If you’ve got some time on your hands, US magazine Poets & Writers has a very interesting interview with literary agent Nat Sobel (more…)
It’s not really possible to start a new publishing house.
As a small press, if you want to be sold through the big chains, you’re going to be selling your books through a distributor, which cuts further into your rapidly diminishing profits. Amazon will buy directly from you, but they charge you for the privilege of selling to them, meaning that most of your sales will earn you no more than 40% of the cover price. So, if your book costs £6, that’s £2.40 to pay for printing, author royalties, book design, advertising, administration, delivering the books to the distributors, getting the ISBN number, sending out review copies, mortgage payments, rent when you lose your house, telephone calls to your wife’s mother, hiring a divorce lawyer, the bus fare to go and visit your children, and paying somebody to pulp the unsold copies of your books.
Charles Boyle has started a new publishing house. (more…)
One of the great things about the internet for publishers is that it gives them a chance to communicate directly with readers. Gone are the days of those “cut out and post” coupons, which would appear at the back of books to be mailed off for the publisher’s latest catalogue. Now we can go online, see what else the publisher’s doing, find out about their upcoming releases, and even buy their books directly.
These direct sales can be an important revenue boost to publishers—they don’t have to share the price of the book with a bookshop—and offering customers a discount is an obvious way of increasing sales.
But now, just as Amazon.com has come under fire for allegedly trying to strongarm Print on Demand publishers into using Amazon’s own POD system, Amazon.co.uk has been revealed to be getting up to some mischief of their own, and it could threaten the future of publishers’ direct sales (more…)
