August 16, 2005

Time for BookBaby?

Matt Blumberg has an interesting post over at his OnlyOnce blog, entitled Why Publishing Will Never be The Same, Part 1, in which he recounts his experience using iUniverse to publish a book.

The part that struck me was that they paid iUniverse $1500 up front, plus iUniverse takes 80% of the revenue. Now, admittedly, iUniverse is printing, packing, and shipping the books, as well as getting them on Amazon and other online sites where buyers can find and order them. But still, iUniverse's take seems too much to me.

This got me thinking.

Perhaps it's time for BookBaby, in the spirit of CD Baby.

Unfortunately, the direct CD Baby model wouldn't be a sufficient replacement for iUniverse, as it's up to the artist to make their own CDs and ship them to CD Baby. CD Baby is more like a consignment shop for your self-made CDs.

I think a BookBaby service would have to go a lot further -- it'd have to print and bind the books as part of the service. This would add to the costs, for sure. But why not do at least a 50/50 split on revenue with the author?

I also think BookBaby would, like CD Baby, need to offer its own online retail service to sell its books, but the bulk of sales would no doubt come from the big dot-coms.

Scenario:

  • Write a book.
  • Lay it out using some nice software tool, save as PDF
  • Create cover art, save as PDF
  • Sign up for BookBaby
  • Upload your PDFs
  • You pay BookBaby some one-time fee for each title. ($100? $200?)
  • BookBaby validates your files, prints one review copy, sends it to you
  • You approve the review copy, tell BookBaby to submit to Amazon, BN, etc.
  • Any time you make a sale, you get 50% of the revenue and BookBaby gets 50% of the revenue.

    Would it work?

    Posted by brian at 09:50 AM | Comments (5)
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