Episode 83: Why Print Books and Ebooks?
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Hello, my beautiful cinnabar moths or any kind of moth you’d like to be. Welcome to the writers triangle podcast about all things publishing and books. And today I’m going to be talking about the benefits of having an ebook. And the benefits of having a print book and why I think every author should do ebook print book. And now it’s hardcopy and paperback. And the benefits of doing each and the cost of doing each because I think that there’s this sort of messaging out there that doing print books are way more expensive than doing ebooks. And I find that they are marginally more expensive, but I don’t think they’re way more expensive. And I think that for from my experience, that there’s so much information out there on Kindle books, and how to do like Kindle Unlimited, and that’s by design, right? Amazon’s a huge company. And they do have the absolute largest share of, you know, the book market. But they’re not the only, you know, company out there that that does ebooks. And we actually sell more ebooks through smashwords than we do through Amazon, which I find to be interesting. And I don’t quite understand. The marketing team has all of the heart numbers, I haven’t done a deep dive on why I’m just happy to be selling books kind of thing. And I think my my supposition about it and again, I haven’t done any research on it is because we don’t do Kindle Unlimited. We put one book on Kindle Unlimited and and that zero page reads. And so for us that just felt like, okay, maybe this isn’t the right way for us to go. And some of our books we just wouldn’t want on Kindle Unlimited, you know, y’all know, we do tons of series. And so for me, putting a series on Kindle Unlimited doesn’t feel like the best way to go for us at this time. I’m recording this in 2023. And of course, it may change in the future. But for now, we’re not doing Kindle Unlimited, and we’re not doing free books, and we’re not doing 99 cent books. And I find that doing Kindle Unlimited or Kindle plus and gain those kinds of deals and specials work really well, for some authors are not so well for other authors. And I think by just doing Kindle, that you’re really limiting your reach. For example, Barnes and Noble has notebooks and we do sell some books through Barnes Noble, but again, we sell most of our books through smashwords. And I think it’s really worthwhile to look into Smashwords. And think about putting your book up there for ePubs.
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And I also think it’s really worthwhile to look at, you know, Barnes and Noble MacBooks. And look at some of the other ebook distributors if you are just doing electronic books. And I think also that not everybody has Kindle ready devices, which we’ve discovered, because we do a lot of giveaways as part of our promotions. And you can check out our marketing episode if you want to know all the different promotions that we do. And the reason that we give away books is because we want reviews, and so having other formats, like having a PDF, having a ePub file, and for some people having a imobie is, is helpful, we don’t use that format, because we find it to be a little bit outdated. So when it comes to promoting books, it’s helpful to have you know, a PDF, and to have that EPUB. And because you need to have the PDF anyways, there’s a lot of stuff that goes into creating an ePub book and creating a print book PDF, that it really lends itself to having the book be printable. And we finally go into like all of the cost of printing a book and what what it takes to have a good print book out there. The services that I’m most aware of for printing book and its print on demand are Amazon and Ingram sparks. And I’ll put a link to an Ingram sparks article that I find the I just want to say the price ranges for some things feel a little out of pocket for me, it’s not what we pay for it. And it’s not what when we’re talking to authors in the self publishing space, what they’re paying for things, but it does give a breakdown on on how to do it and all the things that you need to do. And then I’ll also put a link in the description for Amazon print on demand. And what print on demand basically is is that they only print the books that are ordered. So you don’t send out a bunch of books to bookstores and distribution hubs and such. They don’t have a stock of your books.
