Episode 103 - The Third Process of Publishing: Production with Orna Ross
October 26, 2021
Orna Ross of the Alliance of Independent Authors joins me for the third of a series of seven episodes devoted to the Seven Processes of Publishing: Production. We talk about the production process for ebooks, print books, and audiobooks, including how the requirements for text-centric books is becoming increasingly easy for indy authors to meet; the expanding options for print, including easy-to-produce hardcover editions; and the opportunities that audio opens to indy authors. And we discuss what I have always thought of as the thorny question of ISBNs—those identifiers attached to each iteration of each of your works—and I discover that the answer is actually quite straightforward.
Orna Ross is the founder and head of the Alliance of Independent Authors, a non-profit professional business membership organization for self-publishing authors. ALLi provides trusted advice, supportive guidance, and a range of resources, within a welcoming community of authors and advisors.
"You do need to do all that if you're going to have a successful indy author business. But you don't need to do it all at once" —Orna Ross
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[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome back to part three of our series on the seven processes of publishing. And I'm here again with Orna Ross. Hey, Orna. How are you doing?
Orna: I'm doing very well, Matty, how are you?
Matty: I'm doing great, thank you.
[00:00:12] So today we're going to be talking about production and we're going to be talking about kind of the big three of production, so production of e-books, production of print books, and production of audio books. And then we'll address the thorny question of ISBNs.
[00:00:27] So I wanted to start out with e-books because I think that's probably the first foray that a lot of indy authors make into publishing and into the production process. So what do you and ALLi have to say about recommended partners? How you go about the ebook process? What advice do you have?
[00:00:46] Orna: Yeah, so you're absolutely right. Most authors start there. And it's actually our advice that they should because making an e-book is relatively simple when compared to the other two big formats, which are print and audio. So, yeah, in terms of production, you and I were talking about this when we were discussing how the processes break down across the seven different processes of publishing that we're looking at here and how the tools that we've got now as indy authors very often bringing a number of these processes together.
[00:01:21] So in terms of creating an e-book, it has never been easier, I think it's fair to say. And it's also standardized a lot in recent years. So you can do it in a very detailed sort of way, or you can do the simplest way. And we recommend when you're starting out to keep it simple. And what you're mainly looking to create when it comes to an e-book is the epub format. And I think we may have mentioned this last time. epub 3 is now the e-book standard and can be used on practically every platform. There are advantages to using a particular ebook for different platforms and keeping a track of that marketing wise and everything. This is not something you need to worry about at the beginning.
[00:02:08] And then in terms of the actual creation of it, there are just such great tools now that make this very easy. So lots of people use Vellum if they work on a Mac. That has made things almost laughably easy. It's as easy to make an epub and a print book, lots of different formats of books, with them as it is to just create a Word document.
[00:02:33] But speaking all of the wonderful classic Word document, which most of us need to use anyway because of the editing process, most editors are going to ask you to work in Word because that's the format that's really most widely, I think almost universally accepted in the editing space because it is so easy to track changes there. So you will end up with a Word document usually after the editing process. Now when you went to upload your book to Amazon KDP or a variety of other platforms, they will actually transform your Word document into an epub for you. So the production of e-books has just become easier and easier.
[00:03:20] And different indy authors swear by different tools. So, I mean, I use Vellum, so I tend to talk about it, but I hasten to say there are lots and lots of others. Reedsy does a great editor, which will create a fine e-book for you. There's Jutoh. There's Calibre. Lots of people have their own particular favorites. And lots of these softwares are partner members of ALLi. They're really widely accepted and they're constantly improving. Scrivener is another tool that allows you to create perfect e-books, you know, very highly stylized.
[00:03:59] So some of the tools will keep you very tight. So Vellum, for example, tries to save indy authors from ourselves by giving very few options in terms of headings and layout and so on. Others are much more sensitive, and you can make a lot more changes and things.
[00:04:17] So it very much depends on what you want to do. I would say, bear in mind that as verbal people, we may not be visual. So keeping things, I think with an e-book, particularly if it is a straightforward text e-book and like most novels and straightforward how-to nonfiction, simplicity is the best way to go. You want formatting to be invisible. You want the readers not to see it. ...
Orna: I'm doing very well, Matty, how are you?
Matty: I'm doing great, thank you.
[00:00:12] So today we're going to be talking about production and we're going to be talking about kind of the big three of production, so production of e-books, production of print books, and production of audio books. And then we'll address the thorny question of ISBNs.
[00:00:27] So I wanted to start out with e-books because I think that's probably the first foray that a lot of indy authors make into publishing and into the production process. So what do you and ALLi have to say about recommended partners? How you go about the ebook process? What advice do you have?
[00:00:46] Orna: Yeah, so you're absolutely right. Most authors start there. And it's actually our advice that they should because making an e-book is relatively simple when compared to the other two big formats, which are print and audio. So, yeah, in terms of production, you and I were talking about this when we were discussing how the processes break down across the seven different processes of publishing that we're looking at here and how the tools that we've got now as indy authors very often bringing a number of these processes together.
[00:01:21] So in terms of creating an e-book, it has never been easier, I think it's fair to say. And it's also standardized a lot in recent years. So you can do it in a very detailed sort of way, or you can do the simplest way. And we recommend when you're starting out to keep it simple. And what you're mainly looking to create when it comes to an e-book is the epub format. And I think we may have mentioned this last time. epub 3 is now the e-book standard and can be used on practically every platform. There are advantages to using a particular ebook for different platforms and keeping a track of that marketing wise and everything. This is not something you need to worry about at the beginning.
[00:02:08] And then in terms of the actual creation of it, there are just such great tools now that make this very easy. So lots of people use Vellum if they work on a Mac. That has made things almost laughably easy. It's as easy to make an epub and a print book, lots of different formats of books, with them as it is to just create a Word document.
[00:02:33] But speaking all of the wonderful classic Word document, which most of us need to use anyway because of the editing process, most editors are going to ask you to work in Word because that's the format that's really most widely, I think almost universally accepted in the editing space because it is so easy to track changes there. So you will end up with a Word document usually after the editing process. Now when you went to upload your book to Amazon KDP or a variety of other platforms, they will actually transform your Word document into an epub for you. So the production of e-books has just become easier and easier.
[00:03:20] And different indy authors swear by different tools. So, I mean, I use Vellum, so I tend to talk about it, but I hasten to say there are lots and lots of others. Reedsy does a great editor, which will create a fine e-book for you. There's Jutoh. There's Calibre. Lots of people have their own particular favorites. And lots of these softwares are partner members of ALLi. They're really widely accepted and they're constantly improving. Scrivener is another tool that allows you to create perfect e-books, you know, very highly stylized.
[00:03:59] So some of the tools will keep you very tight. So Vellum, for example, tries to save indy authors from ourselves by giving very few options in terms of headings and layout and so on. Others are much more sensitive, and you can make a lot more changes and things.
[00:04:17] So it very much depends on what you want to do. I would say, bear in mind that as verbal people, we may not be visual. So keeping things, I think with an e-book, particularly if it is a straightforward text e-book and like most novels and straightforward how-to nonfiction, simplicity is the best way to go. You want formatting to be invisible. You want the readers not to see it. ...
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[00:04:45] Matty: Yeah. I am also a happy user of Vellum and I do like the fact that they don't let you go too far astray. And I'm sure there are ways to do this in many of the different packages that encourage more. Manipulation of it, but I love going in there, I've picked a style and Vellum for my fiction work and a style and Vellum for my non-fiction work. And I know that as long as I keep picking that style, that all the books across the series will look consistent. So that's a nice plus of that.
[00:05:11] And you had mentioned the fact that epub is sort of the industry standard, but you can have a Kindle epub, you could have a Nook epub, you can have different flavors of epub. Can you talk about that a little bit?
[00:05:24] Orna: Yes, so, Vellum again will produce a particular epub for the platform that you are working with. And this is not so much that the platform requires a different production process or that you end up with a particularly different file, but it's very useful when it comes to the distribution, which is the next stage of the process that we'll be talking about, which you're able to trace back which book sold and you're able to keep tabs on your books because you'll know the Apple one is connected to the Apple store. The Kobo one is connected to the Kobo store. And so at the end, when you're adding links and things to take people, you can actually get a clear idea of where the book is selling by tracking the format.
