Writing a book is only one part of the whole process of publishing a book. There’s the actual thing that eventually needs to get out into the wide world. Hard copy? E-book? Print-on-demand? All three or a subset only? Taking a step back: where are you as author located, where are the publisher and the printer, and where is the prospective audience? Is the prospective readership IT savvy enough for e-books to even consider that option? Is the book’s content suitable for reading on devices with a gazillion different screen sizes? Here’s a brief digest from after my analysis paralysis of the too many options where none has it all – not ever, it seems.
I’ve written about book publishing logistics and choices for my open textbook, but that is, well, a textbook. My new book, No Taming of the Enthusiast, is of a different genre and aimed at a broader audience. Also, I’m a little wiser on the practicalities of hard copy publishing. For instance, it took nearly 1.5 months for the College Publications-published textbook to arrive in Cape Town, having travelled all the way from Europe where the publisher and printer are located. Admittedly, these days aren’t the best days for international cargo, but such a delivery time is a bit too long for the average book buyer. I’ve tried buying books with other overseas retailers and book sellers over the past few years—same story. On top of that, in South Africa, you then have to go to the post office to pick up the parcel and pay a picking-up-the-parcel fee (or whatever the fee is for), on top of the book’s cost and shipping fee. And it may get stuck in Customs limbo. This is not a good strategy if I want to reach South African readers. Also, it would be cool to get at least some books all the way onto the shelves of local book stores.
A local publisher then? That would be good for contributing my bit to stimulating the local economy as well. It has the hard copy logistics problem in reverse at least in part, however: how to get the books from so far down south to other places in the world where buyers may be located. Since the memoir is expected to have an international audience as well, some international distribution is a must. This requirement still gives three options: a multinational hard copy publisher that distributes to main cities with various shipping delays, print-on-demand (soft copy distributed, printed locally wherever it is bought), or e-book.
Let’s take the e-books detour for a short while. There is a low percentage of uptake of e-books – some 20% at best – and lively subjective opinions on why people don’t like ebooks. I prefer hard copies as well, but tolerate soft copies for work. Both are useful for different types of use: a hard copy for serious reading and a soft copy for skimming and searching so as to save oneself endless flicking to look up something. It’s happening the same with my textbook as well, to some extent at least: people pay for it to have it nicely printed and bound even though they can do that with the pdf themselves or just read the pdf. For other genres, some are better in print in any case, such as colourful cookbooks, but others should tolerate e-readers quite well, such as fiction when it’s just plain text.
In deciding whether to go for an e-book, I did explore usability and readability of e-books for non-work books to form my own opinion on it. I really tried. I jumped into the rabbit hole of e-reader software with their pros and cons, and settled on Calibre eventually as best fit. I read a fixed-size e-book in its entirety and it was fine, but there was a glitch in that it did not quite adjust to the screen size of the device easily and navigating pages was awkward; I didn’t try to search. I also bought two e-book novels from smashwords (epub format) and tested one for cross-device usability and readability. Regarding the ‘across devices’: I think I deserve to share and read e-books on all my devices when I duly paid for the copyrighted books. And, lo and behold, I indeed could do so across unconnected devices through emailing myself on different email addresses. The flip side of that is that it means that once any epub is downloaded by one buyer (separately, not into e-books software), it’s basically a free-for-all. There are also epub to pdf converters. The hurdles to do so may be enough of a deterrent for an average reader, but it’s not even a real challenge for anyone in IT or computing.
After the tech tests, I’ve read through the first few pages of one of the two epub e-books – and abandoned it since. Although the epub file resized well, and I suppose that’s a pat on the back for the software developers, it renders ugly on the dual laptop/tablet and smartphone I checked it with. It offers not nearly the same neat affordances of a physical book. For the time being, I’ll buy an e-book only if there’s no option to buy a hard copy and I really, really, want to read it. Else to just let it slide – there are plenty of interesting books that are accessible and my reading time is limited.
So, now what for my new book? There is no perfect solution. I don’t want to be an author of something I would not want to read (the e-book), but it can be set up if there’s enough demand for it. Then, for the hard copies route, if you’re not already a best-selling author or a VIP who dabbles in writing, it’s not possible to get it both published ‘fast’ – in, say, at most 6 months cf. the usual 1.5-2 years with a traditional publisher – and have it distributed ‘globally’. Even if you are quite the hotshot writer, you have to be rather patient and contend with limited reach.
Then what about me, as humble award-wining textbook writer who wrote a memoir as well, and who can be patient but generally isn’t for long? First, I still prefer hard copies first and foremost nonetheless. Second, there’s the decision to either favour local or global in the logistics. Eventually, I decided to favour local and found a willing South African publisher, Porcupine Press, to publish it under their imprint and then went for the print-on-demand for elsewhere. PoD will take a few days lead time for an outside-South-Africa buyer, but that’s little compared to international shipping times and costs.
How to do the PoD? A reader/buyer need not worry and simply will be able to buy it from the main online retailers later in the upcoming week, with the exact timing depending on how often they run their batch update scripts and how much manual post-processing they do.
From the publishing and distribution side: it turns out someone has thought about all that already. More precisely, IngramSpark has set up an international network of local distributors that has a wider reach than, notably, KDP for the Kindle, if that floats your boat (there are multiple comparisons of the two on many more parameters, e.g., here and here). You load the softcopy files onto their system and then they push it into some 40000 outlets, including the main international ones like Amazon and multiple national ones (e.g., Adlibris in Sweden, Agapea in Spain). Anyway, that’s how it works in theory. Let’s see how that works in practice. The ‘loading onto the system’ stage started last week and should be all done some time this upcoming week. Please let me know if it doesn’t work out; we’ll figure something out.
Meanwhile for people in South Africa who can’t wait for the book store distribution that likely will take another few weeks to cover the Joburg/Pretoria and Cape Town book shops (an possibly on the shelf only in January): 1) it’s on its way for distribution through the usual sites, such as TakeALot and Loot, over the upcoming days (plus some days that they’ll take to update their online shop); 2) you’ll be able to buy it from the Porcupine Press website once they’ve updated their site when the currently-in-transit books arrive there in Gauteng; 3) for those of you in Cape Town, and where the company that did the actual printing is located (did I already mention logistics matter?): I received some copies for distribution on Thursday and I will bring copies to the book launch next weekend. If the impending ‘family meeting’ is going to mess up the launch plans due to an unpleasant more impractical adjusted lockdown level, or you simply can’t wait: you may contact me directly as well.
Keet blog 