The future of publishing is being pushed towards the web more than ever, but that doesn’t mean that the printed word is going to die a death all of a sudden. Some people enjoy nothing better than curling up with a good book, and can think of nothing worse than using an eReader for their literary indulgences.
If you spend your day working in an office environment, you might not want to come home and spend more time in front of a computer screen. There is also the matter of the generation gap, where older readers are far more likely to purchase print versions of books than eBooks.
If you’re looking to self-publish and you have an older audience in mind for you works then, surely it makes sense to have both print and digital versions of your novels available for every generation of reader? It might cost you more to have a printed version available to purchase from the marketplace and via your website and bookstores, but if the audience is there, why not take the risk?
According to research by the Association of American Publishers and Nielsen, the US market share of printed books compared to eBooks was 76.7% to 23.3% in favour of print, with 85.7% of the market share in the UK being printed books.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at the advantages and cost of having both digital and print versions of your novel available for readers:
The Benefits of Creating a Print Version of Your Novel
Putting your words in the marketplace is a daunting experience. There is no guarantee that your novel is going to find an audience, and the reviews that your book receives can sway from the ecstatic to negative, and right down to the downright rude.
There is nothing you can do from the review side of things, but creating a print version of the novel can be a superb way of testing to waters to see if there is demand for your novel. By printing a batch of between 100-500 copies of your novel, you can commit to a trial run for your novel and create demand with your ready-made audience (including family, friends, colleagues, social media followers and blog/email subscribers via your website).
EBooks are great, but there is no doubting that a printed version of your novel looks more professional and legitimate than a Kindle version. Printed books can look stunning, especially when they are taking pride of place on the bookshelves of local and national bookstores.
Printed versions of your novels give you plenty of options as an author to build your audience and take advantage of public appearances, such as book signings, public readings, selling and performing at schools, colleges and universities and selling at book fairs. You could also run competitions from your website, with the winner receiving a print version of your novel, which would be a far better prize than a free version of the digital version.
The Cost of Having a Print Version
There are a wide variety of services that will print copies of your self-published novel for you, and if you have a sizeable budget to hand, you can use print-on-demand services with the majority of the marketplaces, including Lulu, CreateSpace (an Amazon company) and more.
According to this article on the BBC, the cost of self-publishing a print-run of 500 copies of your book can be up to £2,000 ($3,100). On top of that price, you can pay a publisher directly for marketing services, which will set you back another £700 ($1,100). That’s a total cost of £2,700 ($4,200), which is a good place to start if you want to see if your book has legs.
Using the Lulu print service as another example of costing a print version of your novel, you can get professional quality printing, multiple shipping options and discounts depending on how many copies you want printing. You will need a Lulu account to be able to create a project, prepare it and print off copies, but it is worth it as you can also publish the eBook version and keep the project on file for future printing and marketing.
Lulu has a discount model that can save you money the more books you print off, so there is an incentive to order in bulk. They also have a book calculator which can give authors a price for the amount of books they want to print off. Below is an example of a completed book calculator form:
As you can see, an average 250-page perfect bound paperback novel costs $7.56 per unit, with a total price of $756.00 per 100 copies of your novel. The more copies you decide to print, the cheaper it will be per unit, but you need to do your homework first to ensure that you will be able to sell the number of copies you have printed.
The Advantages of Having Print and Digital Versions of Your Novel
One of the issues that the self-publishing naysayers have with the digital form of publishing is that it creates a community of authors who live online and have very little interaction with the broader literary audience outside of Twitter and Facebook.
Traditionally published authors go on book tours, with public readings, appearances and signings making up for a lot of their marketing and promotion, and it helps keep their works – and the authors themselves – in the public eye. Not all authors are celebrities, but it does create a buzz for your novel and a level of intimacy with the reader that simply publishing on Amazon KDP and spending months publicising your novel on Twitter could ever achieve.
Of course, self-published authors who only have print versions can still do public readings by reading from their own printed copy, but public readings are a perfect sales opportunity, with a chance to engage with your audience afterwards, before selling signed copies of your books as you sell them. You can’t get that from an eBook, as people rarely appreciate somebody autographing their Kindle screen.
Marketing and promotion is a crucial part of any author, especially now that the marketplace is so crowded and people are constantly dreaming up new and interesting ways to reach out to readers via the web and in person. By having printed and digital versions of your self-published works, you have double the opportunity to impress and won’t be found wanting when an opportunity to make a public appearance and sell hard copies of your novel arises.
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