[00:06:14] And there are little differences in the platforms and just having little tweaks that make a difference. But quite honestly, as a beginner, I would not get too hung up on this. If you use Vellum, it makes it really easy. It spits it up for you. If you don't, forget about it. It's not important to know at this point, you know where at the beginning, I always think, you've got to go through the production process at least once, all the different stages of it. That's the most important thing. And if we get too hung up on some of the details, we can actually stop ourselves in our tracks and spend too long worrying about things that don't really make that much difference until you've got a few books up and running anyway.
[00:06:59] Matty: Yeah, I think that is great advice. Better to spend the time writing than to spend the time figuring out how to make a new header and some formatting software.
[00:07:08] We had talked about the fact that epub has become the standard and mobi used to be the standard for Kindle based books. The one place where at least fairly recently I found mobi was still helpful to have is when people are sideloading books from their computer. So let's say I have my books up on PayHip. So if a Kindle reader downloads a file from PayHip, at least until fairly recently, it was better for them to have a mobi because it was easier for them to get onto their Kindle from their email or wherever they're downloading it from. Is that still true or is that starting to be a thing of the past?
[00:07:50] Orna: It's still true for those who have Kindles of a certain age. So it's still convenient from that point of view. But, you know, this is definitely going to disappear over time.
[00:08:03] Matty: So any other cautions you have about the production of e-books, any helpful tips or tricks on the ebook front? Why don't we start talking about ISBNs now, because I know that's always a question. So let's start out. ISBNs for e-books. What do you think?
[00:08:19] Orna: Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So ISBNs are how the book industry keeps track of which format of the book it's got. So if you ever want your book to be distributed by a library, if you ever want your book to be picked up by a bookstore, your e-book I mean, then it needs to have an ISBN. So, yes. And it also makes you the publisher of record for that book. And so we 100%, no ambiguity, say yes for the small cost involved. It is well worth having your own ISBN for your e-books. One for an ebook. One for your print in its different formats. One for your audio book.
[00:09:11] So the whole point, if you think about what the ISBN is for, it is the book identification number. Say a library wants to distribute your book, your e-book, to its patrons and they want to acquire your e-book in order to do that. Well, if they go looking for your e-book and you only find an ISBN for your print book, then they simply can't get out your e-book. Because they're not going to go to the trouble of sending you an email and saying, hi, we're the library, we want your e-book. It doesn't work like that. So, yeah, it's important, we feel.
[00:09:47] Matty: So for my print books, I do have ISBNs that I've purchased through Bowker. And I think that one of the interesting things I learned early in the process is that one ISBN from Bowker, I don't know what it is, 125 bucks or something like that. It sounds ridiculous. But then you can buy like a hundred for not very much more. If you buy them in quantity, even if you are just planning on publishing a couple of books, it pays you to get a batch. Can you provide some maybe more updated information on that?
[00:10:18] Orna: Yes, absolutely. You're absolutely right. You know, ISBNs and the cost of them is something that troubles American and UK citizens but doesn't trouble French citizens at all, because ISBNs are provided free by their library service. So there are lots of countries in the world where you don't have to pay for ISBNs. It's just some people. Nielsen is the company in the UK and Australia and Commonwealth countries generally and Bowker in the US.
[00:10:50] So yes, buy in bulk because you pretty quickly to start to go through them. You're going to need one for your e-book, as we said, one if you do paperback, hardback, large print, and one for your audio book. And then once you start to produce a few books. And then you'll probably sometime do an upgrade or and update and upgrade to such a degree that you need to do a new edition, in which case you will need a new ISBN. So think of this just as one of the costs of doing business.
[00:11:20] And definitely buy in bulk everywhere. It pays to buy in bulk, and I think they're more expensive in the US than anywhere else in the world. They are pricey enough there. But if you think about the overall costs in relation to other things, it's not that expensive when you consider the that is what makes you the publisher of record in the eyes of the world compared to not having it.
[00:11:47] It also allows, for ALLi, this is important. It may not be that important for an individual indy author, but for some people it would be, it allows us to be counted, you know, all the statistics that are done around publishing use ISBN for the research. It's very hard to get up what's going on with the ISBNs. So the fact that we are purchasing our own puts us in there and people know what's going on, are able to evaluate and give us information about what's happening in the indy author world.
[00:12:22] Matty: I think I know what the answer to this is going to be, but I'm going to ask, because I've never heard this actually addressed, that when people start hearing about bulk purchase of ISBNs, and you can buy them in big bulk because publishers of various sides are buying them in bulk themselves. I can imagine it would be tempting to say, you know what, let's have all the writers in my writer's group go in and buy a bunch of ISBNS and then we'll all share the pool. But I'm assuming you can't do that because the purchase is affiliated with an imprint. Is that true?
[00:12:54] Orna: Yeah, the purchases affiliated with the publisher. So if you all go together, and you're in Writers' Group Illinois or whatever, then Writers' Group Illinois becomes the publisher. So when you actually make your application, you have to put down the imprint name, the publisher name, all of these details. And so if you buy one bulk group of ISBNs and there will be one publisher name on that and everybody else who's using that will fall under that agreement.
[00:13:25] Matty: I had one more question about ISBNs for e-books. So again, I have Bowker ISBN for all my print books and that's always the advice I hear from people, i.e., they don't recommend that you allow Amazon to assign your ISBN. But for my e-books, I distribute to most platforms on Draft2Digital, and they will provide an ISBN that then moves on to the library platforms because Draft2Digital is how I'm distributing to library platforms like Overdrive, for example. What is the danger of using an ISBN from an aggregator like Draft2Digital?
[00:14:04] Orna: Well, in future times, if somebody wants to trace back that book and find out who the publisher is, supposing they wanted to license the rights and they didn't know, for example, how to get at you, and I know they probably could find you relatively easily on the internet because of your website and so on, but just supposing for whatever reason, you no longer exist. And it's your heirs, for example. So they want to get in touch. It's Draft2Digital, they'll end up with, because Draft2Digital owns that ISBN. So Draft2Digital is the publisher of record for that e-book. So, yeah, we would really recommend that you use one of your own purchased ISBNs on the e-books as well as the print.
[00:14:51] And yeah, you will hear varying opinions about that, but I think a lot of this arises from almost a sense like an e-book isn't quite a real book or something. You know, why would you give different advice for print and e-books? If you think about just from a publication perspective, as opposed to from a saving money perspective. From a business perspective, why is an e-book, which would probably actually generate you more money at the end of the day, something that you wouldn't actually want to have your own ISBN for. I don't quite follow the logic, I guess,
[00:15:29] Matty: Is the considerations for not using an ISBN that would be assigned by Amazon KDP, for example, is that different? Is Amazon taking on more ownership by providing the ISBN than Draft2Digital is taking on by providing their ISBN?
[00:15:44] Orna: No, they don't take on more, but there is a reason that all of the services are "kindly" providing us with "free" ISBNs. There is an advantage to owning the ISBN and that's why they are claiming that advantage for their business rather than you are claiming it for your business.
[00:16:06] Matty: So that we don't make the production segment of this all about ISBNs, I don't want to have to title this, "Everything You Wanted to Know about ISBNs but Were Afraid to Ask," let's move on to print books. So same question that we started out with for the e-books. Is there an approach, a platform, vendors that you and ALLi recommend for print books?
[00:16:25] Orna: Yeah. When it comes to print, using just two platforms is easy, right? And it’s the same PDF interior that you will use for both. It's KDP Print for the Amazon ecosystem and IngramSpark for kind of rest of world. And you use the same interior, generally speaking. They both know are doing a hard backs in most countries. They're both doing obviously your straightforward paperback and large print is an option with both now as well. But it's a distribution issue as to why you need both, and it's advised that you do.
[00:17:06] So essentially to create a print book, you are literally physically creating a file that produces the interior, the pages, and a file that produces the cover. And KDP Print and IngramSpark require slightly different cover production, so you need a different cover for each of them, and then you just upload them to the platforms. And when you upload to Amazon, you don’t go for an expanded distribution in Amazon. And then it would distribute around the world through IngramSpark, and it will distribute on Amazon online retail store through KDP Print.
[00:17:53] Matty: Currently I have regular print and large print for my books and the investment to make the large print was fairly small because I just went into Vellum and I picked one of the large print formats and I hit generate, and then there was the interior. And I'm not even sure I paid my designer that much more to provide me with a large print cover along with all the other covers, the regular print, the e-book, the audio book and all that. When you're doing hardcover, is there more work on the author side to set that up?
