The Small Press Network (SPN) has announced the full program for its 2018 Independent Publishing Conference, which will run at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne from 22-24 November.
The three-day conference comprises an industry research day, a trade day and a ‘fundamentals of publishing’ day, as well as the presentation of the Most Underrated Book Award.
This year’s research day on 22 November will feature a disability awareness training session tailored specifically to the publishing industry. Run by Writers Victoria in partnership with Arts Access Victoria, the PublishAbility workshop will cover best-practice language, the social model of disability, barriers to participation, the case for inclusion beyond compliance, and knowing your organisation’s legal obligations. Monash University associate professor Rebecca Giblin will give the keynote address on the research day, addressing ‘the case for rethinking author contracts’.
The trade day on 23 November will feature a panel on podcasting with Wavesound acquisitions editor Chiara Priorelli and book podcasters Astrid Edwards (The Garret), Joel Martin (the Morning Bell), Meaghan Dew (Kill Your Darlings podcast) and Elizabeth Flux (Pratchat).
Chaired by academic Emmett Stinson, the ‘Publishing in the Age of Trump’ panel will feature Perth-based researcher Per Henningsgaard and trade day keynote speaker Danika Isdahl, of Kentucky-based publisher Sarabande Books, discussing the role of US publishers based outside of New York City and their survival in the current US political environment. Isdahl is attending the conference with support from the Melbourne UNESCO City of Literature Office.
As previously reported by Books+Publishing, other presenters at the conference will include Yvette Holt (First Nations Australia Writers Network), Bianca Whiteley (Nielsen BookScan), Robert Watkins (Hachette), Rebecca Lim (Voices from the Intersection), Michael Gordon-Smith (Australian Publishers Association), Rachel Bin Salleh (Magabala), Glen Jones (Amazon Australia), Jonathan Seifman (Booktopia), Belinda Bolliger (Scholastic), Caitlin Yates (Black Inc.), Shalini Kunahlan (Text Publishing) and Michael Mohammed Ahmad (Sweatshop). Former Sleepers Publishing publisher Zoe Dattner will deliver the fundamentals day keynote on Saturday, 24 November.
The conference will again offer free childcare to attendees, which can be booked when booking conference tickets.
The view the full program for each day and book tickets, visit the conference website.
This news story first appeared in Books+Publishing on 2 October 2018. Books+Publishing is Australia’s leading source of print and digital news about the book industry, keeping subscribers up to date with the latest industry news, announcements, job advertisements, events, trends and more.
The Dryandra Country Visitor Centre in Western Australia has revealed refurbishments and technology updates, including a newly self-published guidebook, after receiving two grants worth nearly $90,000, reports the West Australian.
Visitor centre manager Geire Kami said that one of the two grants from Tourism WA was used for refurbishment, including interpretive areas for tourists to learn about the Indigenous history of the region, while the other grant was used to update the centre’s equipment, including computers and software.
‘This allowed me to put more focus into a self-published biodiversity guide project, which introduces tourists to the amazing things on offer in Cuballing and Narrogin,’ said Kami.
‘We have been told by [tourism organisation] Australia’s Golden Outback that we are without doubt the only visitor centre in Australia which is self-publishing local attraction guides to encourage tourists to stop.’
The centre has plans to release two more guidebooks.
The European Union’s (EU) Economic and Financial Affairs Council (ECOFIN) has agreed to allow all member states to give ebooks and audiobooks the same value-added tax (VAT) status as printed books, reports the Bookseller.
While the new rules do not compel EU member states to align the ebook and print book rates, it would mean a 20% reduction in the tax currently applied to digital publications if they choose to do so.
The European Commission said the decision, first proposed almost two years ago, would allow digital publication VAT rates to align with the ‘more favourable regime’ currently in place for printed publications.
‘Today’s decision is the final step to ensure that the unequal treatment of the two products—paper versus digital—becomes a thing of the past,’ said the Commission.
Read more at Books+Publishing.
In the US, more than one million books were self-published in 2017, breaking the record for the the total number of titles self-published in a year, according to a report published by Bowker.
Self-publishing in the US grew by 28% between 2016-2017, with a total of 1,009,188 self-published titles in 2017, up from 786,935 in 2016 with 8% growth from 2015-2016.
According to the report, self-published print books were up by 38% for 2017, driven by a 50% increase in ISBNs requested for books published using self-publishing platform CreateSpace.
