Anyone who manages
to complete a book naturally wants to see it in print. There is a
long-established model for achieving this - you send out dozens, even hundreds
of letters to publishers and agents singing the praises of what you have
written and then wait months for the replies. That was bad enough, but there
are now so many of us with the means and the desire to write, that traditional
publishers no longer accept submissions - you have to get an agent first. If
you could write really well and told a great story you might be offered a
contract and the publisher would take full financial responsibility for the
production and sale of your book, offering you a small royalty payment. My
first job, back in the late sixties was in academic publishing, and we would
ask potential authors to send in a synopsis and sample chapter long before they
finished the book. That is the old model.
If you've tried this
for long enough, or have accepted that your work does not have wide enough
appeal, then there is another traditional way of getting into print:
self-publishing. There were two ways of going about this: in the first
you get your typescript edited and then pay a printer to print as many
copies as you think you can sell. Alternatively you could approach what
used to be called a "Vanity Publisher". This is a firm which will do
all the editing, commission the printing and do the marketing - for a fee, and
usually a pretty hefty one.
Three new
technologies have thrown an enormous spanner in the works. The most prominent
of these is the e-book, but behind that is the advent of "print on
demand", and a newcomer -
"crowd funding". With PoD you no longer have to commit to a
certain volume of print but can order only the number of print copies you need
to fulfil an order. The traditional model does still work for non-fiction,
especially in academic and specialist areas.
Sales of printed books are actually rising, but unless you are already
well known or have a truly exceptional talent, the chances of getting published
by the traditional route are vanishingly small. Even established authors are
now turning to self-publication because the rewards are so much greater.
Instead of the usual 10% royalty you get at least 40% and in some cases up to
70% of all your sales. It is relatively easy to format your script as an e-book
and quite simple to have it put on sale by one of the big e-book publishers -
Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble for example.
The crowd-funding
websites work a bit like agents. You submit an idea to them and if they like it
they will advertise for subscribers to finance publication. Their subscribers
get cheap access to unusual books and are a
ready-made readership for the authors who succeed in attracting enough
subscribers. Unbound is probably the best
known in Britain. There are interesting similarities with the way authors like
Dickens used to serialise their books to a subscriber list.
If a traditional
publisher has commissioned your book they will be able to get it on show in
bookshops and make sure the e-book version is well publicised. The difficult
bit with self-publication of course is getting the book noticed. This is where "co-publication"
comes in. There are still plenty of Vanity Publishers out there who make all
their profit from the fee they charge for publication. (I was quoted £2000 by
one firm.) This means they have no incentive to publicise the book properly.
Many of them do describe themselves as "Co-Publishers" but I had
little hesitation in deciding that I did not want to go down that route.
For a few months I
made rather half-hearted attempts to get agents interested, and had got to the
stage where I was planning to do the whole thing myself when I discovered
Cambria Books. Thelma, our friend Gaynor and I were wandering around the
National Eisteddfod which last year was outside Llanelli. It was a lovely day
and a great way to catch up on Welsh language culture. Cambria Books had a
stand proclaiming "Publishing is E-volving". The name was
irresistible, because I had used "Cambria" to describe my new
semi-utopian Nation in "The Phoenix Nation". They are based in
Llandeilo which is only a few miles from where we live so I was hooked.
Long negotiations
ensued with the main man, Chris Jones, during which the book was approved by
one of their readers, and my contribution to the costs was agreed -
considerably less than the vanity firm, and not enough to pay their profits
without the commission they charge on sales, so they do have an incentive to sell the book. The contribution is only due when the book is published, and for that you get PoD at about 3p
per page, distribution to bookshops via Ingrams and placement of the ebooks on
Amazon. They also arrange reviews, interviews and publicity via their website
and email.
Chris is confident I
will at least recover my costs, and that is my main concern. I would of course
love it to become a best seller, and to have to negotiate film rights, but I
will be happy if enough people read it to make a small dent in the general complacency,
and if it gives a little hope to those of my grandchildren's generation who can
see beyond their smartphones.
You can get print and ebooks here: The Vandervelde Documents
You can get print and ebooks here: The Vandervelde Documents