[00:18:28] Orna: It's exactly the same. It's just, again, the same interior file and you would just need a slightly different cover for the hard back, generally speaking. And it's just the same thing. When you're actually setting up a paperback to simultaneously set up large print and the hard back it is not difficult. And is recommended because there are lots of people who only read large print for eyesight reasons, libraries like large print, and as you say, it's very little extra costs and very little extra effort.
[00:19:06] And so our advice is always as a general rule of thumb to be in as many formats as possible and as many territories as possible. It just makes sense just to be where the readers are. So sometimes authors will say to us, but I never read our hard print or I'm not going to buy a hardback because blah, blah, blah. Fine. But, you know, the readers are there and it's about, if they want to buy a hard back present of your book that they loved for their mum at Christmas or whatever, because they liked it so much, and you don't have one, well, why not? For very little extra effort, as we said, you can have that.
[00:19:44] Continuing on the print production thing. I think the other big question that comes up for people is whether to use print on demand or consignment print, you know, do their own offset print run. And this is a sort of an ongoing debate in the indy author community. And I think for most indy authors, print on demand is the way to go because it means you don't have to invest in expensive inventory upfront. For some people, though, if you've got a distribution outlet worked out and you are distributing in bulk or to lots of outlets and through bookstores or whatever it might be, it can make sense to actually run consignment print.
[00:20:32] And because your cost per book is much lower, it makes it easier in terms of getting a profit. Sometimes with print on demand, and particularly if your book is complex or has a lot of illustrations or it's very long, the economics of print on demand can just mean that it barely works. And it's certainly impossible for indy authors to compete on price when it comes to the average novel that or the average how-to nonfiction or a straightforward nonfiction memoir, whatever. Trade publishers with their economies of scale and their consignment runs are going to be cheaper than us every time. And it isn't right for us to expect the print on demand can deliver a similar sort of price.
[00:21:20] So in terms of pricing very often, you're best to just add on the profits you want to make per book on top of your costs when it comes to print. That's a straightforward way of doing it as any other. And your readers are likely to buy online and may not be overly price sensitive. So don't worry too much about the price of your print book, because people are willing to pay more money for print. e-book tends to be very price sensitive, particularly e-books on Amazon.
[00:21:52] Matty: When you're uploading your print books, the platforms are quite clear about what the production cost is for the print book based on basically, I guess, how long it is and I'm sure there are other considerations. So you can very clearly see, oh, it's costing me this much. There's also a small fee for e-books, I guess, based on the length of the book and the file size. I assume like 10 cents per book, just to be safe, I believe, with my books that are about 80,000 words and don't include any fancy graphics or anything like that. Are there other costs associated with that, especially on the print side, that authors should keep in mind, other than that number that shows up as the production costs that the retailer or the producer is charging?
[00:22:40] Orna: Just to say on that e-book pricing, that's a delivery charge and it's very much related to the size of the file. And sometimes the size of our file can be very big because of illustrations and stuff like that. In other words, the pictures and stuff in the file are bigger than they need to be, thereby making the book far more expensive to deliver than it needs to be. And this is something to watch out for in the production of your e-book. And it's something that's worth discussing with your designer to make sure that the pictures are optimized for size.
[00:23:19] So the pricing of print and the selling of print is an absolute minefield because it's done based on this crazy system, if it's done through bookstores, of discounts. And so the wholesaler gets a discount. Distributor gets a discount. The retailer gets a discount. And the author gets whatever's left over in the end. So it's really, really tricky and difficult to work out how much is going to be left for you, because they're talking about that use of the word "discount" means the trade discounts.
[00:23:57] So say it will cost $10. The distributor takes the discount of up to 55%, sometimes, of that and before anything happens at all. So they're not talking, when they talk about trade discounts, so this is how they get paid, they're not talking about the book is actually discounted at retail, which it often is as well. Very often, the author is getting a very small percentage of a book that is sold through bookstores because so many of the people are getting their percentage from that book.
[00:24:39] So I think for most indy author to really focus on the selling of your books online, selling your e-books and print books online, and audio books, makes life a lot easier, a lot more straightforward, particularly at the beginning. When you're getting into distributing through bookstores, selling through bookstores, producing books for bookstores, because you will produce them differently if you have decent orders for bookstores, and when you're getting into that, that definitely is more advanced stuff.
[00:25:10] At the beginning, your production question is just literally making the epubs, making the PDFs, making the covers. It literally is a production question. And then putting them out there on the platforms, then you start thinking about how you're going to distribute them.
[00:25:28] Matty: Right. What are you finding in terms of the quality? If you look at the quality of a print on demand hard cover as a reader, what's your reaction quality-wise?
[00:25:40] Orna: It's just getting better and better. Like print on demand, what used to be awful, I remember when it was a palpable quality difference between the two. We also often hear people say, IngramSpark books are better quality or Amazon books are better quality, or I have problems with Amazon. I never have problems with Ingram or vice versa. Just from our vantage point of kind of seeing the overview, we can quite safely say that there is very little to choose between them. That you can run into, and I think this is important from a production point of view to bear in mind, you can run into production problems at any time with print.
[00:26:18] Funny things can happen with machinery. These machines are incredible. They are pumping out, it's extraordinary that they can do what they do, they're pumping out books such a rate of knots, each one individual and different, so things can and do go wrong. It's amazing that they don't go wrong more often, to be honest. Customer service on both Ingram on the Amazon side are really good about it. If something does go wrong with your batch of books, if a reader ever says to you, you know, that the book they got, they weren't happy with or anything, they will replace those or you. They don't want that happening and you definitely don't want it happening.
[00:26:54] So it's a good idea to spot check your print. Definitely proof your print yourself at the beginning. Take your time. By the time you get round to proofing print, very often you're tired. You've been through a lot, especially the first time. You're also a bit overwhelmed and a bit confused and you may not even know what you're looking for. But it's really important that you proof, that you sit down and read through the thing and you're sick of it by now, but you need to read it through again from start to finish like a reader and just make sure that everything is where it ought to be.
[00:27:31] Look at the contents page. Sometimes that gets left off for some reason. Your ancillary, your back matter or your front matter. Make sure your ISBN matches, that it is the one that's supposed to be there. And all of those kinds of spot checks are really important. For e-books, of course, as I said, sometimes by the time it gets right to the print book, you just flick it and think, oh yeah, that looks lovely. I'm delighted with that. It's great. So do check.
[00:27:58] Matty: Yeah. I try to make it a practice whenever I upload any new files on print, on either KDP or IngramSpark, I'll page through the whole thing. And I'm paging through it pretty fast. But I look at it all just in case.
[00:28:13] The funniest production experience I've had, this was more of a as a consumer than as an author. But I thought I kind of had a sense of how KDP print on demand must work. And at one point I needed to order a copy of my own book and I didn't feel like waiting for an author copy so I just placed an order as a customer. And pretty soon my Amazon Delivery Day box showed up that had my book, my coffee mug, a thing of toothpaste and something else.
[00:28:40] I'm like, how did that happen? How did they get a print on demand book into a box with my other stuff? And someday I do want to find somebody who's affiliated with Amazon who can explain that to me because in my corporate world, I supported the distribution center of an online retailer and so I'm especially interested in that kind of stuff, but I thought I have to rethink my whole idea about how they're doing it.
[00:29:39] Anything else you want to share about print books before you move on to audio books?
[00:29:43] Orna: Just to say that what you did there, purchasing the book as a customer, I think is worth doing. It's worth getting the author copy and then also just buying a copy and just to make sure. I would just say, just be really careful, yeah, just check and recheck and check again is the advice I'd like to give.
[00:30:00] Matty: It is nice to always interact with your products as a customer when at all possible. So you can sometimes see things. For example, I had put my book up on Amazon in the UK. And I was going to send my sister, who lives in the UK, a copy as a thank you because she had helped me out with it, and it was 9.99. So I put it in my cart and then I went to check out and it said, books over 10 pounds ship free. So I was like, good to know.
[00:30:25] So I went into Amazon KDP for the UK. I changed the price to 10 pounds and now it was cheaper for any customer because any customer who is just buying one book is now going to benefit from the fact that for one penny more, they don't have to pay shipping and handling. So it's nice to get the reader perspective.
