The Book Business: What Everyone Needs to Know®

What does self-publishing look like beyond Amazon? The lion’s share—more than half in almost all cases and more than 80 percent in many, as far as we can tell—of indie book sales are through Amazon; however, they are not alone trying to serve the indie author and fledgling publisher.

At about the same time indie authors started flocking to Amazon to self-publish through Kindle (and then, if they wanted to, also through Amazon’s CreateSpace for print book editions), Amazon started publishing.

The question will be this: what does the “established” publisher have to add to the marketing and distribution of a title? As long as there are lots of decentralized bookstores, publishers must call on them, take orders from them, and ship to them. But as and if the ecosystem becomes more online, more e-book, and physical retail becomes more Amazon

First, Amazon made their Kindle device connect directly to content, which loaded into it without needing to go through a personal computer first.

As we write, Amazon is also moving aggressively to build a brick-and-mortar store capability, the future shape of which is still unknown. But since Barnes & Noble is candid about shrinking its bookselling presence, mass merchants are finding books less attractive than they used to be, and independent bookstores are, at best, growing slowly, it

Book-of-the-Month Club either anticipated this fight or started it by installing a board of judges with impeccable literary pedigrees who were to pick each month’s selection. More important on the sales front, the millions of dollars the book clubs quickly generated came largely from fiction and, as time went by, from romance, mystery, science fict

How do publishers calculate their profits? Here’s how book-publishing economics actually works. A publishing house has overheads that are reasonably fixed: primarily rent and salaries but also travel and entertainment, insurances, legal and accounting, and the costs all businesses have to keep operating and keep their doors open. Unless there is so

Book contracts cover a wide range of issues, and therefore, agents’ changes to them do as well, from who gets to approve the cover design to who gets to sell the translation rights, and many questions in between. But the “deal” that is made comes down to royalties, advance, and rights, typically. The parties involved may go back and forth on these

By far the biggest provider of printed books—mostly through one-at-a-time print-on-demand—for indies is Ingram’s venerable Lightning Print operation.