Why is there no focus on the business of publishing?

Spent some time last week at Book Expo America at the Javits Center in New York. I've never been to BEA before, but as an author and publisher, I was told this is one of events that I must attend to get a firsthand look at the latest trends affecting the book industry.

The massive exhibit hall at the Javits was filled with book publishers, service providers, and others who in some way make a living from the book industry. Besides the author book signings and the publisher displays of their new titles, the key themes of the conference focused e-books and how to use social media tools to market your book.

As I walked around the exhibit hall and talked to the exhibitors and other attendees, it was very apparent that physical books were still the key focus of many people, and they had not yet made the transition to the e-book and social media mindset. Yes, everyone was talking about e-books and social media, but the exhibits and exhibitors were still in a physical book world.

The second half of the story is that Amazon reported last week that e-books are now outselling physical books on their website.

Which brings me to publishing and the publishing business model. To a relative newcomer like me, as the Amazon data makes clear, the publishing world is changing and it's changing rapidly.

Since the publishing model is changing, one would think that an important part of the content for an event such as Book Expo America would be a discussion of the changes occurring in the publishing model, and how a publisher could leverage this new publishing model to make money.

In my conversations with some exhibitors and industry experts, I asked many times, where was the discussion of the business side of the publishing business?

The answer was very interesting, and went something like this. The creative types who are involved in the publishing business would much rather talk about social media, cover design, and page layout, but are not really interested in talking about the business side of publishing. If you ran a social media session opposite a business of publishing session, the attendance would run 10 to 1 in favor of the social media session

Now the business side of publishing is not the sexy side of the business, however, making some money on the books that you publish, be they e-books or physical books, needs to be a primary consideration. If you are not making any money, you will be out of business pretty quick, and won't have the opportunity to work on all the creative things.

Even for the small publisher, it costs a minimum of $10,000 to produce a book, and the typical number for a good quality physical book is much closer to $25,000. Add to this some marketing expenses, some distribution costs, and publicity expenses, and you could very easily be looking at a $40,000 investment to bring a book to market. Even a simple e-book can cost five figures to produce after paying the editor and designers.

After making this investment, you will receive somewhere between $5 and $10 per book sold. To simply cover the costs of production, you will need to sell several thousand books.

All of this begs the question, if the business side of the publishing business is changing rapidly, and it costs a fair amount of money to publish a book, why is the focus only on social media and how to conduct a book signing, and not on how to produce a book that you can sell profitably?