Cheater’s Guide Cover
DMZ · January 9, 2007 at 10:28 am · Filed Under General baseball, Mariners, Off-topic ranting, Site information
Since I have a copy of the cover, I thought I’d share.
As always, you can pre-order The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball
That is, if you’re curious, a DZ logo on that hat. I’ve asked if they can have a real one made up for me, and they’re looking into it.
I am a graphic designer who is working in the publishing industry designing book covers, I am curious, with your publisher how much say did you have in the cover design?
Jsut as an FYI, MY B&N purchase confirmation came through and it says “scheduled ship date: April 2, 2007″.
I apologize if this is an impolitic question, but I was curious how much money you will see from the sale of each $11.XX copy. Wasn’t sure how the book industry worked…
Cover design: very little. I sketched a couple ideas, but they’re not at all like what they ended up with. There was an earlier version of this that I had some suggestions on, and this is the result.
Date: as far as I know, which isn’t all that much, we’re still releasing in late February.
I know I have asked this before but – is this going to be available in Britain? Because I want to support the site but I don’t want to have to pay international air fair/customs duty in the process!
So April 2nd is a good guess. Release date and ship dates are a little different with smaller titles. Stores won’t be pre-ordering tons of copies. They’ll place their order upon “release” triggers in their computer. So a few weeks from Release to actual shipment to an end-user would be about right.
I see $0. Also, yeah, that’s kinda impolite.
The basic version is: I got an advance to write it, and I’m not going to see any money unless it sells enough that my share per book * books sold is > advance. That share per book, being that this is my first book, isn’t great. Neither was the advance. The advance, though, paid for the photos in the book and my research trip to Cooperstown where I spent a week in the Hall of Fame library.
This is exacerbated by my zeal to sell it in trade paperback rather than hardback. I really want everyone to be able to buy it for themselves and their friends and strangers, but that means my share per copy sold is a lot lower. That’s more of a gamble than you might think. But I want people to read and enjoy it, and hopefully more people will be willing to give it a shot at $11 even if they haven’t heard of me.
I have no idea. Probably not, since there’s not a lot of baseball played there.
Thanks for the explanation — didn’t mean to be “impolite.”
I hope your strategy works out. Seems like a good way to get your name out there and build up a good reputation for your next literary outing.
Welll… we’ll see, I guess.
If the book comes out in February, as you think it will, I’m going to buy 14 copies and give one to every owner in my rotis league. Well, I guess since I just pre-ordered mine, I’ll only need 13 copies.
Just my little contribution.
Congratulations, man. It must be damn exciting to see this coming to fruition. As someone who has worked as a writer and editor for 20 years, I know it’s gratifying to have something tangible after so much hard work (even if it is just a cover shot!). I know you’ve been published before, and you have a healthy dose of perspective going on (ref: #7), but it’s going to be like Christmas when a box of books arrives on your doorstep. Way to go.
Dan, Dereks “strategy” is pretty standar in the idustry, there are not many authors who make a lot of money off writing books, hopefully that is not the point of this.
Derek, your comments on the cover design sound alot like our authors, we don’t have to answer to them at all. We have actually had a few authors who didn’t like their cover designs at all, but they don’t really get any say in it. As a graphic designer I am very glad, but if I was an author I don’t think I would like that very much.
Oh and most imprtantly… good luck, can’t wait to read it!
I don’t really see how stealing signs is cheating, but that’s a minor quibble.
Good looking book, Derek. I’m definitely getting one.
“I don’t really see how STEALING signs is cheating, but that’s a minor quibble.”
You don’t?
On cover design: yes. I’m not going to say much more than that.
on Evan’s comment–
This is in the introduction, “Towards a Philosophy of Cheating” in which I explain we’ll be talking about everything from gamesmanship to game fixing.
