What we learned from self publishing a book

On 20th April 2007 in Berlin, we had an idea – an idea to write a book as a collective. On 28th October 2010, a full three and a half years later that book, Digital Advertising: Past, Present, and Future was officially released. To date we have sold over 2,000 books, with monthly sales looking something like this:

Apparently not bad for a business book, but no way as well as it should have done. This post aims to take you through the journey and provide some of the key lessons learned (quite a few mistakes were made along the way). In case you can’t be bothered to read the whole post (it’s long and part of a cathartic process for me), the key learnings can be summarised as follows:
• A contract with a publisher means nothing if it is not signed off at the right levels. Make sure that you have had a meeting with the editor as well as your contact
• Self publishing is tough as you do not have readily available global distribution channel and it is almost impossible to replicate this
• Check as many variables as possible before deciding who is going to do your printing (see below)
• Don’t set your price too low. You can always discount later
• In selling a book, 10% is in the writing and 90% is in the marketing. Make sure you have a clear marketing strategy
• Do not rush to get your book live. Be sure to find ways of getting value from an initial exclusivity period
• On the revenue side, expect to make as much from events around the content as selling the content itself
• Do not expect to make money from self publishing a business book

Ultimately we must not forget that once the publisher had fallen out, the key objective was to simply get the book out and we achieved this. Anything else was always going to be a bonus. While it did lead to revenue for Creative Social, it in no way compensated the amount of time that went into the book but am certain it helped our profile and I know it inspired at least one person (who kindly e-mailed James Cooper to say that reading the book, helped his secure his job).

And to celebrate the fact that we have sold over 2,000 books, over the next 5 weeks, we will be reproducing each essay on the blog, in some cases with an update from the author. Arguably this will make the book obsolete. Alternatively it may actually lead to increased book sales – there is something quite nice about having something physical after all.

Anyway, if you’re interested here is the full journey we went through:

Background
During Creative Social Berlin, one of the topics that came up was that the best talent in the industry did not have a profile. And it was also discussed that clients did not get digital. So how about producing something that used the Social’s knowledge to educate clients on masse. And the idea of a book was born. We asked for volunteers to drive the book forward and Flo Heiss and Laura Jordan Bambach dutifully stepped up to the plate. Flo comments “I loved the idea of sharing our collective knowledge of digital, but also the idea of capturing the spirit and specialness of Creative Social. I think the book does this brilliantly.”

The publisher (part 1)
The first step was finding a publisher (for us it was key that it was a physical book – see why here). Through a contact we were introduced to Laurence King Publishing who immediately jumped on the idea. The first step was to find an editor (which our publisher funded) and for us it was a no brainer to ask Patrick Burgoyne, Editor of Creative Review, as he had been to at least five previous Creative Socials and he knows the landscape well. The team, between them, then sifted through a number of submissions from Socials to provide a list of topics that gave us the framework for the book. Here is what we signed of with the publisher:

The book started its life from a conversation at the Creative Social in Berlin in the spring of 2007. The idea was to get together the most interesting people working in the digital field from around the world to write about their personal view on this digital thing. The book is aimed to inspire students and clients alike. A look back “a look into the future“ a look at the now.

The book will take the form of collected essays. They can be anything from 1000 words to a drawing, a line of copy or a photo essay.

The plan was to get all the content for the final proofs completed by the end of July 2008 and then aim to get the book on the shelves by June 2009 – 11 months later. I know – quite incredible. Many traditional publishers still get their books published in places like China and then have to have them shipped over. To put this into context, we had by self publishing we had a first copy of the book a little over one week after the final files were delivered (more on this later).

Then came the writing. The process of getting the authors to all write, go through first edits and getting a version we were happy with over to Patrick took over 6 months and it was hard work.

It was at this point that we submitted it to our publisher who dropped a bombshell – the top dog did not like it – he was expecting a how to do digital advertising book. Obviously this was extremely frustrating as we had sign off from the outset but ultimately it was what it was and in the end we amicably agreed to part ways as what they were looking for was not ultimately what we want to write.

