Part 39: The Science of Publishing

by Shawn Burke, Ph.D.

Introduction

We take a scenic detour in this installment of The Science of Paddling. Over the past months, blog readers have seen several posts about my adventures in publishing. Now that the book is out (yay!) I’ve had some time to reflect on the experience of being a first-time author and independent publisher. The book industry is harder to get my head around than contour integration.

For anyone curious about how one brings a book to market, or who might even be interested in writing and publishing their own work, this post is for you. Just know that you’ll manage what feels like the world’s longest to-do list.

Spoiler alert: It was worth it. And it was a lot harder than I expected.

So, You Want To Be An Author?

Those who’ve read The Science of Paddling book know the blog’s origin story; I won’t repeat it here. The first four blog posts appeared in paddling club newsletters and on a few websites, notably Wesley Echols’ surfskiracing.com and Rob Mousley’s surfski.info. The blog languished for several years because I couldn’t find a distribution means for articles I was happy with. I also didn’t want to invest the time and effort to build a platform from scratch.

My wife has a website for her business based on WordPress. After seeing how effective that was for getting her blog posts out to the world, I decided it was time to revive TSOP. There was a new article in the works which, combined with the earlier posts, was a way to launch with actual content online. That’s how The Science of Paddling blog was born. It took years to find its readership. We now have over 1,400 followers on Facebook, and the blog site has been visited by readers from over one hundred countries worldwide. Thanks for being a reader, everyone!

One day a long-time friend surprised me when he said, “You know, there’s a book in there, and you need to write it.” A few months later he called, and we talked it over. Aside from (mostly) convincing me to think seriously about a book, he pointed me to two key assets: Adobe Indesign for book layout (more on this later) and the book Thinking Like Your Editor by Susan Rabiner and Alfred Fortunato.

I continued writing blog posts. We were in the midst of the COVID pandemic, and folks really liked reading them. I’ve been writing for a long time; it’s an essential part of what I do for my day job. And I was pretty good at it. Rabiner and Fortunato’s book helped me see the gaps in my writing. That improved my articles.

The blog allowed me to explore many topics, driven chiefly by what interested me that day. As the number of articles grew, I wondered if there was enough raw content to build the book. I was convinced there was after writing about wake deficits (see Part 26: Waking Up) and impulse (see Part 25: Impulse Part 1 and Part 33: Impulse Revisited). At that point, I saw the through-line for the book’s first seven chapters. Up until then, there was something fundamental missing.

Time to start writing a book.

Adventures in Publishing Land

With an Introduction and a few draft chapters, I went looking for a publisher. I borrowed a copy of Writer’s Market from the local library. Writer’s Market lists publishers and literary agents (among other things) along with the types of books they’re interested in; it’s updated annually. Since The Science of Paddling didn’t fit neatly into common book categories, I spent a fair amount of time researching potential publishers from this vast list. I narrowed it down to four and wrote book proposals tailored to each. A book proposal is a business plan minus the financials. Having worked in and with high-tech startups, I’m familiar with business plans.

I sent off the four proposals and waited. After a couple of months, I heard back from one; they would be the only publisher that got back to me. While they passed on my book, their acquisitions editor was nevertheless encouraging. She wrote that my proposal was the best they’d seen in a long time. However, the projected market needed to be bigger for them to be interested.[1]

If I couldn’t find a publisher, why not be my own? In our DIY world, there are a lot of resources for the aspiring author and self-publisher. I signed up for Reedsy’s newsletter (highly recommended) and benefited greatly from the information there. I also decided to minimize upfront spending, given the projected market size. This meant I would do almost everything myself, for free. That added time to get the book finished. Still, I learned a tremendous amount along the way.

I learned that there are a tremendous number of scams and disreputable “publishers” out there. Rather than belabor the point, interested readers and prospective authors should consult Victoria Strauss’ “Writer Beware” website. It might save you a lot of money and grief.

