Chris Aldrich (boffosocko.com)These days the idea of bestseller means selling in the range of 10,000 books. The average book released these days sells only 250 copies, so if you’re over that, you’re doing well.
Tag: Publishing
Chris Aldrich (boffosocko.com)
It’s not a “license,” it’s a sale. You bought it, you own it. It’s a book. Books are older than copyright, than publishing, than paper, than commerce.
Cory, the only other published that I have come across that works as openly as Craphound is Verso Books. The book that you buy is yours and actually is imprinted with your name.
No one wakes up in the morning hoping to be as vapid as possible. But eventually you internalize the squeeze. Everyone down the chain adjusts their individual decisions to the whim of the retailer, or to their best guess at the whim of the retailer. If it’s Barnes & Noble, you may hear that a cover doesn’t work, that the store won’t carry the title unless you change it. If it’s Amazon, you may not hear anything at all. You go back and adjust your list of wildly optimistic comparative titles — it’s The Big Short, but . . . for meteorology!
The editors at N+One discuss the current process associated with publishing in the 2010’s and the place of Amazon within all of this.
Choose active media, set yourself up to succeed by building systems to cultivate positive habits, but most importantly: Take a second to think about the contracts you’ve entered into as you go about your day. Are those contracts you’re happy with? Did you realize you had entered into them?
Craig Mod shares some notes from a lecture he shared at Yale to 70 or so publishing CEOs, marketing, editorial, and PR folks on the topic of contracts:
It’s an essay about “contracts” — and I don’t mean the formal things we sign upon joining a company or getting a divorce, but the more implicit contracts we enter into with a piece of media, software, or an application. Contracts can become proxies for thinking about “media accounting:” What we gain or lose by engaging with different media and mediums. Consider this missive a little bit of Media Accounting 101.
It is about the agreements we make that we may not always be aware that we are making. This is another interesting examination about being informed.
Central to this discussion is attention and in particular James Clear’s book Atomic Habits.
Massive (belated) congrats Fiona. Saving starts now.
Yet, there was something I wanted to do with this book that made it different. During the navigation ideas phase, I wondered what it would be like to give the book away for FREE to teachers and leaders all over. Now, folks would still have to pay for shipping, but with printing costs as low as they are, I wondered how this was possible.
I had a number of really bad experiences of sending books out to teachers free. The organization and fulfillment of this process were tough for all involved.
Thanks for sharing the process AJ.
I’ve always wondered about self-publishing, but always from a digital perspective, using Gumroad or some other platform. I had never thought of physically publishing something and giving it away. I obviously need to explore this in more detail.
Syndicated at Read Write Collect