Bowker data shows that self-published ebooks decreased by 13%, continuing a downward trend for the third consecutive year. However, Publishers Weekly noted that because Bowker’s ebook data is based on ISBNs issued using its Identifier Services, the drop is likely due to more authors moving to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) self-publishing platform, which issues its own Amazon ASIP identifiers. Although Amazon owns CreateSpace—which it will merge with KDP—Bowker still records the number of print books produced by CreateSpace, but KDP ebook titles do not appear in Bowker’s data.
In light of the exclusion of Amazon’s ebook data, Bowker’s report showed that three platforms accounted for 88% of all self-published print and ebooks in 2017: CreateSpace, Smashwords and Lulu.
Since 2012 the number of ISBNs assigned to self-published titles has grown by 156%, due in large part to the increasing number of online self-publishing products and services, according to Bowker Identifer Services director Beat Barblan.
Barblan said: ‘Self-publishing shows no signs of slowing down and continues to grow at a steady rate … Authors who set out to self-publish, market and distribute high-quality books now have more resources than ever.’
This news story first appeared in Books+Publishing on 12 October 2018. Books+Publishing is Australia’s leading source of print and digital news about the book industry, keeping subscribers up to date with the latest industry news, announcements, job advertisements, events, trends and more.
The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), a UK-based non-profit independent author organisation, has launched a new campaign called Self-publishing 3.0, according to a press release about their forthcoming white paper on the concept.
The #selfpub3.0 campaign promotes ‘true independence’ for authors, encouraging authors to focus on their own websites as the ‘hub’ of their publishing business rather than putting all their intellectual property into the hands of other businesses, such as trade publishers or self-publishing services.
ALLi founder Orna Ross said that the rise of personal branding, mindful consumption and mobile phone reading among consumers, combined with digital publishing technology, has created ‘more favourable conditions than ever before for author businesses’.
‘But only authors who have developed an independent, creative and empowered mindset, who understand the value of their intellectual property, can benefit from these opportunities,’ said Ross.
The campaign also encourages authors to have a variety of income streams such as direct sales, subscription models and crowdsourcing, and to have a wide distribution network using retailers and other services to distribute in all formats.
For more information on ALLi and the campaign, click here.
Writer, publisher, promoter
So you’ve written a book, gone through the tricky process of prepping it for publication, and then released it out into the world. Congratulations! That is hard work, and you did it. But you want people to read your book, right? And maybe you’d like to see some sales too, so you can recoup the costs of publishing. That’s where promotion and marketing come in.
Why market?
This is the part that most authors loathe. They’d like to think that the beauty of their words and the originality of their story will draw readers like an enticing aroma, and sales will come tumbling in.
The reality is … not like that. As of the time of writing this article, more than one million titles were self-published last year in the US alone. There are now more than five million Kindle ebooks just on Amazon. That’s a lot of books. The chances of people finding your book in that sea of pages are almost infinitesimal, unless you do some work to put it in front of readers’ eyeballs.
Maybe you only wrote the book for friends and family—that’s fine, and you may have already achieved your aims if your friends and family have their copies. But if you wrote it for a wider audience, you need to market it. If you didn’t want to attract readers for your book, you could have left it in a drawer and saved yourself the production costs.
As a self-published author, you’re not just the book’s writer. You’re its sales and public relations (PR) department too. And that’s not such a bad thing. Remember this: no one is as invested in selling your book as you are. No sales representative knows your book so well or understands who it might appeal to—or has a personal financial stake in making sure it sells. As a self-published author, you also have some unique advantages for marketing, which we’ll discuss soon, but first …
Promoting vs marketing
The first thing to remember is that there’s a difference between promotion and marketing. These terms are often lumped in together, but in reality they are different parts of the chain.
‘Marketing’ is an umbrella term that includes promotion—in fact, most business gurus talk about the ‘4Ps’ of marketing: product, price, placement and promotion. A marketing plan looks at every aspect of a book as a saleable item, from its target audience and where it’s sold, to the quality of the book itself, its sale price, and who it’s advertised to. In a traditional publishing house, different teams of people—sales, PR, advertising—implement a coordinated strategy to market a book release. As an independent author, you’re the whole shebang, although you can outsource some aspects of it if you have the money to invest.
