Self-Publishing Success in 1974
Part Two: Marketing
Two decisions that we made at the very beginning of self-publishing have proven particularly helpful. First and most important was the price. On David Gleason’s advice, we stared with a price that we felt would be reasonable to charge for a paperback intended to reach the general adult, college, and high school market — $2.95. Our production decisions were based on the fact that we had to keep costs low enough so that even after bookstores took 40% or distributors took 50% (or even more depending on the quantity ordered), and even after postage and printing fliers and other promotional material and other operating expenses, we had to be able to come out ahead with a $2.95 retail price. With too high costs, we could end up losing money with every book we sold. We were excited enough not to figure in the value of our labor, but we simply couldn’t go ahead with a project that had no chance of breaking even.
My initial calculations were based on average receipts of about $1.50 per book and operating expenses running about 50% of production/printing expenses. As it turned out, for the first printing, we had many more direct sales than anticipated, giving us higher average receipts per book. But our operating expenses also exceeded our expectations, leaving us about where we had hoped to be. Then with the second printing, the production cost per book dropped from $1 to about 50 cents, but we began dealing more with bookstores and distributors than individuals, so our receipts per book dropped, leaving us a little bit ahead.
In 1975, our first full calendar year of operation, we ended up spending $70 to $200 per month in addition to the cost of the second printing. Our receipts that year ranged $150 to $450 per month. In other words, there was no simple way to relate printing expense to operating expense. The bills flow in at a relatively steady rate, and the rate of sales and receipts has to keep pace. Success depends not just on the total number of books sold or the total amount of receipts, but rather on how fast these sales are made. If we were to sell 1,000 books in a month, we’d make money. And if it were to take us two years to sell them, we’d lose money. For 1975, our receipts totaled $3380, and our expenses (including the second printing cost, but not including a percentage of rent and utilities and phone, as allowable under IRS regulations) amounted to $3,195. (“Receipts” here means cash received, and does not include accounts still owing).
The other important decision we made at the beginning was the company name: the B&R Samizdat Express. B = Barbara, R = Richard. Samizdat means “self-published” in Russian. The name sounded so much like a train that we called it “Express” instead of “Press.” This unusual name, with its usual explanation, as well as the unusual title of the book, made potential buyers and reviewers give the book a second glance. Opening the book, the hand-lettered format caught their eye, and they took a few moments to sample the text and get involved.
We could see this process in action at the Globe Book Festival the very day we got the first copies from the printer. Walking by our table, people would do a double-take at the word “Lizard,” come back, stare at the striking cover design, open the book and start reading. Or they’d ask questions: “B&R what?” “Why did you hand-letter it?” “Is that really ‘Lizard?’ ”
Managers of a few small bookstores met us there and ordered. And a sales representative, Sumner Dane, saw people gathering around our table and indicated that he wanted to handle our book. He regularly went the rounds of stores in New England, representing a wide variety books and book publishers, ranging from operations as small as ours to Bellerophon Books. He took orders, forwarded them to us, and we paid him a percentage of what the bookstore paid us. We gave him a relatively hefty cut (20% of net, or about 35 cents per book) to keep him interested in our small operation. Inside of a couple weeks, he placed our book in a couple dozen stores and got an order for a hundred from Paperback Booksmith, a bookstore chain that also acted as a distributor to other stores. (For bulk orders like that, we gave the chain/distributor 50%; and, in our arrangement, the sales rep got 10% of net).
In succeeding weeks, we picked up a few extra stores by going personally and talking to store managers. But more often than not, the book buyer wouldn’t be in or would look askance at an author peddling his own book, or at any book salesman with only one title to sell. We didn’t have much time to spare, what with our regular jobs, so we concentrated our attention on direct mail sales.
We had had fliers printed so we would have something to hand to people at the Globe Book Festival. And a trickling of mail orders came in from people who had picked up the flier. More importantly, we did a mailing to about 200 friends and relatives, offering a 50 cent discount if they ordered (prepaid) directly from us before December 1. We have never charged for shipping/handling/postage. We like to encourage people to order directly from us, since such orders save us the percentage that would go to bookstores and other middlemen, and also give me a chance to get direct feedback from readers. By the way, for single copy orders, we give bookstores a 20% discount, to make it worth their while to act as middlemen on special requests form customers. They have to order five copies to get 40%. It being Christmas time, that mailing sold 60 books directly, then friends and relative and friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends who had read the book, spread the word. We sold about 190 books directly by that snowball effect in the first couple months. In addition, we had sold about 60 books at the Globe Book Festival, 55 at a Christmas craft fair, and 25 at another (poorly attended) craft fair.