MarinerDan:
The basic way it works is that Amazon buys the book from the publisher at 50 cents on the dollar. So, a 20$ list price is bought by Amazon for 10$. If you’re big enough, they pay 11$. If you are small potatoes, it’s 9$. Author get a share of what publisher receives. Something like 7-10% for a paperback, 10-12% for a hardcover. If the author does more work, like editing, typsetting, etc, it increases his take, up to 15%. So, the author gets $1 per Amazon book, and say $2 per direct order. Most sales are via Amazon.
In some cases, the publisher will give a bigger commission, say 20% to 40% for any books that are sold from a “click-thru”. So a 20$ book gets the author an extra 5$. Publisher is happy since that leaves them with 15$ instead of the 10$ from Amazon. So, if the author provides a link to his publisher, click through that and reward him. If an author provides a click-thru to Amazon, use that link, since Amazon will pay 5% to whoever provided the link. Again, reward the author, not Amazon.
The publisher will pay you an advance, something like 10-50% of the author’s expected royalties. So, if the publisher figures the author will earn 5000$, he’ll front him say 1000$ (which the publisher of course withholds from the first 1000$ in royalty). That money serves two purposes: (a) gives the author some spending money to get his job done, (b) a committment/investment from the publisher, since they’re going to want to see a return on their money rather quickly.
In the end, if an author can make more than minumum wage, he’s a success.
Hmmph, B&N.com it’s 13 cents more than Amazon, and thats only if you have a member card. How am I supposed to boycott Amazon if they have it for cheaper.
I keep trying to explain the fine line of acceptable (stealing signs) and unacceptable (corking bats) cheating to my friend from Uruguay. This seems like a good book to get him.
looks good– the kind of cover you’d stop and look at when displayed on a table…
hey! Jay got the one HOF vote he predicted
Derek – is that a custom hat, or is it an old Denver Zephyrs logo?
Derek,
You should let people know that even if they don’t buy the book… if they shop at Amazon on a regular basis to click the book through USSM and any purchase they then make at amazon, USSM gets 5-10% of that.
It’s how I am able to keep my site online and I’m guessing if it’s brought up often enough, it will help USSM financially as well.
Why do you want to boycott Amazon, Dash?
It’s a custom logo for the book.
Matthew, is that right? I’ve never seen it explained that way.
Paul Dickson wrote a pretty interesting book on signs in baseball that came out about three years ago. The gist seemed to be that stealing signs if you were coaching or a player standing on second base wasn’t considered cheating so much as if you had a guy sitting in the centerfield scoreboard with a pair of binoculars who was then, say, closing or opening a window to signal the next pitch to the batter…
#25
Not speaking for Dash; my friend stopped buying from Amazon when they made users agree to giving them the right to sell user personal information (I can’t remember exactly what they do with your info, but I believe they can sell it to 3rd parties). That was several years ago.
Tangotiger — thanks for the interesting explanation of author compensation.
Colm, mostly it’s just personal bias. Don’t really like the way they operate, their site design, and I absolutely despise their search engine.
I know I have asked this before but – is this going to be available in Britain? Because I want to support the site but I don’t want to have to pay international air fair/customs duty in the process!
Honestly, what are you complaining about? The pound is worth about $2 right now. I just punched it into Amazon and got $8.98 for shipping, which arrives in 2-3 weeks. So, $20.14. ₤10.41. You’d pay more for Harry Potter from Amazon.co.uk with the P&P.
And on this end, I just ordered the last Harry Potter book from the UK. (Long story, but I have the British versions, and wanted to keep the set going.) $41. For a book that will be $12.94 at Costco.
The weak dollar sucks, sucks, sucks.
I just went for the Canadian editions
So Derek, if you could get a hat with that logo, would it be red/black, or would you choose some other color setup?
Also, I second having the little bits on the internet to thumb through. I decided that I absolutely had to pick up Bill Veeck’s autobiography, Veeck As In Wreck because of the first chapter. Hooray for Eddie Gaedel.
Derek – is that a custom hat, or is it an old Denver Zephyrs logo?