[00:30:43] Orna: But it's a fantastic example of something you just could not have known if you hadn't done that. And yeah, I really do encourage everybody to use every platform that you're publishing on this is e-book, audio, print, whichever, do become a user, if only briefly. You will have your own preferred way of reading on your own for readers and all the rest of them to get outside your comfort zone and use every platform as a reader, just to see what goes on because they're not all same. They’re really quite different. The experience could be quite different from the reader perspective. So that is, I think, probably one of the best examples I've ever heard of that.
[00:31:25] Matty: So onto audio books. So the same question, any recommendations for platforms or vendors or services that you went ALLi recommend?
[00:31:34] Orna: Yeah. So, again, as in e-books and online, print on demand, Amazon is the world leader in audio books. There has been, and I'm not going to get into this on your show because we're very much focused here on the actual nuts and bolts of production and distribution and the processes of publishing, but from a campaign perspective, there have been a number of problems with the two, which is ACX, Audiobook Creation Exchange, which supplies books up to recently to Audible and Apple, which up to recently most of the audio book market in the US, the UK, most of the places where audiobooks are most sold.
[00:32:19] So there has been a problem with that supplier and they are being challenged by a number of authors in terms of payments and so on. But ALLi still recommends that you use ACX to produce audio books because they are a leader and we're hoping that they will continue to make changes that improve the situation there.
[00:32:41] However in the wake of that, and really it was happening anyway, as it has happened with e-books, there have been a number of alternative services that have come along in recent times. Most notably, I would say, Findaway Voices, who also offer a way to sell your books directly online through Authors Direct. You can sell your audio books online through them, and Findaway is the actual tool that you use to put the audio books together.
[00:33:10] So in terms of production, what are we talking about with an audio book? Again, you need to cover, it's the same as print and e-book. And for each of these formats, you need different kinds of covers. So an audio book cover is a square. And when you're designing your book, you need to, we talked about that when we discussed design, you need to take these things into consideration. So you need your cover and then you need your sound file. The sound file has lots of different requirements on all the platforms in order for it to pass quality control.
[00:33:42] So you need a narrator to actually speak your words. Some authors do this themselves, both again, as with cover design, hiring a professional is recommended. Unless you are already a skilled voice actor, it's very difficult for you to do justice to particularly fiction. Nonfiction is easier and readers are more forgiving of the author reading non-fiction. But again, you need to be good, not a boring monotone. You need to know what you're doing. You need to know voice. Audio is skilled work. People train to do it. It's just picking up the book of doing it yourself is not the same thing. So recommendation is to get a skilled narrator.
[00:34:25] So between the costs of production, narration, narration is expensive. It's generally charged per hour, finished hours produced. So what ACX did, Audiobook Creation Exchange, the exchange part was about bringing author and narrators together and allowing them to come into a royalty sharing agreement, which would mean that there was no big upfront expense for the author. Findaway has now also introduced a marketplace for this as possible. There are also marketplaces, too.
[00:35:05] Our recommendation is, if you can afford it, to actually pay the narrator and own, you know, have the rights to the audio. And saying that, recognizing that it is a big expense. However, the return on audio is much higher. So it's a matter of like anything else working out your return on investment rather than just thinking about what you're going to be spending. And owning those rights outright, you need to work out how many copies do I need to sell before I move into profits? That is your real question. And for most authors that we have seen who are cognizant of the value of their audio book rights, they are doing extremely well.
[00:35:48] There is an unfortunate sort of attitude in the indy community that audio books are jam, you know, they're kind of extra, and I think that's a mistake. In the old days, yes, a publishing house for them, audio was a subsidiary right because they have to kind of sell the rights to an actual audio production company because they produce things like tapes and CDs and stuff like that. We're dealing with digital audio and a digital audio file is just as easily sold from your website, directly online, and picked up by the reader. There are all sorts of great tools that will allow you to do that.
[00:36:25] We've mentioned BookFunnel before and I would do a shout out for BookFunnel again here with audio. They're really fantastic in terms of delivering it directly on to the listener's device, whatever that might be. We want a fantastic customer service operation that allows that to happen.
[00:36:41] But there are lots of other tools. Soundwise is a very interesting audio company, Authors Republic also. So there's lots going on in the audio space and I would recommend people to get stuck in and think about what they want to do with their audio books. Because for lots of our members now, in terms of financial return, e-books first because they're so much cheaper to produce, but audio books are moving rapidly into second place for lots and lots of indy authors. Because yes, there is that upfront payment, but once you've earned back from that, you begin to really see a good return on audio.
[00:37:20] And there's such growth in the audio book market, whereas the e-book market in the US particularly, also in the UK and beginning to in other parts of the world, it's there, you know, it's fairly set. There is some growth, but it's slow. Whereas audio books are still growing rapidly. Young people love them. People are commuting listen to them. They used to be for older people, people who couldn't read, the sight issue again, but they've completely moved out of that now.
[00:37:51] Matty: You had mentioned ALLi's recommendation of ACX for production. Is it possible to use ACX for production and still take advantage of some of these other platforms?
[00:38:01] Orna: I should have mentioned, as always, non-exclusivity is our recommendation always. So ACX, one of the problems we have with them is KDP will encourage you to go exclusive into KDP Select, but they won't punish you if you don't. ACX does to some degree, and your return on your books really drops with Audible if you don't go exclusive. So it goes down to 25% versus 40 if you are exclusive. Nonetheless, we recommend non-exclusive and going wide in audio as in everything else, because it's a slower build but over time you will see far more results because, I'm not going to go into now, but exclusivity generally is not a good look, whether it's ebook, print, or for audio. So yes, use ACX but also use the others.
[00:39:04] Matty: There's sort of a comparable thing here, I think, between in the e-book world, there's KDP and Draft2Digital as an example. In the print world there's KDP and IngramSpark. In the audio world there's ACX and Findaway as an example of an alternative. Am I understanding that correctly?
[00:39:25] Orna: That's exactly right. And then it's not either, or it's both. So, yeah, instead of thinking of it as do I use this one or I do I use that one, when the answer is always use both. Use as many as you can, time and money allowing, as many formats, as many outlets, that is the general rule of thumb.
[00:39:45] Matty: Yeah. I'm realizing I may rethink how I'm treating my audio books because for the last two I hired a narrator directly. I paid them directly based on finished hour. And then they graciously loaded those documents onto Findaway for me. But I realized I'm I think distributing to Amazon through Findaway rather than I could uncheck it on. Findaway, I think, and go in and load it on ACX but choose the non-exclusive option on ACX. Note to self to fix that.
[00:40:23] Orna: Because you will already be on the reduced rate of 25%, but then you will also be paying Findaway's 30% of the 25. Also like most of the platforms there's often by going direct you can be put in for things that you won't necessarily be able to avail of if you are distributed by the aggregator. And this is again a general rule, it doesn't apply across the board, but most platforms when you upload directly, there are marketing tools and things that you can take advantage of, and you get communications and things from those services that when you go through aggregators you don't. So, yeah, but I definitely would recommend you go direct to ACX. It does make sense.
[00:41:11] Matty: I'm realizing that another benefit I think, is that for the books before Findaway became a thing, early on when I was doing audio books and I was doing them all through ACX, then pretty soon they would show up link to my e-book and for all my other books that were distributed that way, if somebody buys the e-book, they get the audio book for a vastly reduced rate. And so, especially when the e-books were on sale, like let's say I ran a sale for an e-book at 99 cents. And then people could always add on the audio book for 7.49, I think. So it was a good deal. And I don't see that for the books that I've done through Findaway, but I imagine that if I went direct to ACX, perhaps that option would show up for those books as well.
[00:41:55] Orna: Exactly. That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. And that it's true for all the platforms, generally speaking, when it comes to aggregators. And then on Amazon, you've got this nice link between the e-book and the audio book through Whispersync so if you leave off the audio book and then you want to read your book and bed at night, it'll actually pick up where you left off on the audio, and then you get up the next morning, get into your car, and it would pick up where you left off on the e-book the previous nights. So all of that is very, very nice from a reader or listener's perspective.
[00:42:30] Matty: This is one of these things where whenever I learn something like this, and I'm always weighing retrospectively the pros and cons of now going back and fixing it, or just having this be a lesson learned going forward. I don't know that there's an answer to this question. It's just, the perennial question of indy authors is you learn a better way and then you have to weigh do you go back and fix it or do you just figure, well, that's water under the bridge. I'm just going to apply that lesson going forward.