Promotion is one aspect of marketing, and it’s split into two parts. There’s free promotion, called publicity: that’s the personal platform you create to give yourself and your books exposure to a wider audience. It mainly consists of things like your website, social media presence, newsletters and so on, but it also includes things like book reviews, your attendance at public events, and your networks and relationships (with readers, booksellers, distributors, librarians and so on) that facilitate getting your books into readers’ hands. It is what people refer to when they talk about ‘personal brand’, and generally the only outgoing cost for this kind of promotion is your time and energy.
Paid promotion is advertising, and that doesn’t just mean billboards and posters on buses (although, sure, you can do that if you can afford it). Paid promotion is available in a lot of different places, at various price points, and can be very useful for self-publishing authors.
Your marketing plan
Marketing your book is just like publishing it: you do it one step at a time. While it’s tempting to dive right in, book marketing can be overwhelming and time-consuming (not to mention expensive, if you get into advertising). Before taking any major steps, you should sit down and work out a plan.
In the next article, we’ll talk about the basics of marketing and start putting together some strategies. Until then, check out some of these great books and articles you can read to help you along the way:
Ellie Marney is a teacher and hybrid YA author. She lives in Victoria with her family, and her latest book, White Night (Allen & Unwin), was published in March 2018. Find her at www.elliemarney.com or on Twitter or Instagram.
What is the ‘Need to add a Distributor? Click Here’ link on my title’s Sales & Pricing detail page, and when do I need to use it?
You should only click on this link when you are contracted to a book distribution company who is managing your titles’ marketing and sales. If you are marketing your title via your website or approaching retailers you do not need to add your own publisher name. The contact details you have provided in your MyIdentifiers account are sufficient.
A ‘book distributor’ is often confused with a ‘book retailer’ or ‘wholesaler’. For instance, Amazon and Booktopia are wholesalers or online book retailers and, as such, are not designated as ‘distributors’ on the Books In Print database. Many wholesalers may offer some or all of a publisher’s products for sale at any given time, but generally do not act for the publisher. We do receive inventory information from the largest wholesalers and display this availability information in the Books in Print database.
When using the ‘distributor’ link on MyIdentifiers, an email will be created to contact us here at the Australian ISBN office. Your email should contain one of your ISBNs as reference and the name of your distributor. Once received, we will verify that the distributor appears on Books In Print, and the distributor link will be added to your Publisher record.
To add the distributor link to your specific title/s, sign in to your MyIdentifiers account, go to My Account > Manage ISBNs. Click on the title or ISBN to open the record, then at its ‘Sales & Pricing’ page scroll down to ‘Country Price Data’ and choose the required distributor from the pull-down menu. Click SAVE.
For more information, contact the Australian ISBN agency on (03) 8517-8349 during business hours or email myidentifiers@thorpe.com.au.
Ebony McKenna, winner of the 2018 Romance Writers of Australia’s Romantic Book of the Year, spoke with Independent Publishing about her book The Girl and the Ghost, and her experiences in self-publishing.
Describe your latest book in under 50 words.
In The Girl and The Ghost, publicity-shy student Morgan Parker has a family who lurch from one PR disaster to another. To Morgan’s shock and surprise, she finds a ghost in her room. He’s come with the house and provides a welcome distraction to the mayhem of real life.
Why self-publish?
I love being able to control the timing of my stories to take advantage of different celebrations through the year. I have a Christmas story coming out in early December. I’m part of an anthology of ghostly romances released last year around Halloween, and the next will go out in the lead-up to Valentine’s Day. I also launched The Girl and The Ghost on an auspicious date—Friday the 13th!
Self-publishing means I get to mix shorter stories in between longer novels and bring out incredibly useful nonfiction editing and business guides to help other authors.
What year did you start and where are you based?
I was traditionally published in 2010, then started self-publishing in 2014. I published ebooks to begin with, as distribution was so easy! A year later I dipped the proverbial toe in the ‘print waters’ and love how practical that side of self-publishing (and distribution) is now. I’m based in Melbourne, and I’m really lucky that the printer I use—IngramSpark—is in the same city. That keeps delivery prices low when I need copies.
How many people did you contract on your book and what did you do yourself?
I’ve hired editors in the past but these days I’ve developed a thorough checklist, so I can edit my own work. This prompted me to create an ‘Edit Your Own’ series for authors to follow.
When I first began and knew nothing, I used other companies to format and distribute my ebooks. Since then, I’ve learned as much as I can about formatting for ebook and print, so I can do that myself. I also format for other authors.
I buy my own ISBNs, fill all the forms in, register for lending rights, list my titles with library suppliers, contact libraries etc. I do just about everything myself these days except the covers.
