The Publishing Process

There is always some lack of understanding between the different disciplines in the publishing business; much the same way that many politicians don’t have a clue about what people really want.
You can’t fully understand authors and their needs, problems, responsibilities and requirements unless you are, or have been, one. Full time.

The same applies to the other links in the publishing chain - publishers, printers and booksellers. The final link, the reader, is something most of us, hopefully, do know something about.

All four of these links in the publishing chain are very closely related and dependent on each other, whether they choose to believe it or not. Yet you wouldn’t think so, the way that booksellers and publishers get at each other’s throats every so often...

We at Zambezi don’t profess to know more than a fraction of the printing business, even though we make a point of visiting one or other of our printers when we can, and having a guided tour of their facilities. So I won’t even try to say too much about that side of things.

On the other hand, Sasha and I have a considerable amount of experience about both the author’s life, and the publishing scene; Sasha has been (and still is) a most successful author, with 119 books under her belt - published internationally, with sales of over 6.5 million copies and translations of a number of these titles into 11 different languages.

We both have many years of direct experience in the publishing process, having started right at the bottom and learnt every single step along the way. One never stops learning, but we do have a fair amount of savvy under our belts.

So, it’s fair enough for me to pass on a few bits of information that just don’t normally filter through to the man in the street, and every so often, there are totally unfounded stories in the papers about this or that aspect of the book trade. Some make us laugh, while at times, we gnash our teeth.

One of the books we used when starting out is by Dan Poynter, called “The Self-Publishing Manual”. We still have a copy here, and we still open it now and then to check out one point or another. The copy we have has 464 pages; later editions no doubt have many more pages. This is some indication of how much is involved, even at the self-publishing level, let alone as a full time business.

I won’t try to summarise the book; in this article, I just intend to touch on major publishing topics, to highlight what they are, and to mention a few interesting points along the way.

Factoid:
There are more than 130,000 new books published in the UK every year.
In the USA, the figure is over 190,000.

Authors
At the outset, obviously, one needs a manuscript from an author to work on.
Books can be either commissioned by the publisher, or submitted as an unsolicited idea by an author. In either case, a decent synopsis of the book is essential. Not a completed project, just a short synopsis, and a sample chapter or two.

Usually, the work is commissioned by the publisher, who has probably noticed a gap in the market for a specific book, or a new approach to some subject. If you think about it, it would be unusual for a new author, with little or no contacts in the publishing world, and definitely no knowledge of what new titles may be due for release in the near future, let alone in a year’s time, to have written a complete book and have it available at just the right time for an eager audience.

Factoid:
the average book in the UK sells no more than 250 copies a year.
Let that sink in... then, work out a few figures:
Let’s take a typical book costing £9.99 in the bookshop. Round that out to £10.00 for ease of calculation, as I will with the figures below.
Depending on the number of pages (more pages raises printing costs) and the number of copies printed (bigger run = lower printing costs), a 1,000 copy print run can cost the publisher about £2 per copy.

Why not?
Consider this: if there are over 130,000 new titles published every year in the UK, that equates to about 356 new books coming out every day, non-stop, including Sundays...

With figures like these, it’s actually impossible for any bookshop to stock even a fraction of these new titles, even if the shop kept no backlist stock at all. And, who can manage to buy and read even a fraction of all this stuff? Then, consider how many books exist on every subject, or even topics within any subject.

Obviously, it is essential to know, in advance, what is going to be needed in a year’s time (sometimes longer), and how to present the book in a way that will be different and appealing to a prospective reader. There is little point in an author touting his manuscript around his family & friends:
a).  What do they know about the publishing business, and
b).  is your spouse really going to tell you that your book is trash?

Some of the bigger publishers get hundreds of unsolicited proposals every week. that’s at least 10,000 a year.
If the publisher turns out 100 books a year, that’s 9,900 people who must get a rejection slip.

More and more nowadays, the case is that the bigger publishers, with bigger overheads & expenses, try to take on only absolutely sure-fire winners - usually by following on with established, successful authors. That means, easily another 60 -70 rejection slips.