[00:42:55] Orna: Yeah, it's a hard one. My general rule, and this has nothing to do with ALLi, this is just me as an author, my general rule is if there's money involved, I do it retrospectively. If it's just a lot of administration, unless it's something important, I generally say, okay, live and learn.
[00:43:14] Matty: Yeah, that sounds like a good measuring stick to use. And based on what you'd said earlier, ISBN for audio books as well, or do you purchase those through Bowker or Nielsen?
[00:43:25] Orna: Yeah, what's the same just audio book. It's just another format to the same distributor for the same ISBN agency.
[00:43:33] Matty: Yup. So each time you register an ISBN, you assign it to the title. One of the questions is what's the medium, and so you would just assign one of the ISBN, but you would assign it as an audio book.
[00:43:42] Orna: That's exactly right.
[00:43:46] Matty: Other thoughts about production for audio books?
[00:43:50] Orna: Quality is really important. So you will be rejected if the quality isn't there. It's another reason to work with narrators who have proper microphones and record in proper conditions and stuff like that. So quality control is high. There are lots of delays at the moment at ACX. So do not plan a launch based on an assumption that your audio book is going to be ready in a very short time, because at the moment it's taking them quite a long time to get, in some cases it's been months. It's just worth taking note of.
[00:44:22] If you find a narrator you like, it can be worthwhile sticking with that person and developing a relationship. And I think it's another art form. So there's a lot of learning. I would really recommend that you would have gone through the e-book process at least once, if not twice and print before turning to audio. Trying to learn all three at once on a first book, I mean, it can be done. It has been done by better people than me, but certainly I would get myself into a right old tizzy if I tried to do them all at once, because they are very different processes. The audio is very different from others.
[00:45:02] So from that point of view, I think, there's no rush here. That's what I always tried to impart for people who are starting out. You feel like you're in a hurry, you feel like I've got to get my first book done, then I'd go to my second, my third, and I've got to get into all these different formats and so on. And all of that is true. You do need to do all that if you're going to have a successful indy author business. But you don't need to do it all at once. And you're much better, and much more likely to stay there, if you ease off a bit, in terms of the time pressure. Give yourself the time to enjoy the process and to learn the process and embed it.
[00:45:41] The other tip I would give you is write everything down in your own language. All of the platforms are fantastic, you know, pages where they tell you what to do and how to do it, and they really are very good and very clear. But there are lots of things you will learn along the way that you may forget next time out. So just write everything down for yourself in your own way.
[00:46:02] On this is good because once you've started producing a few books, and you start to see an income flow, you may well assign the upload or even aspects of the production of the books to an assistant or somebody else. And so if you have your process very clearly documented, that's really helpful for them.
[00:46:24] Matty: Great. Well, I think that is a great note to end our discussion about production on. So, Orna, thank you so much. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and ALLi and all you offer on this.
[00:46:36] Orna: Yes. So ALLi is the Alliance of Independent Authors and we're at AllianceIndependentAuthors.org because we're a non-profit organization. And I'm Orna Ross. I wrote novels and poetry. I had also some nonfiction and I'm at OrnaRoss.com.
[00:46:55] Matty: Great. Thank you, Orna.
[00:46:57] Orna: Thanks, Matty.
[00:05:11] And you had mentioned the fact that epub is sort of the industry standard, but you can have a Kindle epub, you could have a Nook epub, you can have different flavors of epub. Can you talk about that a little bit?
[00:05:24] Orna: Yes, so, Vellum again will produce a particular epub for the platform that you are working with. And this is not so much that the platform requires a different production process or that you end up with a particularly different file, but it's very useful when it comes to the distribution, which is the next stage of the process that we'll be talking about, which you're able to trace back which book sold and you're able to keep tabs on your books because you'll know the Apple one is connected to the Apple store. The Kobo one is connected to the Kobo store. And so at the end, when you're adding links and things to take people, you can actually get a clear idea of where the book is selling by tracking the format.
[00:06:14] And there are little differences in the platforms and just having little tweaks that make a difference. But quite honestly, as a beginner, I would not get too hung up on this. If you use Vellum, it makes it really easy. It spits it up for you. If you don't, forget about it. It's not important to know at this point, you know where at the beginning, I always think, you've got to go through the production process at least once, all the different stages of it. That's the most important thing. And if we get too hung up on some of the details, we can actually stop ourselves in our tracks and spend too long worrying about things that don't really make that much difference until you've got a few books up and running anyway.
[00:06:59] Matty: Yeah, I think that is great advice. Better to spend the time writing than to spend the time figuring out how to make a new header and some formatting software.
[00:07:08] We had talked about the fact that epub has become the standard and mobi used to be the standard for Kindle based books. The one place where at least fairly recently I found mobi was still helpful to have is when people are sideloading books from their computer. So let's say I have my books up on PayHip. So if a Kindle reader downloads a file from PayHip, at least until fairly recently, it was better for them to have a mobi because it was easier for them to get onto their Kindle from their email or wherever they're downloading it from. Is that still true or is that starting to be a thing of the past?
[00:07:50] Orna: It's still true for those who have Kindles of a certain age. So it's still convenient from that point of view. But, you know, this is definitely going to disappear over time.
[00:08:03] Matty: So any other cautions you have about the production of e-books, any helpful tips or tricks on the ebook front? Why don't we start talking about ISBNs now, because I know that's always a question. So let's start out. ISBNs for e-books. What do you think?
[00:08:19] Orna: Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So ISBNs are how the book industry keeps track of which format of the book it's got. So if you ever want your book to be distributed by a library, if you ever want your book to be picked up by a bookstore, your e-book I mean, then it needs to have an ISBN. So, yes. And it also makes you the publisher of record for that book. And so we 100%, no ambiguity, say yes for the small cost involved. It is well worth having your own ISBN for your e-books. One for an ebook. One for your print in its different formats. One for your audio book.
[00:09:11] So the whole point, if you think about what the ISBN is for, it is the book identification number. Say a library wants to distribute your book, your e-book, to its patrons and they want to acquire your e-book in order to do that. Well, if they go looking for your e-book and you only find an ISBN for your print book, then they simply can't get out your e-book. Because they're not going to go to the trouble of sending you an email and saying, hi, we're the library, we want your e-book. It doesn't work like that. So, yeah, it's important, we feel.
[00:09:47] Matty: So for my print books, I do have ISBNs that I've purchased through Bowker. And I think that one of the interesting things I learned early in the process is that one ISBN from Bowker, I don't know what it is, 125 bucks or something like that. It sounds ridiculous. But then you can buy like a hundred for not very much more. If you buy them in quantity, even if you are just planning on publishing a couple of books, it pays you to get a batch. Can you provide some maybe more updated information on that?
[00:10:18] Orna: Yes, absolutely. You're absolutely right. You know, ISBNs and the cost of them is something that troubles American and UK citizens but doesn't trouble French citizens at all, because ISBNs are provided free by their library service. So there are lots of countries in the world where you don't have to pay for ISBNs. It's just some people. Nielsen is the company in the UK and Australia and Commonwealth countries generally and Bowker in the US.
[00:10:50] So yes, buy in bulk because you pretty quickly to start to go through them. You're going to need one for your e-book, as we said, one if you do paperback, hardback, large print, and one for your audio book. And then once you start to produce a few books. And then you'll probably sometime do an upgrade or and update and upgrade to such a degree that you need to do a new edition, in which case you will need a new ISBN. So think of this just as one of the costs of doing business.
[00:11:20] And definitely buy in bulk everywhere. It pays to buy in bulk, and I think they're more expensive in the US than anywhere else in the world. They are pricey enough there. But if you think about the overall costs in relation to other things, it's not that expensive when you consider the that is what makes you the publisher of record in the eyes of the world compared to not having it.
[00:11:47] It also allows, for ALLi, this is important. It may not be that important for an individual indy author, but for some people it would be, it allows us to be counted, you know, all the statistics that are done around publishing use ISBN for the research. It's very hard to get up what's going on with the ISBNs. So the fact that we are purchasing our own puts us in there and people know what's going on, are able to evaluate and give us information about what's happening in the indy author world.
[00:12:22] Matty: I think I know what the answer to this is going to be, but I'm going to ask, because I've never heard this actually addressed, that when people start hearing about bulk purchase of ISBNs, and you can buy them in big bulk because publishers of various sides are buying them in bulk themselves. I can imagine it would be tempting to say, you know what, let's have all the writers in my writer's group go in and buy a bunch of ISBNS and then we'll all share the pool. But I'm assuming you can't do that because the purchase is affiliated with an imprint. Is that true?