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They only print the books once an order is placed on the books have been paid for and that helps authors fight costs like when you when you do large batch printing and large batch printing. I think the smaller A batch that I’m aware of is 100 books. And then it goes up from there, small batch and large batch printing is where you pay for the books to be printed. And then you ship them out to a bookstore, or to a warehouse, or the printing press may offer storage. And then you keep the books in storage and ship them out. When order as orders come in, or you ship them you talk with different booksellers, and work out deals where you have return policies. And that is okay, we’ll ship you, let’s say 50 books, 50 copies of our title. And if it doesn’t sell within a year, if all 50 copies don’t sell within a year, you can return them to us. And with doing that, you have to pay the return fees. And you have to pay the storage fees for those books once they’re returned, or before they ship out. So some places do do small and large batch printing, some places do print on demand, we do a mix of different printing options, because we’re sold on on every continent in the world except Antarctica, which I’m super happy about. And each region has their own preferences and likes of what they prefer that you do and what’s most economical based on the areas. So for some areas, small batch printing is better. For some areas, large batch printing is better, and for some print on demand better. And I’m not going to go into what we found by region for us, because going to conferences and such and talking to other book publishers, they haven’t found the same thing. So there’s no universal just say, we know for sure, like for example, in California, large back, batch printing would be the right choice for you. Because we find differences for genres differences for authors, and differences based on how the author moves to the world and different regions and what they’re doing in those areas to create buzz, and we find that for us give a little bit. And we find that for us, hometown, small batch printing usually works out out pretty well. And we’re usually able to sell all of those books in the author’s region, that that hasn’t been consistently true even for some authors that are like on the go and really hustling and creating a lot a lot of opportunities to promote their book. And we’re able to create a lot of opportunities for them to promote their book in that area as well.
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We’re not finding that there’s any consistent rule while we’re batting 1000, on on anything that we do. And so that’s why I’m a little bit hesitant to say that for certain you should do any specific thing. Because just you know, I say it almost every time I’m on the mic, but there’s the it’s love letter to authors, and I don’t want to be heartbreaking. And something that’s going to cost authors a lot of money. Because those book returns, you have to pay for the books to be shipped to the bookstores, you have to pay for them to be printed. And then if they don’t sell, you do have to pay for those books to be returned. And then you do have to pay for those books to be stored after they’re returned. And I think that’s why some places are doing those 99 cents for for paperback and giving away a lot of the paperback and hardback books, because there are having those returns. And when we’re conferencing and talking with other publishing houses, that’s where we’re finding that a lot of them are doing it than just Okay, let’s just go and do like a huge sale for this book, and write it off. And we tend to not write off any of our books. So we we tend to hang up and say no, we really want to make sure all of these books are full price. A benefit of having a print book is that we do, we are able to benefit from Amazon’s ability to buy batches and then really heavily discount them. Amazon will sometimes lose money on books, it’s part of their business model. And that’s how they keep a larger slice of the market is that they just sell cheaper than anyone else can sell. And often the at the price that they sell it, it’s cheaper than what we can offer the books for. And that’s whether or not we print with Amazon or not.
K
I do find that when we print with Amazon, that they do tend to promote those books more. And they do tend to give better sales and better discounts and such. And I think that’s because of the options that they have in terms of their printing capacity. One of the drawbacks of printing with Amazon is that if you print with them as soon as they have all of the files that go into creating the book, they just put it up and there’s no pre sale. So our method is that we only print through Amazon. We only make it available through printing with Amazon once the book has gone live so that we can have that pre sell time where the book is being pre ordered. and that we can stick to our publication date. And for us, it’s rather serious that we stick to our publication date, because the Library of Congress, all of our books are listed in the Library of Congress. And once they get a library of congress number, they’re locked into a specific publication date. And we want to make really sure that we’re not messing with that at all. But we do think that it’s really important to offer through Amazon, because we’ve just noticed that increase in sales, right, and that, that’s what it’s all about is increasing sales and making sure that your book sales, so looking at doing like an Ingram Spark, or doing like pub printing through Amazon, there are some additional costs, but I, I hope that they’re not too additional, and that it is things that you were doing, one of the things that that they list on all of the print on demand. And all of the book publishing sites that I don’t agree with is the cost for manuscript critiques. And we did a whole episode on beta reads, and I find that you can get beta reads for free. And if you, you know, go check out that episode. And I give all the details on how to do that. And so you shouldn’t be paying for any sort of beta read, or manuscript critique, or any sort of just like basic review, or sensitivity read, I think, for the most part, you can find those for free, there are readers who are voracious readers, and they love free books, and they’ll be willing to do it for that. Because it can be really expensive, it can be as cheap, as you know, $5, if you do, if you go on Fiverr, to as expensive to over $2,000. If you go through a professional site, and I haven’t found we we have tested those professional sites. And to be honest, I didn’t find any benefit, we have a form that we give all of our beta readers. And I found that our free beta reads are usually better than our paid ones, actually. And so I really heavily encourage people not to pay for them, go check out that episode. And get into getting those free batteries, most free sensitivity reads. Because I think that anything we can do to lower the cost of being an author is really important. And something that we take care of for authors. I just want to make accessible to all of those indie authors out there and to other small presses, as you’re checking out, you know, our, our, our podcast, and I hope that you are and I hope that you’re finding benefit for it. So I think as as other small presses do really well, we’re a micro pressive other micro presses, small presses, and indie presses are doing all the stuff that we’re doing, we kind of create an industry standard for what a small press can deliver and the quality that we can deliver. And I humblebrag, our quality is the same as the Big Five, we have a list of what they do for marketing, and we’re able to do all of the same things that they do.
