Sunday Mailbag- Self Publishing vs. Publisher?

Q: I see you self-published your caricature book. I’m curious why you went that route, as opposed to shopping it around to a publisher? I would think with your credits as a caricaturist and illustrator with MAD and all, you’d have had an easy time finding an actual publisher for a how-to book like this. Why self publish?

A: I released The Mad Art of Caricature back in 2011, and I did think about approaching publishers about the book. In the end I decided to self-publish (sort of… I actually created my own publishing company Deadline Demon Publishing) for four reasons:

1. The niche target audience of the book
2. The rise of distributors that provide access to book wholesalers
3. Amazon
4. Math

The first reason above, the relatively small initial target audience of the book, actually made one of the points you bring up as being a reason to approach publishers more of a reason not to approach publishers…that being my credits in the world of caricature/illustration. My thoughts on the book was that it would initially sell well among caricaturists and cartoonists. I had (at the time) been doing this blog for five years and building an audience and following online thanks to my work with MAD, etc. so I had a very strong path to that specific target audience. I thought I’d have a good chance of quickly recouping the costs of a print run of 3,500 copies, after which all the sales would be profit. I way underestimated it’s popularity…I had to order a reprint only 4 months after the first run.

The rise of distributors that provide access to book wholesalers was a big factor. Independent publishing had been growing like crazy in the 00’s and more and more book distributors were willing to take on self-published books if they felt they were viable to a big enough audience. I knew that once that my specific audience market dried up any future for book sales would depend on it being on bookshelves in “Art” sections, a high ranking on searches for books on “caricature” in online stores, and in general getting in front of the eyes of people who might be interesting in drawing caricatures but who had never heard of me. In order to do that I needed wholesalers like Ingram, Barnes & Noble, and Baker & Taylor to offer my books to brick and mortar bookstores, and to get the book to rank high on searches on Amazon, etc.

A friend, fellow NCS member and cartoonist Jerry Von Amerongen turned me on to a local book distributor called Itasca, who had been distributing his books, primarily collections of his fantastic panel cartoon “The Neighborhood”. Thanks to his recommendation they agreed to distribute my book.

Book distributors like this exist as a storage and fulfillment center for smaller publishers that do not have a warehouse and a shipping department. Big publishers warehouse their books, takes orders from wholesalers like Ingram and then ship out to the wholesalers, who in turn take orders from retail stores and ship the books to those stores for sale. Wholesalers also take returned books that either did not sell or are damaged, and return them to the publisher. Book distributors do those jobs for the smaller publisher, for a fee per book and usually a fee for warehouse storage room. What makes this advantageous is books carried by a book distributor are treated as “legitimate” books by wholesalers, who are notorious for otherwise refusing to wholesale self-published books. Thus, you get access to wholesalers and therefore retail book stores. That’s why you see copies of The Mad Art of Caricature on bookshelves in Barnes & Noble and other brick and mortar stores.

The one thing book distributors do NOT do that a publisher does (sort of) is promote the book. It’s your job to get retail stores to know about your book and order it. That’s a tall task. Fortunately for me a “How to” art book is something that has a long, continuous life (there are new potential caricaturists born every day) and being listed in a wholesalers catalogue under that section gets you a shot at being picked up. I also got a review of the book in the School Library Journal, that got me a little attention. If your book sells, they order more copies. Etc. Etc.

The third reason was the rise of Amazon as a primary source of book sales. Young people probably don’t remember but Amazon started out as a book seller and only became the you-can-get-anything-here behemoth over time. Getting listed on Amazon was easy and, as there were only a small number of “how to draw caricatures” books on the market my book quickly became the top result in a search on Amazon for “Caricature”, “Caricature drawing” or similar. It was easy to see Amazon was going to be a major place where people searched for and bought books, and no distributor needed there. I take wholesale orders from Amazon and ship books directly to them.

Finally, simple math. When you factor in the costs of printing, distribution and shipping, and the average of what I get for wholesale sales, I get a lot more money per book sale than I would ever get from an advance and royalties from a publisher. The downside is I have to do the publisher’s job, including putting up the dough to pay for a print run. That’s a lot of work and a lot of money up front, but in the end the numbers work better for a book like this. If I was looking at a bigger book, something for a much wider audience (a kid’s book, for example) going the traditional publisher route would make more sense.

Thanks to R D Griffin for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!