I originally founded Sundog Publishing in 2003 as a vehicle for self-publishing my own college textbooks. With two titles of my own in print (one of which is now in its second edition), I am now helping other prospective authors, especially academic authors, consider alternatives to large commercial publishing houses.
The most compelling reasons to self-publish include the following:
Please feel free to contact me if you have questions not answered by the remainder of this page.
- Grant Petty
The value of a book lies not in the cost of the paper, ink, or binding, but rather the content. It is the content that determines how many readers will be interested in a given book and what they are willing to pay for it. You, the author, are the creator of the content, and therefore it is your product the reader is paying for. The physical book, which usually costs well under $5 per copy to manufacture, is just the medium, just as a 15-cent CD is the medium for $17.00 worth of music.
Notwithstanding the central role of the author in creating most of the value of the product, traditional publishing houses typically offer book publishing contracts that strip the author of both ownership and control of their own content while paying royalties that are a very small percentage of the net sales price of the book -- usually around 10% for first-time authors. Authors, most of whom have better things to do than study the economics of publishing, typically accept these terms without argument.
Commercial publishers are motivated primarily by a desire to maximize profit, which means not only keeping author royalties low but also jacking up book prices as high as the market will bear. In the case of textbooks for college courses, this price can be quite high indeed, because the person selecting the book (the instructor) is not the one paying for it. It is no coincidence that textbook prices are often 3-4 times higher than non-academic books of similar physical description and sales rate. Let me repeat: The cover price has almost nothing to do with the cost of manufacture --- a typical hardbound textbook selling for $100 probably cost less than $4 to print and bind.
In the old days (meaning "more than a couple decades ago"), the process of laying out and typesetting a book, inserting photographs and other figures from "camera ready copy", and other tasks, was indeed very labor-intensive and required a staff of skilled specialists. Modern technology has now eliminated much of the pure labor of preparing a book for publication. Anyone, including authors, can use a suitable layout program like InDesign or LaTeX to produce a PDF file that can be turned into a truckload of printed and bound books. In view of these advances, it should cost substantially less than it used to for a major publisher to publish your book. Book prices should go down, and author royalties should go up. Yet the ratio of sales price to author compensation has not changed!
The problems of high book price and low author compensation are worst for "niche" fields in which total sales of a particular book are likely to be at most a few hundred to a thousand. Publishers understandably don't want to assume the significant expense and risk of producing a new book without some reasonable expectation of turning a profit. And because they have large staffs to pay and other expenses (including titles with disappointing sales), they can only make money if N times P, where N is the number of copies sold and P is the profit margin per copy, is a fairly large dollar figure. If it is known a priori that N will be small (e.g., because the prospective book is called The Ecology and Evolution of Badger Phenotypes), then P must be large. The way to achieve large P is to pay authors almost nothing and charge customers (e.g, the poor research libraries) as much as the market will bear.
Some authors are not motivated so much by the financial rewards as they are by seeing their work used as widely as possible, especially in the classroom. For those authors, a high list price is painful both in terms of its adverse effect on sales (i.e., N) and its impact on students' pocketbooks.
I believe that it is largely because of insufficient incentives (tangible and intangible) to authors that there remain so many glaring gaps in the textbook offerings at the upper division and graduate levels in specialized fields like mine. Under the traditional arrangement, authors are unlikely to earn enough to even remotely compensate them for the considerable time and effort it requires to write a specialized textbook. Academic authors must therefore undertake the task primarily as a "labor of love," often in competition with other obligations such as teaching and research. Relatively few academic authors are prepared to make the sacrifice, especially in early- or mid-career, which is when they are most likely to be attuned to deficiencies in existing textbooks for their own new courses.
When you self-publish a book, you take complete control of the book publication process from beginning to end. With recent advances in publishing technology, 80% or more of the effort of creating a new book is in the writing, which you will be doing regardless of whether you self-publish or work with a traditional publisher. By accepting the remaining 20%, you retain complete ownership of the fruits of your intellectual labor, and you potentially earn significantly more per copy sold.
Example: For an author contemplating the writing of a textbook with a list price of $80 and a sales potential of, say, 500 copies per year, the choice might be between $3000 per year under a traditional royalty scheme (e.g., 10% of the $60 wholesale price) and a net income (after expenses) of over $20,000 if the book is self-published at the same wholesale price ($30,000 minus approximately $10,000 in printing and other expenses). If the book continues to do this well for, say, 10 years (which is not unreasonable for a one-of-a-kind academic textbook), the choice is between $30,000 in total income from a one-time writing effort versus roughly $200,000!
Alternatively, the author might choose to take the same $3,000 in personal income as s/he would under a traditional publication contract, in which case the self-published book could wholesale for a mere $26 per copy. From the student's perspective, the difference is then between $80 retail and $35 retail per copy!
More likely, the self-publishing author will choose a book price that is significantly below what a commercial publishing house would charge for the same book while still high enough to reward the author for the significant extra effort and risk of self-publishing. In short, by cutting out the middle man and increasing the return on the author's effort, self-publishing is potentially the answer to both high textbook prices and the shortage of good textbooks.
Self-publishing is not for everyone. You have to want to do it, and you have to be willing to acquire the requisite knowledge and tools to handle both the technical and the business end of things. You must be confident enough in the ultimate success of your book to be willing to invest considerable time and money in getting it to market. Once the book has been printed, you must either handle marketing and order fulfillment yourself or else figure out who will and at what cost.
For those with an entrepreneurial spirit and a wide range of interests and abilities, creating and publishing a successful book can be one of the most satisfying accomplishments you can imagine -- akin to designing and building one's own house from scratch. But most people aren't eager to take on that kind of commitment, especially at the level of being architect, carpenter, plumber, electrician, painter, and carpet-layer all rolled into one! Many or most would prefer to contract some or most of these functions to others, keeping only the parts that really interest them.
