How This Book Got from Ron’s Computer to you Kitchen
Part Four: Exploring Self-Publishing Options (07/29/24)
Self-Publishing vs. Traditional Publishing
The next step was researching self-publishing. This is where the author shoulders the entire financial burden and has to figure out how to market and sell however many copies they decide to print.
A lot of self-publishing is now publishing on demand (POD) where authors print and pay for the number of copies they believe they can sell short-term. The problem for me was that no POD house could produce the quality that Ron would have demanded for his book—the quality he adhered to in everything he produced during our 35-year tenure at The Herbfarm.
James was all ready to help me with the self-publishing route, as that had been our original plan. Ron, of course, would have done the marketing, and I would handle logistics. But now I needed to know how this book would get sold. Without Ron (my marketing arm), how were we going to get the word out that this book existed?! There is no value in printing a beautiful, memorable book and having it sit in my garage or basement!
This led me into the search for marketing firms and fulfillment firms. Several firms would not get involved with marketing unless I printed with them. Really, in the end, there was no single company who could handle what I was asking them to do.
None of them really worked out. I had started my research in April of 2023, and now it was July. I ran the Skyhorse offer by colleagues. No one had ever seen a profit-sharing structure like they proposed. It was sort of self-publishing with a layout, editorial, and printing staff on board. A major advantage: Simon and Schuster, a big name in publishing, does all their marketing and distribution. OK, I said…”let’s go that way” and I began to consider all the details in their contract.