Key learning 1 – A contract with a publisher means nothing if it is not signed off at the right levels. Make sure that you have had a meeting with the editor as well as your contact

Key learning 2 – Check what you are getting more thoroughly when choosing a publisher. Lulu may still have been right due to the local printing (this was so important for us) but do ask the following questions:
• Support – I would advise that you make sure that you get telephone support as well as e-mail support. When the pressure was on at the end of the project, this lack of telephone support (Lulu told me it would cost an extra $1k to get this) was a real hindrence
• Sales support – check what support you will get from the person who is selling to you. I had very little contact from the person who sold the package to me (despite promising otherwise)
• Include postage costs when looking at pricing – Set an estimated price and work out what the profit will be. Be sure to incorporate postage costs. Lulu’s costs are absolutely extortionate at £2.99 a single unit which represents 78% of the single unit cost
• Amazon kindle conversion – where possible use a service which includes conversion to kindle. So far these have represented 12% of our sales and in the end we had to go to an agency for help with getting the conversion done (thanks Perfect Fools)
• Printing locality – Fact that Lulu prints out of UK as well as US and Australia was important for us (but obviously ships globally)

I have to add that the Lulu experience was extremely frustrating. A lot of the time it felt like the person at the other end was trying to do the bare minimum to answer your questions rather than understand the overall issue and proactively help although this did change towards the end once I had complained enough. Perhaps the biggest mistake I made was trusting Lulu’s mechanical edit. Be sure to thoroughly check the mechanical edit yourself AND get other people to also review at least once. I made the mistake of doing this only once I had submitted the final draft for formatting and the team (thanks Chris B (and Eli), Louisa St. P, Pete P and Scott R) found countless errors. While the extra cost was only £83, the time and the stress was far more costly.

The Cover
In terms of the cover, we asked for the authors to find volunteers to design the cover. We were fortunate in that the quite fantastic Bertrand Carrera stepped up to the plate and designed us this cover:

There were some issues along the way (mostly in relation to project management) but the main one was that the initial cover included a white edge around the book. The problem with this is that Lulu could not guarantee to 100% accuracy how it will be cut and therefore the first versions looked extremely untidy. We therefore removed the white edge and even now with just the white spine, there are differences between different runs of the book. The other thing is make sure that when you submit the file that is flat and uncheck the overprint file box in illustrator (knowing this could have saved a lot of heartache). Finally I know that Bertrand could have done with a little more Creative Direction but time did not allow this (again we go back to project management).

Setting the price
The aim of this book was always to get as many copies as possible in people’s hands. We therefore set the price at £9.99 which is relatively cheap for a business book. Of this £9.99 we received £4.89 for every book which was sold directly through Lulu but only £1.70 for every book which was sold through global distribution (Lulu provides this Globalreach service for $75 and is definitely worth doing – it has actually accounted for 14% of sales and probably is the channel which is holding up the most, probably thanks to Amazon).

The Kindle version on the other hand was set at £6.89 (over 30% discount on RRP) although it was worth noting that with the Kindle you can earn up to 70% of the list price. Realistically if we were to do this again, we would aim for a higher RRP price to give us far more flexibility (you can always discount after) and to make it far more feasible to sell in stores like Magma (at a price of £9.99, Magma retain £4.50 which effectively means we make less than £1 per book sold there).

Key learning 3 – Business books tend to be more expensive and give yourself plenty of room to discount later.

Marketing the book
Given our backgrounds, I am slightly ashamed to say this is the area we fell down the most. A large part of this is that when I picked up the project again, we set the main objective as just getting the book out. However it was only once it was done that someone told me that in publishing, ‘10% of the work is writing the book, the other 90% is in marketing it’. However it is kind of too late to find that out once you have done the launch party (which was fun – big thanks to LBi for supporting it). I had kind of hoped that the authors would naturally promote it and find clever ways of getting us out there (and some of them certainly came through with some interesting ideas) but this alas this an exception rather than the norm. While the authors were proud of the book (when asked the average score out of 10 was 7.5) and felt engaged (again 7.5), the effort their put into it was far less (5.2 out of 10). This probably comes from the fact that 1. we did not state the importance of promoting it up front and 2. Creative Directors come up with ideas but seldom actually do).