I always bring in professionals for cover designs. Covers are incredibly important and must convey to the reader that the book is not simply worth their money, it’s also worth their time.
What makes your book unique?
My ‘voice’ is very Australian, with local references and humour. The Girl and the Ghost is packed with lashings of swoon-filled moments and bold teenagers with crazy ideas that sometimes even work.
What has been your biggest success?
The Girl and the Ghost is my seventh and most successful novel—the reviews have been consistently incredible and it recently took out the Ruby award for Romantic Book of the Year from the Romance Writers of Australia. It’s unusual for a self-published book to win, and unheard of for a YA novel to win. Plus, I edited this book myself using all the methods I’ve gathered over the years, so this feels like a true validation of my efforts.
What has been your biggest challenge?
Cutting through a crowded marketplace is by far the biggest (and ongoing) challenge—and it’s not unique to self-published authors. Traditionally published authors also face this huge challenge, even when their publishers have marketing budgets. You must consistently produce the very best quality books you can.
What would be your top tip for those starting out in self-publishing?
Be as professional as possible in all aspects of the business—because this is a business.
What will you publish next?
I’m writing rebooted fairytales which tie in with my four-part ‘Ondine’ series. It’s so much fun playing in this fictional sandpit. I’m writing with a huge grin!
For more information on the author and her books, visit www.ebonymckenna.com.
As much as writing books is a passion and business for authors, selling books is a passion and the only business for independent booksellers. And while independent bookstores are known for being wonderful community gathering places with staff that genuinely care about the book industry, that doesn’t mean they can do it all for the love. They still need to sell books. Everyone has to make a living in this business, and this is what the independent booksellers need, for you and your book, in order to succeed in selling it.
You
1. Be a good customer
Don’t just know a store exists via Google searches—actually know them. Cultivate relationships with indie booksellers by purchasing books from their stores and encouraging your friends, family, and fans to do so as well. It makes sense to support your local independent bookstore before you ask them to support you. It’s one way to be a good literary citizen—and it is good business, too.
Independent bookstores have become more than just a place to buy a book; they are constantly evolving. Indie bookstores are community hotspots—supporting the local community, creating publishing programs, publishing and selling their own unique content, and hosting author events. When pitching your book to an indie bookseller, consider the unique ways your book ties into supporting the bookstore and the community. Your support of them will make them more likely to support you.
Before you approach a bookstore owner, research his or her background. Get a feel for the shop’s customers and the types of books the store typically promotes and sells. Take a look at the store’s social media accounts and see what kinds of author events they typically host. When you meet with the owner, use this information in your pitch. If they have a certain type of customer that will be interested in your book, mention it.
2. Booksellers do not want to hear about your success at Amazon.com!
It’s great to have success on Amazon, whether as a traditionally published author or self-published author, but consider the fact that indie bookstores have to compete with them before you brag about how well your book is selling there; it won’t help you get your book in your local independent bookstore. In fact, Amazon is their biggest competitor, which is one way IngramSpark’s self-publishing platform is uniquely positioned to help indie authors achieve more success in this particular retail market. Independent booksellers reject stocking books published via CreateSpace or Amazon KDP, because their sales of those titles ultimately profits their biggest competitor: Amazon.
3. Know a store’s demographic
A bookstore owner wants to make sure your book aligns with their customers. Niche bookstores may only carry a certain genre. Know your genre and your target reader. Be able to accurately and concisely explain what your book is about. That way, you and the bookstore will have a better idea if it fits with their readership.
Spend enough time at the store you’re targeting to understand who their customers are. Their readers won’t be your readers if your readers don’t shop at that kind of bookstore. Familiarise yourself with their inventory and see if your book fits in. If an indie bookseller does not foresee his/her customers buying your book from their store, he/she is not going to buy it from you.
Your book
4. Discounted and returnable
If you want your book to flow easily into independent bookstores, then consider the 55% wholesale discount and make it returnable. The book industry is a returnable industry, which means bookstores will expect to be able to return books they don’t sell and get a credit for their return.
Keep in mind that a bookstore is not likely to buy numerous copies from you outright. They want to be sure your book will sell before they take on more than one or two copies. If you’re self-published, print-on-demand services are a cost-effective way to get your book out there. A bookstore will be more likely to buy your book if the distributor has return capabilities, such as IngramSpark’s, and if you set bookstore-friendly terms regarding the wholesale discount. Beyond the fact that it’s run by their competition, bookstores don’t generally take CreateSpace or Amazon KDP publications because they don’t allow returns.
