Disrupting an Ancient Industry (How I Published a Book)

Dec 6

Dec 6 Disrupting an Ancient Industry (How I Published a Book)

Two months ago I published the 130,000,000th book available today. That’s a lot of books! If you piled them all on top of each other, it would make a stack that goes… very high! My Goodreads want-to-read list is only a tenth of that. So it’s reasonable to ask: With that many books out there, why bother adding one more to the pile? I’ll respond with the annoying quip once favored among Microsoft execs: You’re asking the wrong question.

The important question is not should you write a book—of course you should. If you have something meaningful to say, and an audience of at least one—please write it! People are constantly looking for new stories and insight that are relevant today. So the number of books written—or tales told—in the past is just a curiosity, irrelevant. People will always want new stories, and people will always write them. So we can set aside the existential anxiety that comes with that first question, and join the endless river of human storytelling.

The question you should have asked is: How should you publish your book? In my journey over the past year, I’ve learned a lot about the publishing industry. And since starting my most recent book, Under the Moon in Illinois, I’ve had several stories earn recognition and publication, and I’ve sold more books than I expected. So I feel like I have some insight worth sharing, which I will do now.

(As an aside: In writing that provocative title, I was planning to include the long history of publishing, starting with cuneiform etc. etc., but this is supposed to be a short article, so… you’re welcome!)

How to write something worthwhile

There’s an old chestnut, usually attributed to Mark Twain, that says, “Write what you know.” I love Twain, and since he probably didn’t say it, I won’t offend him by replying: That is bullshit. If writers only wrote what they know, we wouldn’t have the work of Shakespeare, or Dickens, or Italo Calvino, or Isabel Allende, or Ursula K. Le Guin—and on and on. They wrote about places and times and people they couldn’t experience first-hand. They just had excellent imaginations and storytelling talent—and that’s enough.

Better advice, I think, is: Write what you love. This might sound obvious, but I see a lot of writers, young and old, trying hard to choose subject matter they ‘think will be popular.’ You’ll spend hours and hours on this project, so if you don’t really love it, you’ll probably either give up or it will sound inauthentic. Don’t worry about popularity. Everything is interesting if well-told.

Now, there are so many great books about writing, I’d rather just refer you to them (below.) But I’ll share one notion that’s important to me. Look for inspiration from other artists. You need to know what’s been written, so you can be original. But also, art propagates new art. It’s like asexual reproduction. I had a kind of vision of my last story collection one winter afternoon in the woods of upper Michigan, when into my head popped the Tom Waits line, “A black crow snuck through a hole in the sky,” and shortly after, “I wondered how the same moon outside over this Chinatown fair could look down on Illinois and find you there.” And just like that, I had the whole mood in my head, and the stories just dropped into my lap like late-autumn leaves. Haha, no, actually the stories took a lot of work—but the part about the vibe is absolutely true. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I wanted to be in that place all the time, and I was hungry to learn about the people and the places. I had begun to write what I love.

“I had a kind of vision of my last story collection one winter afternoon in the woods of upper Michigan, when into my head popped the Tom Waits line, “A black crow snuck through a hole in the sky”...”

One more thing on this subject… I do consider carefully how my writing can affect people’s lives. Great stories, fiction or non, entertain and provoke thought. They help us understand the world. I try to hold myself accountable to this—a notion of a reader over my shoulder, and how I’m not wasting their time. In this way, I feel motivated to research and learn. The Corn Belt is a rough place, but it has a lot of mystery and mythology, along with extraordinary people—by spending time here, I conceived of the fictional town of Middling, IL. An imperfect place, to be sure, but also a fascinating one worth the time I’ve spent.

The Rise of Independent Publishing

When I wrote Under the Moon in Illinois, my original plan was to (1) earn some credibility by winning some awards and getting some stories published, which I have, and (2) using that success to get a book contract with a traditional publisher. By ‘traditional publisher,’ I mean companies that offer contracts to authors—usually in the form of a modest advance and some royalty sharing. These traditional publishers then print a bunch of books up front, and these books are made available to bookstores via wholesalers like Ingram or Penguin.