Key learning 4 – 10% of the work is writing the book, the other 90% is in marketing it

Also think that due to my other commitments (since 1 May ’10, I have had my own consultancy to run), my time had to be focused on getting the book ready for the launch on 28th October 2010 (the first final copy was only received with two weeks to spare) and very little focus was put on the marketing. However, with 60% of sales happening in the first 7 weeks post launch, it really was a key period and probably the biggest missed opportunity was in only getting copies to journos once we had launched which subsequently meant in the trade press, we got a total of zero reviews (which is a real shame as overall the feedback has been fantastic).

In terms of the things we did try:
• We sold a paltry 29 books at the London book launch – This was a tad disappointing, especially as the kind folks at LBi was supplying free booze but I think we had the book stand in the wrong place (as people walked in – it should have been pride of place in the venue) and in getting authors to sell it, we maybe did not have the best salespeople
• The US book launch was far more low key but led to increased revenue. This was partly driven by James Cooper’s fantastic idea to charge a total of $20 to also get a tweet through Creative Social
• Twitter proved highly effective – the initial tweet announcing the book got 674 clicks and every time we posted a discount offer from Lulu, we got at least one sale. We were however very conscious in not turning our twitter stream into a sales promotion tool
• Pay with a tweet was not so effective – we created an extract of the book which people could download by paying for a tweet but saw less than 100 tweets overall and no obvious increase in sales

• We put this same extract on scribd and had a total of 1,001 views although again did not see a significant increase in sales
• We put together some videos together of the authors which while did not lead to increased sales, was certainly useful in providing additional content to drive people to the blog
• We set up a facebook fan page but we set it up as an afterthought and there was not enough ongoing content to be effective
• We did manage to get our book into Magma in London but so far I believe we have only sold one book (probably more due to the fact we have no images in the book):

If/when we do another book this is what we would do differently:
• Be clearer (and more focused) on the audience and what we want them to get out of it
• A far shorter timeframe between writing the content and publishing (it is testamount to the quality of the initial essays that they do not seem dated)
• Get the authors in the future to commit to a given number of book orders (lovely idea from Patrick Collister to actually produce individual covers for each author) to secure income (a big thanks to Thesedays who bought 200 books to support their Brand New Day conference). In addition I would get them to commit to a minimum amount of marketing (including twitter and blog coverage)
• Increase the number of US based authors (just because of the size of that market) as well as include authors from Australia and the Far East
• Not launch the book until at least a month after we have a copy of the book we are happy with. This will allow us to:
o Arrange a set of exclusive talks/conferences around the content of the book in which the attendees would get an exclusive copy of the book before it is officially published. More events where the book is the ticket (courtesy of Sam B)
o Send books to key titles (especially US based titles) so that they can post reviews as the book goes live
o Get schools more involved from the outset
• Tap into one of the schools and make the marketing of the book one of their projects (courtesy of Gavin)
• Do the video interviews for a wider sample of the Socials from around the world (for logistical reasons we confined it to UK based socials)
• Develop a slick presentation to support the book which all the authors could use as a framework
• Set up the Facebook page far earlier and be clear what activity is planned to support it (including promotions)
• Consider getting one of the agencies to develop an iPad app which supports the book
• The 2 agency bulk buys we received made a big impact. In future we should provide clear bulk buy discounts and promote them to agencies (courtesy of Chris B)

Irrespective it was a fantastic journey and hope that sooner rather than later we will be inspired again to start the next one so that we can implement all these learnings (although we may yet get an offer from a publisher – you never know).

Anyway if you have your own tips, please do share them. In the meantime thanks to everyone involved in making the book happen as well as all of you who supported us by buying the book – I hope you enjoyed it. And if you are interested in buying the book, you can find it on Amazon or Lulu.