Why Marketing Must Be Every Author's Concern

Producing a new book and marketing it is costly and carries high levels of financial risk. A publisher will not accept a manuscript unless he has evaluated everything regarding the manuscript and its author. This information helps the publisher to asses how easy it will be to sell the book.

We are going to evaluate your submission in terms of the following kinds of criteria.

Is your manuscript unique or is it just a copy of something that has been done elsewhere? We look for an "angle", especially in subjects that have been covered before. Are you as the author marketable? The kinds of things that make you a marketable author for our kind of genres are the respect and authority you have in your field i.e.how difficult is it going to be to convince readers that you know what you are talking about. Are you active and known in your field? Do you lecture, run courses and / or appear on radio and TV talking about your topic. Are you willing to undertake lecture tours? Has your previously published work sold well i.e. do you have a following? If you run courses is this book going to be a set text book for your students? If so what projected sales figures could you guarantee from your classes.

We ask you various questions on our submission form regarding marketing etc. You know the subject of your book and its target market better than we do. You may have spotted a gap in the market. We may not know about that gap until you explain it to us. Presenting this kind of information to your publisher can make the difference between having your submission rejected or being asked to submit your manuscript.

The Difference Between Traditional,Vanity and a Co-operative publishing house

Traditional publishers generate income by making a profit out of book sales. They will offer royalties to the author, sometimes with an advance payment.

Vanity publishers make their profit by being paid by the author to print and produce a book. Some authors who cannot find a traditional publisher to take on their book eventually go to a vanity publisher and pay to have it published. There are some disadvantages for you as an author.You carry all the financial risk. The publisher has already made his profit in printing the book.(approx.one to ten copies)
They rarely offer much if anything in the way of promotion and marketing of your book. A book which comes out of a vanity press carries an automatic stigma because there is little if any discernment as to what they will publish and many bookshops will not carry them on their shelves. The assumption is that your book was too poor to have been of interest to a proper publisher and so is of no value.

A co-operative publishing house does not feel that they can finance a book 100%, due to a limited budget, or they cannot carry the full financial risk. They look into the possibility of the author putting up a portion of the initial printing costs. In this way the financial risk becomes manageable for them and the author benefits by being published. These books are all marketed and distributed via normal channels.The author is guaranteed a financial return which will recover at least their initial investment.

Which style is Kima Global? We operate on a mixture of traditional and co-operative publishing. We never do Vanity.

What Kima Global offers in the way of marketing their books

Kima Global markets their books locally through agents based in South Africa. Our international sales are handled by distributors in the USA, Australia and the UK. Our books are also available on the web on sites such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BookSurge, Exclusive Books and of course our own site.

Despite the phenomenal growth of the internet, booksales via the internet are still quite small (about 2.5%) and most of our books are still sold via regular bookshops. We create a fact sheet for each title for our three agents who represent us at bookshops around South Africa. This process starts about three months prior to publication date. The newest titles on our fact sheets are our front list books and most book sellers will concentrate on ordering from our front list. Books that were brought out in previous years are put on what is called our back list. They are still in print and available and can be ordered. However, we will not be promoting them as actively or advertising them as widely as any new books on our front list. Instead we promote our back list via our newsletters, the internet and through our data base. We also encourage our authors to do their own promotions and help them where we can.

Alternatively a new paradigm for book distribution is one pioneered by Booksurge. This has the potential to revolutionise the way in which books are distributed and sold by making use of the very latest technology. For more information on this visit their website at www.booksurge.com. to view some of our titles.

Some books sell well because of excellent marketing and others flop despite excellent marketing. Some quietly published books make it big through word of mouth recommendations. We call them sleepers. Once again there is an element of fate involved in this. For every rule in book publishing and marketing, exceptions can be found that become bestsellers despite not following the rules, and then there are other books that have all the earmarks of bestseller material that are completely ignored by the public.

We have a stand at the annual Frankfurt Bookfair where we meet with other publishers. This is where we try to sell the rights of our books to other publishers in foreign countries for translation. Alternatively a bigger publishing house may want to buy one of our titles for their list.

Still interested to get published?

Nadia - submission editor