It’s All About the Processes

I wrestled with an outline for a few months. I decided that every chapter would have a ‘Take Aways’ bulleted list of its main points. More advanced derivations or analyses would be fenced off in an ‘Extra Credit’ section. I didn’t want to scare off potential readers with that level of detail up front; they could refer to it later as appropriate. Much later, I decided to write a glossary. There’s a lot of terminology in my book. A glossary would help readers (and me) settle on consistent terms and usage. Ditto for a list of symbols.

Every chapter drew from existing blog posts. There was a lot of rearranging and mashups, editing, expanding with new content where appropriate, and creating and updating figures. It all had to connect; the book had to flow. I didn’t want to publish a blog post anthology.

My wife offered the use of her Grammarly subscription. That really pushed things up a notch. Grammarly is a web-based application that analyzes uploaded text for spelling, punctuation, and grammar, given specific stylistic preferences you set. Its feedback is unsparing. I’d upload a draft article or a chapter that was twelve pages long. Grammarly would munge on it and return over two hundred “suggested” corrections. I jokingly referred to it as “death by Grammarly.” But by the time I’d finished using it with the chapters, introduction, appendix, and other bits, I noticed that my writing had tightened up. Grammarly isn’t an AI like ChatGPT that “writes” books. It helped me with the text’s mechanics, conciseness, and stylistic consistency. My voice still came through.

Most of my articles rely on math; after all, it’s the language of science. I used an application called MathType to format my equations. MathType let me export equations in many different publication-friendly formats, including for this blog site, which is powered by WordPress. I could move from creating Word document content to publishing a blog post. I still had to cut and paste LaTeX language for the blog – an equation markup language used for most technical books and journals – but that was OK.

Then MathType was sold, and my version was no longer supported. It “broke” with updates to my laptop’s operating system. New application versions were delayed, and when they finally came out, they didn’t run on MacOS. So I held off upgrading my laptop’s operating system as long as possible to make sure I could edit and format all the equations the book required. Then my laptop died. I resurrected an older desktop computer, installed MathType, and kept it limping along long enough to edit and export all equations in encapsulated postscript format for the book. Thank goodness I had everything backed up! I also exported PDF versions of every equation. This would prove invaluable during the book layout stage.

When my laptop died, I no longer had a way to edit my figures. Those were created using another app that was no longer supported; this also broke under new operating system versions. I had to invest in another vector graphics application and learn how to use it to create new figures and re-create old ones.

Despite all these complications, the draft content was finally completed. By this point, the book was up to revision 2. It was time to solicit feedback.

How Many Paddlers Does It Take to Write a Book?

Fortunately, I know many paddlers with engineering backgrounds. I wanted two content editors from different facets of our sport. Content editors provide feedback based on their experience with the subject matter, here emphasizing paddling expertise. I was fortunate that Kirk Olson (surfski paddler) and Todd Johnson (canoeist) agreed to review my draft from the paddler’s perspective. They also provided general editorial comments. I was fortunate to land Chuck Gedney as the third content editor. While not a paddler, Chuck has a Ph.D. from MIT in mechanical engineering with a doctoral thesis in boundary layer transition and control. He also did a minor in applied mathematics. Chuck kept me from making silly mistakes in the analysis and provided all manner of feedback.

Finally, I needed a book editor. Doug Berg, a Minnesota canoe racer and wilderness tripper, is a former English teacher who has also edited books. He graciously accepted my offer to edit The Science of Paddling. Aside from the usual “editor stuff,” Doug insisted I always keep the reader in mind. My writing should welcome them in. That also meant making sure my voice was always present and used consistently throughout each chapter and the entire book. He also convinced me to write a brief introduction to Newton’s Laws of Motion to level-set the readership. I really didn’t want to – I was ready to be finished at that point – but I’m glad I did.

