Publishing Train Wreck: April 2014

Okay, so, as you may have noticed, absolutely nothing that was on the Clark Ink release schedule for April has actually been published. And it's May. And I promise you that tomorrow will not see the release of the books scheduled to be released tomorrow either. And one should never begin a sentence with the word "and," if one believes in such things as rules when writing as an art form.

So what happened? Well, a lot, and it was all on Clark Ink's side of things so...sorry. My bad.

What I've learned is that in order to change one's business model, and add a new distributor for trade paperbacks, and release new titles all in the same month, one must first royally jack up the entire process by not having all the proper dots over and crosses through the necessary letters.

We are moving away from making hardbacks of major releases available in every bookstore and putting the emphasis on trade paperbacks and e-books. This is fine for the hardbacks. We are falling back on our old friend Lulu.com with whom Clark Ink has been doing business for years with our little print editions of e-books that we sell exclusively through the main Web site. No problems there at all. In fact, the hardbacks on the release schedule are entirely ready for press and just waiting on the go button to be clicked. I'll get to the main issue, which is the trade paperbacks, momentarily, but first I'll finish on the hardback changes.

We are moving away from distributing hardbacks to brick-and-mortar and online retailers, not because they don't sell well enough or because we can't manage a decent distribution deal, but because of hypothetical problems we have never actually encountered that just might sink a small press company like Clark Ink if they should in fact occur. Specifically, if there should ever be massive amounts of returns on the hardbacks, we can't really afford to handle them. I think in the history of my career as a publisher, there has only been one return ever of a copy of any of our books. No big deal. However, we are now making an effort to significantly broaden our readership and expand brand awareness bla bla bla. If this works, we anticipate there will be many more sales, which could potentially lead to many more returns, so until we can see that the problem is either not a problem or is self-correcting in the long run, we are playing it safe and making the hardbacks strictly print-on-demand through Lulu, while the trade paperbacks and e-books will get the global distribution treatment.

On to that...

The way we've found to make this work best financially for our trade paperbacks going forward is to go directly through Amazon.com, which has so far been an all around fantastic decision. Over the past four years, there have been maybe three total Clark Ink sales that were not from Amazon.com anyway. We do about 99% of our business through Amazon.com simply because that is where people shop for our titles. And Amazon is willing to not only print Clark Ink books to be sold via their store, but to distribute them to other booksellers worldwide as well. Fantastic! Economically sound! Profitable! Yay!

Unfortunately I suck as a human being, which throws a great wrench into the whole plan. The Amazon system is great, but it took some trial and error to work out the kinks on this end and learn the new ropes. In addition to that, there were a few last minute layout errors that snuck past and needed to be fixed, and we had to figure out the process for getting that done at Amazon, which now that we know it will be no big whoop going forward.

All that being said, look for everything that has been backed up to be published sporadically this month. We'll be able to be more accurate about release dates going forward once we've actually had books printed by Amazon and have a better idea of how much time it takes from hitting the go button and having the sales page up. I'd anticipate a few days. Meanwhile, we may just go ahead and hit the go button for the Cry, Wolf hardback at Lulu within the next twenty-four hours or so to prove that Clark Ink hasn't collapsed under all this reinventing of the wheel. Everything will come out this month thereafter in a staggered sort of way, but it will come out. In months ahead, we'll strive to have the new system down to a science, and it will be safe to more or less believe in the release schedule again.

We are also going back to publishing the trade paperback and hardback editions at the same time, rather than waiting a year to release the paperback, because, to be brief (which novelists suck at), from a small press standpoint, it makes the most business sense to do so.

Now you know my tale of woe.

But (another word one must never, ever begin a sentence with), now that we're almost on track again, this new way of doing things is really opening up so many doors for me as a writer and as a publisher, and I'm looking forward to a tremendously good year!

Still, it's not about sales for me, as you won't have gathered from this particular entry. The business side of all this is just a means to an end. Success for me is getting the work that I feel has merit out there for people to read or not, making it as attractive as possible, doing it justice, and feeling good about it, whether it sells like gangbusters or not. Yes, we are going to be actively trying to sell more books (not that there was anything technically wrong with sales before), but that's not really my concern. The year will be successful for me either way, as long as the stories and characters are engaging and the packaging is artfully done. Just so you know. ;)