoy what they buy so that it continues to spread through word of mouth. You work “nationally”, or even “regionally”, and if you want that duplicated in a different country, you have to sell the rights to someone like yourself.

But that “boom and/or bust” era of publishing is essentially over. It will always be there for big bestselling frontlist, for people obsessed with rankings and wanting to read what everyone else is reading, who read a few books a year, but most people are going to be buying books recommended by others they trust rather than how much has been spent on marketing them into this narrow retail funnel.

Shops are always going to play a part. The way I see it, shops that just put books onto shelves are going to fade away, however big they are, and are going to be too expensive to service for small publishers like us. Those that survive are going to be active in the community, talks/workshops etc., know their market, and be able to talk to customers. They’re the ones I’ld like to support, like the one mentioned above. We could get a section on the website headed “Retailers; 50% discount”. Explain it there to shops. Button for them to click if they want to take part. Buttons to press for which monthly newsletter they want. Boxes to tick on the newsletter if they want to order, or for them to do it from their regular distributor. Box to tick for one free review copy, whatever. Could have an “authors in your area” box, just a question of automating it from the address list, using authors who’ve ticked a box to say they’re available- “tick this if you would like any of these authors xyz to discuss a launch”. If you have one or two authors in a county, it’s not enough to make it of interest. If you have a couple of dozen, with a new title coming out locally every few months, it might be. We’ll have 1000+ authors soon, a lot of them are active, I’ld like to get it past 10,000 while I’m still here.

But the main route has to be letting potential readers worldwide know your book is available. At various points/times some of them will congregate in places, like conferences/workshops/events. Others will be looking at specialist magazines, regional or national. Or they’ll be working in associated areas, so it’s contacting university departments or organizations. How much of it works? I don’t know. Others here are much more clued up than me, and would say I’m talking twaddle, but I operate on the principle of Invincible Ignorance, “try everything, just in case”. One way or other, we do end up selling books.

To contact these people you need the information, have it regularly updated, and have enough volume of good quality titles coming through to persuade them to subscribe to getting information. I’ld guess there are about 100,000 such contacts we should have on the database, and we have about 10% of them. It’s an impossible task for one publisher, which is why the database revolves around author input (about two thirds of it comes from authors, one third from us). Which is why the more authors we have, the stronger it gets, which is why we work a lot on the systems to enable us to bring out a lot of new titles efficiently.

We’ll be making it easier to use, with all the results sorted in priority order – so for your book’s subject area, you can press a button and see, for example, which are the major magazines by circulation numbers anywhere in the world, and which are the ones we’ve had most success with (whether articles, or reviews, etc). You’ll be able to see which shops in your locality we mostly deal with, whether you live in Sydney or Vancouver, who’s had signing sessions there before, comments by previous authors on what worked and didn’t, who to contact, advice on parking, , etc. Hopefully we’ll have it in place later this year, though we’ve been working towards it for years now and a reverse form of Pareto’s law seems to operate with computer software – the 20% of stuff you really want to get done doesn’t get done because you can never finish off the 80% left over from the last time you did anything.

So to get back to your point, at last – “how much do I know about the readers?” Nothing. It’s a presumption I can’t begin to make. I can see a fair bit about the markets we’ve involved with, which review copies went out to who, which resulted in reviews, and so on through every aspect of marketing. I can see whether it had any impact on sales. In this respect, you can see and know as much as me.

Getting to know the readers, and helping them to know you, has got to be the next step for us, when we can get there…..

John

Ii think what he says boils down, as far as we’re concerned, to;
Bookstores as they are now, prime locations for delivering wide ranges of new titles, disappearing in 20 years (with smaller, more focused ones surviving)
“Books” being primarily digital files rather than “printed”
The price for the content that books represent will be coming down
Successful publishers will be the ones who can connect with and deliver to authors an online community rather than those who rely on selling books into shops (““the idea of a “General Trade Publisher” will have no meaning””)
Territorial rights will disappear, and publishing worldwide is not only possible but the most profitable and author-friendly way to publish

I think he’s right. And it might happen faster – it doesn’t seem more than a few years ago since I celebrated 25 years of going to the Frankfurt Book Fair by deciding that was enough; back then we still had to follow up by fax, emails hadn’t taken over. Hard to believe now. Though it seems ironic that he intended to deliver his speech in the most old-fashioned, expensive, limiting kind of way – flying across the Atlantic to speak to a relatively small group of people at an industry jamboree. And was then prevented from doing so by a good old-fashioned earthly belch.

