Twitter Replacement Therapy, Cheap Books, and Proposal Writing

No Really, It’s Fine

The cornerstone of Belt Publishing’s business model is direct sales, as longtime readers of this newsletter (and/or my book based on it) have heard me often say. About 50% of our yearly revenue comes from purchases made through our website (or ecommerce site, as they say). Non-profit presses—the business model for many indie presses— receive grants and donations that help them make their numbers work. For us, our online store allows us to bring in the necessary revenue.

The Belt Publishing Spring Sale starts today, and we have drastically cut the prices on almost all our books. We have similar sales four times a year, one for every season. Sometimes, people ask, after seeing the discounts, if we are selling our books for so little because the press is in trouble. Not at all. In fact, we could conceivably always offer our books at 50% off and still come out better than if we did not sell them directly to readers at all, which is the case for many other presses (think about it: how often do you go to a publisher’s website to order a book?). That’s the amount that the middlemen—distributors and booksellers—take for the majority of our sales. Booksellers purchase our books at discounts ranging from 40-62%, and our distributor charges us a commission plus fees to send those titles to those vendors—Amazon, indie bookstores, etc.—so what we receive from books bought somewhere else works out to a small percentage of the list price. We simply match that percentage, more or less, during our sales.

(Why yes, I do think you should go do some shopping now.)

Substack Notes?

I surprised myself by enjoying the first days of Substack Notes. This is largely due to my jonesing for Twitter, which, these days, isn’t much like Twitter anymore. It’s a creaky, often ghostly place were I seem to see the same small group of people’s posts, and a similarly small, but other group of people, seem to see my posts. What’s interesting about Substack Notes, based on couple hours of so browsing, is that I am seeing a lot of interesting people ask honest earnest questions about the platform itself (“How do we follow someone without subscribing?”) and joking about how closely Notes mimics Twitter (“restocking” instead of retweeting), and basically being wide-eyed neophytes, and there’s something charming about that. But that won’t last long, of course, and I am also wary of Notes as well, as I wrote in my, um, Note:

I also found it enervating that so many people were posting about how great Notes was at increasing subscriptions to their newsletters—and that Substack promoted this news to encourage more people to use Notes. If people are posting primarily as part of their newsletter hustle, that does not portend well for the site. Anyway, Substack preloaded a post for me to send to all of you to join notes—and I bet you are receiving tons of those emails in your inboxes this week! So I’m just gonna cut and paste it here:

Notes is a new space on Substack for us to share links, short posts, quotes, photos, and more. I plan to use it for things that don’t fit in the newsletter, like work-in-progress or quick questions.

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How to join

Head to substack.com/notes or find the “Notes” tab in the Substack app. As a subscriber to Notes from a Small Press , you’ll automatically see my notes. Feel free to like, reply, or share them around!

You can also share notes of your own. I hope this becomes a space where every reader of Notes from a Small Press can share thoughts, ideas, and interesting quotes from the things we're reading on Substack and beyond.

Who knows? Maybe it’ll work! It would be fun. Also, maybe not.

Take A Class With Me!

I am offering my book proposal course again! It will run from June 5-16. The course is entirely asynchronous. You take it on your own time, and you can spend as little or as much time on it as you wish. I walk the class through exercises geared at helping you clarify to yourself and others the focus of your non-fiction book, the audience for it, your credibility as the author, your outline, and more. The course has indeed led to contracts from Simon & Schuster and Princeton and University of Chicago and Eerdmans and lots of other presses, though I am garbage at promoting that and even worse at getting people to write testimonials. It’s good for people with an idea for a book, for those with proposals stuck in their drafts folder, and for those who simply want to better understand what is expected in a book proposal.

The best part of the course isn’t me—it’s getting to know the other people in the group. There are lots of chances to exchange feedback and work with fellow writers. Many writing groups have formed out of previous courses—and one, I recently learned—has stuck together for going on 8 years now!

If you would like to take the course but the fee is a hurdle, please please simply email me (anne.trubek@gmail.com) and I’ll give you a discount on the price. No need to provide evidence; we are on the honor system here.

Links Please

My final note in this News and Notes edition of Notes from a Small Press that discusses Substack Notes (where I found the very cool newsletter,

Noted

by Jillian Hess) is about.... copyright. Copyright is a most flummoxing issue! I'm working on writing about it more for a future newsletter, so if you have read or written anything you find particularly persuasive about the Internet Archive case, I’d love for you to share. Thanks!