Why (and how) I just used BookBaby for digital publishing A couple of blogs back I shared the key points of a very informative presentation I had just heard by Brian Felsen, honcho of BookBaby, where he discussed the virtues of letting others (like BookBaby) do the grunt work when you are sending your book to Kindle, Nook, Smashwords, and others. So I tried it yesterday—I submitted an older, steady-selling book now used by many college classes as a textbook. We sell a lot of the paperback What Every Superintendent and Principal Needs to Know, a $24.95 K-12 educational niche book that my firm publishes under the Education Communication Unlimited imprint. (It was written by Rosborg, McGee, and my brother, Jim Burgett). What prompted me to use BookBaby was the recent increase in sales of our .pdf digital version of the same book, at $20. My thought: since mostly students will buy the .pdf version, why not modify that to mobi for Kindle and ePub for Nook and Smashwords (and iPad, etc.) for those wanting to have the text in and on their readers? At $19.99, the 35% (mostly) that we would earn in royalties is less income than our own versions—particularly our .pdf edition, which is kind of a goldmine. But will we sell twice as many new books, plus 28 books more to pay back (from the royalties) the BookBaby cost of $186 (the $149 package plus 74 pages over 250 at 50 cents a page)? BookBaby doesn’t do any of the prep and promo, but here we had the book written, proofed, formatted in .doc or .pdf, and we had its original front cover all ready to go. (Alas, I had to stretch that .jpg cover to 550 pixels to meet their size requirements. I’ll discuss the quick way to get all this prep stuff together for ancillary publishers in my next newsletter, 7/10.) I also had to dig around and marry some text, but I found that pesky stuff already available too, like the author bios, a fetching description of the book, the original ISBNs, and the keywords. So Brian’s claim that BookBaby is fast is sort of true. It took about 30 minutes to gather the info, set up an account (the usual stuff), and finish the submission form. (It’s a bit deceptive because to get this gem together took the authors, three of the top educators in Illinois, about four months to write, and a couple more months for us to get the cover and editing done, plus final formatting and proofing. At that point we had the paperback ready to print—and its digital derivative ready to sell in .pdf. So it was about six months and 30 minutes.) But the 30 minutes for $186 to do a process we have done about 20 times for similar items sent to each of these three ebook houses, plus LSI and sometimes Lulu. Not a whit of difference once we caught on to the internal changes needed to make mobi and ePub look civilized (but never as attractive as the paperback). You can see our process at the prep and submission stages in How to Get Your Book Published Free in Minutes and Marketed Worldwide in Days. My reaction to BookBaby? It’s easy to figure out and complete. They ask for the very same things you must provide if you go directly to Kindle, Nook, and Smashwords—logically, since they’re filling in the same boxes. The difference is that, submitted by them, the converted text and cover have to look good when they emerge from Kindle, Nook, and Smashwords, hands-free by you. And that may be worth the $149 because getting the text properly formatted is time consuming and sometimes vexing. (My full response is still incomplete, of course, because I have no idea yet how long it will take for BookBaby to get the product to the publishers and what it will look like. If there are problems there I will let you know in a follow-up blog.) But there was another, disappointing surprise. Originally it was to cost $99 to get the book converted, submitted, and so on… But now for $99 you must have it in final ebook format (mobi- and ePub-acceptable) and they will just do the submission. That’s not much of a bargain. The price is up to $149 to get what I first read for $99. (I don’t quite see the value of going to the $249 premium version.) I hate pocket- emptying surprises even though I heard Felsen say this was likely to happen. I guess I was thinking, or hoping, it would happen in 2025.) And an irksome procedural problem. I had to leave the computer for a few minutes in the middle of filling in the submission form, and when I returned the page had closed without a word saved. Nor was there a save box to keep what you had completed on the screen, or somewhere accessible. That should be corrected. That’s it. A review without many teeth. Some annoyance, but overall it wasn’t much different than filling in, say, the Nook submission page (which is the easiest and fastest) except that I expect BookBaby will make my copy clean and pretty in print. I’m not sure if it’s worth $149 (or $186), but to get the money back is mostly my responsibility to let my K-12 crowd know of the new reader wonder when it’s available so my sales push past recompense into high and long profit. However, if I had no idea how to submit my own books this would be a huge bargain. As it is, it’s a bit like betting on the race favorite to place. Best wishes, Gordon Burgett Lightning Source, CreateSpace, royalties, POD, and profits… Pete Masterson kindly agreed to my sharing a blog discussion response he sent (on 3/29) to the Linkedin Independent Book Publishers Association-IBPA group, to this question: “Does Lightning Source pay royalties to independent publishers who use their print services in the same way that CreateSpace does?” Pete is the author of a definitive guide on book design, Book Design and Production, which Dan Poynter describes as “A masterful work…. The industry has needed a book like this for years.” Says Pete, author of the following (For more information, see www.aeonix.com): “Lightning Source (LSI) is a printer with a link to Ingram Book Group for distribution. LSI does not pay royalties. Books are sold either directly from LSI or through Ingram, revenue is collected, printing costs are deducted along with the discount rate you select (between 20% and 55%) and you (as the publisher) are paid the difference. ”The ‘downside’ of working with Lightning Source is that you must be a publisher, not simply an author. That requires setting up a publishing entity (that is owned by the author) to handle the publishing duties. I have many clients who have done exactly this. ”CreateSpace (owned by Amazon.com) operates in dual modes. In one case, CS is a subsidy publisher and they offer the full range of author services, including typesetting, editorial work, and cover design. (These services may not be of the highest quality, so do careful research and consider your exact goals for your project. CS tends to be a lower cost subsidy publisher and may be a good choice for the “right” projects.) “CS also operates as a printer. If an author-publisher provides an ISBN (instead of obtaining one from CS), then CS will print books at a reasonable cost. You can release CS books for sale via Amazon.com with a 40% discount from list price. If you use a CS-provided ISBN, you can get “extended distribution” (beyond Amazon) with a 60% discount from list. However, the ‘extended distribution’ is achieved by CS signing your book up with Lightning Source (with a 20% discount), so it’s very hard to justify using CS in that mode. ”Indeed, if you sign up with Lightning Source, and put your book out with a 20% discount, non returnable, you are likely to make more NET revenue than if you provided the 55% discount, fully returnable terms that are the normal trade book standard. “Books sold with the short discount are very unlikely to ever be purchased by a physical (bricks and mortar) bookstore, but all such books are ‘automatically’ listed by Amazon and almost all other online booksellers. But guess what? For most titles, the physical bookstores are unlikely to stock a small/self- published title in any event. “For more information on this short discount approach, see Aaron Shepherd’s POD for Profit.” 15 Publishing Tips from Published Professionals Let me share some of the best Q-A info from the June 9 BAIPA Meeting in San Rafael, CA. (BAIPA is the Bay Area Independent Publishing Association, a first-rate monthly gathering of published folk living near San Francisco.) 1. If you want to use a famous (or even little-known) painting on your pages, find out the museum where it hangs, and get the rights (or how to license its use) from them. Sometimes it’s free. 2. Do you know aboutCreativeCommons.org ? In its words: “Creative Commons is a global nonprofit organization that enables sharing and reuse of creativity and knowledge through the provision of free legal tools.” Just take a look to see if it will help you, or through it you can help others.