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Self Publishing VS Agent


ZombieWife

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I read about self-publishing. A self-published author could get 35% or 70% of each ebook sold depending if the ebook is sold on Amazon or one of the ebookstores.

35%? That's just an insane ripoff. The retailer's costs for ebooks are virtually nothing, the author should be getting 90%. It makes sense for the retailer to take a decent cut of the price for physical books, when they need to deal with warehousing and shipping etc, but there is effectively no marginal cost in selling an ebook beyond bank fees.

Even with the gatekeepers, there is still a great deal of crap being published.

If that's the quality of what's getting past the gatekeepers, can you imagine how awful the majority of what doesn't get past them is?

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I've worked for "the world's largest publisher" for almost three years, so I feel I can speak with a little authority here.

Most people who self-publish do so for one of several reasons:

1) They have no writing talent, but lots of inspiration and/or dedication and want to bring their dream to life.

2) They think self-publishing means instant money.

3) They have little to no writing talent, but are experts in their subject.

4) They want to publish their memoir, because everyone is the star of their own story.

5) They've got talent or a good, even great idea, but have given up because they don't have enough name recognition.

Of the thousands of books we publish each year, I'd say less than two, probably one percent fall under the fifth category. I have a shelf on my desk reserved for books that interest me, have a good cover design, and the writing inside isn't atrocious. I've been through literally thousands of books we have published in the last three years, and there are eight on that shelf.

Self-publishing a fictional novel is a bad idea. Self-publishing fantasy or sci-fi is a terrible idea, unless you are an excellent writer with an excellent marketing plan. Prove you can sell five to ten thousand books and a traditional publisher might decide to take a look at you. But doing so means a level of dedication few have or can maintain.

You gotta get out there, talk to as many newspapers, radio and TV stations as you can about getting an interview or review. Talk to libraries and book stores to set up book signings and possibly to take a few copies to loan/sell. Set up a good website/blog for your book and promote the hell out of it. You must realize the book is not going to sell itself and that even with all this work, you'll be lucky to ever get your sales into the four digit numbers, let alone five.

That said, if you do have an expertise in a certain subject, self-publishing isn't a bad path to take. We sell far more books about business, computers, cookbooks, healthy living, etc. than fiction. One of our most popular titles is Timeless Secrets for Health and Rejuvenation. It's a terribly written, awful looking book, but it has a great title and that's what people buy when they're looking for something in that category.

One of my benefits working there is that I get to publish two books a year for free. The first one will be out in a month, but it's not my own original work. It's an anthology with twenty-five different writers inside, most of them really good. And every single one of them has parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, teachers, friends who will surely buy a copy. My hope is also that if it catches on it will be picked up by a tradition publisher and made a yearly anthology.

I only have this plan because I've worked there long enough that I know how to game the system, so to speak, in my favor. I'm not delusional or greedy (well a little greedy) or desperate, as most self-published authors seem to be, I just know the rules and how to use them.

Of course, the scuzziest part of self-publishing is the company itself. They want you to sell books, but they don't care if you do. You've already paid the fee for your publishing package, which runs from $600 to $3000. They've already got your money. If you keep making them money, all the better.

If you are one of the dedicated few who get your book to sell, you do so knowing the company is taking half of the profit. You get to name the price of the book, so you know exactly how much per book you'll be making, but the company starts the price at anywhere from $5 to $15 dollars (while paying only $1 to $5 to print each book).

If you have a regular fictional novel of 200 pages, the starting price is about $5. You set the price at say, $9.99 so for each book you sell you're getting about $5. This is where some people get greedy. I've seen 60-page books of poetry selling for $17.99, which is beyond ridiculous.

Regardless, the company is making half of the profit, and most of the time the only work they've done is take your Word or InDesign file and convert it to the correct PDF format. They'll help with marketing, yes, but only if you buy their $300 to $2000 marketing package.

And this isn't even getting into the sales people.

One of the happiest days of my life was when I was moved from the sales floor to the production floor.

Bliss.

For two years, all day long I heard the pitches of the guys who try to sell people publishing packages. Most of them are, to put it nicely, douchebags about the way they go about their business. Their job is to get you to sign on the dotted line for a publishing package, and they will tell you absolutely anything to get you to do so. Anything.

There are ways to make self-publishing work for you. You can use it to make a little money if you have the dedication and skills, or as a potential stepping stone to get yourself noticed and introduced to the next level. But it will not make you a star.

And you have to deal with the stigma that comes with it, as has been on display in this thread, because most of your peers are terrible and as a result people will assume you are as well.

