Sally,

What do your clients want to self-publish? My guess, and I'm no expert, 
is that it's only profitable for something like _Embeadery_ - very 
specialized book, well-defined target audience.

Conventional wisdom is that you have to go through the big publishers 
who control Distribution to make any money in fiction, and that's 
probably true. There may be 40,000 people in the US who will buy a copy 
of my next sf book (especially if it has a dragon on the cover) but most 
of them will only do so because they walk past the book in a bookstore 
or drugstore or airport and pick it up and flip through it. In the US, 
the chain bookstores and other outlets buy from Ingram's. Ingram's isn't 
interested in distributing self-published books.

I took a chance on self-publishing the bead embroidery book because I 
figured that there aren't that many places where people buy specialized 
books like that - they certainly don't expect to pick them up at the 
drugstore! and I sort of know where to find my target audience: beadwork 
and quilting shops, beadwork and quilting conventions. A lot of these 
folks are already very isolated - for instance, the long winters in 
Alaska encourage a hobby that involves sitting quietly in a warm place 
and fiddling with itty bitty beads - and they use the Internet to keep 
up with new techniques and books, so that helped too; I joined a whole 
bunch of beadwork lists long enough to mention the book.

Also, it was something of a labor of love. There are half a dozen books 
on bead embroidery available from major publishers and they are ALL dumb 
and simplistic beyond belief. The repetition of basic information with 
nothing added eventually irritated the heck out of me, so I decided that 
I would by God write a book with some INFORMATION in it, and I would 
publish it myself so that I wouldn't have to deal with the crafts 
publishers who dumbed down the other books, and maybe with a lot of luck 
it would sell enough copies to recoup the printing costs so that I 
wouldn't feel like a total idiot.

The only way this could possibly work is because I get to keep all the 
money that people pay for the book, so instead of getting 8 to 35 cents 
a copy in "royalties", I get somewhere between $10 and $30 a copy 
depending on who's buying it. (Amazon.com and the major catalog 
companies and the ONE distributor of beadwork books in the US all demand 
discounts of 55% to 65%; I had to factor that into the list price to 
make sure I wouldn't be selling to the big guys at a loss.) Even with 
those discounts, selling a mere 3,000 copies earned around $40,000. (The 
downside is that I had to personally pick up and pack every single book. 
That adds up to a lot of heavy lifting)

I was totally gobsmacked by the speed with which that first printing 
sold out - it was gone in less than a year. Not only that....I didn't 
even have time to advertise the damn book last year, I was too busy 
packing and shipping copies! The second printing is moving a bit more 
slowly; I'm placing my first ad in a beadwork magazine come August. 
It'll be interesting to see if that improves this year's sales. I really 
don't know. I keep thinking that everybody who could possibly be 
interested in this extremely arcane subject must already own a copy of 
the book...and then some more orders come in.

So is this typical? Is this such a rich country that there are over 
5,000 people out there who buy every new crafts book that's remotely 
related to their interests? Did this book somehow fill a long-felt want 
in the beading world? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

But I'm working on Volume II.


-Margaret Ball
www.flameweaver.com

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