|
||||||||||
|
Subscribe to the Absolute Write Newsletter and get the Agents! Agents! Agents! report free! Click here.
|
Win a 1-year subscription to Writer's Digest by subscribing to Absolute Markets-- all paying markets for your writing. Click here. |
|
| |||||||||||||
|
|
Xlibris and the
Knife Wound in My Back Been thinking about a Print on Demand book? Well, I’ve got a slogan for you: "buyer beware." I’m not soured on the concept, right now; so much as I’m soured on one of the companies. Listen to my tale of woe and misery, and perhaps you’ll avoid some of my mistakes. I chose Xlibris for my POD book. I did this because iUniverse was taking subsidiary rights at the time. [iUniverse digression: They have since come to their senses and stopped taking subsidiary rights. iUniverse, does, however, still have a time frame associated with discontinuing its services, which I fear could potentially hinder re-selling a book to a traditional publisher. Funny iUniverse fact: we all know what a big deal they make out of their Barnes & Noble affiliation. Read their page on getting a signing at a B&N store. (Click here.) They admit you’ll have to bring your own books because B&N stores will not stock shelf copies of POD books. Well now, what good is it to have an affiliation with a store that won’t stock your product?] Xlibris' selling points for me were the lack of rights signed away, extra commission for books sold off their website, and entry into the Ingram system (i.e. anyone can order it and it’s on the online book sites). I thought the $16 at which they were retailing books was a bit on the high side for my book, which would turn out to be 228 pages, and that having a uniform price for a book, regardless of length, was a little silly, but $16 didn’t strike me as a prohibitively high price. So, for $300, I was published. My first big problem with Xlibris came after I got the printed test copy. When you proof a book, do not go off PDF files. Get printed galleys. I wanted to keep the process moving along and had been looking at PDF files on my screen. The files I’d been sent filled about half the screen or blew up to twice the size of the screen if I upped the size. The smaller size was adequate for reading, but not sufficiently large for me to notice the direction the quotation marks were pointing. Yes, it seems there had been an export error. It seems when having characters speak, the quotation marks ("smart quotes") were pointing in the wrong direction. Now every book has some errata, and doubtless, I have some typos. I have some blame in this for not detecting this systematic error. Still, this was an importation error, not one with my manuscript. Unfortunately, I’d signed off before the prototype was printed, and Xlibris decided if I wanted that importation error fixed, I need to cough up another $300 and reset the whole manuscript. That’s letter of the law legal, but I thought it smacked of a lack of professionalism. Clearly, there was a limit to how interested they were in the end product. Still, only the last section of the book was heavy on dialogue, and it was more of an annoyance than bad copy. I also had no intention of paying what I considered blood money. The next problem came when the book was released. I’m not sure how other POD publishers work, but Xlibris has roughly a six week period when a book will be available for purchase on their site prior to appearing on Amazon.com, BN.com, etc. You may recall I mentioned getting a higher royalty from the Xlibris web site. That would be nice… assuming I could get anyone to purchase from the site. I had the initial friends and family purchases from the site, but when I issued notices of the book’s availability in a 16,000-circulation newsletter where I wrote a regular column, the number of books sold was a staggering zero. Depending on which marketing person you talk to, the worst-case sales scenario for a situation like that is either 80 or 160 books sold (0.5 – 1% conversion). To sell zero books is almost a statistical improbability. Needless to say, I’ve had indications that sales have started trickling in since I announced Amazon and BN.com availability, so my best guess is that the consumer confidence was just not there for the website of a publisher that no one had heard of. Word to the wise: if the only place you can sell your book is the website of the POD publisher, you might want to see how willing your target audience is to buy off an unfamiliar web site. Perhaps my experience is unusual, perhaps not. Draw your own conclusions. So then a friend of mine ordered some books directly from the Xlibris, using the reseller’s discount. This was an unmitigated disaster. He couldn’t get anyone to take his information initially; in fact, he told me he was on hold for an hour. When he did eventually talk to someone, that person said they’d call him back with a tracking number. He never got called back. Two weeks later, I called to complain about it. Of course, everything was denied, but my friend got a call from them 10 minutes after I hung up. Funny, that. If you think that was the end of the shenanigans, you’d be incorrect. When Xlibris shipped the books, they forgot to put the suite number on it, and delivery was delayed a week for UPS to send a postcard requesting additional delivery instructions. Moving right along to the topic of the online bookstores. Xlibris promises to get you listed, but I guess they don’t promise to get your book’s information, description, etc. on any of those sites. Details of my book were haphazard. Borders actually got it correct… before they merged with Amazon. I had to submit all summary and description information to Amazon.com and BN.com to have any details about the book listed, and, to the best of my knowledge, BN.com still hasn’t processed all of it. Not what I’d call sterling service from the publisher, but probably meeting the bare minimum of their legal requirements. Amazon has also proved to be an interesting listing. After waiting a month from the time my book appeared at Borders.com, and BN.com, I asked my publishing representative why I wasn’t on Amazon. He agreed to look into it, as he thought it should have been listed by then. One week later, the listing still didn’t exist, so I inquired again. I was directed to the typos department at Amazon. This time, something happened. In a couple of days, I was sent a link to the page with my book on it. Trouble was, there were only two ways to find my book on Amazon. You could use the direct link I’d been e-mailed. Or you could enter my ISBN number into a price comparison search engine (which had not worked prior to receiving the note from Amazon customer service, so I know it was entered approximately the same time as that e-mail was sent). You could not find my book by typing in my name at Amazon.com. You could not find by book by typing in the title. It was unsearchable from the Amazon website. At first, I figured it would take a day or two for the database to reset or some such thing. A week later, it wasn’t, so I sent