Criteria for Possible Profit Making Book

On Thu, 15 Apr 2004 19:10:09 GMT, -xiray- <do_not.RemoveThis@e-mail.me> wrote:

 >On 15 Apr 2004 01:38:46 GMT, brimarern.RemoveThis@aol.com (BriMarErn) wrote:
 >
  >>What criteria (intuitive as well as rational) do you have to tell if a book
  >>idea will sell or not?
  >>
  >>Comments
 >
 >As a publisher...
 >
 >The knowledge that on average 1 of 100 trade books sells well.
 >
 >The knowledge that in technical publishing 1 in every 10 books must
 >sell well to keep the company moving forward.
 >
 >Editors at publishing companies play the odds. Their longevity at a
 >company is whether their choices over or under perform.

The skill is to distinguish between a subject which a lot of people
are interested in and one which enough people will buy a book about.

As a small publisher we can't afford the 1 in 10 success rate. Every
book must at least return its costs, and we've achieved that -- but it
involves saying no to a lot of book ideas, some of which I'd like to
take up but which leave that nagging "will it/won't it" decision just
weighing on the "won't" side.

A book we expected to sell several thousand sold just enough to
justify a reprint, and then stopped dead meaning we'd have made money
if we had stopped there but left us at break even with a stack of
copies -- and yet we've got one title which has been selling only a
couple of hundred a year but which has been doing that for 14 years
because, while it is now seriously out of date, it is the only book on
the subject.

The best advice I've seen appeared on one of the publishing mailing
lists: No one ever wen't broke printing too few copies.

The mystery to me is how fiction succeeds or not. If someone wants a
book on magazine production then they'll either buy our book or one of
half a dozen others on the subject, and many will buy most of them.
But if I want a "good read" I'll pick up what's on sale in the right
place at the right time that happen's to catch my eye -- one of many
thousands on offer.

Many years ago I played in a band for which I also worked as publicist
-- and after many months of churning out press releases and calling
radio stations, newspapers etc, often with little success, suddenly it
changed to the calls being incoming and the effort was to hold on to
the wave. What caused the change -- I wish I knew. I'm sure that
without the massive effort by all of us it would not have happened but
what caused the change is a mystery.

There's an "overnight" success at present in a book by Christopher
Paolini (Eragon) but that success came from several years of hard work
by Chris and his parents. Looking at that book you can see why it
stands out from the crowd -- but not why it stands out from the other
good examples in his genre which have not done so well.

Gordon Woolf
The Worsley Press
<a style='text-decoration: underline;' href="http://www.worsleypress.com" target="_blank">www.worsleypress.com</a>
Publishers of "Publish Your Book - a guide to self-publishing or to
what others are doing with your book"<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
 >> Stay informed about: Criteria for Possible Profit Making Book 

On Fri, 16 Apr 2004 13:51:51 +1000, Gordon Woolf <gwoolf @
nospamnetspace.net.au> wrote:

 >
 >As a small publisher we can't afford the 1 in 10 success rate.

Gordon, to clarify: the 1 in 100 and 1 in 10 rates are in the context
of those "1's" being top level sellers for the particular publishing
company, it does not mean that only 1 in 10 garners a profit above
cost. At least that's the context that I've heard it espoused in NYC
publishing circles. To continue... embedded in those "maxims" is the
caveat that only a few out of a group are true dogs, and that the
majority of the others sell with modest profitability.

The idea here is that editors cannot usually predict what books will
be the best sellers... sometimes sales results are extremely
surprising. So editors have to play a numbers game with acquisitions.<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
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