I used the feedback and markups from all four editors to produce version 3. I generated PDFs of the book’s chapters and front/back matter and put them online. I solicited six people from various parts of the paddling community to write “dust jacket blurbs,” sometimes called editorial reviews, using version 3’s text. I got blurbs back from five of them; you’ll find them inside the book’s front cover. Editorial reviews go live the moment your book is listed online for pre-sale or sale, so what these early reviewers have to say is crucial to the launch.[2]

While these early reviewers were reading version 3, I was busy working on version 4. In this penultimate update, I took another pass through the entire manuscript. I reorganized, rewrote, and edited everything one final time to ensure consistent use of terminology, mathematical symbols, and phrasing. Only when considered in its entirety do you notice inconsistencies across chapters. The text had grown to over 82,000 words, 140+ figures, and nearly 200 equations. It was now a book, albeit in draft form.

After producing version 5, a fully-formatted version of the book I’ll discuss in the next section, I solicited the next set of reviewers. These paddlers volunteered to publish book reviews in exchange for early access to the near-final manuscript. Adobe allows folks to put InDesign documents online for this type of review. These pre-prints are called either Advance Reader Copies (ARCs) or Digital Reader Copies (DRCs). I was fortunate to land twelve of these reviewers from around the world. All I asked of them was to write a review and post it wherever they saw fit after the book launch. What they wrote was up to them. These peer reviews in paddling club newsletters and Facebook groups help sustain interest in the book after the initial launch.

Amid all the writing, there were a few “small” things that needed my attention:

  • Decide on a size. After reviewing all the books on my paddlesports bookshelf, I settled on the standard 7” x 10” trade paperback format. Standard sizes help when it comes time to get your book into a bookstore or library. That’s because these places have standardized bookshelf sizes. Have you ever walked into a bookstore and seen a stack of seemingly random books piled atop a table and not on shelves? Often, those are books produced in non-standard sizes or spiral bound. The spiral binding means there is no spine on which to print a book title, which means the book would be anonymous sitting on a shelf. Consider size and format carefully.
  • Decide on a price. I conducted an online survey of TSOP readers and used that information to set my USD 29.95 retail price. I also researched printing costs and industry-standard wholesale discounts to ensure I wasn’t producing a book that lost money with each unit sold.[3]
  • Obtain permission to use photographs from various rights holders. In other words, respect others’ intellectual property.
  • Obtain a Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN). The LCCN is used by libraries to find your book. While not strictly necessary, I plan to get The Science of Paddling out to libraries in a hardcover edition.
  • Obtain ISBNs – International Standard Book Numbers. ISBNs uniquely identify a book, including each edition and its publisher. Bricks-and-mortar and online retailers rely on them to acquire, list, and sell books.
  • Register with the U.S. Copyright Office. The book’s copyright notice and the copy I later sent to the Copyright Office unambiguously establish me as the owner of my work. This gives me specific and defensible intellectual property rights.
  • Select BISAC codes. BISAC codes are industry-standard book categories that tell bookstores where to shelve your work. Online retailers use them for readers looking for books covering topics of interest to them. I chose ‘SPO010000′, Sports & Recreation / Water Sports / Canoeing; ‘SPO025000′, Sports & Recreation / Water Sports / Kayaking; and ‘TEC000000’ for Technology & Engineering / General. You get to pick three. Choose wisely!
  • Decide on a wholesale discount. Wholesale discounts allow retailers to make money selling your book. If you only do direct-to-consumer sales, this is irrelevant. If you hope to sell through the various online retailers, it’s a must. Wholesale discounts range between 30-55%, with 55% being almost an industry standard.
  • Decide whether to make your book returnable. If you hope to one day have your book on the shelves of Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, !ndigo/Chapters, etc., your book must be returnable. But, if the book is returnable, and a retailer decides to return copies they bought on spec, the publisher is on the hook for the wholesale price of every copy; in essence, the retailer gets their money back. Large publishing houses understand this is the cost of doing business with large retailers, and they plan to have enough financial cushion to absorb the losses. As an independent publisher, this was a non-starter. My book is non-returnable.
  • Write a book description for the back cover. This means writing like a salesperson.
  • Write a sell sheet. A sell sheet is like a product cut sheet, including information on where to order the book. When I donate books to an event, I include a stack of these. Only a few people might receive a donated copy, but everyone who didn’t can take a sell sheet home and order their own copy.
  • Set up an Author Central site on Amazon and Goodreads. This means polishing your bio.
  • Think of all the other things you should have thought of.

