The picture shows my perfect summertime scenario. Reading on the beach, shaded, with a tall, cool one close by. This aspirational reading scene is my hope every year around this time.
As a self-published author, you could be the name on the cover of the book enjoyed by the summertime reading enthusiast. How would that feel?
Maybe Touchwood Press Publish-It-Yourself resources can help you toward that feeling.
I like detective fiction best as a summertime read. Or that classic that I’ve been promising myself I would finally get to. I’ve been trying to finish Moby Dick since high school. I’m re-reading Slaughterhouse Five and launching a project to read all the Vonnegut books I read but didn’t understand in college.
The New York Times, Goodreads, Kirkus Reviews, and other sites with book reviewers all see summertime, and especially vacations, as reading time. Rightly so. But if you’re not getting away to the beach or wherever on vacation any time soon, find a summertime reading spot and while away a few hours a week working on that stack that’s been growing on your nightstand, or trespassing on valuable desktop real estate. Open your mind and make space for new content. Wander in your thoughts in a summertime sort of way. I mean what is summertime for?
Here is Amazon’s May 30, 2025, announcement: For the first time since starting print operations almost two decades ago, starting June 10, 2025, we are changing the royalty rate for books priced below certain list prices (e.g. less than 9.99 USD) from 60% to 50%.
I have been in and around publishing long enough to understand that printing and binding a book is not cheap. In the pre-POD (print on demand) days, printers and publishers were compelled to produce print runs as large as possible in order to reduce per-book costs to a level that they and their customers could handle.
Back when I was in the textbook publishing business (the 1980s), tiny changes in the commodity price of lumber (used to make paper) and manufactured paper caused great angst in the C-Suites of the major publishers. These same economics usually made it impossible for authors to self-publish because the print runs that printers demanded were way beyond what self-publishers could spend. We are thankful that POD technology made it possible for us to self-publish and Amazon to re-invent book selling. Note: The economic travails of the 70s and early 80s also sent US publishers as a rule to Asian printers, where labor costs were much less. This spelled the deaths of American companies and industries with long-standing stakes in book printing and binding. That’s another story.
I am impressed with how creatively Amazon configured the price increase. Lowering the commission rate for books priced below USD 9.99 is definitely a price increase for authors with books below that price level, but Amazon figured out how to give us a choice. When I received the first notice of the change, I dropped everything, logged into KDP, and raised the prices for all my books priced that were below USD 9.99 to that level. By acting fast, I was able to avoid losing any sales and avoided the lower royalty rate ahead.
When I raised my prices, I did not notice initially that there are new thresholds for most of Amazon’s non-US markets as well. So, I had to make a second pass and re-set prices for the UK, Canada, etc.
Take a quick look at this analysis of the costs of printing and binding a 200-page paperback book. Thirty-five to 45% of the total cost of printing and binding can come from paper and ink. A five ot ten percent increase (tariff or otherwise) will play havoc with the bottom line.
Cost Component
Typical % of Total Cost
Paper
25–30%
Ink
10–15%
Labor
15–20%
Binding
10–15%
Overhead
10–15%
Other(margin, packaging, etc.)
10–15%
But wait, there’s more.
It seems pretty transparent that Amazon bundled a cost reduction with their price increase to soften the blow. …we are reducing color printing costs for paperbacks in some marketplaces to help authors adopt color printing…
Color printing generally requires better-grade (thicker, denser) paper than black-and-white printing to avoid “bleed-through” and ink dispersion effects that degrade image quality. This costs more. So, by lowering the cost, Amazon has either found a workaround or is able to handle reduced margins for color printing as compared with the margin increases that they will realize from the price increases described above.
Either way, I will re-think whether I have books that will benefit from color printing. Note that the cost reductions impact both standard and premium color jobs. At Touchwood Press, we’ll be looking at the viability of creating color versions of our 50 Fun Facts print books to match the color we can include in the eBook versions of those books for readers using phones or tablets.
Last month, we journeyed from idea to the publication of our first audiobook in three weeks. At no cost. International distribution. Easy-peasy.
Here were the keys:
We already had a decent microphone, a Blue Yeti, and a tiny bit of experience using the Audacity free version as our audio studio.
The narrator has done some acting and is familiar with speaking lines. He was the co-author and worked for free.
We used FindawayVoices.com as our production/distribution platform, and that was very helpful, and free.
The book, 50 Fun Facts About the New York Yankees, was launched in paperback and e-book on Amazon in July. We had the thought to produce an audiobook version once the Yankees were definitely going to the World Series. We didn’t allow quite enough time as it turned out, so we missed that opportunity. But not by much. We’re delighted that the book was available as quickly as it was, and on multiple distribution channels. We can now say that we have started up a brand new arm of Touchwood Press.
Takeaways:
Don’t be intimidated at the prospect of producing an audiobook version of your book. Just as with publishing the print book, you can do this, even if you need a little help.
However, remember to respect the medium. You’ll need a quiet place to record. You’ll need to be aware that your breathing and other mouth noises (and other noises) will absolutely end up in the recording. It may require multiple takes and some editing to get an acceptable audio files.
The two co-authors of the Yankees book are on different coasts. This did not present any serious problem. One author sent production-ready audio files to the other, who merged and did final production on them before uploading to FindawayVoices. There were remarkably few re-tries needed to get an OK from Findaway, and we were off to the races. Within a few days, we were notified that six distribution channels (GooglePlay, Audiobooks.com, others) have included our audiobook in their catalogs. Listeners everywhere can buy our audiobook, and we get royalties (almost) instantly, at rates that vary by channel. Pretty slick.
What about Amazon?
Amazon’s ACX is the kingpin in the audiobook production world, especially for self-publishers. That’s great. However, through my research and what I’ve heard from others over time, ACX offers a more complicated path for self-publishers than say, FindawayVoices, which we use for our first adventure into audiobooks. The complications begin with the ACX Book Posting Agreement, a lengthy contract that is well worth your time if you want to get into the audiobook business. For our purposes, publishing our first audiobook, this was a bridge way too far. Having said that, I look forward to accessing the benefits that ACX can offer as we ramp up our audiobook enterprise.
The Opportunity
The audiobook market is expected to grow about 25% per year between now and 2032. The market was $4.2 billion in 2022 and could be as big as $40 billion in 10 years. It’s not hard to figure out why, in a world where we live tethered to our phones, more and more folks are listening rather than, or in addition to, reading. Decide for yourself if you can bite off the time and effort to produce your own audiobooks and gain another slice of the pie.
It has long held true in publishing that 20% of the titles make for 80% of the profits. Whether the typical numbers are more like 40/60 or 10/90, the principle is the same. In any speculative business such as book publishing (or movies or music or gold mining), the best-sellers carry the rest of the list to profitability and sustainability. But if Lora Kelly, a writer for The Atlantic, is right, even this economic pillar of the publishing business is changing. See Taylor Swift Is a Perfect Example of How Publishing Is Changing for the story.
This may be very good news for other self-publishing authors like Ms. Swift. I’ve always thought that the best way for a self-publishing author to get a shot with an established, aka traditional, publisher is to wait for them to come to you. For years now, savvy acquisition editors have been training their sights on Amazon and other platforms to get a bead on the next best sellers. A single shot to an aspirational writer has sometimes landed a new super-star author. What are the odds? Better than a total shot in the dark, apparently.
So, be ready for that e-mail or letter from an editor at a big-name publisher. Know your rights, and your copyrights. Be prepared to sell some, but not necessarily all, your rights to the first big-game hunter who has their sights on you. In the meantime, dream big, and get back to writing your sequel!
