George Parker: Making Book On Books!

My columns of last week and the week before were all about “Transformation” as it related to the advertising agency business, which is currently in deep shit, and continues to sink at a rapid rate. But enough of that misery, let’s talk about books, their creation, marketing and success rate.

Anyone can write a book, the problem is, getting the thing published via traditional publishers. Your chances of getting your proposal read by someone at a publishers are slim to none, they usually only read what has been submitted by agents they know and have some regard for. So, the first thing you have to do is get an agent, which if you’ve never been published is next to impossible.

Anyway, assuming you get someone to publish your opus, don’t assume this is going to make you rich. The average sales of most business books is often less than five thousand, and here’s the best bit, you’ll probably get less than ten percent of the cover price from the publisher… Out of which your agent will get fifteen percent. So, if your book retails at twenty dollars, for all those months you slaved away burning the midnight oil, drinking cheap scotch and shoving Peruvian Marching Powder up your schnozzle, you’ll get about a dollar fifty!

For years and years, if you wanted a book, you went to a classic book store. Things are very different now. Although Barnes & Noble is still the world’s best known name and has few rivals in the brick-and-mortar bookstore business; consumers today have more book-buying avenues than ever, with online sellers, general merchandisers, discounters and wholesale clubs offering big selections at low prices. Barnes & Noble was also late to enter the digital e-reader realm with its Nook device, which now must play catch-up to Amazon’s Kindle.

Amazon has not only changed the way books are bought, it’s now changing the way they are published. I published my last book, The Ubiquitous Persuaders, through Amazon’s “BookSurge” publishing arm. Not only do I get increased sales through the main Amazon Web site, but for every copy of my twenty two dollar book, I receive nine dollars and fifty cents. This is what’s known in the trade as a “Fucking No-Brainer.” And my douchenozzle agent gets zip!

I even make more money on the Kindle edition than I do on Kindle versions sold by traditional publishers. As analyst David Schick, puts it… “Whether it’s television, Internet, Wal-Mart, Amazon or an e-reader, there’s always, it seems, a new attack on traditional book reading and buying in bookstores,” said “It’s just one thing after another.”

Book stores will survive, but they’ll be niche specialists concentrating on specific areas, such as history, travel, arts etc. The Barnes & Nobles will go the way of the big record stores; music is now primarily a Web business with niche specialists surviving through independent stores offering stuff you can’t find on vanilla sites such as iTunes.

So, what’s the conclusion, apart from the fact that big book stores are as fucked as big record stores? To me, I think this is now an advantage for people who want to generate creative content, ‘cos there are now so many non-traditional ways to get it published. Just never forget that if it sucks, it will always suck, and a lot more people will know it sucks. So don’t do shit that sucks.

Otherwise, good luck!

George Parker is a guest columnist for psfk.com. He is the perpetrator of adscam.typepad.com, which is without doubt, one of the most foul and annoying, piss & vinegar ad blogs on the planet. He is the author of MadScam and his new book, The Ubiquitous Persuaders, which is currently setting the ether ablaze (and which you can order now on Amazon). He will continue to relentlessly promote the crap out of it until you are forced to stab yourself in the eyes with knitting needles.