Being a Partner in my Publishing Business Isn't Always Fun
This time is one of the not enjoyable times. It's when my partner and I come together to plan our focus for the new release year.
We made a major decision to separate from our long time distributor. Our distributor has served us well, but our focus has changed currently.
WHAT WAS THE GOOD IN OUR DISTRIBUTION?
The reason we went with our distributor had been to get our paperback books into the bookstores. They did that for us extremely well for our last seven years.
We started in a time when doing POD was overly expensive and didn't necessarily get your book in stores or libraries. Therefore, using a small press distributor was helpful and streamlined our process and promotions.
WHY DIDN'T WE DO IT SOONER
Time. We just hadn't had the time. We'd planned on moving over backlist titles when POD prices came down, but procrastinated due to slow but consistent sales and it cost us in the end. Business is about learning and improving.
WHY CHANGE NOW?
After realizing that we wanted to update our covers, and would have to pay our current distributor to re-cover our existing backlist of books (which were now less than 2000 copies of various titles) we figured it wasn't worth the cost.
Moving those back list of titles to POD made more financial sense. Also, with the closing of many bookstores, we can no longer rely on that venue as a major sales source.
THE COST OF SEPARATION
Well, this is where I feel like it's an UGLY part of the relationship. In order to close our contract, this company is charging us for 10 months of service to close out accounts that they have to distribute our books. Yep, $40 a month, and cost to destroy the titles we have or ship them to us.
OUCH!
Yep, being both publisher and author, I realize the degree of investment a publisher makes in getting a book to the public, for selling it, for promoting it and much more.
BUSINESS MODEL CHANGE
Our business model is changing to being more supportive of our ebook promotions. From now on we will only use POD at least in the next 3 years.
HOW HAS YOUR CAREER CHANGED OR PERSPECTIVE ON PUBLISHING CHANGED YOUR BUSINESS MODEL?