The alternative is an ‘indie publisher,’ who typically doesn’t offer contracts to authors they don’t know. Instead, they do all the production themselves, and outsource the printing to print-on-demand services like Kindle Direct Publishing or IngramSpark.

There are other categories of publishers—most notably what’s called ‘vanity publishing.’ I won’t spend time on these, because they’re almost all scams or hucksters, who collect big payment from authors up front to publish their books (usually in print runs like a traditional publisher) in exchange for giving the author a sense of ‘credibility.’ That is to say, inflating the author’s vanity.

So, before I started sending a bunch of letters of inquiry to traditional publishers and literary agents, I decided to look into the indie publishing route. Here’s what I learned.

Royalty agreements from trad publishers are much, much less generous than those offered by Kindle Direct Publishing.
Traditional publishers provide almost no promotion or marketing for their authors. Instead, they encourage them to ‘use social media’ and ‘leverage their networks,’ to earn an audience. You might ask, Isn’t that the main thing you want from a publisher—promotion? In this case, you are asking the right question!
Trad publishers own the rights to your book. So if, for example, you want to make changes to the book down the road—or you want to release an audiobook, or other related media—you need to get their permission! And they usually don’t grant it!
Trad publishers demand a say in the design of your book. They usually require you to use their cover art, for example, along with their editors, etc.
Trad publishers waste paper. There’s no other way to say it. I know so many authors who admit they have closets full of unsold books, from a publisher who’s completely lost interest in working with them. I gotta say, that’s pretty depressing.

If you work with a credible indie publisher—which can be yourself—the following things are true: You’ll get a more generous cut of royalties. You’ll be free to do whatever kind of promotion you like. You’ll own your intellectual property. You’ll only print as many books as people want. You’ll have full control over the design of your book.

The ‘Hidden Continent’ of Indie-published books

If you like data and scholarly analysis, take a look at Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing. This academic work explains how difficult it is to know how many indie-published books are sold each year. In short, that’s because the vast majority of such books are published through Amazon, whose sales data is private. That’s why John Thompson refers to these books collectively as the ‘hidden continent.’ But by most estimates, indie-published books sell at a volume at least as high as those sold through the ‘Big Five’ major publishers. And what’s more, the authors of indie-published books take a much higher share of revenue.

There are a lot of corollaries to the disruption we’ve seen in other media industries—mostly notably, music. But one thing is very different: The new direct-to-customer avenues available to book authors enable these authors to actually sell their product. For actual money. (Not, by contrast, for the fractions of a penny that Spotify gives to its artists. Except for Joe Rogan, of course. Not that he’s an artist. But anyway.)

Book Wars has a fascinating account of a person they call Data Guy. He’s anonymous, but a software engineer in the games industry—so we may well know him. He’s also an indie author who has published successful books. He, along with some collaborators, observed the emergence of a set of writers who were earning a living by bypassing traditional publishing. So Data Guy wrote a spider that scrapes Amazon’s bestseller rankings to see how well books from different publishers are doing. Then he compiles the metadata for all these titles (it’s all publicly available). He manually resolves publishers that his software can’t distinguish between traditional and indie. Data Guy reverse engineered Amazon’s ranking algorithm, to convert rankings to sales and sales to revenue. I’ll spare you the data details (it’s all in the book), and instead point to one significant conclusion: “Indie-published ebooks account for the same proportion of the unit sales of ebook bestsellers on Amazon as ebooks published by all traditional publishers.” That’s a lot of books!

Most of this data is related to ebook sales—aka, Kindle. But with the introduction of print-on-demand services (and looking at my own book sales) you can safely conclude that indie publishers are doing just as well with print.

If you’ve read this far, it will be no surprise that I decided to skip the traditional publishers, and indie-publish my book. But I didn’t want to just post a book published by Kipling Knox on Amazon. I wanted to set up a concern that could represent my work, present and future, and also represent other authors’ work. I wanted to disrupt an ancient industry. So for that reason, I’m happy to be…

Introducing Prairie State Press

Prairie State Press is an independent media publisher. We conceive and publish ebooks, print books, and audiobooks. We also produce live shows that combine storytelling, music, and visual art. In CY2022, we released our first book, the aforementioned Under the Moon in Illinois, in print and ebook. The audiobook version is coming soon—samples available here.

