Customer Reviews

Publishing for Profit: Successful Bottom-Line Management for Book Publishers

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Thomas Woll draws from a variety of publishing experiences including being a start-up publisher and years of consulting for a variety of publishing clients. He has the expertise to teach us the publishing business.

He covers the gamut of publishing. Subjects covered include defining your niche, structuring your staff, using financial projections, the editorial process, copyrights, book production, sales, more sales, fulfillment, publicity, selling subsidiary rights (a special expertise of his), direct mail marketing (another of his areas of special expertise), and (ugh) returns. I can't imagine a publisher, new or experienced, not being able to find great value in this book.

Tom gives a variety of valuable forms and charts to use for tracking data and strategic planning. We've decided to incorporate several of these into our operations. He also goes through in greater detail than I've seen in any other book the projections you need to run in order to manage your cash flow. Cash flow will make or break your publishing company. Study these sections carefully.

I speak from my own experience as a small publisher: If you're a small publisher, you need to know the information in this book. As Tom says, publishing is a tough business, and you need the competitive edge of this knowledge.

Tom Woll has covered every major subject involved in running a publishing company, and covered them well. This book is clear, succinct, and avoids both the Scylla of boredom and the Charybdis of inadequate coverage.

The topics include:
--setting an overall strategy for your company, and updating it,
--staffing properly,
--workflow through the whole editorial, production and marketing process, and the interaction needed between departments,
--cost-saving tactics for production departments,
--subsidiary rights sales and administration,
--an overview of marketing, and the economics of reaching your customers, and
--an overview of accounting and financial techniques from a manager's perspective.

I routinely recommend this book to potential clients in my consulting practice, and to fellow members of the small publishing e-communities. Many new publishers know quite a bit about the editorial and marketing sides of publishing, but have given very little thought to the nitty-gritty of keeping the company afloat. If you know someone like that, get them to read this book as soon as possible!

As a small publisher, I definitely want to get to a successful bottom-line! This book is helping Chalfont House become even more successful. It's one thing to say that a published book is working well...but show me the numbers! Publishing for Profit shows you exactly what you need to know for a Title Profit and Loss statement. Other topics demonstrated are: defining your niche, goal setting, budgeting, cash flow analysis, income statements, balance sheets, planning, contracts, distribution, marketing, advertising and publicity, and operations. Those sound like dreadful, math-filled, boring accounting topics, but Woll makes them urgently relevant.

There are 35 highly valuable forms/tables included: book sales by channel; publishing time line; organization chart; budget template; cash flows; growth rate; income statement; editorial plan; comparative book template; title p&l; contract analysis; title fact sheet; production schedule and checklist; tip sheet; book list analysis; sales tracking; marketing plan; author questionnaire; subsidieary rights forms; and book club pricing template.

Get out your highlighter, and dog-ear this book!

Tom's book contained exactly what I was looking for, financial information about the business of book publishing. I come from the franchising industry were every business has its operating norms and ratios. To my dismay, I was unable to find norms and ratios about the book publishing industry until I read this book. I would urge anyone in the publishing business or anyone considering publishing a book to read this book.