John Hunt

'It's always been difficult to get published. But up till the last couple of decades, if you managed to get published, you were sure of some sales, or at least that your publisher would work hard to get them with a reasonable prospect of results. It's a different world now. With electronic point of sale, print on demand, internet bookselling, new delivery formats like e-readers, several hundred thousand new titles in English coming out every year, a lot of what was said 6 years ago or even 6 months ago is now out of date. A few years ago when we started O Books I began writing down notes for new authors, based on questions they kept asking. It soon turned into a 100 page document. One of the authors it was a particular joy to work with was Tim Ward. We thought it would be helpful for others to share our thoughts, coming as they do from both sides of the fence'.'But there are titles around on every conceivable aspect of publishing and marketing books, from how to improve your style to increasing your sales through Amazon, finding the motivation to keep going or appearing on "Oprah". Why did we think another book would be helpful? Most focus either from the self-publishing end, from the viewpoint of an author who doesn't have a publisher, or from the perspective of mainstream publishers/publicists used to dealing with $50,000-plus publicity budgets. In our business we deal with the middle ground, where most real-life authors are and most potential ones hope to be'.'A company recently tracked the sales of 1.2 million books in the US, and the results were: 950,000 of these sold fewer than 100 copies; another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies; 25,000 sold more than 5,000 copies; less than 500 sold more than 100,000 copies; and, 10 titles sold more than 1,000,000 copies. The average sale was 500 copies. If your aim is to get above the average, or to reach it (because that includes J K Rowling etc.), to the level of 1000, on to 10,000 and up to 100,000 copies, this is the book for you. If you've already sold that many, you don't need this'.