Print, eBook, and Audio-Selling Your Book in the Metaverse

“Access to market” are the go words for modern publishers. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an indie, or one of the big four (maybe five again?) You cannot simply have a book published in?one format. The book market is striated and segmented like sedimentary rock, with innumerable layers. Not only does individual preference matter, but access and compatability are key components in differentiation for each consumer.

Everyone wants that big sales number for a book launch (those crucial first six weeks), and different book types mean different numbers.??And let’s face it, there is still caché for that successful hardcover run—even industry veterans ignore or give serious side-eye to ebook sales. And not without reason: read?Scribe Media’s post?on book sales lines and you’ll see just how hard it is to calculate!??Then, when it comes to cache, it’s that BookScan number ultimately that is de-rigeour for the industry’s essential performance metric. If you want to fall down the rabbit hole, google?Bookscan?accuracy.?

But looking at the?Pew Research?center’s numbers above 30% of readers are preferentially choosing other media, and that’s not nothing.?

Let me give you an example. I spend about one hour, sometimes two, every day doing dishes and performing kitchen cleanup. Sound familiar? Here’s a?list of 28 things?(by Abi Johnson) you can do while “reading!” I like to fill my time and my mind, and so I am a huge consumer of audio content. Here’s another example, if you’re a parent of young kids, this might sound familiar: holding your toddler’s hand in the semi-darkness, while quietly reading?Andy Weir?to stay awake. Perhaps you work nights, where you’ve some downtime. Having an e-reader, or epub app on your phone may be the only way you can read. I have four different epub apps on my phone!

To be sure, there are still a ton of people (even Millennials and beyond) who like the look, feel, and smell of a hard cover, or the portability and replaceability of a well-thumbed paperback.?Meghan Jones at Readers Digest?has a nice round up of the reasons. There are collectors, and hobbiests, and designers who want to own each book, and care how they look on a shelf. There are people who will take your carefully designed book spine and rearrange their entire shelf of books in a rainbow (alphabetizing?be-damned!)

Meanwhile, the great frontiers of book publishing, reading and literacy, have moved comfortably into the new terrain. ePub files are getting better, bigger, with more graphics and more features. They’re better than books. They keep your page, you can read them at different sizes.??Soon, they’ll play gifs and perhaps even?Manipulates. And yes, they’ll still be books. Devices have more memory and can hold larger files than ever. The last ebook?I published?was nearly 300 megabytes!?

But standards across platforms have?more or less solidified,?making production on a dozen different formats realistic and possible. I’ve spent over thirty hours going over a single epub file, trying to make sure compiling wouldn’t reduce image quality, or relocate images inappropriately—all of that, and then I read a book on the library app,?Overdrive, from one of the big five publishers and the formatting is atrocious! I finished the book though, and enjoyed it. Which says something important: “the plays the thing.”

If you’ve met any bright young Twitter authors, (Shout out to my Twitter Author friends) you know they’re probably publishing their book through?KDP, or?Smashwords,?ScribeMedia, or any of a dozen different platforms. Print on demand makes that possible, with decent print quality, perfect binding, and full glossy paperback covers! But it’s no panacea, offset print runs are still the way to get the best deal for sure (particularly for color). If you’re publishing a book in color, print-on-demand can eat up profit margin fast. This ain’t no thing if you’re publishing fiction, but if you’re publishing non-fiction with pictures, diagrams, tables and charts, this can be a deal breaker for color. I had a $50 book, for which we could only take about $5 of profit per sale.?It was an even exchange for this particular project, trust me.

And here’s this: print on demand suffers its own slings and arrows of distribution issues. Try getting a POD book to Capetown (I’ve done it, it’s hard). A client, (I won’t name him, but he’s a best-seller in mathematics) had to abandon his POD publisher after the first 50 books sold completely failed to materialize, he ended up at Scribe Media instead. POD factories aren’t everywhere, books still need to transit, and they still need to arrive in a timely fashion. There’s nothing worse than hearing customers complain about the book they bought but can’t get!?

Here’s the point. If you’ve got a book you’re ready to publish, or you’re an indie press wondering if it’s worth doing an audible book. If you’re an author going it alone, wondering if you should make that ebook. The answer is always yes. In fact, there are people, not naming any names here who will buy more than one copy of your book! In fact, they may even buy more than one copy of your ebook, one for their Kindle, one for an off-brand e-reader!