Author/Designer Q&A

I am in the mood to answer questions today and I mentioned that on Twitter. The questions that came in were great, but they can’t be answered in 140 characters. So I’m posting them here. Please feel free to ask follow-up questions in the comments.

Great question!

Self publishing: The advantages here are that you have full control over your project and you get all the money from sales. The disadvantage is that you have to manage all of the work of writing, photography, illustration, editing, book design, production, printing, marketing, distribution, and you have to pay for all of that. Basically if you want to self-publish, you have to become a publisher which means going into business to do all of the tasks a traditional publisher would do for you. It will probably cost you at least $20,000 US to produce a knitting book, and could cost substantially more depending on how organized you are and how big your book is. (Going with an e-book cuts the costs about in half, because you have no printing costs, but all the rest of the costs are still there.)

Traditional publishing: You don’t have to do the editing, illustration, photography, book design, production, printing, or distribution of your book. You have to write it and work with the publisher on the editing, and they do the rest of making the book. The downsides are you likely won’t make more than about $1 a book in royalties and you still have to do a lot of the marketing and promotion yourself. In fact, you likely won’t even get a contract with a publisher if you don’t have a marketing plan and a “platform” already in place when you submit your book proposal. There is still a good amount of legitimacy and prestige that comes from having a book put out by a well-known and respected publisher and some knitting publishers, such as Interweave Press and Sixth & Spring, also put out magazines (Interweave Knits and Vogue Knitting, among others) and run events, where they will automatically do marketing for your book.

Other options: There are some hybrid models out there. Cooperative Press is the best known option in the knitting world. Authors have had different levels of satisfaction with their experiences working with this company. Your best bet would be to interview several of their authors before approaching them with an idea. I am not sure if any other hybrid publishing activity is going on in the knitting world right now. Here is an interesting article about the hybrid publishing options for literary genres and trade non-fiction. I think there are some great opportunities here for the future, but working out the details is going to be an adventure for anyone who takes this path.

Distribution issues: For those who don’t know, Unicorn Books and Crafts has gone kaput. They were the primary distributor getting all of our books–self published and traditionally published–into yarn shops. No one knows what is going to happen in this area now. Will shops be willing to order from many different individual publishers and authors? Or is that too much a pain in the butt? Yarn shops have been telling me for the last few years that books don’t sell there any more anyway, and they were carrying fewer and fewer titles. Things are changing so much now that it’s almost different every day. There are a few small distributors who work with a few authors, but no other distributor with the reach that Unicorn had.

I think the best way to make money with books these days is direct sales — by building up your personal platform and email list and social media audience and have those people waiting for the next great thing from you. Sites like Amazon, KnitPicks, WEBS, and other big online businesses are important to extend your reach and audience, too.

I would not try to sell in to bookstores because the contracts with the distributors are, IMO, too restrictive and you get too many returns, that are often damaged so you can’t sell them. I definitely think you should have your book on Amazon, but Cooperative Press does that for you, right?

 

There are several different ways to go.

Traditional Book Printer: Traditional printers may use “offset printing” technology or “digital printing” technology (you can google those terms for technical info). I work with Versa Press in Illinois on my Stories In Stitches books. The main reason I chose them is that they will do print runs of 500 or 1000 books, while most other book publishers will not do a print run of less than 2000  or 2500 copies. For Stories In Stitches, I wanted to do limited edition print runs so this was the best choice for me. Versa Press has printed other knitting and crochet books for self-published authors and for traditional publishers as well. There are several other printers in North America who produce very nice books and who have done good work. You can usually find out who printed a book on the copyright page of the book or in the author’s acknowledgments. Full-color books are quite expensive to product, and most of them are printed in Asia, usually China. Asia Pacific is a broker that will get print quotes for you and organize everything from delivering your files to the printer, to shipping and customs. It will cost quite a bit less than having the books printed in North America, even with the additional shipping expense.

Print On Demand: These places have varying prices and quality, so I suggest always ordering 1 book or a physical proof on the actual paper that will be used to make sure you like the product before ordering more books. This is good for quantities anywhere from 1 to 500, depending on the vendor. These are all digital printing. Here are some reputable options:

• LuLu
• MagCloud
• Blurb
• Amazon Create Space
• DocuCopies

A google search will turn up all kinds of other printing companies offering a variety of services.

There are also local bookstores who have “Espresso” book printing machines who can print smaller quantities of books for you. This is cool because it lets you keep money in your local community and support your indie bookstore at the same time.