And it might be more extreme than he suggests. I don’t find infinite choice particularly helpful – it gets bewildering. The more TV channels there are, the less TV I watch. The wider the range of religions I know about, the harder it is to settle into any one of them. The more bombarded with supermarket offers or new credit cards, the more inclined I get to shop locally or pay with cash. And the wider the choice of books, the more I rely on personal recommendation.

Perhaps that’s just starting to get crotchety. But meetings and book fairs – giving those up was one of the better decisions in my life.

John Hunt

John Hunt

John Hunt

I see posts every day with comments like this one by Andrew Zack 4th Feb in the Huffington Post;
“I wouldn’t recommend anyone more than a decade from retirement invest in starting a bookstore. We are experiencing the beginning of the end of paper books right now. The brick-and-mortar store and the paper book will disappear faster than you might imagine.”

And it’s obvious that things are going to get tougher. But the end of the brick-and-mortar store and printed books completely? I just don’t believe it.

A lot will go, sure. Maybe the big chains will go – the shareholders will want somewhere more exciting to put their money. For independents not overburdened with debt, who happen to be in the business because they love books rather than retail, it could be different. People want to congregate, to browse, to talk to someone who knows their subject area, or them personally. They want to meet and listen to authors. Authors want to meet readers. Annual festivals aren’t going to take over this role.

Maybe we’ll be right back down to the number of shops and amount of shelf space that I referred to in the first blog. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Just means that bookselling gets back to being more intimate again, as the norm rather than the exception.

We publish a lot of authors, and encourage them to set up signing sessions in their local shops (too many of them happen for us to be the intermediaries in that). We want those bookshops there. They may evolve into something a little different, like libraries are. But whatever, they’re going to be part of the landscape, and we need to support them. Put our money (??) where our mouth is (got enough of the latter, not so much of the former). Just doesn’t seem right that shops are better off ordering stock from their main competitor. And what isn’t right we should at least have a try at changing.

So if any other independent in the UK (can’t work it in North America yet) is interested in taking up an offer of 50% discount on firm sale only, just contact Catherine.harris@o-books.net, and she’ll arrange it.

John Hunt

This lovely and very gracious comment in “The Bookseller” (here’s hoping that lots of booksellers are reading it) on our new sister imprint, Zero books, prompted this second blog on the subject of bookshop sales.

Being sales manager (I think, have had no direct contact) of Verso, the leading political publisher from a left-wing perspective in the UK/USA, Rowan Wilson knows vastly more about bookshops than I do.

The books are never going to be in all bookshops though. And I do try and pin stuff down to what we can realistically do where. There are 20,000 bookshop accounts in the USA/UK etc. If we had one in each shop, and each copy sold through, being replaced by one more, our sales reports would show 40,000 of each sold, and Nielsen, which tracks bookshop sales, would show 20,000 of each.

But that’s quite unrealistic. From the info in “Our publishing process” on the website; Looking at the latest Bookseller analysis of sales in 2008; in the kind of non-fiction specialist areas that we mostly publish in, a sale of 3,000 copies in, for example, “popular philosophy” (rather than academic philosophy, where good sales are in the hundreds), would easily get you into the top 20 titles in the UK in 2008, into the company of authors like Julian Baggini, Alain de Botton and Bertrand Russell (yes, he still sells).

In comparison to this, the sales on the first two titles on Zero books (published late last Spring) are in the 1000-1500 bracket. Keep selling steadily. The more recent ones, more in the 500-1000 level.