How Text and Images Become a Book

I understood early on that The Science of Paddling wouldn’t easily lend itself to being an eBook. That’s because it has so much formatting. Figures and equations only make sense if they appear with, or at least near, the text that refers to them. Most eBooks, like the ones you might read on a Kindle device or app, have text and images that “reflow.” This means the formatting – page width and height, font size, margins, and even the fonts – changes with the device and user preferences. My book requires a lot of precise formatting, so a print version is my best option for now.

Who would print the book? Since I wasn’t working with a publisher, I had many options. Not surprisingly, Amazon has a publishing and printing arm called KDP, the acronym for Kindle Direct Publishing. They’re an obvious choice. However, I learned that choosing KDP as my printer would block me from the rest of the book ecosystem. Bookstores won’t order a book from Amazon because Amazon has put so many of their peers out of business. Online booksellers generally won’t buy from Amazon; they’re the competition. I could have my book printed in bulk and sell it myself, but that would require a significant upfront expense. I wanted to avoid taking on order fulfillment, especially for international orders, even though that would provide the greatest profit. And I wasn’t looking for a vanity press, either. Given my effort, I wanted to produce a book you could buy from the usual places. As you can see, my original question about printers became three questions: who would print it, distribute it, and handle the order fulfillment. That led me to Ingram Spark.

Ingram Spark is a print-on-demand printer and distributor. They have US, UK, and Australian factories filled with devices that look like oversized Xerox machines. These machines print entire books, including their covers, and bind them. They are fed formatted digital files that comprise the book’s content and cover art. Since books are printed on demand, there is no stock. Since there is no stock, a book is never “out of stock.” Copies need to be ordered and printed to fill orders. This also means I wouldn’t incur warehousing fees.[4] Since Ingram Spark is also a distributor, I didn’t have to establish business relations with hundreds if not thousands of booksellers and send them books in response to their orders. Ingram does that. I just needed to create a formatted book.

So how do you do that?

While I write in Microsoft Word, it doesn’t have the precise formatting features needed to produce the book I envisioned. I remembered the app recommendation from my friend who got me to write a book: Adobe InDesign. You’re probably familiar with Adobe Photoshop. InDesign is a full-featured book layout program. It’s an industry standard; many printers can work directly with an InDesign file. Its greatest strength – immense flexibility and customizability – means a very steep learning curve, especially for a newbie like me.

I was lucky to find Book Design Made Simple by Fiona Raven and Glenna Collett, which walks you through laying out a book using InDesign. I wouldn’t have been able to figure out InDesign as quickly without this reference. InDesign builds a book using user-defined character, paragraph, and page styles. It’s not a text editor; that’s what Word is for. You write the text in another application (like Word), develop a book design, then “flow” the text into your InDesign document. I consequently had to become a book designer to define all the styles needed to lay up my book. Who knew?

This led me to study styles used in other sport science books. The Lore of Running, 4th Edition, inspired my cover design. I drew inspiration from David Gordon Wilson’s Bicycling Science. I finally settled on an interior that updated the classic engineering texts I used in college and graduate school with modern design elements and fonts. This expanded my role from content creator to designer. I specified over seventy design elements for my book and a half dozen font families.

Laying out the book took a lot of time. A LOT of time! When I felt confident I had a good draft, minus a few fiddly bits, I had a local copy shop print and spiral bind a hardcopy in the 7” x 10” format. This gave me a first look at how the various stylistic choices looked when printed.

I found approximately thirty of the equations didn’t print correctly. MathType relies on specific Microsoft fonts to generate equations. These include fonts used to produce fractions, large parentheses, large brackets, and a few but not all Greek symbols. These fonts are not included in InDesign and are nowhere to be found at Adobe. I had to hunt for additional fonts to install so the equations were printed correctly. Unfortunately, that didn’t fix most of my problems. Fortunately, I previously produced encapsulated Postscript and PDF versions of my equations. My PDFs stood alone; they included all required fonts in their data. So approximately twenty-five equations in the final book are PDFs. This may seem like a lot of detail, but if you want to produce a book like mine, these issues will arise. Consider yourself warned.