We also tried a direct mail campaign to a few local colleges to see what kind of response we’d get. First, we contacted the administration for permission. Then we delivered fliers with the 50 cent discount, December 1 deadline cards stapled on, and college personnel put them in the students’ boxes, saving us the cost of postage. It seemed like a good idea, but 1,000 such fliers brought us only six direct orders. (It’s hard to measure the secondary effect of students buying the book in stores after seeing the flier or after hearing about it from somebody who bought it on the basis of a flier.)
Meanwhile, we could see by November 4, just one month after we had received the first copies, that we would run out of books in a month or two. So we ordered a second printing of 3,000, which was ready December 4.
After Christmas, business came to a standstill. There we sat with 3,000 books in our living room.
Following the advice of the Publish-It-Yourself Handbook, we had set our “official publication date” a couple of months after the date we first received the books form the printer, and we had sent out review copies to major review sources and also to local papers around Boston and in other areas where I had lived. We hoped and expected that when December 1 arrived, a few of these publications would review our book, and orders would start coming in from strangers around the country. But by January 1, as far as we knew, we had only been mentioned in a paper in Greenfield, Massachusetts, where a friend had brought the book to the editor’s attention. And that review only brought us an order for two books from a local bookstore.
We had used The Literary Marketplace (an R.R. Bowker publication) to build our reviewer mailing list, and had sent out about 100 review copies in the first mailing, together with 100 form letters to another set of reviewers asking them if they would like to see the book. After that, we sent out about 100 more review copies, following up on miscellaneous leads. Two local newspaper in Tennessee (the state where I was born) asked for review copies, and then didn’t send clippings and didn’t answer follow-up letters. A Chicago reviewer asked for a review copy, and in reply to a follow-up letter, indicated that he had just lost his job due to the “economic crunch.” The Washington Post was kind enough to acknowledge receipt of the book and to say that they would consider it the next time they ran a children’s book section, but to the best of our knowledge, they never ran a review of The Lizard.
With a disproportionate expenditure of time and money for phone calls and correspondence, my mother managed to place the book in half a dozen stores in her area of Pennsylvania. And we wrote a flurry of letters to distributors and bookstores, but got zero response.
The advice in the Handbook didn’t extend beyond production and the first promotion push. It seemed like we had reached a dead end.
Then a form letter arrived in the mail from Library Journal. At first, it seemed like an ad. Then I realized that a review clipping was attached; The Lizard was to be reviewed in the January 15 issue. A few days later, a similar letter arrived from Booklist, a publication of the American Library Association. Their review would appear February 1. Both reviews were very favorable, and both treated The Lizard as a book intended for adults.
I immediately wrote follow-up letters to all the reviewers who had received copies, asking if they had scheduled or already published reviews. A few answered. Publishers Weekly indicated that they “review only those books which have a widespread national circulation.” (Catch-22: you need widespread circulation to get reviewed, and you need to get reviewed to get widespread circulation.) The Boston Globe indicated that, as a rule, they don’t review paperbacks. (A strange criterion of literary merit.) A few others said simply that they didn’t plan to review it or that they had no way of knowing which of their reviewers might have picked it up or whether anything would be written. A Harrisburg, Pennsylvania paper sent a clipping of a brief mention that had already appeared. The Philadelphia Daily News also ran a brief mention.
The book editor from The Philadelphia Bulletin replied with a question: “Tell me something about your business — who you are, what you are, and where you got that name.” I replied with a lengthy letter, and on January 26, the lead review in the Sunday Bulletin was a very favorable commentary on The Lizard and our company. Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia telephoned the next day to order 25. A couple more stores and a few individuals ordered by mail. And letters to stores listed in the Philadelphia Yellow Pages brought a few more orders from that area. The Bulletin review also led, with the prompting of friends and relatives, to reviews in half a dozen local papers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and a few more store orders.
About this time, Library Journal and Booklist reviews began to take effect, and we started getting library and book jobber orders from all over the US and Canada. (We charged libraries full price, and gave jobbers a 20% discount to make it worth their while to act as middlemen.) A year after the appearance of those reviews, we still got a trickle of orders directly attributable to them. All in all, those review directly sold us about 300 books to libraries and jobbers (including over 100 to the various offices of Baker & Taylor).
Large East Coast distributors, such as A&A, rebuffed us, saying it wasn’t worth their while dealing with a company that had only one title. But a handful of stores reordered and reordered again. (Booksmith reordered twice, 100 copies each time.) And our sales rep kept getting a few new stores a month. Meanwhile, reviews appeared in The Valley Advocate (western Massachusetts), the Lancaster Independent Press (Pennsylvania), and Aspect (a bimonthly literary magazine published in the Boston area).
Part Three, the final part, will be posted here soon.