5. Quality product
Bookstores want to be about 90% sure that they can sell a book before they buy it, so that means that you have to give the bookstore a quality product. Something that stands out qualitatively and fits in beautifully genre-wise.
6. Easily shelved
Your book needs to be easily shelved by the bookstore. Booksellers don’t want something that looks or sounds so unusual that no one knows where to put it. So if you have the idea that your book is completely unique and there is nothing like it out there in the universe, you need to visit a lot of stores and libraries and go online and figure out what people will be looking for when they discover your book.
It’s one of your jobs as a self-publisher to figure out how people will actually discover your book, and if your book is labelled or packaged so uniquely that the bookstore doesn’t know where to put it on the shelf, then you’re just creating difficulty for yourself. Booksellers aren’t interested in books that stick out for the wrong reasons. Visit your local bookstore and take note of the trim sizes, book cover imagery, and interiors. Your book doesn’t need to look like a clone of everyone else’s, but if you notice themes for certain genres, stick with that, because they most likely represent industry standards for a particular genre that shouldn’t be tinkered with.
7. Appropriate retail price
Make sure your book has an appropriate retail price. There are some books that are more manuals and textbooks where you won’t be printing very many or there is such a specific demand for them they’re what some people call a destination book and you can charge a premium price for them. There are others that might be more fluff or impulse buy and those would have a lower price. This is where your market research comes in. You want your book to fit into its category and stand out qualitatively so that the end buyer doesn’t end up with sticker shock. ‘Oh, all these other textbooks are $48.95 and here’s one that’s $9.95. Huh, it might not be very good.’ Make sure you do your research to find out with which titles yours could most closely be compared.
8. Easy ordering
Having your book available via IngramSpark will be of great comfort to booksellers. Ingram is well-respected within the book industry and a reliable resource to booksellers when it comes to someone supplying them with books.
A bookseller won’t want to deal with inconvenient distribution. When they work with distributors, they can order, sell, and invoice books in bulk. But working with indie authors means they have to do all of this individually with each author. Using a reputable distributor for your book will be more convenient for the bookstore, and the easier you make it for an indie bookstore to sell your book, the more likely they are to be willing to try.
9. Publisher/author support on the book sale
What booksellers are looking for is what kind of publisher/author support they’re going to get from you for the sell through. There are hundreds of stores and outlets in this country, so what is going to draw an individual to a particular store to look for your particular book?
It’s the bookstore’s job to sell your book, not market it. Busy bookstores may be approached by authors often, and they are inundated with consignment offers on any given day. You will be expected to fulfill your end of the bargain in the form of marketing. The bookstore wants your book to sell, but don’t expect the store to do the legwork for you. Have a solid marketing plan in place and let the bookstore owner know what it is. It will show them that you take initiative and have confidence that your book will sell.
If you want your book to sell at a specific store, start a grassroots book marketing campaign to make it happen. Have your friends and family who live and/or shop near the store request copies of your book. Have them stagger their requests so your book establishes a consistent sales record. When you approach that store to ask if they’ll stock your book, management will be more likely to say yes if they’ve already sold some copies of it.
Plan your strategy for selling your book to independent bookstores ahead of time, and start by frequenting those stores. Know what they’re selling and to whom, and see if your book is a good fit for each store you approach. If indie bookstores are a sales channel you’re interested in pursuing for your book, utilise these tips, and self-publish your books with IngramSpark.
October
Digital Writers’ Festival, (30 Oct-3 Nov) online
November
Feminist Writers Festival, (1-3 Nov) Sydney, NSW
Supanova, (2-4 Nov) Adelaide, SA
West Coast Fiction Festival, (3 Nov) Perth, WA
Quantum Words, (3 Nov) Sydney, NSW
Brimbank Writers and Readers Festival, (8-17 Nov) various suburbs within Brimbank city, Vic.
Supanova, (9-11 Nov) Brisbane, Qld.
Jaipur Literature Festival in Adelaide, (9-11 Nov) Adelaide, SA
Scone Literary Festival, (9-11 Nov) Scone, NSW
untitled Literary Festival, (15-18 Nov) Stonnington, Vic.
Word for Word: National Non-Fiction Festival, (16-18 Nov) Geelong, Vic.
Independent Publishing Conference, (22-24 Nov) Melbourne, Vic.
Wollongong Writers Festival, (23-25 Nov) Wollongong, NSW
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