[00:12:54] Orna: Yeah, the purchases affiliated with the publisher. So if you all go together, and you're in Writers' Group Illinois or whatever, then Writers' Group Illinois becomes the publisher. So when you actually make your application, you have to put down the imprint name, the publisher name, all of these details. And so if you buy one bulk group of ISBNs and there will be one publisher name on that and everybody else who's using that will fall under that agreement.
[00:13:25] Matty: I had one more question about ISBNs for e-books. So again, I have Bowker ISBN for all my print books and that's always the advice I hear from people, i.e., they don't recommend that you allow Amazon to assign your ISBN. But for my e-books, I distribute to most platforms on Draft2Digital, and they will provide an ISBN that then moves on to the library platforms because Draft2Digital is how I'm distributing to library platforms like Overdrive, for example. What is the danger of using an ISBN from an aggregator like Draft2Digital?
[00:14:04] Orna: Well, in future times, if somebody wants to trace back that book and find out who the publisher is, supposing they wanted to license the rights and they didn't know, for example, how to get at you, and I know they probably could find you relatively easily on the internet because of your website and so on, but just supposing for whatever reason, you no longer exist. And it's your heirs, for example. So they want to get in touch. It's Draft2Digital, they'll end up with, because Draft2Digital owns that ISBN. So Draft2Digital is the publisher of record for that e-book. So, yeah, we would really recommend that you use one of your own purchased ISBNs on the e-books as well as the print.
[00:14:51] And yeah, you will hear varying opinions about that, but I think a lot of this arises from almost a sense like an e-book isn't quite a real book or something. You know, why would you give different advice for print and e-books? If you think about just from a publication perspective, as opposed to from a saving money perspective. From a business perspective, why is an e-book, which would probably actually generate you more money at the end of the day, something that you wouldn't actually want to have your own ISBN for. I don't quite follow the logic, I guess,
[00:15:29] Matty: Is the considerations for not using an ISBN that would be assigned by Amazon KDP, for example, is that different? Is Amazon taking on more ownership by providing the ISBN than Draft2Digital is taking on by providing their ISBN?
[00:15:44] Orna: No, they don't take on more, but there is a reason that all of the services are "kindly" providing us with "free" ISBNs. There is an advantage to owning the ISBN and that's why they are claiming that advantage for their business rather than you are claiming it for your business.
[00:16:06] Matty: So that we don't make the production segment of this all about ISBNs, I don't want to have to title this, "Everything You Wanted to Know about ISBNs but Were Afraid to Ask," let's move on to print books. So same question that we started out with for the e-books. Is there an approach, a platform, vendors that you and ALLi recommend for print books?
[00:16:25] Orna: Yeah. When it comes to print, using just two platforms is easy, right? And it’s the same PDF interior that you will use for both. It's KDP Print for the Amazon ecosystem and IngramSpark for kind of rest of world. And you use the same interior, generally speaking. They both know are doing a hard backs in most countries. They're both doing obviously your straightforward paperback and large print is an option with both now as well. But it's a distribution issue as to why you need both, and it's advised that you do.
[00:17:06] So essentially to create a print book, you are literally physically creating a file that produces the interior, the pages, and a file that produces the cover. And KDP Print and IngramSpark require slightly different cover production, so you need a different cover for each of them, and then you just upload them to the platforms. And when you upload to Amazon, you don’t go for an expanded distribution in Amazon. And then it would distribute around the world through IngramSpark, and it will distribute on Amazon online retail store through KDP Print.
[00:17:53] Matty: Currently I have regular print and large print for my books and the investment to make the large print was fairly small because I just went into Vellum and I picked one of the large print formats and I hit generate, and then there was the interior. And I'm not even sure I paid my designer that much more to provide me with a large print cover along with all the other covers, the regular print, the e-book, the audio book and all that. When you're doing hardcover, is there more work on the author side to set that up?
[00:18:28] Orna: It's exactly the same. It's just, again, the same interior file and you would just need a slightly different cover for the hard back, generally speaking. And it's just the same thing. When you're actually setting up a paperback to simultaneously set up large print and the hard back it is not difficult. And is recommended because there are lots of people who only read large print for eyesight reasons, libraries like large print, and as you say, it's very little extra costs and very little extra effort.
[00:19:06] And so our advice is always as a general rule of thumb to be in as many formats as possible and as many territories as possible. It just makes sense just to be where the readers are. So sometimes authors will say to us, but I never read our hard print or I'm not going to buy a hardback because blah, blah, blah. Fine. But, you know, the readers are there and it's about, if they want to buy a hard back present of your book that they loved for their mum at Christmas or whatever, because they liked it so much, and you don't have one, well, why not? For very little extra effort, as we said, you can have that.
[00:19:44] Continuing on the print production thing. I think the other big question that comes up for people is whether to use print on demand or consignment print, you know, do their own offset print run. And this is a sort of an ongoing debate in the indy author community. And I think for most indy authors, print on demand is the way to go because it means you don't have to invest in expensive inventory upfront. For some people, though, if you've got a distribution outlet worked out and you are distributing in bulk or to lots of outlets and through bookstores or whatever it might be, it can make sense to actually run consignment print.
[00:20:32] And because your cost per book is much lower, it makes it easier in terms of getting a profit. Sometimes with print on demand, and particularly if your book is complex or has a lot of illustrations or it's very long, the economics of print on demand can just mean that it barely works. And it's certainly impossible for indy authors to compete on price when it comes to the average novel that or the average how-to nonfiction or a straightforward nonfiction memoir, whatever. Trade publishers with their economies of scale and their consignment runs are going to be cheaper than us every time. And it isn't right for us to expect the print on demand can deliver a similar sort of price.
[00:21:20] So in terms of pricing very often, you're best to just add on the profits you want to make per book on top of your costs when it comes to print. That's a straightforward way of doing it as any other. And your readers are likely to buy online and may not be overly price sensitive. So don't worry too much about the price of your print book, because people are willing to pay more money for print. e-book tends to be very price sensitive, particularly e-books on Amazon.
[00:21:52] Matty: When you're uploading your print books, the platforms are quite clear about what the production cost is for the print book based on basically, I guess, how long it is and I'm sure there are other considerations. So you can very clearly see, oh, it's costing me this much. There's also a small fee for e-books, I guess, based on the length of the book and the file size. I assume like 10 cents per book, just to be safe, I believe, with my books that are about 80,000 words and don't include any fancy graphics or anything like that. Are there other costs associated with that, especially on the print side, that authors should keep in mind, other than that number that shows up as the production costs that the retailer or the producer is charging?
[00:22:40] Orna: Just to say on that e-book pricing, that's a delivery charge and it's very much related to the size of the file. And sometimes the size of our file can be very big because of illustrations and stuff like that. In other words, the pictures and stuff in the file are bigger than they need to be, thereby making the book far more expensive to deliver than it needs to be. And this is something to watch out for in the production of your e-book. And it's something that's worth discussing with your designer to make sure that the pictures are optimized for size.
[00:23:19] So the pricing of print and the selling of print is an absolute minefield because it's done based on this crazy system, if it's done through bookstores, of discounts. And so the wholesaler gets a discount. Distributor gets a discount. The retailer gets a discount. And the author gets whatever's left over in the end. So it's really, really tricky and difficult to work out how much is going to be left for you, because they're talking about that use of the word "discount" means the trade discounts.
[00:23:57] So say it will cost $10. The distributor takes the discount of up to 55%, sometimes, of that and before anything happens at all. So they're not talking, when they talk about trade discounts, so this is how they get paid, they're not talking about the book is actually discounted at retail, which it often is as well. Very often, the author is getting a very small percentage of a book that is sold through bookstores because so many of the people are getting their percentage from that book.
[00:24:39] So I think for most indy author to really focus on the selling of your books online, selling your e-books and print books online, and audio books, makes life a lot easier, a lot more straightforward, particularly at the beginning. When you're getting into distributing through bookstores, selling through bookstores, producing books for bookstores, because you will produce them differently if you have decent orders for bookstores, and when you're getting into that, that definitely is more advanced stuff.
[00:25:10] At the beginning, your production question is just literally making the epubs, making the PDFs, making the covers. It literally is a production question. And then putting them out there on the platforms, then you start thinking about how you're going to distribute them.
