Customer Reviews

Publishing for Profit: Successful Bottom-Line Management for Book Publishers

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As a small publisher, I definitely want to get to a successful bottom-line! This book is helping Chalfont House become even more successful. It's one thing to say that a published book is working well...but show me the numbers! Publishing for Profit shows you exactly what you need to know for a Title Profit and Loss statement. Other topics demonstrated are: defining your niche, goal setting, budgeting, cash flow analysis, income statements, balance sheets, planning, contracts, distribution, marketing, advertising and publicity, and operations. Those sound like dreadful, math-filled, boring accounting topics, but Woll makes them urgently relevant.

There are 35 highly valuable forms/tables included: book sales by channel; publishing time line; organization chart; budget template; cash flows; growth rate; income statement; editorial plan; comparative book template; title p&l; contract analysis; title fact sheet; production schedule and checklist; tip sheet; book list analysis; sales tracking; marketing plan; author questionnaire; subsidieary rights forms; and book club pricing template.

Get out your highlighter, and dog-ear this book!

Whether publishing their own work or taking in manuscripts, publishers pursue fame, fortune or both. Unfortunately, most publishers are interested primarily in marketing, promoting and distributing; selling more books. Tom Woll shows you something more important: keeping track; counting your money. He shows you how to manage your cash and organize your business--to sell more books.

I have been a publisher for 31 years and I wish this book had been written 32 years ago. DanPoynter@ParaPublishing.com.

Thomas Woll draws from a variety of publishing experiences including being a start-up publisher and years of consulting for a variety of publishing clients. He has the expertise to teach us the publishing business.

He covers the gamut of publishing. Subjects covered include defining your niche, structuring your staff, using financial projections, the editorial process, copyrights, book production, sales, more sales, fulfillment, publicity, selling subsidiary rights (a special expertise of his), direct mail marketing (another of his areas of special expertise), and (ugh) returns. I can't imagine a publisher, new or experienced, not being able to find great value in this book.

Tom gives a variety of valuable forms and charts to use for tracking data and strategic planning. We've decided to incorporate several of these into our operations. He also goes through in greater detail than I've seen in any other book the projections you need to run in order to manage your cash flow. Cash flow will make or break your publishing company. Study these sections carefully.

I speak from my own experience as a small publisher: If you're a small publisher, you need to know the information in this book. As Tom says, publishing is a tough business, and you need the competitive edge of this knowledge.

The first time I read this book was early in my career as a publisher. With only one book on the market, a lot of the advice didn't hit home. How hard is it to manage one title and a part-time assistant? Now with three books in print and more in the pipeline, I'm finding Publishing for Profit ever more useful. With growth in mind, I need guidelines from someone who's been there, done that. Mr. Woll's experiences with a number of publishing companies gave him a broad-based view that will be equally as helpful to companies who are reorganizing as well as to upstart companies who want to start off on the right foot. Does the single title self-publisher need this book? Not really (though if he or she is planning or dreaming of bigger things, reading this book might be educational). But the multi-title, multi-author, multi-employee publisher should take a look to see if his or her publishing system could be improved. Mr. Woll covers it all, from working with staff and authors, to managing cash flow and developing company goals.

Tom's book contained exactly what I was looking for, financial information about the business of book publishing. I come from the franchising industry were every business has its operating norms and ratios. To my dismay, I was unable to find norms and ratios about the book publishing industry until I read this book. I would urge anyone in the publishing business or anyone considering publishing a book to read this book.

The tone in which the information in this book is presented is discouraging, pessimistic and sometimes condescending. It is a depressive read for someone considering starting a small press. It portraits the publishing business as an unpredictable and scary place where your chances of survival or even barely scratching a living are infinitely slim. It becomes easy to think "why even try?"

The introduction tells you how tough the business of publishing is, how easily disasters can happen, and how sales channels are practically impossible to access unless you are an established publisher. The part that explains that these risks can be overcome or mitigated, and how, is not included. After this initial backlash, the book is sprinkled with ifs, buts, hopefullys, and maybes. In addition, the constant recommendation of answering the suggested questions is not always accompanied by a good explanation of how to find pertinent answers to those questions.

This book could have been so much better if it had presented the same facts and information in a more positive way in the light of the wonderful opportunities that the changes in technology and the internet present to the very flexible and adaptable small press.

Publishers are not too well served for books that address their particular sphere of activity... Publishing For Profit does just that. Not only does it succeed in its objective of establishing a formula for successful bottom-line management, it provides a benchmark against which any publisher, even the most experienced, can measure their own performance....I would challenge any publisher, having read this book, not to have gained something from it that would lead to a re-evaluation of their own operational procedures and, as a result, the implementation of change.

Dag Smith, Chief Executive, The Publishing Training Centre (UK)

I've worked on the editing side of publishing for years and am expanding my horizons into the actual publishing side of the business. There were sooo many questions I had and even more I didn't even know I should have that PUBLISHING FOR PROFIT answered in a clear and concise way. I suggest anyone interested in the publishing industry read this book, from self-publishers to authors for a better understanding of how the publishing business works and how to work within the publishing business.

Since venturing into the publishing world approximately a year and a half and eleven titles ago, I've read quite a number of books about publishing, from the "The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing" to "The Self-Publishing Manual" to "1,001 Ways to Market Your Books," plus lots of other books about typography, the printing process, graphics, publishing contracts, etc. etc. I also belong to two publishing groups (I highly recommend Yahoo Self-Publishing for newbie publishers). In short, I believe that I've managed to pick up quite a bit of information within a relatively short time. Nevertheless, I gained an incredible amount of knowledge by reading this book by Thomas Woll.

First, it's written in a very clear and easy-to-read manner. So many non-ficiton books make for very dry reading, or use such heavy language that you struggle to understand what they're actually say, or use an annoying overly-chatty style (at least that's the case in some of the publishing books I've read). The writing here flows so well that this is one of the few non-fiction books that I literally devoured - and went back to read again, and then yet again, without getting bored or feeling the desperate need to take a break after a short time.

Second, the information in the book is incredibly useful and important. For me, just the first four chapters would have been enough, and more than worth the price of the entire book. Yes, I know about cash flow and creating a budget, but the clear way that Woll presents the subject, and the fact that it's all geared towards publishers' needs, gave me a whole new perspective on things. As a matter of fact, I've already redone my budget and publishing plan for the next three years based on his advice!

The chapter on management was also extremely useful to me. Many of the other chapters were not applicable to me at this stage of the game (being a small one and a half person publisher outside the U.S.), but they will surely be of interest to anyone building up his publishing business beyond one or two titles.

In short, if you are serious about publishing, this book is a MUST for your library. It will help clarify all of those nasty money issues that no one wants to think about while they are pursuing their dreams of publishing the next great bestseller, and teach you how you can do that while keeping an eye on the bottom line. Highly recommended.

Tom Woll has covered every major subject involved in running a publishing company, and covered them well. This book is clear, succinct, and avoids both the Scylla of boredom and the Charybdis of inadequate coverage.

The topics include:
--setting an overall strategy for your company, and updating it,
--staffing properly,
--workflow through the whole editorial, production and marketing process, and the interaction needed between departments,
--cost-saving tactics for production departments,
--subsidiary rights sales and administration,
--an overview of marketing, and the economics of reaching your customers, and
--an overview of accounting and financial techniques from a manager's perspective.

I routinely recommend this book to potential clients in my consulting practice, and to fellow members of the small publishing e-communities. Many new publishers know quite a bit about the editorial and marketing sides of publishing, but have given very little thought to the nitty-gritty of keeping the company afloat. If you know someone like that, get them to read this book as soon as possible!