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The flip side of it is that we don’t have the clout that they have. So we can’t add the pressure. So there’s a slight difference. But we’re mostly the same. I feel, in my humble opinion. But you know, I’d love our process. And I think it makes me and I think if you have a press, you should think you’re amazing. And yeah, so that’s my my little rant on how awesome we are. So when you’re doing the I feel like for ePubs and print books, I think that a false divide has been created. And I think that for some people with eBooks, if you’re just doing ebooks, if you’re just doing Kindle books, the vibe out there is that those books aren’t edited, and I hope that everyone is editing their books and you know, join a critique circle. And you can get edits for fairly reasonably priced items can cost as much as you know, $5,000 a book. We’ve never paid that much for editing. But we’re fortunate enough that we have an in house editor so we have an in house typesetter and we have an in house artists that we work with and that keeps our our costs really reasonable. And I find that, you know, if you do a book cover for an ePub if you’re doing Amazon or Ingram or I think that I’ve want to say Barnes and Noble might be doing polishing but I haven’t looked that up my apologies. They do offer any place that’s going to print and I know Smashwords offers a template for you to put the artwork into so you don’t have to guess on how to size it and all of that. And anybody who knows how to create a cover can figure out the templates because they do come with markings and measurements for you to be able to check it we’re very fortunate our artists takes care of all of that shout out to Ira twos just a fantastic artists and I’ll put their link in the bio as well because they’re amazing. We have first dibs but I think that they may have some space on the roster. You should absolutely check them out.
K
They’re super professional and I think they’re reasonably priced. There are a In house artists and of course, we encourage, you know, we’re never interfering with anybody getting their bag. So we’d love it if if more people would work with our group, because they’re just absolutely amazing. And it really is nice because a lot goes into the cover, check out our episode on covers, if you want to know everything that goes into a cover, and something to consider when you’re looking at a cover artist. So when you’re doing an EPUB, or a print book, you have to have typesetting, where somebody is making sure that your book aligns with industry standards, and wherever you’re going to upload it to that that ePub meets the conventions of what an ePub is supposed to look like. And if somebody has already typesetting your EPUB, then it’s not not that far of a stretch to go ahead. And typeset for paperback and hardback, and typesetting for paperback and hardback is a little bit different. All three of those books have different trim sizes, and trim sizes, just the size of the book. And the trim size determines how thick a book is going to be. Because that’s how many words that you’re going to put on the page. And the trim is the space between the last word and the edge of the page. So determining how many what’s the measurements and all of that if you look into like an England sparks or an Amazon, they have set sizes that they recommend that your books be for paperback and hardback. So you don’t have to guess you can actually go in and look and know what you should be typesetting for. And I think that they also offer typesetting templates, we have a typesetter. And they take care of all of that. So I’ve never personally typeset a book, from what I understand in talking with our typesetter. They said it takes when you’re I did talk to them for this episode. And they said when they were learning how to typeset that it was pretty intensive, in that it took about 40 hours for them to get good with all of the different ways to typeset. But what that 40 hours investment did is that it’s it’s saved, it would save you if you put that time in and it might not take you 40 hours, right because you’re not dealing with doing a wide range of books, because they’re a professional typesetter. And they typeset all of our books and all of our books have different lengths, different genres. And different different typesetting means in terms of some books have artwork, and inside of them.
