New Publishing Business Model For Low Cost Publishing

July 8, 2013 - PRLog -- New Authors and Low Cost Publishing – A New Publishing Model Emerges

Publishing companies commonly provide books to the ‘funnel distributors', who stock the big high street book stores at discounts in excess of 50% RRP. This being so, there is little wonder that the cry “Small independent publishers are dying out!” is being heard more and more. If you consider a paperback with an RRP of £5.99 (lets say £6 for ease), this means that the publishing company would have to make this available to the distributor for £3. Even if we were to assume that the sum cost of printing and distribution only equated to £2 per book (we won’t even consider initial costs for the book's production such as proof reading, formatting, cover design etc) then this would mean £0.50 per book for the publisher and author to share. Deduct tax and associated costs such as transportation of the book to the distributors who in turn supply the high street stores, and even a 50/50 split between publisher and author is, in reality going to recoup, at best, perhaps £0.20 for the small, independent publisher and £0.20 for the author. This being so, let's say the book sold five hundred copies. This gives a profit of £50 for the publishing company and £50 for the author. Let’s take this further. Let's imagine that, despite the lack of huge budgets for marketing that the big publishers have (including paying for prime spots within supermarkets and book shops etc), the book actually does incredibly well and sells an amazing 5000 copies. This is a huge success and yet the profit for the publishing company is £500 and for the author £500.  £500 for what may have been, for the author, six months of work, or even three years of work, depending on their writing style/method.

Clearly, the above figures cannot sustain a business and therefore the cry of ‘Small independent publishers are dying out!’ is indeed  the truth. Something has got to ‘give’…

That ‘something’ has happened in the form of reputable publishing companies such as Barrett Carter Publishing  Ltd (www.barrettcarterpublishing.com) defining the most cost effective outlets and covering a minimal amount of the book production costs for GBP£395 (includes tax) which is paid by the author. For this price, the author’s book is taken as a rough manuscript, proofread, formatted for paperback and ebook, allocated an ISBN and barcode, registered with Neilson Book Agency, cover art completed and then sold in paperback and for ebook on Amazon and in various other ebook stores such as Smashwords and Barnes and Noble. What we have here is a win/win situation for the author. A single payment that actually gets your book into the online bookstores, allowing the author to truly be ‘a published author’ in one swift stroke. The reputable companies such as Barrett Carter Publishing do, of course, still have standards. The actual quality of the writing must be of a sufficient standard for publication (after all, this isn’t the so called ‘vanity publishing’ in which a company prints any book sent to it). For every book published by Barrett Carter Publishing, the author keeps 90% of the clear profit.

This model is expected to encourage a raft of new writing talent, and with sales of ebooks up 60% last year, online sales can only go from strength to strength. Interestingly, it is the sale of ebooks rather than physical paperbased books that accrue authors most profit. With no physical printing and distribution to factor in, an author will commonly make GBP£ 2.00 profit on the sale of each ebook as opposed to the £0.20 of a physical paperback. Consider this in the context of the 500 book sale scenario outlined earlier in this article. Within the traditional model, the author may make a total of £100. However, equivalent sales of the ebook would yield ten times this amount, with a profit of £1000.  When one considers the ever growing number of electronic devices that people are reading books on - desktop computer, iPad, iPod, Kindle, Nook, smartphone etc - then it seems clear that the new model of book distribution which concentrates on internet based outlets, utilizing ‘Print on demand’ models for paperbacks and puts heavy emphasis on ebooks, is clearly the best way forward for aspiring new authors. When one also considers the additional advantages such as the fact that from submission of manuscript to actual publication and  online sale takes less than two months (compare this with the traditional process usually taking a year), the future has, in fact, never looked brighter for those aspiring authors ready to take the plunge and become ‘A Novelist’.