Welcome to tales of cross-Atlantic writing and publishing
Stories of the trade from a writer and publisher
Years ago a writer friend in the UK lost her publishing contract because her last novel had only sold 31,000 copies.
Those would have been spectacular sale figures for me, either as a writer or a publisher. And it underlined two truths:
1. The amount of money left with the publisher from the sale of each book is so pitifully small, large houses require large sales to cover the costs of their editorial and sales teams.
2. An indie publisher could take on non-commercial books by keeping in-house costs to a minimum.
I’ve been publishing my own books, with both mainstream (Harper Collins, Random House, Simon & Schuster etc.) and independent houses, in the States and the UK, since 1992. In 2012 I started Barbican Press to bring out other people’s work and started publishing simultaneously in the UK & US in 2021. Hence the title of this Substack, “Books Across the Pond”.
My new nonfiction book, My Head for a Tree: The Bishnois and their Message for the World, was delivered last week. It’s coming out next year from Home - Profile Books in the UK, and Greystone in North America. More of that process anon.
Barbican Press has eight titles coming out in 2024 – I’ll talk about how those got selected, edited and marketed as each book appears.
Last week we had our pre-sales conference for the Fall titles with our sales team in Berkely, California. All was positive, the new books admired, and then projected sales figures came in. No title topped 500 copies for the first 90 days of sale.
When I started publishing, with a list of edgy literary fiction, I looked at the sales figures of nearly all books on the Booker Prize shortlist, Britan’s top fiction prize. Hardly any had reached 500 sales before the shortlisting. So that became my goal: keep costs to a minimum so your business can sustain itself on sales of under 500.
Such figures won’t do anymore. Expanding to the States has been fairly costly. After the pre-sales conference I had a dream, of another sales conference, in which it was cheerily agreed we needed to have a title that kept selling in print batches of 5,000 copies. The market is there, our books are terrific, and all we need is for readers to know about them. It’s a question of marketing. Game on!
Thanks for reading, and please come back to join the journey of writing, and publishing, on both sides of the Atlantic. I’ll be sharing lessons from the past and adventures of the future.
And closing with a writing tip.
Here’s this week’s:
Avoid the word ‘seem’. It’s too tentative. Make up your mind and take your reader with you. The writer who says ‘it seems different’ needs to take time and work out precisely how.