[00:25:28] Matty: Right. What are you finding in terms of the quality? If you look at the quality of a print on demand hard cover as a reader, what's your reaction quality-wise?
[00:25:40] Orna: It's just getting better and better. Like print on demand, what used to be awful, I remember when it was a palpable quality difference between the two. We also often hear people say, IngramSpark books are better quality or Amazon books are better quality, or I have problems with Amazon. I never have problems with Ingram or vice versa. Just from our vantage point of kind of seeing the overview, we can quite safely say that there is very little to choose between them. That you can run into, and I think this is important from a production point of view to bear in mind, you can run into production problems at any time with print.
[00:26:18] Funny things can happen with machinery. These machines are incredible. They are pumping out, it's extraordinary that they can do what they do, they're pumping out books such a rate of knots, each one individual and different, so things can and do go wrong. It's amazing that they don't go wrong more often, to be honest. Customer service on both Ingram on the Amazon side are really good about it. If something does go wrong with your batch of books, if a reader ever says to you, you know, that the book they got, they weren't happy with or anything, they will replace those or you. They don't want that happening and you definitely don't want it happening.
[00:26:54] So it's a good idea to spot check your print. Definitely proof your print yourself at the beginning. Take your time. By the time you get round to proofing print, very often you're tired. You've been through a lot, especially the first time. You're also a bit overwhelmed and a bit confused and you may not even know what you're looking for. But it's really important that you proof, that you sit down and read through the thing and you're sick of it by now, but you need to read it through again from start to finish like a reader and just make sure that everything is where it ought to be.
[00:27:31] Look at the contents page. Sometimes that gets left off for some reason. Your ancillary, your back matter or your front matter. Make sure your ISBN matches, that it is the one that's supposed to be there. And all of those kinds of spot checks are really important. For e-books, of course, as I said, sometimes by the time it gets right to the print book, you just flick it and think, oh yeah, that looks lovely. I'm delighted with that. It's great. So do check.
[00:27:58] Matty: Yeah. I try to make it a practice whenever I upload any new files on print, on either KDP or IngramSpark, I'll page through the whole thing. And I'm paging through it pretty fast. But I look at it all just in case.
[00:28:13] The funniest production experience I've had, this was more of a as a consumer than as an author. But I thought I kind of had a sense of how KDP print on demand must work. And at one point I needed to order a copy of my own book and I didn't feel like waiting for an author copy so I just placed an order as a customer. And pretty soon my Amazon Delivery Day box showed up that had my book, my coffee mug, a thing of toothpaste and something else.
[00:28:40] I'm like, how did that happen? How did they get a print on demand book into a box with my other stuff? And someday I do want to find somebody who's affiliated with Amazon who can explain that to me because in my corporate world, I supported the distribution center of an online retailer and so I'm especially interested in that kind of stuff, but I thought I have to rethink my whole idea about how they're doing it.
[00:29:39] Anything else you want to share about print books before you move on to audio books?
[00:29:43] Orna: Just to say that what you did there, purchasing the book as a customer, I think is worth doing. It's worth getting the author copy and then also just buying a copy and just to make sure. I would just say, just be really careful, yeah, just check and recheck and check again is the advice I'd like to give.
[00:30:00] Matty: It is nice to always interact with your products as a customer when at all possible. So you can sometimes see things. For example, I had put my book up on Amazon in the UK. And I was going to send my sister, who lives in the UK, a copy as a thank you because she had helped me out with it, and it was 9.99. So I put it in my cart and then I went to check out and it said, books over 10 pounds ship free. So I was like, good to know.
[00:30:25] So I went into Amazon KDP for the UK. I changed the price to 10 pounds and now it was cheaper for any customer because any customer who is just buying one book is now going to benefit from the fact that for one penny more, they don't have to pay shipping and handling. So it's nice to get the reader perspective.
[00:30:43] Orna: But it's a fantastic example of something you just could not have known if you hadn't done that. And yeah, I really do encourage everybody to use every platform that you're publishing on this is e-book, audio, print, whichever, do become a user, if only briefly. You will have your own preferred way of reading on your own for readers and all the rest of them to get outside your comfort zone and use every platform as a reader, just to see what goes on because they're not all same. They’re really quite different. The experience could be quite different from the reader perspective. So that is, I think, probably one of the best examples I've ever heard of that.
[00:31:25] Matty: So onto audio books. So the same question, any recommendations for platforms or vendors or services that you went ALLi recommend?
[00:31:34] Orna: Yeah. So, again, as in e-books and online, print on demand, Amazon is the world leader in audio books. There has been, and I'm not going to get into this on your show because we're very much focused here on the actual nuts and bolts of production and distribution and the processes of publishing, but from a campaign perspective, there have been a number of problems with the two, which is ACX, Audiobook Creation Exchange, which supplies books up to recently to Audible and Apple, which up to recently most of the audio book market in the US, the UK, most of the places where audiobooks are most sold.
[00:32:19] So there has been a problem with that supplier and they are being challenged by a number of authors in terms of payments and so on. But ALLi still recommends that you use ACX to produce audio books because they are a leader and we're hoping that they will continue to make changes that improve the situation there.
[00:32:41] However in the wake of that, and really it was happening anyway, as it has happened with e-books, there have been a number of alternative services that have come along in recent times. Most notably, I would say, Findaway Voices, who also offer a way to sell your books directly online through Authors Direct. You can sell your audio books online through them, and Findaway is the actual tool that you use to put the audio books together.
[00:33:10] So in terms of production, what are we talking about with an audio book? Again, you need to cover, it's the same as print and e-book. And for each of these formats, you need different kinds of covers. So an audio book cover is a square. And when you're designing your book, you need to, we talked about that when we discussed design, you need to take these things into consideration. So you need your cover and then you need your sound file. The sound file has lots of different requirements on all the platforms in order for it to pass quality control.
[00:33:42] So you need a narrator to actually speak your words. Some authors do this themselves, both again, as with cover design, hiring a professional is recommended. Unless you are already a skilled voice actor, it's very difficult for you to do justice to particularly fiction. Nonfiction is easier and readers are more forgiving of the author reading non-fiction. But again, you need to be good, not a boring monotone. You need to know what you're doing. You need to know voice. Audio is skilled work. People train to do it. It's just picking up the book of doing it yourself is not the same thing. So recommendation is to get a skilled narrator.
[00:34:25] So between the costs of production, narration, narration is expensive. It's generally charged per hour, finished hours produced. So what ACX did, Audiobook Creation Exchange, the exchange part was about bringing author and narrators together and allowing them to come into a royalty sharing agreement, which would mean that there was no big upfront expense for the author. Findaway has now also introduced a marketplace for this as possible. There are also marketplaces, too.
[00:35:05] Our recommendation is, if you can afford it, to actually pay the narrator and own, you know, have the rights to the audio. And saying that, recognizing that it is a big expense. However, the return on audio is much higher. So it's a matter of like anything else working out your return on investment rather than just thinking about what you're going to be spending. And owning those rights outright, you need to work out how many copies do I need to sell before I move into profits? That is your real question. And for most authors that we have seen who are cognizant of the value of their audio book rights, they are doing extremely well.
[00:35:48] There is an unfortunate sort of attitude in the indy community that audio books are jam, you know, they're kind of extra, and I think that's a mistake. In the old days, yes, a publishing house for them, audio was a subsidiary right because they have to kind of sell the rights to an actual audio production company because they produce things like tapes and CDs and stuff like that. We're dealing with digital audio and a digital audio file is just as easily sold from your website, directly online, and picked up by the reader. There are all sorts of great tools that will allow you to do that.
[00:36:25] We've mentioned BookFunnel before and I would do a shout out for BookFunnel again here with audio. They're really fantastic in terms of delivering it directly on to the listener's device, whatever that might be. We want a fantastic customer service operation that allows that to happen.
[00:36:41] But there are lots of other tools. Soundwise is a very interesting audio company, Authors Republic also. So there's lots going on in the audio space and I would recommend people to get stuck in and think about what they want to do with their audio books. Because for lots of our members now, in terms of financial return, e-books first because they're so much cheaper to produce, but audio books are moving rapidly into second place for lots and lots of indy authors. Because yes, there is that upfront payment, but once you've earned back from that, you begin to really see a good return on audio.
