- Connections can be acquired by networking, going to events, following people on Twitter, reading blogs, and generally taking part in the community
- Email is a bad way to make first contact with anyone! If you get to know people via events, blogs, Twitter, etc., first then they’ll be more inclined to respond to your email when it arrives.
- Yes, one has to be careful. No one worth their salt in publishing takes money from you until after you’ve earnt it
- Two book deals are also good for the author in that it means you have some security for your next book, so not a bad thing unless you don’t have a second book in you

And yes, huge amounts of time and chasing and luck and stubbornness and learning. I think that’s true of any large project – and we need to remember that a book is a really large project, even when we split it out into half an hour every day over several years…

Thank you, and good luck with yours!

A few quick observations.

- Without ‘connections’ its quite difficult to even get started.
- Many folk don’t reply to emails (presumably they are swamped).
- There’s plenty of people out there looking for ways to take money from the budding authors.
- The discussion is often prefixed with it needing to be a 2 book deal (which I assume is to weed out the ‘people with a novel in them’)

In my case, there was much time and chasing to get to a published product. I’ll put it all down to learning curve and be wiser when I try again. The first one can become the beta test.

And hopefully a better approach for book 2.

Good luck in your own efforts.

27% Adult Trade
22% Professional
18% Elhi (elementary and high school)
14% College
9% Juvenile Trade
6% Religious
4% Scholarly

So 64% of book sales have nothing to do with education, so it’s definitely not all copies of the Great Gatsby.

130,477 active publishers in 2008, up 27% in 09
Total no. of publishers continues to increase, almost all of this in the sub $50m pa category

Publishing worth $40.3 billion in 2008
Sector is expected to grow moderately with increase in both net $ sales and unit sales.

And this despite the recession.

Interestingly, Bowker says that traditionaal publishing output declined in 2008 but on-demand publishing more than doubled:

“Our statistics for 2008 benchmark an historic development in the U.S. book publishing industry as we crossed a point last year in which On Demand and short-run books exceeded the number of traditional books entering the marketplace.”

(Link is to google cache because Bowker’s website appears to be down.)

More from Bowker:

“57% of British consumers purchased one or more books last year, compared to only 50% of Americans”

So the $118 per family is a bit misleading in a way because only 50% of Americans buy books anyway. If that mapped to 50% of families, then those families that buy books, mags, newspapers are buying $236 per year, or a little under $20 per month, which is not too shoddy really.

More from Bowker via Follow the Reader:

Who was reading in 2008

* 45% of Americans read a book last year
* The average age of those who read a book was 44
* 58% of readers are women
* 32% of readers are over the age of 55
* The average reader spends 5.2 hours reading per week vs. 15 hours online and 13.1 hours watching TV (In 2008, going online surpassed watching TV as a primary activity)

Who was buying books in 2008

* 50% of Americans over 13 bought a book
* The average age of the most frequent book buyers was 50 years old
* 57% of book buyers are female and they buy 65% of books (e.g. women buy books and they buy in volume)
* 67% of books were bought by people over 42; Gen Xer bought 17% of books; Gen Y bought 10%
* Of books purchased by those who earn $100K or more, mystery and detective fiction represent 16% of sales, juvenile 13%, romance 6%, thrillers 4%, and comics and graphic novels 4%
* 41% of all books are purchased by those who earn less than $35K
* The average price of a book purchased last year was $10.08
* 31% of all book purchases are impulse buys

Reading is a very common hobby, maybe not as common as watching TV, but with 45% of people in the US reading, and 50% of people buying, I’d say that counts as common.

The thing is, it’s not just about the end product. It’s not just about selling and buying books, it’s also about the process it takes to write a book, and whether that is something that people feel they want to support through micropatronage.

I saw a graph of how the average US consumer spends which showed just $118 per year was the average amount spent on reading (books, newspapers, magazines, etc.). Of course authors aren’t making much. People aren’t buying what they produce, period. I rather doubt it takes millions of sales to be a \best seller,\ probably more like a few thousand.

I agree that certain types of book just aren’t attractive to publishers. I tried to pitch a book about blogging several years ago, back before there were billions of them. Again, I was (and am) a leading expert in the subject area and have written a lot (freelance journalism as well as blogs). But publishers seemed unclear about what sort of book it was – was it a tech help book, a business book, a personal growth story? Where would it be shelved? In the end, one well-known publisher said that they liked the idea, but could it be about how blogging changed my life. I declined their kind offer.