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There are horror stories for everything. Sure, big publishers have some problems; there's some seriously bizarre stuff that goes on between publishers and booksellers, for instance, though I don't know enough about it to go into details. That does not change the fact that self-publishing (meaning publishing without a gatekeeper) isn't viable for getting your novel out to the masses unless you have a built-in fanbase.

Yes, there are success stories. A few. Think of them as the Harry Potters, the Twilights, the Goodkinds and Newcombs and Paolinis* of the self-publishing world. They're the lucky ones. Anyone who believes that they can pull off the same feat intentionally is delusional.

*It's not relevant that Paolini was originally self-published, other than that it underscores how goddamn lucky he got.

I have read that a traditional publisher get 52.5% of each ebook sale, and the author gets less 16% of each book sale.

[...]

A self-published author could get 35% or 70% of each ebook sold...

Classic weasel statistics.

The first is alarmist nonsense on the level of "Taco Bell charges $1 for a taco and the ingredients only cost 5 cents!" That doesn't mean they're making 95 cents profit - it means that a whole shitload of things (not literally, we hope, but you can never tell) goes into making a taco beyond the ingredients. Maybe they are keeping an unfair amount, but we can't legitimately infer that from the numbers we have.

The second completely ignores the disparity in numbers of books sold. A less biased translation, still favorable to self-publishing, is: A self-published author could make up to over five times the amount per book sold than a traditionally published author. Therefore, if one can sell one-fifth the books by self-publishing compared to traditional publishing, it's a good move.

One-fifth is hilariously optimistic. One five-hundredth is probably optimistic.

Even with the gatekeepers, there is still a great deal of crap being published.

Let's not get confused on our terms here. It's the difference between saying "McDonalds burgers are crap" and being served steaming raw sewage on a bun.

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Let's not get confused on our terms here. It's the difference between saying "McDonalds burgers are crap" and being served steaming raw sewage on a bun.

Thanks for your well-reasoned definition of crap.

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You are ignoring his point.

Just because crap gets through the traditional publishing system doesn't mean what doesn't get through isn't just as crappy or crappier.

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I read about self-publishing. A self-published author could get 35% or 70% of each ebook sold depending if the ebook is sold on Amazon or one of the ebookstores. I read about some former midlist traditionally published authors, after they have been dropped by the traditional publishing companies because of lack of profitability, finding success or renewed success self-publishing. I read about self-published authors able to publish a book on his or her timeline as opposed to finding a date that is suitable to the traditional publishing company when putting together the annual publishing catalog. I also read about traditonal published authors getting a date a six months to a year out, only to learn two weeks before the release of this book that the date has been pushed back.

This sounds like it could have come straight from an advertisement by Author Solutions or one of the other vanity presses out there.

Midlist authors have an advantage over first-time novelists in that they usually have some name recognition, but I'd challenge you to name ten that have had serious success with self-publishing. First-time novelists who sell big self-publishing are so rare that they show up over and over in all manner of deceptive vanity press advertisements (usually along with names that don't belong there, like John Grisham).

35% or 70% is, as kurokaze pointed out, a joke because your sales volume is ridiculously low. If by some miracle you sell 100 copies (as opposed to selling a dozen to friends and family) at $10 a copy, you've only made about $700. You won't have much left after whatever you spent on the self-publishing package.

The rest of this is the usual anecdotal stuff, which is endemic not just in the vanity press rip-offs but in scams like Amway. You should not trust them.

As for "self-publishing being the future", I doubt that. Gatekeepers of some sort will only be more valuable as the amount of crap out there grows, even if they are no longer the big publishing houses.

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I see it as sort of like the music industry. There are a ton of talented musicians out there who'd never get a record deal today (although records deals aren't what they used to be anymore, either). Bob Dylan or Springsteen, for instance, would never win American Idol.

It's much easier now to get your music out there than it used to be because the record companies and the radio stations have lost a lot of their power and influence. Not so with publishing houses. I'd recommend finding a small press or imprint that suits you best and that's actively looking for new writers, and working with an agent would definitely help.

Mainly, though, I think you need to ask yourself what your goal is in getting published. Is it for the simple bragging rights or are you trying to build a brand? If it's the latter, then the traditional publishing route is your best bet.

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The problem with self-publishing is that no-one will touch your book. Self-published books are known to be bad, and I don't want to spend my time reading crappy books (this is also the reason why I don't accept them for review). As others said - even books which are published through publishing houses can be bad, why would people want to try random self-published books that are probably neither edited nor well-written?