The Zephyrs hat has a single Z. Still does.
The weak dollar sucks, sucks, sucks.
Unless you’re trying to sell books in Europe–then it’s handy.
HA, it’s actually only £6.50 on Amazon.co.uk [last time I checked, like, a week ago, it wasn't listed]. I just played a game of football and had to pay £5 for the privilege, so this is a snip.
What is that book you guys always go on about? ‘The Hardball Times Baseball Annual (Paperback)’? I need to bump my order up to £15 to get free delivery so I might as well get this as well.
[Quick reply appreciated before I accidentally click off the Amazon page].
And it’s even more complicated, as I’m sure Derek knows, by the issue of paperback rights when a book is first published as a hardcover. It’s obviously a lot harder to sell a hardcover at (say) $30 a pop than it is to sell a trade paperback at $10, but the author generally gets a bigger percentage and if it sells well enough it is re-issued as a paperback, which can be a whole separate financial transaction for everyone (in some cases the publisher of the paperback is different from the publisher of the hardcover). But if the hardcover doesn’t sell enough, it may not be reissued in paperback at all — and all the people who (ironically) didn’t buy the hardcover thinking “I’ll get it when it is out in paperback” are out of luck. Publishing is a tricky business, and while everybody can name the exceptions (King, Grisham, Rowling, etc) almost nobody is getting rich (including a lot of publishers). For non-fiction, many books are almost a loss-leader that authors use to help establish and maintain their “personal brand” as an expert in a particular field. For course, some fields are more lucrative than others.
I just pre-ordered mine. Hopefully the bat corking section will help me in my Redmond Wood bat league.
Curse you slow Americans! I had to go ahead and pre-order it anyway – and that The Hardball Times Baseball Annual I got saddled with as well better be good or else!
I’m going to mention this book at the UK baseball forum I am a member at – hopefully raise its profile a bit across the pond.
hey, it looks really good on the sidebar.
‘buy’ needs capitalisation though. I’m anal like that.
Nice cover. I’m looking forward to getting my pre-ordered copy.
(1 for me. 1 for my gf. 1 for a friend.)
FWIW: When you google “cheat” and “baseball” you get pages and pages of cheat codes for video baseball games and cheat sheets for fantasy baseball. The first link I found that wasn’t on one of those two subjects was on page 6 — some baseball player who “cheat” on his taxes.
43- Take note of the format for all other sections of the sidebar.
36 – Quite. I’m continually pitching business contracts to a certain large corporation which operates on both sides of the pond. The US clients are price sensitive. The ones in London think we are amusingly cheap.
How weird, when I look at the Amazon sales rank, it should be fairly high up in the baseball bestsellers, but it’s not.
Or “The bestselling new & future releases on Amazon.com” where it should be, if the ranks are updated hourly, ~5th.
Just ordered my copy, but wish I’d read carefully here first as I didn’t “click through”. Sorry.
I hope they beat the April shipping date, as I’ve really enjoyed your writing here and am anxious to get my copy. Though I hope you get rich, I hope it doesn’t reduce your presence here.
Good luck.
Hey cool.
My USSM output, you probably noticed, has been way, way up since I’ve been writing full-time. If the book does well enough, that can continue.
Derek,
I tried to send you an email to the USSMariner address but not sure if you got it. There is a great chance you ignored it because I call you David to start with (no idea why).
Anyway, I had a thought about promoting your book so if you are interested please drop me a line at johnbeamer230977@yahoo.com
Derek, have you looked at TitleZ.com? It will graph your Amazon rank over time, and also compare a book to others you define. I had actually written (for an author friend) a Windows tray app that queries Amazon via their web services and logs the rank, but I quit after I found this.
I uh… use TitleZ frequently. Perhaps too often.
‘Derek Zumsteg is the author of “Cheater’s Guide To Baseball”‘
Best About The Author ever?
Derek, can your paperback edition include an extra chapter called “How To Throw An Organization?”
My actual about the author reads