The last major construction item was the index. InDesign, Word, and other programs have auto-indexing capabilities. These will produce one-level indexes. And they will be horrible. Fortunately, in my various walks through the book’s versions, I collected a list of terms to use as index entries. It overlapped with the glossary I had written. I spent time organizing and editing the index entries. I established a cross-reference strategy to produce a passable two-level index. Then it was time to link the index entries with their various occurrences in the book. Adobe’s guidance on this is useless; I had to combine information from a half dozen online sources to figure it out. But I persisted and finally produced an index linked to many, many parts of the book.

Everything was finally in place. I had a draft book in electronic form! I packaged my book’s text into the format specified by my printer. Packaging produces a file with all the fonts, text, figures, equations, and formatting information included. This means, among other things, that the printer doesn’t have to own or license all the fonts needed to print your book. You see, fonts are copyrighted intellectual property. The fees I paid to Adobe for using their software granted me a non-exclusive license to use their fonts in my book.

I uploaded the final text and cover files to Ingram Spark and waited to see if they flagged any errors. This review process can take up to three days. Remarkably, I received an e-mail a few hours later informing me that my files had passed muster. The e-mail included a link to download the book’s electronic proof copy (an “eProof”).

As I reviewed the proof, I passed along a copy to the final set of eyes: the proofreader. Proofreaders come in all shapes and sizes. Since I had gone through spell-checking, grammar, and content editing numerous times, I only sought feedback on formatting inconsistencies, missing figure titles, consistent formatting, footnotes, and spelling mistakes. I reviewed the files in parallel. It took three iterations before I finally accepted the eProofs. My next step was to order a physical proof copy and assess how the book looked. An actual physical copy!

In parallel, I posted book updates on Facebook and on this blog site. You want people to know the book is coming. I also connected with an organizer of a major local race interested in a bulk purchase. Their race date decided the book’s publication date, which I set for the first of June 2023.

You must have your book finalized and authorize its release at least a month before publication. Six weeks would be better. This includes adding a significant amount of metadata about the book. Book metadata comprises the ISBN, BISAC codes, an author bio, search terms and phrases, international pricing in a dozen markets, and editorial reviews. Once you authorize your book to be published, this data is pushed by Ingram Spark to approximately 40,000 retailers worldwide. It can take a long time for this data to be loaded onto these retailers’ IT systems, so it’s best to get it all right the first time.

My proof copy arrived a few days later than expected; I was about to butt up against my deadlines. I spent a day reviewing it, then authorized its release the following morning. A few days later, the book listing started appearing on sales sites worldwide. Some even offered pre-orders. Amazon never got the cover image up in time for the book launch. We’ll get back to Amazon in a minute.

Once I authorized the book, I was able to order author copies. These are copies of the book I can purchase and do with as I please. I sent copies to my editors, blurb writers, the photographer who provided images for the front and back cover, and a few others. I sent a copy to the person who convinced me to write the book, noting that it was “all your fault.” I also sent copies to the U.S. Copyright Office and the Library of Congress. I donated one to my local library. And I kept a few on hand for consignment sales I had planned through local brick-and-mortar stores.

The book’s on-sale day finally arrived. Yay! Several people pre-ordered it from Amazon and received notice that their copies would ship on the publication date. Imagine my dismay to learn that Amazon subsequently delayed shipping pre-orders by one to two weeks. Soon my book appeared as “Temporarily Out Of Stock” on Amazon worldwide. I scrambled to find other places where folks could order and receive a copy and put this info on my blog site. My book launch was getting mucked up by the publishing industry’s 700-pound gorilla.

