How I (Could Have) Made Millions Off My Cat

NOT THAT GETTTING PUBLISHED by a big house is such a bad idea. But good luck even getting one to pay attention. Literary agents get inundated with author queries. Without an agent, publishers throw out most proposals without reading them. Now, suppose you beat the odds and actually get published by one of them. Only about 10 percent of the books they put out generate enough money to pay back the authors’ advance. And no wonder. There’s a book in print for every 100 men, women, and children in the United States. I don’t mean a copy for every 100 people; I mean book title. And 200,000 additional titles get published every year. Yet only a third of American adults read books, and that number has been declining steadily. So after beating the odds to get a prestigious imprint, you probably won’t get rich.

But you will get on radio and maybe television, which might help you with your career. You’ll be considered an expert on your subject even if, like me, you don’t really know much about anything. You’ll win honor and glory. And while there isn’t much money in writing a book, there’s money in honor and glory.

Besides, like statistics in general, the ones on publishing tend to be misleading. The most successful authors aren’t necessarily the ones who sell the most books. They use their books to gain knowledge that they exploit in other media. The interesting thing here is that publishing a book is only the beginning, not the end, of the business reasons for doing it. To put it another way, you want to wag the Long Tail.

You may have heard of the Long Tail and Wired magazine writer Chris Anderson’s bestselling book of the same name. He based it on a well-established economic distribution theory: Lots of little things can outsell a few big things. Amazon, for instance, offers millions of titles that only sell a few copies apiece. Then it sells thousands each of a few bestsellers. It makes more money on the poor sellers than it does on the bestsellers. Hence the Long Tail, a graph line that drops steeply and then perks along at a low level. The Internet allows corporations to make fortunes from the Long Tail, thanks to user-driven content, viral marketing, and online communities—lots and lots of people selling just a few things.

When it comes to books, though, Amazon is just another bookstore. It just sells product; it doesn’t sell the actual informational content. Amazon makes money on just one part of the economic chain, which leaves a lot for you and me to exploit. We’re not the passive victims of The Man. Your book may sell just a few thousand copies, but look at the value you can generate besides the book itself. You can resell the information in the form of websites, presentations, consulting, a newsletter, and a higher salary at your next job. We may be at the bottom of the food chain, but the soil down here is rich.

Before the Internet, and long before the Long Tail, many obstacles stood in the way of selling your personal knowledge. My dad makes a good case in point. A born tinkerer, he spent all his free time inventing stuff: a dinner table that folded out of a wall, solar-powered toy boats, a full-size rowboat that converted into a sailboat, a bar made out of old bottles, and, in the basement, a tropical waterfall with live fish. His plans died with him in 1987; I never saw him write down more than the barest sketches and figures. Now, imagine what he could have done these days if he wanted to gain some notoriety or bucks from his inventions. He could have an inventor’s blog, self-published pamphlets, a video how-to series on the Web, and a book titled How to Invent Stuff. Maybe all that would lead to an inventors’ version of Iron Chef on TV, where ingenious types turn junk into flying cars. In fact, ABC’s short-lived American Inventor specialized in just this type of programming.

The truth is, if I had suggested any of this to him, he would have given me one of those “There-you-go-again” looks. Dad tinkered in his basement to get away from the world, not to sell to it. It’s up to the rest of us to exploit our own knowledge. Personally, I inherited so little of Dad’s mechanical skills that I shouldn’t be allowed near a power tool. But I can write a cat book.

NOW, SUPPOSED I DECIDED that the book had real sales potential. I actually did ask my agent if she thought she could sell it to a big publisher. She just laughed, understandably. So I joined a well-known group of writers who have self-published their books, including Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, Zane Grey, Walt Whitman, the authors of Chicken Soup for the Soul, and Richard Nixon.

Unlike these people, I had the advantage of printing on demand. P.O.D. got its start during the ’90s and caught the Internet wave. Today there are about a dozen major sites that will produce your book. Some will also help you market it. While many traditional printers would be happy to do your book, most won’t unless you order at least 1,000 copies. P.O.D. printers let you produce just one copy at a time for as little as $4.

I found a site called blurb.com to be the easiest to use. After downloading free software, I typed the book into one of the program’s numerous templates, uploaded the photos, and hit the “Publish” button. Then I went to the site’s “bookstore” and ordered my first copy, in paperback, for only $13. Blurb hit me with an $11 shipping and handling charge, which made my stupid little cat book seem suddenly rather expensive. Somehow I don’t think it will turn into a best seller.