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And some books don’t some books have a unique symbol for different scene breaks, other books don’t. So making all of those decisions for your books and knowing what they’re going to be and creating a standard for them. I was talking with the typesetter. And they said then it’s like 30 to 40 minutes to typeset a book. And I think that upfront investment, it may be a lot. But again, if you look at check out our episode on being a professional author, I talk about how much time it takes and the different types of things that you’re doing. And that you need to do. And I think if you’re writing a book and you’re in the writing process now, my hope would be is that one day could be spent on doing business and and, you know, attending to things that are in on the business side of it. So you do need to have different measurements on the cover for a hardback for a paperback. And for an EPUB. Editing, you have to do that if you have an ePub a manuscript critique, you have to do that. Even if you have an epub and the you know, line edit and comprehensive editing, you have to do that even if you have an EPUB. So I don’t find that those things are more expensive. I do think that for book formatting and said that you can you can find some typesetters, who would if you want to pay someone to do it, you can go on Fiverr and find people as cheap as I want to say $100 All told, and it can, you know, go up to 1000s of dollars depending on what level you’re doing and how many bells and whistles that you want to include in it. And those are things like do you want to have individual symbols or any artwork included? Those things are a little bit trickier to typeset and that will make it more expensive for us, if not more expensive as to the same price for all our books because we’re doing it in house. But that is something to think about how much style you want your book to have, and what is value added and looking at, you know, thinking about the the typesetters or formatters you know, level of experience what other books have they’ve done. That does require a little bit of reading Search. And so, you know doing it yourself, you’re looking at anywhere from a 20 to 40 hour time investment to learn how to do it, or you can hire someone else. And I think you’re looking at anywhere from 10 to 20 hours of research, I advise everyone to research and look at their their previous work to make sure they know what they’re doing. Another huge downside to doing something like Fiverr, where you’re not doing it through a company, where you’re saving money is that they tend to not always deliver on time. And sometimes people will bail on projects. So that is something to consider. Looking at cover costs, formatting and all of that, I think the price bump can be anywhere from a $300 price bump to do paperback and, and hardcover to a $3,000 price bump. And it just depends on what you’re looking for, and what you get for free. So definitely, you know, check out our other episodes and see how to bring the price down on on things and get things for free or for exchanges. And that will help really bring the price down and then looking at when you’re looking at at cover artists look and see what formats do they do? And how much do they charge per format.
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Some cover artists just charge a straight fee for all three formats. And that you get all three formats and other cover artists have a breakdown by by what cover type. And eBooks are the least expensive because the templates are pretty, it’s pretty much a square and one size fits all or a rectangle rather. And one size pretty much fits all if you’re just doing Amazon. And I think Amazon and smashwords, I want to say have the same ePub cover dimensions. So if you’re doing Amazon, it really you really should be doing Smashwords as well. It’s all the same process. And I’ll put a link to Smashwords down in the description, and of course to Amazon and to Ingram and that you can go check those out. And you know, do your own research and make the best choice for you. I want to talk a little bit about what having a physical book gets you that having an epub and ePub does it. And with ePubs you can absolutely do you know Goodreads giveaways, you can actually do library things giveaway, you can upload to book sirens, and Net Galley and all of those types of things. But what you can’t do is you cannot get industry reviews, it’s harder. If you know people, it’s a little bit easier. But I find that it’s much harder to get industry reviews if you’re not sending out a physical book, three to four months before the publication date. And I’ve I’ve talked with some indie authors about this. And when they asked me like, What can can they do to improve the return and improve the responses. And I tell them, even if you just uploaded for just doing industry reviews, which I wouldn’t see why you would limit yourself to just that, because I know with Ingram sparks you can get into Barnes and Noble and you can get into Walmart and be listed on their website because they have really great distribution. So that’s another added benefit to having print books is that you’ll be listed on these different like very large distribution, booksellers websites. And they also have good distribution, and good rates for for indie bookstores as well. So that’s an added benefit, in addition to having the ability to send out copies for industry of use. And also for awards. There are some awards that will accept ebooks. And there are some awards that only accept ebooks, the majority of awards that, at