Of course it’s a commercial decision – but so is the decision by the author whether or not to write. And therein lies the problem. Because for a lot of potential authors, the commercial decision is not to write because it’s just not worth it (even taking into account all the kudos that having a book under your belt bring, specially if it’s a tech/biz book). That means we might be missing out on some excellent books because they just never got written.

I’m afraid that I totally disagree with you about self-publishing. It has great potential for books and authors that mainstream publishers don’t want to touch or don’t know how to deal with. Robin Sloan has proven that people will support writers they like, even if they are new on the scene. And we’re only at the beginning of the self-publishing revolution.

Of course, I neither believe nor want self-publishing to replace traditional publishers, but I think the market needs to fractionate. We need to have alternative outlets for books and authors that publishers can’t or won’t deal with, and we need a new proving ground for up and coming authors. If I can build up a fanbase (and my skills) through self-publishing then I hope that one day a traditional publisher will not just value my track record, but value it enough to actually offer me a reasonable deal.

I may be wrong, but what have I got to lose? Really? I can either write books, send them out to agents and hope that one of them likes it enough to send round to publishers in the hope that one of them likes it enough to publish… Or I can write books, release them online, get read, get feedback, grow into my craft, build a fan base and maybe even earn some money doing it.

Of course, neither route is guaranteed. You’ll note that I’m not really discussing the part that talent plays. Some books will always be just awful and will be a flop regardless of what the author does. But writing off self-publishing at this juncture is premature, to say the least.

But in any case, that book would not have sold to a publisher. I am one of that rare breed of authors who live only by writing and I failed to get an offer of more than £2000 advance for a book on teens’ use of the Internet 3 years ago (so I never wrote the book – you can’t live for even a month on that much and that’s not long enough to write it). I have years of experience of working in the computer industry behind me and 130 books finished and published – it was entirely a commercial decision on the publishers’ part. The problem, the publishers all told me, is that such a title is hard to place on the shelves of a bookshop – it’s neither parental guidance nor technology, so the bookshops won’t take it, however good the book is. (I know, there are now lots of such books in the US – but still not in the UK.) Publishers won’t produce a book on the basis of possible Amazon sales.

Self-publishing is not a commercial option if you want to be a professional writer. You will still be writing as a hobby.

After many months of not getting started on it, I realized that I just couldn’t relax enough to dive into such a daunting project whilst I was worrying about making ends meet.

So, I started thinking and asking around, trying to figure out if it was realistic to hope for an advance that might cover my essential needs for six months or so, the time I thought I needed to research and write the book.

Boy, was I mistaken.

I actually went to the Frankfurt book fair to meet some editors and speak to people \in the industry\. The conclusion was: fuggedaboutit. As a first-time author, with a book idea which was probably not going to be a best-seller, there was very little chance of me interesting an editor before the book was written (let alone getting an advance, what was I dreaming about?). I’d be happy to find an editor to publish it once it was written.

An author I met there, who has a bunch of book sunder her belt, told me that in her opinion, going through an editor rather than self-publishing makes sense in only two cases: (1) you’re getting a huge advance; (2) you’re given a great editor. Neither are going to happen to a first-time author, realistically.

So yeah. Ideas like Kickstarter and direct financing of artists and creatives by their audience are going to grow.

You can say “Oh, but she writes loads of books so she’s doing ok from all the little advances”, but the majority of authors just can’t match that output and nor should we want them to. Volume is just not an answer.

And again, this isn’t about “getting into writing for the money”, it’s about authors being able to make a living from an activity that takes up a lot of time and thought. You don’t just sit down at a computer and type for a few hours and bingo, there’s your book. It takes time and care and thought and effort and, sometimes, tears and swearing and giving up and starting again and never letting the damn thing get the better of you. If you want good books for your bookshelf, then somehow the system has to support people so that they can write them. The system is currently broken for the vast majority of authors who have to write as a hobby because they can’t afford to give up their day job. And if “success” pays so poorly, then how do people transition from writing part-time to writing full-time?

And regarding tech, yes, disintermediation of the means of production does mean that there’s more noise to cut through, and there’s an issue of filtering that we have yet to resolve. However, the internet does provide a way to reach people that just didn’t exist before, regardless of the noise. I can still achieve things online that I could not before. I’m not aiming to be the loudest voice, I just want a voice loud enough to help me reach the people I need to reach.

And as for giving up, what on earth gave you the idea that I was about to give up?

If you get into writing for the money, you should be prepared for a disappointment. While the technology now allows anyone to write and get their stuff out there, the downside is that is allows anyone to write and get their stuff out there. You’ve got a louder voice, but so has everyone else.

Don’t give up, though. There’s always room on my bookshelf for new good stuff.