Preaching to the Converted

by Neil Nixon
(Kent, UK)

Living Legends on the Cover

Genre: Sports

Technically speaking this is published by someone else - Lulu.com - but it's self publishing as far as I'm concerned because I did nearly all the work and placed the book with Lulu, who are a print-on-demand operation. What I'd say to anyone trawling this site for self-publishing ideas is that this book shows the best and worst of self-publishing. On the positive side it is aimed at a niche market I know well - supporters of Carlisle United. It spins off from some of my other work writing about football, doing the odd bit of radio work in that area etc. It also does well out of the fact that I'm known as a football author and some of my football work brings traffic through my website. It was also very cost effective. It cost around £130-00, £60-00 to buy the distribution deal that put the book on Amazon and in the reach of shops, £70-00 to my mate who works as the official photographer at the club and designed the covers. Allowing for the costings at Lulu that means 39 sales direct from the publisher's site put the project into profit. Finally, it's an easy book to write, chronicling one season of games and gossip. I simply reported what happened and made efforts to make the book entertaining and reflect both the club and its supporters.

On the down side there is a glass ceiling to the sales of a book like this. Carlisle United have a few thousand die-hard fans, and not all of them buy books. But the most dedicated buy everything. Another snag is that you can write a brilliant book about a bad season but when success vanishes, so do some fans and some sales. Most people don't buy directly from the publishers, they wait until the book is on Amazon, where they trust the seller but I make less money. To put this in context, one marketing move I made was to get an administrator on the biggest Facebook page devoted to the club to message the 1100 others on that page with the link to the Amazon page. That was the most successful single piece of marketing, way more effective in sales terms than my local paper interviews. Another thing you have to take into account with books like this is the reluctance of bookshops to stock them. They are not sale or return items, once stocked in the bookshop they have to be sold, or thrown away. For all the talk about the internet, the best route to selling books is - usually - the old route of people seeing them in a shop and taking time to look at them before buying. So print-on-demand needs some thought in terms of marketing. I did find a way round this by doing a gig in Carlisle's biggest bookshop and talking about routes into writing for a living. Bookshops like that gig because I go in and sell other people's work - like copies of The Writer's Handbook - since they're fairly confident of making some money on a gig like that, which appeals to a wide audience, they are more willing to risk the stocking of print-on-demand books. I did sell a few copies of Blueseason at my gig.

I'll never make a living with this title, or any like it, but they do make sense if I can produce the books on relatively few working hours, and find easy ways to reach the buyers.

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Visit Neil's other page on this site, Workington Dynamo.