I went to trade show this weekend and met a guy selling his own book. the topic was of no interest to me but we had a chat anyway. This guy in the UK had self writen and sel-published this technical journal, but what surprisedme was the fact that as well as selling it him self he had choosen to get it printed himself too. He must have gone to a book printer and ordered 1000 copies of this book and was fullfilling his orders himself which amazed me. His idea was that such a specific book market could only be best targeted with face to face sales at trade shows. He has a link on Amazon but very little sales from it, so he goes where his readers are to sell direct to them. Radical ideas, but it does appeal for my sort of writing. He described how he has to do a lot of shows and events to publicise his book and always got asked for a copy there and then, so self printed a load to sell, after that he reckons its his best way. As a writer you have to sell your self and you have to do loads of pusshing to get the sales. has anyone else tried this route?
I do manufacture and sell on-line my own products , but not books . The principle is the same . If your book is nonfiction , covering an obscure subject and your able to produce something of value , it is a viable option. I have sold books on my web site that have been printed by the writer . People do look for books on subjects they are interested in . My interest is music ,I know books on playing jaw harps or how to make and play cigar box guitars are in demand . I believe a writer of fiction would find it harder to sell their books , so to print them in advance would a bit of a risk.
it makes way more sense to use a print on demand service like ingram spark or kdp print... if you want copies to sell locally you buy author copies at a reduced rate the big print run and sell your own orders model is what self publishers used to do ten /fifteen years ago - and it never worked well
It's a relatively common way of selling in highly niche non-fiction markets - if the guy's got a regular schedule of events he hits every year and has a good idea of how many units he can shift, it makes sense. If it's something you're planning on yourself, I definitely wouldn't start with a print run of 1000, though. Go with one of the POD places Moose has suggested and buy a stack of 50 author copies. Make sure you can shift those before investing anything more up-front.
It did for certain non-fiction markets, but not for fiction. I'd agree that it would make sense to start out with a print-on-demand service, but if that book sells well enough it's worth looking at getting books printed yourself to reduce costs.
@big soft moose is quite right. This really does not seem to make much sense to me at all. The cost for an authors copy of a typical length book is $5 or $6, and you can order quite a large number, I think 999 if you wish, delivery in days, though it might take longer for a big batch. I get my book sales copies of E&D in 16 book batches, turnaround under a week. I don't see how a small volume printer could do it faster or for any less cost, and there is no need to buy 500 copies unless you anticipate selling that many in the short term. I would not recommend anyone go that route, no matter how narrow and specialized the niche is, unless the printer can match KDP or Ingram in cost and quality.
When you order in bulk you can get a far cheaper unit price than you'll find at POD places. It would obviously depend on the printer and what you were producing, but you might be looking at rates of $2-3/unit compared to the $5 you're getting from KDP. If you're doing something technical with lots of illustrations, diagrams etc then the savings are likely to be that much higher.
Yes. I haven't done it myself, but I'd presume a book with a few colour pages could be much cheaper with a conventional printer. Amazon charge a lot for colour printing, because they print the whole book that way rather than just the colour pages.
photo books almost certainly would be, and theres also things like lay flat D&D game books and so forth... but its a fairly niche area that is better done through print run. the other thing is people like youtube influencers or minor sports stars with a sure market - the being boss girls had a print run for their book, but they've got north of 200k followers and most of them probably bought one... the trouble with it for most self publishers is although you can get copies for $3 rather than $5 you have to buy a thousand up front - so if you only sell 500 copies that's a $1500 loss which wipes out the saving on the 500 you did sell ... also if you use POD you can get them to fulfill the orders, a lot of people under estimate what a big in in the ass self fulfillment is back when i was a photograher I did a self fulfilled calendar once and although i made a reasonable profit i'm never doing that again
Via Amazano as an eBook is the most for me what I achieved. I don't have energy to sell books on fairs. Maybe on one, two or three, but not evry weekend. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sure, I don't think anyone's disputing that it's a bad idea before you've got reasonable sales expectations - just that there's certain (usually very niche) scenarios where it can make sense. Most fiction authors won't hit the point of needing a 1000-book print run, but if you're going to 10 technical conferences a year and can average 50 sales at each, it's a better idea.
the guy i was talking to owned the rights and had the printing all done privately he did 500 book runs from china, from what i saw gloss colour pictures and a lot of black and white line graphs and diagrammes as well as writing. i reckoned he sold 50 ish on the day i saw him and its a three day event, now he is paying for the stall as well as the books as well as his time to sell them, to me it sounded a great idea and a good way to target a very small specific audiance, but the costs seemed a little high, but its not the sort of book you are going to find on Amazon, or the sortof people that would buy this book from there either, i can understand why this sort of book is very expensive to buy , its very expensive to print and sell forward