“Temporarily Out Of Stock” didn’t make sense. There is no stock since The Science of Paddling is printed on demand. Now Amazon makes less money if they fill orders from an outside book printer rather than using its in-house printing arm. I can’t claim to know Amazon’s internal workings. I just knew that interested readers couldn’t buy my book there, and many people stop looking if it’s not on Amazon. Definitely not good. One of the Big Five publishers could drop a dime and get this fixed. As an independent publisher, I had no pull with one of the world’s largest companies.

Fortunately, I connected with the manager of our town’s independent bookstore. Since I’m a local author, they were interested in my book; we entered a consignment agreement for them to sell it. If I had used KDP as my printer, they would have refused to stock it for the reasons outlined above. I asked what they thought of a hybrid model where I brought Amazon on as a second printer solely to fulfill Amazon orders. Since the bookstore could order my book from Ingram Spark, they saw no conflict.

I signed up for a KDP account and set up Amazon as my second printer. I circled back to my InDesign text and cover files and reformatted these to fit KDP’s requirements. I went through a similar eProof / physical proof approval process. The books from both printers differ very slightly. The print quality is equally good; Amazon uses slightly thicker paper. Since my book was already past its release date, only a few hours after I hit “authorize,” I received an e-mail that The Science of Paddling, printed by Amazon, was now on sale. The following morning I noticed it was In Stock on every Amazon site worldwide – except in China.[5] So problem fixed going forward; it’s still unclear why Amazon pre-orders got screwed up and are only now being resolved.

But the book is out there! It’s exciting, especially when people post photos of their copies out in the wild on social media. This may sound trite, but it’s true: The book isn’t mine anymore, it’s yours. And I’m an author.

I’m (Not) Rich!

A trade group representing independent publishers conducted its annual survey of the publishing industry, focusing on sales. A small number of authors dominate sales figures worldwide; no surprise there. The Danielle Steeles and Steven Kings of the world do pretty well. As for the rest of us… Most new authors generate between $0 and $1,000 in revenue per year per book. Some more established authors earn an average of $5,000 in revenue per year, per book, for as long as their books are popular enough to generate sales. Like their music industry peers, authors must scramble to earn less than a living wage. If I were to consider writing as a career these days, I’d probably pick something else. Or, like me, have another gig that keeps the light on.

I wrote The Science of Paddling to get the information out there. A surprising number of people like what I write – many even find bits of it actionable. I like to write, too. And to date, I’ve seen nothing like my book out there. But I’ve learned a lesson from my blog, which has always run in the red. I treat my book authorship and publishing like a business, not a hobby. I’ve carefully tracked my sunk costs for bringing the book to market. Even with my penny-pinching ways, that cost isn’t insignificant.

So, I’m now entering the marketing phase of the book’s life. Another author confessed that this is the most significant part of publishing a book: not the writing but figuring out how to sell it. This doesn’t come naturally to me. It also doesn’t come naturally to most authors; they’d prefer to be left alone to write. It’s another opportunity to learn and become comfortable with being uncomfortable. As an independent publisher, I have to!

Am I glad I did it? Absolutely. Even on those days I thought I’d trashed my book by hitting the wrong keys using InDesign. Or when Grammarly offered over three hundred “suggested” revisions to a chapter. Or when my laptop died along with two critical applications. The ultimate proof point is that I’m writing two new books and designing a hardcover version of The Science of Paddling. I’m embracing Ted Lasso’s advice: be like a goldfish.

Thank you all for being readers. And special thanks to everyone who has bought a copy of my book, or that plans to.

Copyright © 2023, Shawn Burke, all rights reserved. See our Terms of Use for more information.

V1.0

  1. For prospective authors, note that this was a business decision. Rejections like that are not a commentary on your work. They reflect whether your book aligns with the publisher’s business model.
  2. A common practice in the publishing world is to pre-write these reviews. Looking at many editorial reviews, you’ll see the same names popping up repeatedly as small clusters of authors review each other’s work. I did not enter into any quid pro quo and did not write any of the editorial reviews. What you read is what these folks wrote.
  3. Yes, you can actually do that.
  4. Yes, those are a thing.
  5. Why not China? I have no idea.