But let’s just assume that I did have a potential winner on my hands. The first thing I would do—as much as a year before I even wrote the thing—would be to establish a website, sniffitfirst.com. Each day I would post a little piece of cat wisdom and invite users to send in their own. That way I could collect a bunch of e-mail addresses and tell my cat folk when the book came out. This is exactly what I did for my book Thank You for Arguing, even though I didn’t publish it myself. It was my single smartest marketing tactic. I generated some original traffic by advertising on Google searches, and then let things build over the following months.

Back to the cat book: A month before I published it, I would hire myself a publicist. The book Writer’s Market contains a thorough list of literary P.R. people. I’d see if I could line one up for just a month, because I couldn’t afford more than that; good P.R. people charge some $10,000 a month. I’d make sure I got one who could arrange a satellite phone tour, allowing me to conduct interviews at my home office, in my underwear. Sure, you may not make it onto the Today show, but you can still generate buzz for your product; as an example, I did a commentary on National Public Radio’s news program, “All Things Considered”—not exactly Oprah’s book club—and yet it was enough to get my rhetoric book onto Amazon’s top 100 “bestsellers” for a few days.

I wouldn’t publish the cat book on blurb.com if I really wanted it make money. Other P.O.D. sites, such as Lulu and Xlibris, would let me print and fulfill orders more cheaply. Those sites are also better than Blurb at handling technical minutiae, such as getting an International Standard Book Number, a bar code, and listings in the major directories that bookstores use, such as Books in Print.

One caveat: Amazon wouldn’t touch Sniff It First unless I published it using Amazon’s own P.O.D. printer, BookSurge, or got a distributor to send the book out. (The largest distributor, Ingram, has a print-on-demand subsidiary, Lightning Source, which can handle everything from printing to bookstore sales.) Failure to get on Amazon wouldn’t kill the book, necessarily. According to my editors at Crown Books, Amazon sells only 2 percent of the books in this country. Nonetheless, it’s not a bad idea to use a book distributor or wholesaler. Ask your local bookstore to see who’s supplying it. The manager can give you advice.

OK, so suppose I published Sniff It First properly, hired a publicist, got a distributor, e-mailed my cat-obsessed Web fans, got out on the radio, and started actually selling books. Chances are, I’d be losing money. I could expect to make about $2 per copy, and would have to sell at least 5,000 books just to pay my publicist. So what should I do?

Publish another book. A year after Sniff It First, I would come out with a book of dog wisdom. Then I could branch out beyond pets and do books about what I learned from my car, what I learned from my kids, what I learned (and lost) from my computer, and so on. The What I Learned series could be the next Chicken Soup! I’d be rich!
I’d then offer premium memberships on sniffitfirst.com, giving you access to e-books as well as discounts on What I Learned T-shirts and coffee mugs. (I currently print and hawk junk for my argument book on cafepress.com.)

Then there’s the hilarious presentation that I’d work up with one of the “rich media” firms that specialize in souped-up PowerPoint. I would do inspirational videos, get myself on a speaker’s bureau, and charge $10,000 per gig, plus expenses. I’d sell multi-book audio packages and a multi-CD self-actualization course. Then I’d hire a Hollywood agent to shop around a movie treatment about a guy who gets himself in trouble learning the wrong things from his cat and his car. Oh, and don’t forget the musical and the Top 40 hit song, “What I Learned From You.”

In short, you and I must not be content with our status as anonymous tiny hairs on the Long Tail. We want to be prosperous fleas! Instead of making Amazon microscopically richer with a few sales of my cat book, I would multi-purpose the book’s concept in as many media as I could think of. And if some new medium comes along, I would populate it with wise cats.

Except that I won’t. For one thing, I’m too lazy. For another, the cat book is pretty stupid. (Self-Publishing Rule No. 1: Don’t call your own book “stupid.”) But you get the picture here. These days, only a few books are just books. Most turn out to be bombs. Some are collections of information and ideas that may or may not even be on paper. A few are eminently saleable. A very few are goldmines. That’s where you come in, dear reader—not me.

But if only my cat had taught me something really useful, I’d be a very wealthy man.

Spirit editorial director Jay Heinrichs does more than write books about cats. But not much more.

PAGE 1 2 prev