The way I see it, the only ways for someone to sell a self-published book are these:

1) try to generate enough hype around it that people will go and buy it

--> can't see how it would work, because you are in direct competition with books published by major publishing houses and backed by PR teams that are way better at this than you are

2) try to sell your book through bookshops

--> you'll probably sell a few copies, but most people will see a name they don't know and the horrible, horrible cover art; the thought of buying your book will not even cross their minds

3) try to sell your book as an e-book

--> nobody will buy it because it will be lost in the flood of self-published e-books out there.

So, as a reader and a reviewer, I would recommend that your friends give up their illusions of making tons of money and rather try to find a good agent, ZombieWife. :)

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It's been a while since I worked in publishing, and it was on the textbook side of things anyway, so I don't know how applicable this would be. But, in my experience, self-publishing is the kiss of death for all the reasons mentioned above. But having a blog where you put up essays and "works in progress" is fine. We had several authors who "published" lots of articles on their websites. We even had one guy, who basically had an earlier draft of his entire book up on his site.

Now, they were also publishing in scholarly journals, and things might be very different when it comes to fiction, but if someone were just trying find a way to get his or her writing out in public and didn't care about making money just yet, I'd recommend trying a blog rather than self-publishing. The former is pretty normal (at least in scientific circles), the latter is career suicide.

Again, I don't really know how things work with fiction, but there might even be existing blogs with established audiences that welcome new bloggers (there are tons of these now in political science, law, and economics). Posting work on one of them might get a new author some fans, and in any event he or she could get comments and criticism which might be helpful.

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A general rule of thumb for fiction is that more than three chapters online before publication is a bad idea, let alone the entire thing. Putting a short story or novel up in its entirety on your public blog takes away your first publication rights and makes it drastically less likely (albeit not impossible) for it to ever be published for real.

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Something I must admit I'm surprised by is that we haven't seen many well-known authors take the more-lucrative step of self-publishing once they have become famous and successful through traditional means. At that point, the risk of people not reading the book as it's self-published disappears, and they make more money given that they tend to keep the money that traditionally goes to editors and publishers.

Seems to me the only model that might work for this is if those best-selling authors band together and set up some sort of Author's Book Club Press as an author-cooperative. Initially, ABC Press would publish the e-book version of their works, as well as discounted hardcover versions to book club members (likely on cheaper paper, and published on demand, or even more expensive versions with the leather covers for exclusive book club members, etc.), under a typical book club sub-license of the work from the traditional publishers. Then ABC Press can start hiring freelance editors and copyeditors and all the other people needed to publish original works from the authors in the cooperative, and sell them outside of the book club members to the whole world.

Basically: Oprah's Book Club but run by people hired by the author-owners and their literary agents, with a co-op structure where the agents & authors decide who to invite into the co-op. Since they are asked to read new authors anyway to provide cover blurb, it shouldn't be more work for bestselling writers to spend a few extra minutes recommending a particular new writer be allowed to join the co-op. I guess that would make the best-selling writers the gatekeepers, which could have some drawbacks if we are talking about bestsellers by authors you don't judge to produce quality work.

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As said above, it is not impossible to get something published after going that route. In this case, John Dies at the End already had a sizable following before it had a limited run from a small press, its following was even larger by the time it was picked up by a major publisher for reprinting. According to wikipedia, the book was read online by some 70k readers between its start in 2001 and when it was taken down in 2008.

That book, like most brought up, is an exception... just like those few authors who manage to find some success in self-publishing. Most people putting their fiction up on their blogs and websites aren't going to gain much of a following or notice.

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I know that both Paul McAuley and Neal Asher have put out self published ebooks, but these are collections of short stories that are out of print. I think this is probably the best thing about self publishing, and hopefully other authors will do something similar if they can.

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Seems to me the only model that might work for this is if those best-selling authors band together and set up some sort of Author's Book Club Press as an author-cooperative. ... Then ABC Press can start hiring freelance editors and copyeditors and all the other people needed to publish original works from the authors in the cooperative, and sell them outside of the book club members to the whole world.

And at that point, you have to wonder if it's really going to be more cheaper to publish and market books through this ABC press than it would be through a traditional publisher. Once you're hiring editors, and publicity agents, and graphic designers, and inventory managers, and so on, are you really going to see much reduction in costs?

Also, maybe having only established best-selling authors would mitigate this, but who's going to negotiate with bookstores and work out author advances/royalties in this co-op model? What's going to happen as member authors popularity declines, or if certain authors become so popular they feel like they're doing the heavy lifting for the coop, while the others are riding on their coattails? Sounds like a recipe for disaster, IMO.

