Coffee Table Book on Africa

by Estelle Shay
(Riverside, CA, USA)

Be Careful What You Wish For

First, let me start by saying that I am not the self-published author here. My husband is. But I have been with him on this project every step of the way for the past ten years, and can speak knowledgeably on the subject.

Second, let me add that my husband is, in fact, a publisher. For the past 30 years he has published - successfully I might add - an excellent and well-respected film magazine that he founded back in 1980. So when he had the dream of publishing a coffee table book on Africa, he opted - in fact, he preferred - to do it all on his own. He didn't want to have some other publishing entity calling all the shots and dictating how the book should look, or having control over quality issues.

Let me start at the beginning. We did an African safari back in 1987 and fell in love with Africa. So for the next 20 years we kept going back, and were fortunate enough to be able to to visit game preserves in nine different countries, observing the continent's magnificent wildlife up close and personal. Since photography is my husband's passion, he amassed a great many wonderful pictures during those trips, and early in our travels decided to doggedly pursue his dream of doing a coffee table book on Africa, featuring the best of his photos. Since he is a writer by profession, he also wanted to address the question of why the safari experience was so intoxicating it had us going back again and again for more. And so ideas for the book began percolating in his mind.

Ten years ago, my husband began working on his book in earnest, sorting through his photos from each trip and beginning the difficult process of writing and researching the personal memoir that would accompany the pictures. Early last year he finally finished the writing part (nearly a third of the book is text, and it is a 360-page book, so the writing task was considerable), and then he spent the ensuing months overseeing every aspect of the book production, tweaking and cropping the photos, designing the page layouts and the book jacket, selecting the type, proofing the text, and so on. He chose to work with our local printer who prints our magazine because he had a close and reliable relationship with them and knew he could demand the highest quality. They also recommended a bindery adept at handling odd-size books. Because we chose to have the book printed here in the U.S. (most coffee table books are printed overseas because it's cheaper), this was an expensive undertaking, and we financed every nickel of it on our own. He did all this while still running his magazine business - which is his real day job.

The resulting book - "Endangered Liaisons" - was published last September, and I couldn't be prouder of how it turned out. Stupidly, though, we thought that the hardest part was now over, when, in fact, it was just beginning. In retrospect, we were tremendously naïve about how the book business works. We thought if you had a great product, it would naturally sell itself. We also thought we could sell the book just through a strong internet presence - by having an eye-catching and professional looking author's website - which our son did a beautiful job of designing - and by making the book available on Amazon. We didn't want to hand our book off to a distributor/wholesaler to put on bookstore shelves, where all the risk is assumed by us, and the distributor/wholesaler essentially takes the books on consignment, with the right of return, while still commanding more than half the proceeds. We've seen what people do to coffee table books in bookstores. Often the books are pawed over and returned to the shelves in a condition that makes it impossible to resell them. Much better to just sell the thing online.

We soon learned that was a big mistake. Amazon didn't seem all that interested in helping us sell books, that is unless we were willing to fork over more advertising dollars. The whole "if you like this book, then you'll like this one" thing didn't seem to have any logic to it, or work in our favor. And it took almost a year before Amazon even discounted our book - which didn't help sales. In fact, they only just discounted it after we listed it with Barnes & Noble's online store, which did discount the book right away, providing Amazon with a bit of competition.

We tried everything we could think of to drum up business in what little spare time we had. We got local publicity in several newspapers and magazines, but it didn't seem to sell many books. We did a promotional tie-in with The African Wildlife Foundation, which sold a few books, but not many. We got some rave reviews, but that didn't seem to help, and unfortunately, we missed out on some really influential reviews because some of those are pre-press only, and we didn't know about that until it was too late. Or they wouldn't deal with us because we were self-published which we quickly learned didn't win us many points. We did a few book signings, and sold books - but only a handful here and there. Hoping to sell in volume, we approached Costco, but they turned us down - we're told by those in the know that's because we're not a big, established publishing entity. We entered a bunch of online literary contests, and won accolades - but it still didn't sell books and only opened us up to being hit up for more advertising by those websites.

Finally, we went, hat in hand, to a small press distributor recommended by the distributor that handles our magazine, and asked to have our book considered. We went through a rigorous submission process, and in the end this distributor, which said it only accepts maybe 5% of submissions, told us our book was lovely, and that they indeed wanted to represent us. We were thrilled...until they also told us we'd need to fork up $15,000 up front for the privilege of being represented - with no guarantees, of course, that they'd actually sell any books. We turned down their kind offer. We figured why throw good money after bad?

The sad upshot of all this is that we have sold maybe 400 books in nine months, and have a storage unit full of the rest of our print run - about 4600 books. Shrink wrapped and collecting dust, as we pay $1200 a year for storage fees. At this point we're seriously considering donating the whole lot of them, just to stop paying the storage. And that just breaks my heart. It's not about the money - we didn't go into this endeavor thinking we'd actually make any money, though we thought we might earn some of our investment back. But we never realized how closed the publishing industry really is.

In truth, we still have no regrets about doing the book. It is a marvelous achievement and the ultimate scrapbook of our lives. But I hate seeing this wonderful labor of love turn into a permanent thorn in our sides. And yet that is exactly where we seem to be at the present. Time to move on, I guess.

So take this as a cautionary tale. To those of you who dream of self-publishing a coffee table book - keep dreaming, but be careful what you wish for. If you really want to do it, my advice is: know exactly what you're getting into before you take the leap. You're much better off going to one of those POD services like Blurb, where you can customize the book, print up just a few copies, and sell the thing to friends and family as sort of vanity piece. The real book business is brutal.

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