What is your book’s job?
Publishing a book is expensive. Whether you’re self-publishing a novel or spending a large grant on a major venture, the amount of money it takes can seem dizzying. This three-article series will help you manage plans and expectations. In the first article, we’ll focus on what your book needs to achieve for you. The second article, ‘The four quarters of every book-publishing budget’, provides a framework for avoiding budgeting blindspots. The third article provides four matrices for making cost-vs-quality trade-offs.
A successful book is one that does its job for the lowest possible cost.
In the end, your book will cost you whatever you decide to spend on it. And if all goes well, it’ll do its job for that amount. I’ve seen successful books produced for anything from $2000 to $200 000, and I’ve seen as much spent on unsuccessful books.
What is your book’s job?
This is the first and most important question to answer. Every book has a job to do, and you need to be absolutely clear about what it is.
For commercial publishers, its job is usually to make money. If you’re a consultant, its job may be to help you attract better clients. If you’re getting on in life and writing a memoir, its job may be to pass on wisdom and family stories so they aren’t lost when you go.
When a book does its job, it makes an impact. The relationship between impact and your publishing costs is not exactly proportional; it’s an S-curve.
At first, you have to spend some amount of money to have any noticeable impact. That is, you have to actually create something book-like! Then you’ll spend money improving that book so that it can better do its job. Perhaps you have it professionally edited, commission a great cover design, or travel to a conference to talk about it.
Then, at some point, when you’ve spent enough on the right things (in addition to accidentally spending money on the wrong things), your impact will spike. In other words, your return on investment is as good as it’s ever going to be. Perhaps sales climb faster, people talk about it on social media, or you get valuable business leads from it. That’s the sweet spot.
Eventually, the returns on your investment start diminishing: updates and promotion no longer boost impact as much. If you spend much more at this point, you’re overshooting your sweet spot. Your time and money are better spent elsewhere.
Unfortunately, sometimes you overshoot without knowing it – you don’t realise that you’ve already passed your sweet spot, and that your book actually can’t do a better job. It happens to all publishers. Now you know more, and can do better next time.
Let’s say you have $10 000 available. You might be thinking: will that be enough to get me to the sweet spot? But that’s not really the right question. Rather, the question is: what job should we give this book that it can achieve just as we run out of money? That way, the book does its job for the lowest possible cost.
The same applies even if you have a million dollars to work with over several years. If you let a big number make you feel ambitious, you can easily overshoot your impact sweet spot, or blow the budget on lavish experiments before you get there.
What about sales revenue?
If my sales cover my costs, then my project breaks even, and my impact is essentially free, right?
In short, no. It’s important not to count on making money from sales unless you are already an experienced publisher with a sales track record. Most authors overestimate future sales enormously, and most first-time publishers do not recoup their initial investment from sales of their book.
Unless making a profit is your book’s only job, do not plan on offsetting costs with sales. Making a profit from publishing is very hard, and can only be done consistently if every single decision you make is designed to maximise profitability – there is no room for other strategic priorities.
What’s next?
Identifying your book’s sweet spot, and then budgeting for it, takes careful planning and experience. Most importantly, your budget must include some fundamental elements, and you must make conscious and deliberate trade-offs between cost and quality.
The next two posts in this series address these issues: ‘The four quarters of every book-publishing budget’ and ‘Cost-vs-quality trade-offs in book publishing’.