Steven Spatz is a writer, marketer, and president of BookBaby, a distributor of ebooks and print books. He started his writing career at age 13 and worked for several major newspapers after graduating from university.

Steven got a job as a sportswriter when he was 13. His journalistic heroes were Walter Cronkite and Howard Cosell.

He did that for a little while and then went back to the family business, where he learned direct marketing. Steven’s family had a food catalog they grew to be one of the largest in the United States. Through that experience, he really learned about direct marketing, and bringing the right products and services to the right people at the right time.

That’s what Steven has done with most of his career. He’s worked for Mattel and Hasbro Collectibles. About 15 years ago, Steven became interested in the music business. His parent company, CDBaby, still manufactures custom-made CDs and DVDs. Yes, there’s still a market for that! They also work in digital music.

BookBaby started seven years ago. BookBaby’s mission is to help authors get their work out into the marketplace. The BookBaby motto is “We make the little guy look big.”

Steven is using his talent for writing and his knowledge of direct marketing to help indie authors be successful in the marketplace.

In this interview, we talked about the factors every indie author needs to consider, how BookBaby can help you achieve your goals, how the marketplace has changed in the last eight years, and the benefits of using BookBaby to help launch you onto the world stage.

BookBaby grew out of CDBaby, which still sends a lot of music to iTunes, Amazon, and Spotify.

Through these existing partnership, Steven had a great opportunity: when Apple created the iPad, they were looking for companies that could make ebooks. They knew CDBaby already created music files for them, so Apple asked if they could make ebooks. The people at CDBaby had to quickly learn how to make ebook files that would work on the iPad.

Since then, the business has exploded. They added ebook distribution to Amazon, and now they’re in 59 other digital retail stores around the world.

BookBaby quickly realized that if authors were going to succeed, they would need to give their readers the book in the format the reader wanted. That’s why they started offering print distribution.

They began by partnering with a printer they knew. Two years ago, they started printing some books in house as a test, and now they print all their books in house.

At this point, BookBaby is a one-stop shop for everything an indie author needs. They provide:

“Our goal has been to help authors not have to make many decisions. Authors need to spend time writing, and then hand over all the details about their books to experts. You used to have to go to many different places to get all of the services authors really need; now you can just come to BookBaby.”

BookBaby offers a simple five-step guide to self-publishing.

There are five decisions you need to make before you publish your book.

You have to decide that you’re happy with your finished product, and that the book is the best you can make it right now.

Understand that even though your book is as good as you can make it, it’s not going to be perfect. No book is perfect. You have to decide when it’s time to let go.

Steven still talks to authors every month who have been working on their books for years. It’s important to do the best job you can with your book, and then get it out there.

BookBaby runs an ad in industry magazines that says, “The only page that doesn’t need editing is blank.” It’s true. Even the best authors need a good editor.

You put yourself at a real disadvantage if you don’t have a professional editor. (Hint: a pro editor does not mean your English teacher, or your mother-in-law who thinks she knows a few things about commas and semicolons.)

Yes, books are a product—and that means you have to decide what formats and products matter to you and your readers.

Your book needs to get into readers’ hands—and that involves some knowledge of where they shop, and what benefits you can gain from being in different marketplaces.

Amazon isn’t dominant everywhere. Amazon is big in the United States and England. In Europe, they’re the second or third biggest distributor. In Asia, Amazon is almost nonexistent as a competitor.

Thinking outside the Amazon ecosystem is important for indie authors, especially if they want to reach their maximum audience.

Marketing is an activity a lot of authors don’t like to do. But it’s one activity that no one else is going to do for you. There are millions of books available on Amazon and other online retailers. You have to decide how you’re going to make your book stand out in the marketplace.

There are several services you can pay for that may help your book break through the noise. But there are no guarantees when it comes to advertising.

There are also services you can pay for where you learn how to do the marketing process yourself.

You should use every marketing strategy as best you can.

If you follow that script in order, that’s a good starting point for any indie author.

Getting your book into readers’ hands requires a different approach for different channels and formats.

If you just want to be on Amazon, it’s relatively easy to upload the book yourself and go to CreateSpace for your print book. That’s what Steven recommends for those folks who only want Amazon exposure.

If you want to reach fans all over the world, you can go to BookBaby and they will help you format your book so that it works on every single e-reading device in the world. They create both epub files and Mobi files.

It’s entirely possible for you to create your own epub and Mobi files, but sometimes you just want a professional hand to make sure that everything looks and works the way it’s supposed to.

After the conversion process is complete, BookBaby asks you where you want to be distributed. If you go for full worldwide distribution, BookBaby will distribute your book through several channels, including:

If you go with BookBaby, your book can be purchased in 60 stores all around the world. What really sets BookBaby worldwide distribution apart is that your book is distributed through all of the local bookselling powerhouses in their respective countries. You’re not just limited to Amazon outlets in foreign countries.

Plus, when BookBaby adds a new store, they ask you if you’d like to be distributed there. If you opt in to being distributed to that store, expanding your distribution is effortless on your part.

BookBaby collects their money through fees charged up front. That means you keep 100% of the royalties you earn by being distributed worldwide.

For example, on average, Amazon pays authors about 90 days after their book is sold. If you go through BookBaby, you’ll get your royalty check about one week after they receive it from the online bookstore.

