This is No. 5 in an occasional 10-part series on the topic of self-publishing textbooks. If I’ve recorded a podcast or written a post in the series, it will be linked to in the footnote at the end of this post.1 If there’s no link, it’s because I haven’t created it yet. But I will. Eventually. I may write posts out of numerical order and reserve the right to not post about the topic the following week… just because.
You’ve got your textbook all dressed up and ready to go. What next? Time to consider how you are going to print2 it and distribute it. Things are changing all the time in publishing, but I’ll tell you what I know, though bear in mind I might not be up to date, and if you are reading this post months after I publish it, the details absolutely will have changed. But not the principles. Let me approach the topic in reverse order, from easiest to hardest, from most amateurish to most professional, or from least to most desirable, if you like:
Vanity publishing. Where you pay a ridiculous amount for an inferior product. If they want you to pay anything up front, no matter what they promise to do for you, or how fancy the website, DO NOT TOUCH. This is not a viable option, this is a scam to prey on your insecurities.
Traditional publishing. Here, a publishing house may (or may not) pay you an advance (a proportion of your projected future sales). But they are the boss, they are the gatekeeper, they will dangle possible placement of your book in bookshops to appeal to your vanity, but they will only pay you a pittance and it’s not your book, it’s theirs. Plus, they probably don’t want your textbook. Why bother? More thoughts on why you shouldn’t waste your time trying to go trad here.
Amazon (Kindle Direct Publishing). Amazon is the beast, accounting for the lion’s share of book sales everywhere in the world. Get your books onto Amazon’s virtual shelves and you are in the world’s biggest bookshop. You set the prices, it costs you nothing up front, they give you a generous cut of any sales made. You can publish your textbook as a paperback, hardback and/or Kindle ebook and your book will be buyable anywhere in the internet-connected world. Meet Amazon’s formatting requirements and your book will be accepted. There is no quality control of content beyond a spellcheck and presumably a check for obscenities, so it’s up to you to make your textbook content as good as possible. For Kindle ebooks, on every sale they will pay you between 35 and 70% of the cover price to you, for printed textbooks they’ll pay you 60 percent of the cover price, minus printing costs (which depend on the number of pages of your book). The big plus is you can order single copies (“print on demand”) and their printing and distribution can be very fast. I’ve ordered a textbook in the morning and they’ve printed it and delivered it by the late afternoon. The big minus is if you want others to come across your textbook you have to pay Amazon to advertise it to their own customers. So I just use Amazon as a printer and not fritter away my time or money worrying about reaching potential new readers through Amazon searches.
Going wide. The most dangerous number in business is one — if you have one supplier, one customer — one anything — you have a single point of failure. For this reason, relying solely on Amazon, though tempting because they are so good, is not a wise long-term policy. What would you do if Amazon froze your account? There are other companies that can produce your book or ebook, names such as IngramSpark, Smashwords and Kobo spring to mind. Rather than spending lots of time uploading different files and trying to keep track of payments, a good solution is to use an aggregator like Draft2Digital — you upload your manuscript to them and they handle everything else, for a cut of your sales. Smarter self-publishers than I recommend uploading your stuff to Amazon yourself (as they will account for 80 percent of your sales) and then use Draft2Digital for every other vendor.
Getting a local printer to do a print run of your textbook. The plus point is you can get the cost per copy of your textbook way down, say half the price that Amazon would charge, but you’d have to get a larger print run, say 500 to 1,000 copies of your title at a time. This is not something I’ve done, but it’s where the real money in publishing is, if you are happy developing your own publishing business, shouldering the risk of not being able to sell all your copies. But then you’re no longer an English teacher who dabbles in publishing — you’re a publisher.
What I really love about publishing books is the principle that you do the work once (writing and producing the textbook), and then reap the benefits multiple times — every time you sell a copy.
As with everything, the devil is in the details — sales are easier said than done. And now you are into the realm of marketing, a subject for another day.
See you on Friday for the Staffroom video podcast. This week, I’m giving my thoughts on age discrimination in the TEFL world.
Patrick
Introduction: How to publish your own English textbooks in Japan
How to design your own textbooks
How to make the covers of your own textbooks
How to format your own textbooks for different media
How much should you charge for your textbooks?
You’ve published your textbook. Now what?
I say print it, but of course you could release it as an ebook only or PDF file, but I’ll get to that in a bit.