[00:37:20] And there's such growth in the audio book market, whereas the e-book market in the US particularly, also in the UK and beginning to in other parts of the world, it's there, you know, it's fairly set. There is some growth, but it's slow. Whereas audio books are still growing rapidly. Young people love them. People are commuting listen to them. They used to be for older people, people who couldn't read, the sight issue again, but they've completely moved out of that now.
[00:37:51] Matty: You had mentioned ALLi's recommendation of ACX for production. Is it possible to use ACX for production and still take advantage of some of these other platforms?
[00:38:01] Orna: I should have mentioned, as always, non-exclusivity is our recommendation always. So ACX, one of the problems we have with them is KDP will encourage you to go exclusive into KDP Select, but they won't punish you if you don't. ACX does to some degree, and your return on your books really drops with Audible if you don't go exclusive. So it goes down to 25% versus 40 if you are exclusive. Nonetheless, we recommend non-exclusive and going wide in audio as in everything else, because it's a slower build but over time you will see far more results because, I'm not going to go into now, but exclusivity generally is not a good look, whether it's ebook, print, or for audio. So yes, use ACX but also use the others.
[00:39:04] Matty: There's sort of a comparable thing here, I think, between in the e-book world, there's KDP and Draft2Digital as an example. In the print world there's KDP and IngramSpark. In the audio world there's ACX and Findaway as an example of an alternative. Am I understanding that correctly?
[00:39:25] Orna: That's exactly right. And then it's not either, or it's both. So, yeah, instead of thinking of it as do I use this one or I do I use that one, when the answer is always use both. Use as many as you can, time and money allowing, as many formats, as many outlets, that is the general rule of thumb.
[00:39:45] Matty: Yeah. I'm realizing I may rethink how I'm treating my audio books because for the last two I hired a narrator directly. I paid them directly based on finished hour. And then they graciously loaded those documents onto Findaway for me. But I realized I'm I think distributing to Amazon through Findaway rather than I could uncheck it on. Findaway, I think, and go in and load it on ACX but choose the non-exclusive option on ACX. Note to self to fix that.
[00:40:23] Orna: Because you will already be on the reduced rate of 25%, but then you will also be paying Findaway's 30% of the 25. Also like most of the platforms there's often by going direct you can be put in for things that you won't necessarily be able to avail of if you are distributed by the aggregator. And this is again a general rule, it doesn't apply across the board, but most platforms when you upload directly, there are marketing tools and things that you can take advantage of, and you get communications and things from those services that when you go through aggregators you don't. So, yeah, but I definitely would recommend you go direct to ACX. It does make sense.
[00:41:11] Matty: I'm realizing that another benefit I think, is that for the books before Findaway became a thing, early on when I was doing audio books and I was doing them all through ACX, then pretty soon they would show up link to my e-book and for all my other books that were distributed that way, if somebody buys the e-book, they get the audio book for a vastly reduced rate. And so, especially when the e-books were on sale, like let's say I ran a sale for an e-book at 99 cents. And then people could always add on the audio book for 7.49, I think. So it was a good deal. And I don't see that for the books that I've done through Findaway, but I imagine that if I went direct to ACX, perhaps that option would show up for those books as well.
[00:41:55] Orna: Exactly. That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. And that it's true for all the platforms, generally speaking, when it comes to aggregators. And then on Amazon, you've got this nice link between the e-book and the audio book through Whispersync so if you leave off the audio book and then you want to read your book and bed at night, it'll actually pick up where you left off on the audio, and then you get up the next morning, get into your car, and it would pick up where you left off on the e-book the previous nights. So all of that is very, very nice from a reader or listener's perspective.
[00:42:30] Matty: This is one of these things where whenever I learn something like this, and I'm always weighing retrospectively the pros and cons of now going back and fixing it, or just having this be a lesson learned going forward. I don't know that there's an answer to this question. It's just, the perennial question of indy authors is you learn a better way and then you have to weigh do you go back and fix it or do you just figure, well, that's water under the bridge. I'm just going to apply that lesson going forward.
[00:42:55] Orna: Yeah, it's a hard one. My general rule, and this has nothing to do with ALLi, this is just me as an author, my general rule is if there's money involved, I do it retrospectively. If it's just a lot of administration, unless it's something important, I generally say, okay, live and learn.
[00:43:14] Matty: Yeah, that sounds like a good measuring stick to use. And based on what you'd said earlier, ISBN for audio books as well, or do you purchase those through Bowker or Nielsen?
[00:43:25] Orna: Yeah, what's the same just audio book. It's just another format to the same distributor for the same ISBN agency.
[00:43:33] Matty: Yup. So each time you register an ISBN, you assign it to the title. One of the questions is what's the medium, and so you would just assign one of the ISBN, but you would assign it as an audio book.
[00:43:42] Orna: That's exactly right.
[00:43:46] Matty: Other thoughts about production for audio books?
[00:43:50] Orna: Quality is really important. So you will be rejected if the quality isn't there. It's another reason to work with narrators who have proper microphones and record in proper conditions and stuff like that. So quality control is high. There are lots of delays at the moment at ACX. So do not plan a launch based on an assumption that your audio book is going to be ready in a very short time, because at the moment it's taking them quite a long time to get, in some cases it's been months. It's just worth taking note of.
[00:44:22] If you find a narrator you like, it can be worthwhile sticking with that person and developing a relationship. And I think it's another art form. So there's a lot of learning. I would really recommend that you would have gone through the e-book process at least once, if not twice and print before turning to audio. Trying to learn all three at once on a first book, I mean, it can be done. It has been done by better people than me, but certainly I would get myself into a right old tizzy if I tried to do them all at once, because they are very different processes. The audio is very different from others.
[00:45:02] So from that point of view, I think, there's no rush here. That's what I always tried to impart for people who are starting out. You feel like you're in a hurry, you feel like I've got to get my first book done, then I'd go to my second, my third, and I've got to get into all these different formats and so on. And all of that is true. You do need to do all that if you're going to have a successful indy author business. But you don't need to do it all at once. And you're much better, and much more likely to stay there, if you ease off a bit, in terms of the time pressure. Give yourself the time to enjoy the process and to learn the process and embed it.
[00:45:41] The other tip I would give you is write everything down in your own language. All of the platforms are fantastic, you know, pages where they tell you what to do and how to do it, and they really are very good and very clear. But there are lots of things you will learn along the way that you may forget next time out. So just write everything down for yourself in your own way.
[00:46:02] On this is good because once you've started producing a few books, and you start to see an income flow, you may well assign the upload or even aspects of the production of the books to an assistant or somebody else. And so if you have your process very clearly documented, that's really helpful for them.
[00:46:24] Matty: Great. Well, I think that is a great note to end our discussion about production on. So, Orna, thank you so much. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and ALLi and all you offer on this.
[00:46:36] Orna: Yes. So ALLi is the Alliance of Independent Authors and we're at AllianceIndependentAuthors.org because we're a non-profit organization. And I'm Orna Ross. I wrote novels and poetry. I had also some nonfiction and I'm at OrnaRoss.com.
[00:46:55] Matty: Great. Thank you, Orna.
[00:46:57] Orna: Thanks, Matty.
Links
Introduction:
Episode 088 - How to Receive and Give Critique with Tiffany Yates Martin
Episode 065 - X-raying Your Plot with Tiffany Yates Martin
Episode 053 - What Authors can Learn from TV and Movies with Tiffany Yates Martin
Episode 074 - Perspectives on Personal Branding
Episode 100 - Becoming the Relaxed Author with Mark Leslie Lefebvre
For links to Matty's upcoming and recent events, click here.
Episode 065 - X-raying Your Plot with Tiffany Yates Martin
Episode 053 - What Authors can Learn from TV and Movies with Tiffany Yates Martin
Episode 074 - Perspectives on Personal Branding
Episode 100 - Becoming the Relaxed Author with Mark Leslie Lefebvre
For links to Matty's upcoming and recent events, click here.
Interview:
https://www.ornaross.com/
https://www.allianceindependentauthors.org/
150 Self-Publishing Questions Answered: ALLi’s Writing, Publishing, & Book Marketing Tips for Authors and Poets (Publishing Guides for Indie Authors 5) (affiliate link)
https://www.allianceindependentauthors.org/
150 Self-Publishing Questions Answered: ALLi’s Writing, Publishing, & Book Marketing Tips for Authors and Poets (Publishing Guides for Indie Authors 5) (affiliate link)
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