In CY2023, we plan to expand, as a non-profit foundation, to represent the work of talented storytellers from the Midwest, who write about the Midwest. We plan to become a sort of ‘incubator’ of Midwestern art, sponsoring 6-8 writers each year.

Prairie State Press operates largely with contracted staff. The great thing about indie publishing is that you can keep overhead low, but still enjoy exceptional talent, by using the abundant freelance talent available—editors, designers, production people, promoters.

In CY 2023, we also hope to provide some level of service or consulting helping authors help themselves. If you’re a writer who ‘writes what you love,’ then you probably have the passion to produce your work and reach an audience in this entrepreneurial way. So along those lines, I’ll share a few tips to consider…

How you can indie-publish your book—in a unique way

I’ll cover this properly under a separate post, but I do want to highlight some aspects of book creation that I think are important.

Join a community of writers whose work you admire. I belong to the Red Herring Prose Workshop, in Champaign, home of the University of Illinois. This group has been in operation for something like 40 years, and includes several successful, published authors. My work is so much better thanks to their feedback.
Get a great editor (and proofreader). I almost skipped this step, because there was no one who I trusted to help me draw out what I do well, without imposing another aesthetic. Then I met Elaine Palencia, who edited my book under contract. I can’t say enough good things about Elaine. Suffice to say, Under the Moon in Illinois is one story shorter than originally planned, thanks to her critical eye and insight.
Include pictures! Seriously, why wouldn’t you want illustrations in your book? Don’t you want illustrations in every book? With the tools now available for digital photography, art, and production, there’s very little headwind to make this happen—you’re only limited by your own creativity and gumption.
Get a great designer and cover artist. You really want to nail the design, especially the cover art. The measure we used was: Would you recognize this book if you saw it on a coffee table on a TV show? You’ll see from lists of iconic book covers (below) that what matters is simplicity, striking typography, and bold graphics. Internally, you’ll have a lot of decisions to make about font, layout, margins, and running heads. This may be more complicated than you think—it takes work to craft a design that’s so good you don’t notice it. I used Haley Salay for my book cover art and design, but unfortunately, I don’t think she’s for hire otherwise.
Expect to revise many times over. You really do need a book to ‘steep’ for long enough that you have distance from the content. Expect to revise your manuscript at least three times. George Saunders has some great insight into this process. See link below.
Do the production work yourself. You can hire this out, but in my experience, freelancers who specialize in production can be a pain. It’s not that hard—you can do it! I recommend you get InDesign, because it’s a great way to lay out your book once and then export for Kindle, KDP print, and IngramSpark. There are lots of tutorials on YouTube for this. Amazon provides very good directions, but they optimize for Word. There’s some okay content from Adobe.
Get a sample copy from each print-on-demand service. I was surprised to find that both my original materials choices were wrong. Matte covers are very easy to scuff and look crappy, so I went with gloss. And white pages look very manual-like—turns out most literary books have cream-colored pages.

How to earn readers

Well, as we say in the Midwest, “Hooo boy. That’s a tough one, guys.”

You can hire an independent promotion company, but beware—their prices range from $1,500 to $15,000 and up! I did hire a promoter at the bottom end of that range, but in full disclosure, I’d say the jury is still out on that decision. To date, my promoter has emailed Amazon reviewers with a pitch we wrote together. But I think all my book sales have come from what I’ve done, which includes…

Broadcasting emails to subscribers of my website.
Posting on social media (ugh). I have to say, Facebook has yielded more clicks than LinkedIn and Instagram combined. I’m hoping this post changes that, haha.
Personal invitations to friends, family, and colleagues. My good friend Tamim Ansary calls this ‘artisanal marketing.’ He’s found that just letting folks know about his book has re-kindled a lot of old friendships and resulted in book sales. I’ve seen the same thing. People are pretty nice! They just don’t take action unless you put the work in.
Giving readings and holding events where people can buy your book. We have one coming up in January—stay tuned!

Thanks for hanging with me this far. I hope this was helpful. As always, feel free to contact me with your questions and thoughts.