Book Publishing 101

Click on the title of this blog and scroll down to the seven things you need to do when trying to publish a book. Out of the seven things that are suggested on this site, only three are real.

Novel Publishing Tips:

Familiarize yourself with the market. (You must have a target audience.)
Research publishers in your genre.
Research agents.
Write a query letter.
Don't let rejection stand in your way. (You can't please everyone.)
Once accepted, sit down with a lawyer and review your contract.
Have your next project already rolling. (Get busy with the sequel.)

The captioned tips are important. The rest are ludicrous. Unless you are a zillionaire, even if you find a publisher and agent who would take your book, you can't afford them. If you are a zillionaire, you are cruising on your yacht somewhere in the Mediterranean and could care less.

I could care less if you have money and if you do, why are you reading my blog? Go get some caviar or something and let we plebeians carry on with trying to publish a book!

OK, where were we....if you really want to publish your book, the only sensible way is with Publish on Demand or POD publishers. After many months of researching, I found Wheatmark Publishing and have never looked back. No, I don't work for this company. I am constantly mentioning their name because of the wonderful experience I have had and continue to have working with the Wheatmark team.

Listen up, I have an abundant mentality. There is enough for all of us in publishing land and unless you have a scarcity mentality, you will understand that helping others succeed is the only way to obtain success for yourself. I learn by teaching! I don't care if only one person reads this blog....it's worth every minute writing.

Now, here is something that will help inform you about what happens after your book is published. I wanted to know why the cover of Evil in the Mirror wasn't published yet on my Amazon site when it was already on the Wheatmark Book Store site, and how do I know who is buying books?

Write on,

Mittster

The answers from Wheatmark:

You are right … selling books is the bottom line!

As for where … that is hard to say.

Think of a stream of water … we put the electronic data about your book into the stream at the headwaters, the wholesaler. Big online book sellers pick up the data pretty quickly, all things considered. Amazon, B&N … maybe Borders (although it is unclear what they are doing these days).

Farther downstream you have smaller booksellers, including independents such as Powells. Each individual book seller makes independent decisions about which books to “pick up out of the stream” and when. Some booksellers pick up nearly all books. After all, since they don’t buy copies until they get an order, it costs them nothing to list as many books as they want. Some only list books which appeal to their target market – a specific niche.

Some of the listings you see in Amazon’s marketplace (those listings for “new and used”) are from independent booksellers and small niche markets. That doesn’t mean they actually have copies … only that they can get one when it is ordered.

So, the good news is that with distribution through a wholesaler, like Ingram, your book is available to any book seller who may choose to carry it by listing it for sale on their site.

Between this electronic exchange of data about your book between book sellers and the wholesaler, and print on demand technology making it possible for a book seller to order a single copy of your book as necessary to fill orders as they arrive, the potential for interested readers to find your book is greatly enhanced.

One final thought – the wholesaler does not report to us who purchased copies of your book. They report the number of copies they sold but not who bought them. So we are unable to tell you if copies were sold by Amazon, B&N, Powells or a mystery specialty site, etc. With such a presence in the marketplace, one could presume that Amazon might be generating most of the sales. But there is just no way to tell.

We don’t have a lot of detailed information about how and when Amazon processes book information and builds book pages. From what we’ve observed, however, it is clear that Amazon’s systems use several different processes with the information they get from the wholesaler, Ingram. It seems that several steps are involved in building book pages, with the image processing being the last one.

I monitor this and have noted that it seems to take several weeks for the book page to be completed, including the image.

All book sellers use the same source for information about books they offer for sale, the electronic data from the wholesaler. Each of them processes this data according to their own business rules and timetables. For example, it looks like Barnes & Noble has processed the cover image, but hasn’t yet processed the book descriptive text.

The bottom line is that your book’s pages on various book seller sites will settle down as they finish processing the data.

I’ll continue to monitor your book’s Amazon page and let you know when the cover image is up.

Hope that helps answer your questions.