Which is not all through bookshops in the UK. Roughly one third in the US, and amazon account for nearly half, on average.
Which is not getting them up into the top 20 in the UK, but then the authors aren’t writing to be popular, they’re not for everyone, and it doesn’t seem to me to be completely out of line with expectations for that kind of book. In fact, seems to be going well, given that it’s a new list.

The wholesalers have been kept in stock; the bookshops have had the info; which is not to say we shouldn’t be doing better – looking back, we seemed to have loosened up on Foyles, Blackwells, and not kept those sales going. On the other hand, they’re mostly in the Waterstones core stock list, or on their way there, and we’ve started to do more in the USA, and we haven’t had too many returns. The more recent “One Dimensional Woman” has sold more in the US than the UK, for some reason.

The more troubling questions are the broader ones. There are always going to be no more than 20 authors in the top 20, in any particular subject area. But if the sales in one major market like the UK are going to bring a few thousand copies at best, the vast majority are going to be in the hundreds, or dozens. So how do you publish good books in this area without pricing them at the academic £30-£100 range? And how many shops can you afford to ring/visit?

What more should we have done? There have been two major launches. Hundreds, thousands of emails/phone calls. Over 200 review copies sent so far. These have been in response to requests, rather than just blanket mailings of review copies, and the results have been;
Militant Modernist; 62 review copies sent, 4 reviews
Fear of Music; 74 review copies sent, 4 reviews
One Dimensional Woman; 33 review copies sent, 4 reviews
Cold World; 20 review copies sent, nil reviews
Capitalist Realism; 36 copies sent, 2 reviews
The reviews have all been great. But it’s an expensive way of getting them, about £10 a time by the time you add in warehouse charge, packing, post, paperwork, cost of book, arranging it.

We do need to strengthen ties with the most suitable bookshops, who specialise in political/literary/cultural theory, no doubt about that. But then, for that to work for both parties, you need a regular stream of good titles. So it’s pushing uphill on the sales while the cash is running downhill, with the investment in new, first time authors.

And the one thing I know, is that there is no necessary correlation between good books and sales. Doesn’t matter how hard you try you on the marketing, and on getting them into shops. Was just looking at our figures on a fiction title of last summer – good book, glowing endorsements from credible people, four articles related to the book on publication and one magazine extract, half a dozen book signings, two magazine reader competitions, twelve radio interviews, two TV ones, and we’ve sold 250 copies, with 155 extra going out as free for review
Squaring the circle of effort/time/cash/return with wanting to do the best for the author is what we wrestle with every day. On the first zero books, I’ld guess we’ve got the balance about right, though clearly can’t sustain quite the same level of effort across all new titles. But I post this up here in case anyone has any better answers.
John Hunt

It’s tough for the shops, I know. We stopped using a freelance sales team in the UK this time last year. They were running out of accounts they could call on and sell to. We publish a lot of titles in the religion/spirituality area; most of the few dozen SPCK shops in the UK closed down a couple of years ago. The more evangelical Wesley Owen shops were never quite our market, but they’ve mostly gone as well over the last couple of months. Borders closed down before Christmas, though we always found it difficult to get a foot in the door there anyway. So we visit Waterstones (the equivalent of B&N), some independents, wholesalers like Bertrams, Gardners (equivalents of Ingram, B&T etc), – for a dozen accounts you don’t need a sales team taking 15% of the margin. Our sales haven’t noticeably dipped in the UK as a result. Would they have done better with the sales team? Doubtful.

There hasn’t been the same relative level of closures in the USA. Maybe they’re better run, maybe book sales are holding up better – but I suspect it’s mostly a question of scale. With 600 or so superstores you have more room to cut and manoeuvre than you do with 60 or 6. In this case, perhaps what’s been happening in the UK is in front of the US.

More worrying though are the tactics used to stay afloat. Buying space is one thing, but you can take that or leave it. What is hard to affect is the rate of returns. And here, the hurt is probably headed more from the US to the UK.

