Dear Jane,

I read your WD piece on the three choices for self-publishing with interest. I agree with you that there are options ranging from zero cost up to many thousands, but that covers merely the creation of a book, it doesn't cover anything to do with selling it. And that is the key part of the process ... which most authors don't want to do. Most authors want to be authors, not salespeople.

This is where I believe that the online, on-demand services do give a false sense of what can be achieved with self-publishing, partly because such services advertise that an author's book can be "made available through 35 million retailers", i.e., listed on a bibliographic database!

Getting books into retailers is still the key to selling books in any volumes, and to do that you have to actually have copies of your book to place on shelves. Which is why no POD companies actually offer any sort of real sales support into the retail trade.

Yes, POD books can be bought through retailers on special firm sale order, but that isn't you and I browsing in a bookshop for something to read (and people don't browse online bookshops).

In the UK we have the usual POD suspects from the U.S., and several strong UK-based companies doing similar things. Among them is the Matador imprint of Troubador Publishing. It selectively publishes books for authors, about 250 a year, and actively markets and distributes to the retail trade. Books are distributed by a trade distributor, Orca Books, and repped into retailers by Star Books Services. Both of these companies work on a commission-only basis, so will only handle publishers whose books they can sell. We sell hundreds of thousands of pounds of books each year for our self-publishing authors, 90% through bricks and mortar bookshops like Waterstones and Blackwells.

In your WD piece you say that authors cannot ever get this service for their self-published books, but this isn't true in our case. We may be the exception here, but we are an important exception. Not only do we produce quality books, we also work hard to sell them, and we do. So much so that we are recommended by the Writers & Artists Yearbook [the UK equivalent to Writer's Market], plus many many writers' services in the UK. 

We smaller companies, particularly UK based ones, rarely get mentioned by the writing media—AuthorHouse have the largest marketing budget and they shout the loudest—but generally we offer better value for money, a better product and a real crack at sales. (And having said we are a smaller company, we do turn over £1 million + a year.)

Perhaps you could bear all this in mind when next you cover the subject? Have a look at our website and see what we do... 

Jeremy Thompson

Publisher, Matador

Troubador Publishing Ltd

Monday, November 30, 2009 8:28:32 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [1] Trackback