Imagine for a moment you bought a new car for your family and wanted to take it out for a spin. As you head down the street of your neighborhood you notice the roads to the main city streets are blocked and you have no way of getting to the grocery or pharmacy, your access is blocked. Then you discover that your particular model of car has been restricted to the local streets of your neighborhood and nothing further. This is the same problem authors have when they publish and lack access to the market. You are destined to driving the back streets.
Certainly you can walk to the grocery or drug store, which will take longer and you may encounter bad weather. Walking long distances can also create other problems but eventually you may get to where you want to go. Certainly the lack of transportation is a problem if you hope of moving beyond your local neighborhood and venturing out to another city or state. The time and effort required to get to your final destination may be beyond your capability. You have a perfectly good car in the garage but have limited access to the services you need for your family.
Distribution or access to the market for published content is key to having any opportunity at selling significant quantities of your work. Publishers that utilize the print-on-demand model may provide you with a car, but it will be restricted to back roads. The major booksellers will never allow your POD book in their stores. This is limited access to the market and a major problem that most self-published authors face in today’s marketplace. The same scenario holds true for eBooks. A simple PDF file is great for downloading to another computer but in the real market for eBooks, again, you are limiting yourself to the back roads.
If your published work is not allowed direct access to booksellers via direct sales to book buyers working for those booksellers, your chances of becoming a successful author is handicapped. Distribution comes in two forms: access and availability. Here is a description of each.
(1)Access to the market is described as a sales group or distribution company selling your title to book buyers of established and recognized booksellers for the purpose of ordering quantities for their stores or catalogs. These titles are often stocked for quick and easy fulfillment and placement onto store shelves and online catalogs.
(2)Availability means your book title is being entered into a database with the millions of other book titles making it available for sale should a consumer walk into a bookseller and special order. This is the type of distribution used by the print-on-demand companies which in essence is not distribution or access to the market.
The same process is at work for digital content in the form of eBooks and Audiobooks via MP3 files. The biggest difference is that print book distributors are heavily influenced, subsidized and dependent on the major print book publishers. In the digital field that is not the case, at least not yet, digital distributors have no dependence on the biggest publishers. This makes distribution of digital content much more accessible for the independent author.
Regardless of whether you decide to publish in print or eBook format, without access to booksellers you cannot sell significant quantities of your work. Whether the seller is a brick and mortar store or an online retailer, library or school, if you do not have the ability to expand your readership through access to those that actively market and sell product then your audience may forever remain small.
My recommendation for authors is they consider all formats for their published work: trade print, eBook and Audiobook. At this time the market for the eBook has tremendous opportunities for the independent author over either of the remaining two formats.
The market for publishing is changing rapidly and in order for authors to maximize their opportunities and in turn their potential, they must stay informed. The difficulty with the print market has been obvious for many years yet we all tend to think of print when discussing publishing. The business of printing books and shipping to booksellers is anachronistic and outdated way of thinking. As the market for print continues to decline the barriers to entry continue to grow. Not the case with eBooks.
The digital marketplace is new, vibrant and growing rapidly. With over 760,000 new print titles being published each year compared to 50,000 eBook titles the competition is less and access to the market is open and available. The window of opportunity for any new market is small and the time for eBook publishing is today.
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