From what I hear returns in the US average well over 30%, significantly higher than in the UK, and have done for years. With some accounts often running at 60% or more. When the returns come back to the warehouse, the big publishers tend to just put them to one side for pulping. Others give options, you can choose to send them for pulping, at about 15 cents per book. Or you can have them returned to stock, which is 45 cents per book, or 60 cents, or more. Some have a minimum charge of $3 to $4 to put a book back into stock. The books are inspected individually to see if they’re OK to go back into stock, and some are “improved” to get them back to their original condition – a smear touched up, a bit of glue added.

All books can be returned, often after a few weeks, even bestsellers, if that month’s stock levels in relation to sales need to be hit. It doesn’t hurt the bestsellers too much, because there’s enough “pull through” on the sales for the returns rate to be relatively low. For new authors, it’s different. People buy names they know.

I don’t blame the shops here, there are too many books for them to stock, the sales have to turnover fast enough to cover their costs. It’s just that the system seems unworkable.

It’s a downward spiral. The less likely a customer is to see the book they want in the shop, the more likely they are to order it online. Unless they want to browse a relatively small selection of fiction and feel the books by hand (and maybe then still order online to get a better discount) they get out of the habit of visiting the shops. Most sales come through word of mouth anyway, and if you’ve heard of what you want, you don’t need to browse for it. Whether ebooks (and their successors) get to 10% of the market in a decade’s time, or 50% (the most common estimate), or more, it’s going to further contribute to declining shelf space. And they’re going to push the price of printed books down, which increases the relative unit cost of handling them in the warehouse.

In the town where I grew up and first started buying books 40 years ago, there was one small independent that had been there for a century. New books on the tiny ground floor, second hand books on the four rickety floors above. Then came the new large airy malls, and the bookshps with them; one that later became Waterstones, Ottakers (which later became a second Waterstones), and what turned into Borders (now closed). The space given to selling books in the town was multiplied by factors of 10. I can see it going all the way back down again. There will be the occasional quality book that you buy off a shelf, but there will be more browsing of books online to see whether you really want to invest the time in reading; you will buy more, but at half price or less, you will read more, but put half of them down unfinished.

In the meantime, for the publisher, it gets harder to justify the cost of trying to get the books into the shop in the first place.

Our own returns rate in the USA has been relatively steady at between 27-35%. The steady overall rate has been disguising widening variations amongst the accounts. I realise that with a relatively specialist list we’re not representative. But Amazon as a % of our sales have gone up steadily from around 12% a few years ago to approaching 40% today, and they have no returns.

On the other hand Barnes & Noble have gone in the other direction, despite the efforts of the sales team. And the returns rate has gone up to 80%.
So for every 10,000 books sold in, 8,000 are coming back.
For a sample $100,000 worth of initial sales, or 10,000 books at $10 ($20 retail), the costings look like;
Distribution +sales cost at approx 25% of $100,000; $25000
Returns at 45 cents a book, for 8,000 books; $3600
2000 books sold; Revenue $20,000
Authors royalties $2500
Print cost of 10,000 books (some of which can be sold again); $20,000
Which leaves a loss of $31,000, before catalogue costs, marketing costs, pre-print costs, overheads etc.

It’s a lot of work to put in to achieve such a negative return. Particularly if authors then complain you’re not working hard enough to get books into shops. In fact, the harder you work, the quicker you go bust. At 50% returns it’s still unworkable. At 30% it’s marginal, and pushing trolleys in the supermarket car park looks like a good career move. OK, that has its problems, occasional wobbly wheels, rain, but less stressful, healthier, and leaves you time to read what you want.

There’s an obvious answer of course. Publish more commercial books. Fewer of them. Market them harder. Only bring out those you think there’s a chance of being picked up for store promotions, and invest everything in that.

20 years ago, 10 years ago, even 5 years ago, that would have been the right answer. Though then why not work for one of the Big Six publishers who has the clout to do it properly? Now, I can’t see it. It’s locking you into the downward spiral. Readerships are expanding, fragmenting, communicating differently. They’re more international, more local. More online, more diverse. With more choice, at more prices, in more formats. They can even publish their own book in the time it takes to read one. Why would a publishing company invest its future and that of its authors in single 3 for 2 or half-price promotions in one bookshop chain in one country that is struggling to keep its own head above water?