a note. Eventually, I received a note that the problem was forwarded to the people who did the programming, so that it might be fixed. After about a week it finally worked. I have no idea who was to blame for the first problem, but the second error was definitely Amazon. If only Daniel P. Kreft, former starting center for my alama mater, and, last I heard, techie at Amazon, had been the one handling my information, this never would have occurred. I don’t know about other writers, but I wasn’t about to start promoting my book until I knew it was available on Amazon. One of my core readerships is the eBusiness community, and they tend to pop over to Amazon at the drop of the hat. So this was the last thing I had to fight through before beginning promotions. One of things about selling POD books that I’ve found vexing is the sales report. I don’t know that you’ll find better reporting than what I have, although I would hope you could. With POD, you’re pretty much in charge of your marketing, so you might want to pay attention to who’s buying your book, right? Well, with Xlibris, you might have a problem. If someone buys directly from Xlibris, you get to see what town the books are delivered in, which for personal purchases is perfectly fine. It’s not my business if John Smith down the streets buys the book or not. However, one would like to know if a particular store happened to be buying a lot of books. You don’t get that information. More frustrating, anything done through "channel sales" (i.e. a brick and mortar bookstore, or a website such as amazon.com or BN.com) will show up only as "LaVernge, TN." I have no idea who’s ordering through Ingram, and as I’m trying out one of those Amazon-sponsored listings, I’d kinda like to know what my Amazon sales levels are, or if I should happen to suddenly be selling a lot of books in Las Vegas and should go do a signing. Not gonna happen, or so I’m told. Since there’s a one-month delay on channel sales results, I’ve only seen one instance of the channel sales result pop up so far. Still, the most unpleasant thing to occur in my POD adventure has to be the imminent price hike. Not too long ago, I got an e-mail from Xlibris saying that they would soon be having a price increase as they needed to give a larger discount to keep the retailers happy, adhere to industry standards, etc. Amazon, in particular, seemed to have not been happy with their discount. They needed to increase the price of the books to afford to adjust the discount. Now, if I were analyzing this for an eBusiness commentary column, instead of telling my Berenstein Bear-like POD experience, I might suggest that perhaps their business plan wasn’t very good if they couldn’t figure out what standard industry practices were before starting their company. Fortunately, I’m not writing that type of a column. At any rate, the day before I finally got the Amazon listing situation straightened out, I got another e-mail. This e-mail explained the price hike. You may recall my puzzlement at why you would uniformly charge the same price for each book, regardless of its page count? Well, I guess Xlibris came around to my way of thinking, as they now have a sliding pricing structure based on page count. Was this to be a small price increase? Judge for yourself. My original price was $16. The new price, given that my book fell into the category of 200-250 pages, would be $21.99. That’s slightly more than a 37% increase. (Read the official explanation: http://www2.xlibris.com/bookpricing/index.asp … although I’ve looked at iUniverse and 1st Books Library, and their prices for books seem lower… maybe they just haven’t announced their price hikes yet, either?) This creates some problems. Soft cover technical manuals may retail for over $20, but anything over $20 in fiction is most likely in hardcover, so here I am with a trade paperback at a hardcover price. This struck me as a ridiculous proposition. I can’t expect someone to pay $22 for my book. It’s contrary to my proud Scottish heritage to pay that much for a trade paperback. Still, I’m one of the lucky ones. The price goes up on September 1, 2001. As such, I was given three weeks to attempt to market my book at the original price and attempt to recoup my investment. There are a lot of people, right now, who still have a book in various stages of production, who will only have the increased pricing structure for their books. Pity them; they may not have a lot to work with. Hell, the old prices are still on the author agreement page as of 11:45 PM CST, 8/21/01 (http://www2.xlibris.com/pubservices/ps_author_agreement.asp). I guess they reserve the right to change prices later. Am I completely sunk? I won’t know for a couple of months. (Remember, one-month delay on channel sales reports.) My $21.99 book will apparently be available at the Xlibris website for $18.69. That’s under $20, so there’s a chance that might work… except my previous experience doesn’t give me much faith in their site’s ability to close a sale. There’s a chance that with the new discount structure that Amazon might discount my book 30% (as they currently do with all books over $20), which would put it at roughly $15.40. That price, I could probably sell a few. It’s 40 cents cheaper than the current price, after all. When I inquired about this, Xlibris didn’t know if Amazon was going to be discounting or not. I guess I’ll find out on Sept. 1. In all likelihood, unless I can find a brand name, widely-recognized web site that has a deep discount on my book, I fear the game is over, come September. I’ve been able to arrange a small amount of publicity in the coming week, but I’m not sure what the use is of scheduling anything that would see fruition after Sept. 1. I’m not soured on the POD concept, although I don’t think I’d use Xlibris again. Depending on what kind of data I can gather from this… dare I call it a "limited release"… I may do a follow-up next year and re-issue the book with whomever I use for that. Or I might be picked up by a traditional publisher. Or I might not do any more publishing for a while. I don’t know yet. Sit back, digest my tale, and contemplate carefully before you embark on your own POD adventure. Just because my tale is one of woe and misery, doesn’t mean yours has to be. Just keep your eyes open for the warning signs. You might have better luck. Todd Allen is a Chicago-based writer and consultant. His writing has appeared in such diverse publications and websites as Iconocast, The Chicago Tribune, Hogan’s Alley, and The Chicago Brain Trust. His humor can be found at his flagship site, http://www.indignantonline.com. Todd’s book is "Beware the Club Girls." Merciful acts can be simulated by purchasing his book at Xlibris, although if you’re like the rest of his audience, you’d probably rather get it at Amazon.com. It’s a very funny book. Really.
|
Sponsored links 
Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer! How to find a book publisher |
Text on this site Copyright © 1998-2007
Absolute Write, all rights reserved.
|
