Great Sea Serpent

Following my post on moving my old ebooks to print, I've just finished rescanning the original figures for Oudemans' The Great Sea Serpent. This should allow me to reprint the book in paperback within a month or so, depending on how much time I have free.

This is one of the foundational books for cryptozoology, and while we may not agree with all of Oudemans' conclusions, it is well worth a spot on your bookshelf. Unfortunately, the original is quite expensive.

I'll be scanning in another old text on Central American reptiles this week, but I may just reprint the plates (as it includes some gorgeous illustrations, both black-white and color). Not sure how much interest there will be in the text itself.

Philip Henry Gosse

One of my favorite classic natural history writers is Philip Henry Gosse. He wrote several books in the mid- to late 1800s, including a few titles in which he discusses mystery animals (sea serpents and the like). He was the first naturalist to create (and write about) the salt-water aquarium, and had a particular interest in marine life.
I've spent the day scanning the text and color plates for Gosse's A Year at the Shore. I'll put it in line to reprint in a few months, if I have time. Lots of other books I need to keep working on, but I would like to start reprinting a few more of his books. I did have an ebook for his text, The Romance of Natural History (American version), which was fairly popular as a free download.

Print Quality versus Distribution

One of the issues I'm going to be dealing with in future titles is print quality of POD books versus ease of distribution. Currently, all of my titles are printed via LightningSource, Inc., which allows direct distribution through Ingrams and Amazon (and B&N, though I don't have as good an idea as to how many go through that channel). It is incredibly simple for a customer to just go to Amazon, buy the book, and receive it from LSI (drop-shipped) within a week, usually.

However, LSI's print quality is not good for black-white images (yet), and they don't allow the insertion of color pages into an otherwise black-white text (which would reduce print costs). I've been viewing samples of black-white text and graphics from a local printer who does low-run POD books. Frankly, the difference is astounding. You really can't distinguish the quality black-white photographs from traditional offset printing.

The problem, though, is that if I use a local printer, I won't be able to use Amazon, etc., as easily. I would either have to sell via Amazon Advantage, and lose 55% of retail (most of which Amazon would probably discount anyway), which would require raising the initional retail price, or deal with Amazon Marketplace, where I'd have to do direct sales. I'm really not eager to go into direct online sales, again, but that may be something to consider for the future.

The other option is to just focus the local printing on texts that don't really sell online. My titles include those that are primarily online sales, and those that are wholesaled to alternative outlets (seminar sales for one author's title, specialty catalog for another's). I am looking at expanding my direct-to-retailer/cataloger sales; just sold, for example, a small group of books to Adventures Unlimited's Arizona store. (They should arrive there sometime next week.) Sold a few sample copies to a natural history catalog sales business last week, we'll see if they're interested in stocking any.

From Ebooks to Print

Eight or nine years ago, I started publishing ebooks (under Arment Biological Press) with the expectation that the market would grow, the public would embrace the new paradigm, etc., etc. That, of course, hasn't happened. People still like physical books. (Now, people do appear to like free ebooks. There just isn't a large market for ebook sales.)

[Interestingly, producing ebooks as supplements to books already in print has started to become popular recently, with sales averaging in the 10% range (10% of physical book sales). Even online books (Google Books, Amazon's online viewing "upgrades, etc.) are increasing.]

I've now become far more enthusiastic about POD, as this technology is getting better all the time. I've decided to start reissuing some of the former ebook titles as print titles. Every once in a while I get an email from someone wanting to know where the ebooks have gone on my site (technically, I think I've lost the actual pdfs during a move from one hosting site to another). But I still have the original scanned text - though I will need to rescan images for book quality output.