least that we send our books out for require that we send physical copies of the books, and that we send, I think anywhere between five and 10 physical copies of the book. And for us having those books available and being able to send them out, I find that it it actually increases the number of reviews our books get, even if they don’t win the awards. But it absolutely increases the awards. And we’ve been very fortunate that we have, you know, quite a few of our books have received, you know, honorable mentions and awards. And I think that’s because of the amount of awards that we’re able to submit our books to. And that gets you that helps with creating familiarity in the industry and creating a perception on the professional side of things of who you are as an author and are your professional author with all of the bells and whistles. And I know it’s completely unfair to Break Up authors in this way, I don’t agree with it. But the industry is the industry. And sadly, I don’t control it. And I can’t help that if there just is a certain view on if you’re able to do physical books versus if you’re just doing ebooks on where you’re at in terms of your level as an author, which I don’t think it tells me anything other than your preference and time commitment that you that you put into promoting your book and how you decided to distribute the book, I feel that ePubs are a shorter time commitment. And I do keep in mind that it takes seven to 10 books for an author to be able to make a living off of royalties. And then it’s a very paltry living. It’s not, you know, good money, you know, it’s really rare that an author is making good money off of books to where they can just be an author full time, and not work another full time job. So for me, I don’t feel like it tells me anything about the quality of a book, the format that it’s in. However, the industry views it as, you know, seriousness and commitment and whether or not they can trust you as an author. And that’s a lot of reviews. And a lot of reviewers and a lot of awards do have this bias against ePubs. And it it bums me out. I think it’s unfair. And I think a lot of books are are being missed a lot of really great books are being missed, that are just on the the ePub format that are absolutely award worthy. But you know, I don’t control that. So that’s, that’s my 50 cents on it. Doing in addition to all of like the typesetting and covers and all of that there is a slight increase in cost. In terms of the setup for Ingram sparks, I think it’s $50 a book.
K
So it’s $50 if you’re doing hardback and $50, if you’re doing softcover. And with Amazon, I don’t know the off the top of my head, I think it’s like $25 I think it’s a little bit cheaper. With Amazon, there is something to note that sometimes Amazon will say that they’re going to set prices and make sure that you’re reading all the fine print with Amazon. Amazon doesn’t set prices for us, but we’re oppressed. And so it might be a little bit different. If you’re doing it as an individual, they might do it. They might say that, okay, we’re going to set your prices and then consider for yourself if, if that’s the way to go. I know that I think Smashwords suggests prices and I think Ingram suggests prices I don’t know for sure. But make sure that you’re reading the contracts and reading all of all of the fine print. So this is just really the broad strokes of why I think that you should absolutely do paperback and hardback and ePubs for your book. I just think there’s so much so many more benefits. And I also think that there’s so many more opportunities if you do all three formats. And I feel like if you’re going to cut one I would say cut hardbacks do ePub them and paperbacks because you don’t have to send hardcovers we don’t lose. We don’t send your hard covers to those industry reviewers like forwards reviews and blue ink review. And the US Library System has the reviews that they do. And you know like USA, USA Today, New York Times and all that if you’re sending out your books to be reviewed by them, you absolutely need to send them a paperback so do you think it’d be worthwhile to do ePubs and paperbacks that’s my big style for authenticity ePubs and paperbacks and I would say you know think about doing the hardbacks as well I just love listing Hardbox I so when I see a pic is in hardback. So I have like a soft space in my heart. And I know this was not the most environmentally friendly thing to do. But we’re looking at, you know, getting your books out there and selling your books and promoting yourself as an author. If you have a hard stamp because of the environmental impact of of publishing books, I completely understand. I wish that you know, we could say that by ePubs are way more environmentally friendly than than print bucks, but that’s just not the case. When you look at like the cooling station for you guys, every sort of electronic thing does have its own footprint. And, you know, I’m not going to digress and to the climate change and and my take on that. I just don’t really think that that ePub has that much of a smaller footprint than if it has a smaller font Print All then then publishing books, at least when we did our research, we found that some ePubs actually have a bigger footprint than doing a print book. So that’s my my ramble and advice on that. And thank you so much all of our beautiful cinnabar moths for tuning in. And of course if you don’t have to be a cinnabar moth, it can be any kind of moth you want to be, or even a butterfly but I’m not Mariah Carey, and I’m not trying to bite her rhyme, have a great week and talk to you soon. Bye.