Recently read this article on what to do if your book doesn’t sell by a smallish publisher (by which I mean nowhere near as small as me, but also someone who is not sending you on a whirlwind tour of all the countries whose native language you’ve been translated into) and I was sort of surprised to find a lack of instruction about, well, what to do when your book doesn’t sell. So let me try.

Figure out why your book didn’t sell. At least wonder. Take it seriously. Be honest. This will point to solutions.

Could your book suck? It might. You have to consider the possibility. Did it suck back when it was being shopped to publishers? Maybe? Okay then: this is why a publisher with a good track record for picking only winners (as opposed to picking enough winners that you don’t notice all the losers) is better for you even when they reject you. Maybe your book sucks. Don’t publish a book that sucks so bad that you can’t make your money back. Did your advance cover you and make it worth your while? Yes? Hey you did okay — who cares if your book is selling. Take your money and get on with the next book.

Didn’t suck, huh? I though that might be the case. Was your excellent book inadequately marketed? If so, did you meet your obligations? If you failed to understand and meet your obligations, you might have been the problem. You can still correct this — start meeting them. A sales surge a year late is still a sales surge. Is your publisher meeting their obligations? What evidence do you have? Ask for it. You want to know what they are doing and how much they are spending doing it. This will tell you not only how they are promoting your book but also will give you some clues about whether or not they think it actually sucks. If they are not spending anything on you and your sales are bad, then they are probably not sending good money after bad. You should revisit the first question. You should reconsider your choice of publisher.

Are you dissatisfied because your expenses were too high? If “bad sales” just means you haven’t covered your expenses so you’re basically out of pocket, then “bad sales” might also mean that you had unrealistic expectations or just plain managed your money badly. You can’t save this now, but you can change your behaviour for the future — you can streamline your process to reduce your costs or you can participate more aggressively in marketing to increase sales or you can write better books. Or you can change your standards when selecting a publisher, and reject advances that fail to cover your risk. Also, your book might suck. Consider it carefully.

Is it just the wrong time for your book? The Zeitgeist wasn’t with you — it was a month too late or too early? This is actually just another way for your book to suck. If it suddenly doesn’t suck, jump-start the marketing. If it’s too late (the time is right but you’ve been remaindered), sell that to your publisher. They may agree and may have books still sitting around unpulped. If your work is this time sensitive, though, consider the possibilities of demand printing/sales — your book is never remaindered and you can re-market at any time with no start-up cost and no risk. Some titles at Lulu sell in the tens of thousands, and make at least $5 per unit. How bad were your bad sales? At least if you self-publish you can only blame yourself.

Actually that’s a crappy feature in a lot of ways. Helps with the realism though.

Late edit: let’s say your publisher likes your stuff and signs a contract with you that gives you $4,000 in advance against royalties. Let’s also say that you get $2 per book in royalties. What this means is that your publisher is expecting to sell at least 2,000 copies of your book. They are basically saying that to your face here. So, if that didn’t happen, you have to wonder why not. Certainly one possibility is that you (not your book) didn’t live up to their expectations. This should be factored into their calculation when they gave you 2,000 sales’ worth of advance, though. They assessed your book and you and based on that (detailed, time-proven, professionsal) assessment, bet on a minimum of 2,000 sales plus or minus some margin of error. It’s possible that you just got unlucky and wound up on the inside of their error margin — you only sold 1,870 books maybe. But you should find out. Because if you only sold 200 books, then their assessment process is broken, and both you and they should care about that — no one can survive on analyses with 90% error bars on them. That’s basically the “flipping a coin” business model, and you do not want these people managing your PR and sales. You want to take your advance and run laughing to another publisher with another book. So when you see that contract, maybe ask how the advance sum was arrived at. If it’s just “common practice” then you want to be pretty sure that selling up to that advance is also “common practice” for them.

Just realised that the short version of this whole post is: you are shopping for a publisher as much as they are shopping for you. As technology advances and more and more of the business of publishing is automated away, the publisher needs to meet your needs more and more aggressively, because their utility is being eroded. As an author, you should expect them to back up their claims with numbers and analysis and fact. They should be what they imply they are. If it’s just a guy in a suit guessing based on last week’s guess, well, you can do that.