USA Today Archives - Mimi Barbour

#7
Publishing plans – need to be decided on – the release
date and whether the book will be self-published by someone in the group, say
on a multi-venue such as Draft 2 Digital, or will you go with an organizer like
Indie Writes who looks after all the formatting and does the publishing for you, and… takes 15% off the top. There’s a lot of work involved in the formatting
area so you want to make an informed decision.(Original post on June 18, 2015)

First the release date is important. We found out
early on that USA Today sales ranking is counted from the previous Monday to
the Sunday. Therefore if you release the book on Tuesday, Amazon will send out
all the books from the pre-sale the day before the release day and they will be
counted into your sales for that week.

For the NY Times – say your book went on sale
Tuesday, April 15th, the first list you could hit would be the one for Sunday,
May 4th. The New York Times counts
books sold from Saturday to Saturday as a full week, so that first week is
slightly more challenging because you have two fewer days of sales to include.

Now on to whether you release the book on your own
or go through an outside company.

I can tell you that I’ve been involved with both types
of collections—those with a formal publisher like Indie Writes and those we
released on our own. My preference, of course, is to do it without any outside
influence. Which means that you get to keep all the money and that is a huge
plus.

But it also means that someone in the group has to
be responsible for formatting the set. This isn’t as difficult as it seems – as
long as each author makes sure that her file is done according to set rules.

With a template system like Pressbook, it’s a matter
of copy and pasting which takes time but isn’t too difficult. Some people use
Caliber to format to mobi and epubs and others use writing programs that allow
you to pull off different formats. There’s many ways but none of them happen
without some effort.

Another job that will have to be taken on by one of
the girls is the bookkeeping. The royalties have to be made accessible to
everyone, which means new accounts must be open for the book and the login and
password available to all the authors. It also means that someone has to be in
charge of the royalties that get paid into those accounts and divvy it up when
the time comes. I know that there are all kinds of tax implications for those
of you who live in the US, but because I’m Canadian, I can’t go into these – I
just don’t understand them. What I do know is that the girl who did this for
the Brides collections placed it with her accountant and we all split his bill.

And then, of course, the book has to be released on
all the venues. Setting up the pre-orders and then making sure the final file
is there in good time (I’m talking about Amazon) is something that needs to be
looked after.

With Summer Fire, our organizer published it through
her own company and did all the bookkeeping. For the rest of us, it was simple
and went smoothly. We will recover our costs and probably make a few dollars
but when you have a 20-way split, don’t expect to make a bundle. It ain’t going
to happen unless your collection manages to get into the very high numbers on
Amazon – say #1- #100 and… stay there. And that’s one hell of a huge task… or just blasted good luck!

I have been in collections where we did go with
Indie Writes. Many busy authors opt for this choice because they like having the one-stop shop. One of the girls took on the responsibility of collecting all our
files and making sure they were formatted to his instructions. In the end, it
was less work for the group but I think having to rely on an outsider and split
the money had disadvantages also.

But then again, I guess nothing is perfect and
whatever hitches arise have to be dealt with in the most professional way
possible.

So are you still wanting to set up your own multi-author collection???

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