So, what if you appreciate some of the advantages of self-publishing that I cited above but aren't sure you're ready to take on the whole process from start to finish? Or what if you are concerned about your ability to finance the significant up-front expense of printing your book, which typically runs in the thousands of dollars? This is where Sundog Publishing might be able to help. I plan to begin taking on a very limited number of carefully selected new titles and to work in close cooperation with their authors to help them publish a quality book that will be ordered by bookstores and libraries and will be stocked by Amazon.com.
My role will fall somewhere between that of a self-publisher and a traditional publishing house. The precise point between those extremes will be negotiable on a case-by-case basis. The benefits to you, the author, and to your readers, will also fall somewhere between the two extremes.
The reason I can offer this partnership is that I have already been through the process four times and now have both the knowledge and the infrastructure in place to publish and distribute additional titles with vastly less effort and expense than would be required by someone self-publishing for the first time. In addition, I have a strong personal interest in facilitating the trend toward "democratization" of the publishing industry, which includes putting more control of the process, and more of the rewards (tangible and intangible), in the hands of authors.
For the purposes of this discussion, there are three kinds of books:
Sundog Publishing is exclusively interested in book proposals falling in the second of the above three categories. We are particularly interested in developing titles that have a high likelihood of being (a) widely adopted as textbooks for courses, (b) widely purchased by academic libraries, and/or (c) easily found by interested readers without extensive marketing; e.g., via focused searches on Amazon.com.
Regardless of how you initially develop your content, the final book layout and typesetting will normally be accomplished using either LaTeX or Adobe InDesign. Under very rare circumstances, we might accept a completely formatted PDF version of the text to be published, but only if absolutely no additional editing on our part appears necessary prior to production.
A word processing program like Word or Word Perfect is not an acceptable substitute for the above when it comes to final production (see here for an entertaining - and accurate - rant on the deficiencies of WYSIWYG word processors for serious publications). Any content that is created in a word processing program will, sooner or later, have to be imported into either LaTeX or InDesign, a process that might or might not be time-consuming and/or painful, depending on the content. Consequently, book proposals from authors who are prepared to provide their content to Sundog Publishing entirely as LaTeX or InDesign files will be viewed most favorably. Next would be content that can easily be converted to one of these formats, especially pure text with minimal use of tables, equations, or other hard-to-convert formatting.
LaTeX is greatly preferred for any book that includes mathematical equations and is an excellent choice for textbooks in general, especially when content is more important than custom visual design. It also includes tools for cross-referencing and index creation. My two textbooks, A First Course in Atmospheric Radiation and A First Course in Atmospheric Thermodynamics, were entirely created in LaTeX. In practice, LaTeX will be the environment of choice for typesetting new titles published by Sundog Publishing except when there are compelling reasons for using another program like InDesign.
At an appropriate time, Sundog Publishing will provide technical information to be included on the copyright page, such as ISBN number, Library of Congress Control Number, copyright statements, etc.
We will normally require the cover design to be provided as an editable Adobe Illustrator file. We will assist in preparing the final layout, including bar codes etc., but the basic content, including both text and any graphics, will normally be the responsibility of the author unless other arrangements have been made.
Many different formats and bindings exist as options for your book, ranging from spiral-bound 8.5x11 to the highest-quality cloth-bound (hardcover). The difference in cost between these is not nearly as large as most people imagine: binding a book in hardcover adds a great deal of perceived value (compare hardcover and softcover prices of current bestsellers!) while adding less than two dollars per copy in actual manufacturing cost.
In short, choose the binding that is the best fit to the intended use of the book. For durability, I recommend notch-adhesive for softcover, not the cheaper "perfect" binding used for mass-market paperbacks.
Color printing is significantly more expensive than printing using only black ink. If you plan to use color only sparingly, then color pages will normally be grouped together in signatures (e.g., 16 consecutive pages printed as a single unit) in order to be cost-effective, so don't expect to scatter a few isolated color images through your book! Every signature in which any color at all appears might as well be entirely color, from the printer's perspective.
I will offer the authors I work with a great deal of creative independence in developing their book. Nevertheless, the final text and layout of the book must meet high standards of professional appearance, logical organization, clarity, and completeness before I will send it off for printing and binding under the Sundog Publishing name. Please plan to consult with me regularly as you develop your content. I will alert you as early as possible to any deficiencies I perceive. My goal is to help publish books that are (a) likely to be embraced by their target audience and (b) essentially indistinguishable in quality and physical appearance from those produced by major publishers like Springer or Wiley.
Sundog Publishing will be responsible for registering your book with Bowker's Books In Print and for submitting copies to major reviewers such as the Academic Library Association's Choice magazine as well as professional journals, where appropriate. In addition, I will work with you to develop lists of potential contacts within your field who should receive information regarding your new book.
Sundog Publishing will also assume full responsibility for order fulfillment, including online orders via our own website as well as via Amazon.com and other retailers.
Apart from the general policies outlined above, the details of every book publishing contract I offer to prospective authors will be fully negotiable. My goal will be a partnership that is beneficial to the author, to the buyers of the book and, of course, to Sundog Publishing, taking into account the particular purpose of, and audience for, the book, as well as the capabilities of the author.
Generally speaking, you can expect the following:
If you are considering working with a major publisher, I encourage you to consult with me on the contract terms offered by that publisher. Although there is no substitute for professional legal advice, I can probably point out terms and conditions in that contract that are considerably less favorable to you, the author, than I would offer. At the least, you may be able to use my advice as a basis for negotiating more favorable terms (yes, even contracts from major publishers are negotiable, and they will bend if they think they will make money on your book!).
Send email to info@sundogpublishing.com or call 608-263-3265.