That’s life. The book trade is overloaded with books, and at the same time, discounts forced by the bookshop chains and supermarkets drive profitability down, leading to less experimentation by the publishers and more of a closed shop to new authors.

So, although it has never been easier to write and physically produce a book, it has probably never been harder actually to break into trade publishing - let alone to make any money from it!.

Factoid:
The big bookshop chains all insist on at least 50% discount from publishers, with very few exceptions.
The supermarkets insist on at least 80% discount, and they only consider, at most, the current top 50 titles.
Smaller publishers just cannot join this league.

Let’s take the costing thing a bit further. We have a 1,000 copy print run that has just cost us £2 per copy. That’s £2,000 invested in stock.
Great, if those books all sell within a few months; but, if the book turns out to be one of the average ones selling about 250 copies a year, it’ll take four years to sell out.

It could easily be more profitable to take that £2,000 and invest it it the stock market, and make more profit from it that way!

How come?
Well, look at all the bits & pieces involved:
Print run @ £2 = 20%
Author royalty of, say, 10%
Discount to the shops: 50%
Distributor: 15%
That adds up to 95% already, before taking into account a portion of publisher’s salaries, adverts & promo, and all the other expenses involved in running a business.
It is true that publishers tend to make less out of a book than does the author.

With costs the way they are shown above, it is clearly impossible to make a profit, and without profits, the business collapses.

 What actually happens in real life is that, with a really good book, a bigger print run of, say, 10,000 copies will bring printing costs down to £1 or maybe a bit less. (Not practical if the book sells only a few hundred copies a year).

Secondly, the RRP (recommended retail price) nowadays bears no relation to reality, with the chains and Amazon constantly doing “2 for 1” or “3 for 2”, or just plain discounting.

Furthermore, with the publisher anyway seeing so little out of the process, more and more authors are having to accept a royalty based on what the publisher actually gets, rather than what they used to get, before the massive discounting saga began in 1995. Author contracts now tend to quote a royalty based on net income, not RRP.

This still means very tight margins, and only the titles that will definitely sell at least tens of thousands of copies actually make much profit for anyone. Especially through the supermarkets; if you get only 5p per copy out of selling 50,000 copies through the supermarkets, that come to £2,500! Fine for carrots & beans, but pitiful for trying to keep the chain of author, publisher, printer and bookseller alive...

What options does the author have? Very few; and that also applies to the publisher, the printer and the bookshop. Only the top authors, the really big publishers, the major bookshop chains and the supermarkets have much sway over the way things go.

At the moment, legislation tends to favour the supermarkets and the chains, because the Net Book Agreement was done away with in 1995. Since then, discounts are allowed, publishers cannot insist on the RRP being maintained. Neither can anyone limit the discounts allowed. That is really the crux of the problem: there is actually nothing to stop anyone demanding a 99% discount - or 100%, for that matter!

From the chains & supermarkets’ point of view, they will always press for as high a discount as they can, because the prime objective of any corporation - repeat, any corporation - is to make better profits for their shareholders. There is nothing really wrong with this, it is the basis of a free market economy, and it is the principle that enable you, for instance, to set up a business and try to make it do its best to provide for your needs.

What actually should happen is that legislation needs to reflect circumstances as they change from time to time - not just swing from one extreme to the other & stay there. For example, it was no good to have motors cars limited to a 5 mph speed limit permanently. By the same token, it is obviously wrong to go to the other extreme, and just eliminate all speed limits - so, in the UK, we have a 70mph maximum speed limit.

Yet, that silly extreme prevails with book sales; there is no legal maximum discount level. we jumped from 0% discounts to 100%. Instead of laying down, say, 50% maximum, the field is wide open, and smaller publishers, authors, bookshops are all slowly being wiped out.

In the last ten years, three quarters of the smaller independent bookshops have folded. At that rate, one wonders how long it would be before we have only one publisher, one bookshop chain and one supermarket selling books?