So, paradoxically, we’re better off not trying to sell books into (a lot of) shops.

So, given that an author can put a book up on Amazon themselves, what’s the point of a publisher?

Going to have to leave that for a future post.

John Hunt

One of my nephews, aged 10, who has his own picture-taking, all-singing and dancing mobile phone, was thrilled by it.
“What’s THAT?”
“ A phone.”
“Wow. That’s really COOL.”

We’ve been thinking a lot about gadgets, systems and digital books recently, trying to figure out the best way of handling it all on small budgets. How to get the efficiencies that speed and scale can bring whilst keeping things friendly and personal. How to handle more information whilst giving everyone enough time. How to square the circle.

It’s impossible to get exactly right of course. Depends in part on how fast you reckon things are going to change. One significant book retial chain, and online seller, and wholesaler in each country by the end of next year? Or in 5 years time? Are ereaders cutting edge, or allready dinosaurs in the path of more flexible, smaller, smarter gadgets? What’s going to be the “point” of publishers, and how far will their role be taken over by forward-looking printers, or retailers? That would indeed be turning the clock back a century or two.

The only certainty, surely, is that those trying to preserve the status quo will lose out. Publishing in the last couple of decades has looked increasingly like trade across old national boundaries used to be – several barriers from content to reader, a toll tax at each point, increasing the price at each stage but often diminishing rather than improving value. The next generation will look back on the days when the author got 10% or so of the eventual price, with 90% being lost to middlemen along the way, as medieval.

John Hunt
ps free ebook on how how many thinkers see the priorities for the future at

Seth Godin

I guess keeping 90% might seem unreasonable. Self-publishers and vanity publishers make play of their more generous arrangements, author gets to keep 50%, or 80%, or whatever.

On the other hand, the average quantity sold of a self-published book is around 10 copies. The cost of getting books through the system, and marketing them, accounts for most of the 90% that the traditional publisher keeps. Publishing is not a particularly profitable business, at the best of times. It’s relatively small, miniscule compared with manufacturing or energy or finance, and most people in it are there because they like books rather than because they see a way of making serous money. If it was otherwise, and easy to make money publishing books, then it would be easier to get published.
Things will change though. You’ll get author collectives working together for marketing muscle, digital is going to lead to a higher author share however much the big guys fight it, sales online with their lower transaction costs will increase as a %, etc. At O-Books we’ve been driving down the publisher share of the cost over the last few years, through using this database of ours, which, for the author, has advantages and disadvantages. It enables the author to see what is happening, it gives them access to vastly more information than they usually get, but it also puts some onus on the author to use it. It reduces the “one-to-one” time.

So our cost-per-book has come down. We’ve used that to publish more books, which in turn helps to drive the cost down further (in dealing with design, print etc.). Our overall cost hasn’t decreased much, because about half our overhead in time/cost goes into developing the database itself. But it does set up the possibility of setting up a different kind of revenue-sharing.

Could we, for instance, move to a 60/40 split, rather than 90/10 (or 80/20)?

In theory, we should be getting there, as a possibility. There are two main problems. The first is that we don’t really make anything on the first 1000 copies. Not at the kind of retail prices we have. Too much info to process to get the book into the systems and through them. The second is that with the average first-time book 60% doesn’t cover the sales and distribution costs which we get charged for when you count in the returns, and the cost of printing those titles, let alone leave anything for overheads and marketing. Not at the moment anyway.

If the book was to turn into a strong, regular seller, it would be different – the returns come down, the print cost comes down. So here’s a suggestion; what if we left the current contract as one option, and had option B) a contract with no royalty on the first 1000 copies, but 40% after that, less the cost of sending out review copies (about $8 per book) and less the cost the warehouse charges us for returns (about $0.50 a book).

Would anyone go for it?

Note; I’ll put this up on the blog I’ve got now on the new website. I’ll probably start sticking general meandering stuff like this up there so we can keep the forum for proper questions and answers.

John Hunt