Distributing print books is where BookBaby gives indie authors some real advantages:

Over the Christmas holiday, quite a few Print on Demand books on Amazon were out of stock. BookBaby experienced that problem to a much lesser degree, but they were able to solve the problem faster because they own the printing machines.

The nice thing about print-on-demand (POD) at BookBaby is you don’t have to have an inventory of books available.

BookBaby charges an up-front POD fee to have your file available on their press. They’ll print a few test copies to make sure everything looks right. After that, it’s all done automatically as orders come in.

Here’s how the ordering process works:

After uploading the file to BookBaby, there’s nothing the author needs to do, except look at his or her account a week later and see that money is available from the sale of that book.

Whether a customer orders one book or 1,000, the process is the same. Digital printing presses produce the same quality product every time. BookBaby has the capacity to handle book orders of any size.

Why choose BookBaby over another printer? There are several advantages for an indie author:

The potential self-publishing marketplace is huge. There’s room for everyone to compete.

And there are a lot of very good companies out there. Who you choose to work with depends on what you need as an author.

BookBaby serves a wide range of customers. They work with people who don’t know much about self-publishing and need a lot of hand-holding. They also work with authors who prefer the convenience of having one distribution account that handles everything.

The last thing Amazon wants to do is a lot of handholding of its authors. Amazon’s business model is all about producing a large inventory of self-published work that its customers can buy.

BookBaby sends a lot of its content to Amazon. So in that way, the two companies are allies.

But they also offer authors other ways to make their books available all over the world and to keep more control over the process, while getting the help they need.

The complete self-publishing package is BookBaby’s best-selling offer by far. The package costs $1,600, and for that you get:

They take as much confusion and technical worry out of the process of self-publishing as they can.

In Steven’s experience, authors and musicians are quite different.

Musicians are happy to release their music into the world. They release their art early and often.

Authors are often reluctant to release their manuscript. It’s much harder to convince an author that the book is ready to be released than a musician.

Authors and musicians have the same creative drive and the same ambitions, but by and large, their temperaments are quite different.

The indie music scene has been around for 20 to 25 years. The indie author scene has been around for about eight years, so it’s a much less mature marketplace.

On the music side of things, there are only a few decisions to make. On the book side, you have a lot more options in terms of packaging and distribution.

A lot has happened in the self-publishing world in the few years it’s been around in its modern form. Here are some of the biggest changes Steven has noticed:

Expectations have changed tremendously in the last eight years. Authors used to be content to have their book available on Amazon. Now authors want to be the bestseller in their genre.

The awareness of professionalism is important. When BookBaby first started its editing program, 2 out of 10 books that were distributed through BookBaby were professionally edited. Now the number is more like 7 out of 10.

Authors realize that in order to be competitive, you really have to put out a quality product.

The importance of having an author platform has increased as the marketplace has gotten more competitive. Building an author platform is not an easy thing to do, but it’s essential today.

It’s not enough to simply go on Twitter and shout for the world to buy your book. You have to take a more systematic approach to building your author platform.

One of the most important things you can do is to create your metadata deliberately. Metadata is the data that Amazon and Google use to index your book on their websites.

Metadata is found:

You want to make sure that you put some thought behind your Amazon keywords. These are the keywords you tell Amazon your book is about. These keywords help Amazon customers find your book.

Overall, indie authors are becoming more professional in their expectations of and their willingness to do the work it takes to be successful.

Carl is a Swedish psychologist. He called BookBaby six years ago and told them he wanted to publish a book in English. He translated his children’s book into English himself, and then BookBaby helped him publish The Rabbit Who Wants to Fall Asleep: A New Way of Getting Children to Sleep. He had great hopes for it.

At first, the book didn’t go anywhere. Carl called their office every month asking what he could do to make his books sell better.

The first thing they did was change the category the book was in. He put it into a children’s category when the book was really about parenting. After they changed the book’s category, it did a little bit better in sales.

Then they suggested that he have the book translated into more languages. It is a short children’s book, and that meant the translation costs were low. When they released the book in six more languages, the book did a little bit better. But sales still weren’t meeting his expectations.

The folks at BookBaby suggested Carl write more books so he would have more inventory to attract more readers. He didn’t want to do that, because he believed in his book.

Finally, they suggested that he start giving away his book for free on his website and through social media. That’s when they saw downloads of his book really start to tick up. He was getting up to 1,500 downloads per week. People were really starting to take notice.

That’s when the book found its way into the hands of the editor of a prominent British newspaper, The Guardian. Apparently, the editor had a child who wouldn’t go to sleep, so he read the book to his child and like magic, the child went to sleep.

The editor was so thrilled that he wrote an article for The Guardian that was syndicated to more than 600 newspapers. From that point on, sales of Carl’s book exploded. Starting in August 2015, his royalty checks went from four figures, to five figures, to six figures a month, month after month.

Carl was the first self-published author to have his book be number one on Amazon and on the New York Times bestseller list at the same time.

He got a seven-figure book deal to publish two books with a traditional publisher after the success of his first book.

Carl recently contacted BookBaby to say he was going to use them for his next series of books because he enjoyed the process of self-publishing more than the traditional publishing process.

Steven Spatz’s Amazon author page

https://www.bookbaby.com/

Call BookBaby at 866-707-0024 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern time, Monday through Friday, to get free advice on how to move forward with your self-publishing project. They won’t read your book, but they will give you free advice about the next steps you might want to take.

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