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25 February 2010
For the past ten years I have been publishing books for one of the world's smallest audiences. The subject is genetics, which is normally a realm for professional scientists and students. There have been some popular books on genetics for lay audiences. But my audience is even smaller than that. The specific form is guppy genetics for guppy hobbyists. I call it hobby genetics.
I have been using desktop publishing to educate and engage this audience. I started with inkjet printers and a comb binding system. Eventually I upgraded to a Xerox solid ink printer and a Unibind thermal hard cover binding system. I laid out the publications with Adobe InDesign. You see a picture of one of the books on the left.
The advantage of this approach is the ability to serve one customer at a time and constantly update the books. The disadvantage is the process is labor intensive and expensive. I had to sell the book for $100 to offset the enormous cost in time, consumables and hardware. I ran five printers to the ground.
At $100 a book it did not make much sense to try to distribute the book through such channels as Amazon or give the book an ISBN number. And of course, the price limited the sales of the book to those few people passionately interested in the difficult subject of scientific genetics.
But all of that has changed. Two major trends have made publishing to small audiences possible.
First is POD publishing, or Publishing on Demand. Simply put this is short run publishing using digital technology. Printing companies can produce as few as 25 books economically. Typically the result is a black and white book with a full color soft cover. Full color books are three times as expensive, but they still can be priced at a level people are willing to pay.
Second is the entry of the Apple iPad in the e-book market. Simply put, it has legitimized electronic publishing, much as the iPod legitimized and expanded the MP3 music market earlier in the decade. The establishment of the iBook store, along with the existing sales opportunities on Amazon and other e-book sites means the publisher of short run books can much more easily distribute books than ever before.
In the past book sales were dominated by large distributors who dominated precious shelf space in the thousands of small book stores. The rise of the Internet and online book stores have devastated the local bookstore. Even the big box bookstores are losing speciality book sales to online vendors. Because sites like Amazon allow the micro publisher to sell books directly to the consumer, the biggest obstacle to distributing books, the limited shelf space at bookstores, has been removed. And the economics have changed as well since the retailer and distributor have traditionally captured the lion's share of the cover price. If you provide fulfillment, Amazon takes a relatively small percentage of the cover price of the book.
These changes have significantly impacted non-fiction books and books targeted to small audiences. The ability to sell direct to the consumer in a relatively inexpensive distribution format lays the foundation for the rise of niche publisher who can publish to the different distribution formats (paper and electronic) and use highly targeted online advertising to reach small audiences.