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35%? That's just an insane ripoff. The retailer's costs for ebooks are virtually nothing, the author should be getting 90%. It makes sense for the retailer to take a decent cut of the price for physical books, when they need to deal with warehousing and shipping etc, but there is effectively no marginal cost in selling an ebook beyond bank fees.

That's not actually true. Even a title published only as ebook will need setting and converting - we turn most of our physical books into ebooks; starting with either a Word document or a PDF, the conversion to ebook format costs us £1 per page - and, for a decent publisher, you need to add editorial and marketing costs.

Of course, after this is all done the incremental cost per copy to the publisher is very, very low. However, the incremental cost per copy of printing a book is only a few £ (depending on run length, page count and hardback versus paperback - could be as little as £1 for printing a medium selling 100,000 word book, plus warehousing costs).

Certainly the situation where the ebook is more expensive than the physical book is ridiculous. However, an ebook should only be about £2 less expensive than the physical book in order to cover all costs.

ETA: Print costs refer to paperback format.

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And at that point, you have to wonder if it's really going to be more cheaper to publish and market books through this ABC press than it would be through a traditional publisher. Once you're hiring editors, and publicity agents, and graphic designers, and inventory managers, and so on, are you really going to see much reduction in costs?

Also, maybe having only established best-selling authors would mitigate this, but who's going to negotiate with bookstores and work out author advances/royalties in this co-op model? What's going to happen as member authors popularity declines, or if certain authors become so popular they feel like they're doing the heavy lifting for the coop, while the others are riding on their coattails? Sounds like a recipe for disaster, IMO.

Oh, I agree nobody would probably want to bother with it. But essentially i don't see it as an attempt to get a reduction in costs. In certain cases in actually might raise the price of books. As a thought experiment, this is more about ownership of the profits, having the author retain more of the profits from his/her work, since that is the concern people keep talking about. The co-op wouldn't earn much profits at all, and any profit would be paid out as dividends annually to all writers in the co-op based on sales figures for that year. It would have to be a meritocracy. No coat-tail riding at all, unless a book loses money -- print-on-demand and ebooks can still lose money i'm sure, but the book club would only publish the guaranteed bestsellers. As i imagine it, getting your work published by this book club would be an even harder market to break into than one of a traditional publisher. It is not designed to make it easier for first time writers to be published.

The only reason for the co-op to keep even a small amount of profits would be to expand operations so that the higher tide would lift all boats; the authors would probably vote on how much profit the co-op should retain each year.

If it is print on demand and e-book, I don't see much of a need for author advances; the author's have already done well enough to be able to invest into the co-op. All co-ops have a membership fee. It needs to be high enough to pay for the editorial and marketing and printing/electronic costs of any books published by that author that year. Royalties can be scaled to whatever marketing and editorial services of the co-op that are used by the authors. The advantage of the co-op would be IF it can operate on a global level, rather than as a publisher in one market. Working on a global level would be easier for e-books, and IF the market changes to be dominated by ebooks over print, then something like this might do much better than a traditional publisher could do without restructuring for the global market.

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I was curious, so I did a little number crunching when I got into work this morning. I took the title I mentioned in my previous post "Timeless Secrets", ran a report to see how many titles it's sold in the past two years just via websites and multiplied it by the author's royalty rate. This author has made $10,000 in the past two years (about 675 books sold on the web at a royalty rate of $14 per book). This doesn't include any books the author has bought and sold himself.

Another popular title, "Light Infantry Tactics" has sold close to 1400 copies online the last two years. He has a much lower royalty rate (only $4.58 per book), but has still made about $6500 from his books the last two years.

So self-publishing can indeed be profitable for a lucky few. Those two authors will never be stars, but they've used self-publishing to turn a profit- which is what your goal should be if you decide to go that route. You can try to use it to get noticed - the internet is a great resource these days, if you're a good writer then keeping a blog and promoting the hell out of it is a good start - but you'll have to fight that stigma. Unless you have a target audience (fiction/sci-fi/fantasy readers are not a good target audience, as there is tons of that crap out there), trying to make a profit should be the only goal you set for yourself.

It's making yourself one of those lucky few that requires all the work, work that you wouldn't really have to do with a traditional publisher because they already have the people on staff to do that work. And those two examples are probably two out of probably less than 100 authors who have made their books a reasonable success (success for self-publishing that is). That's out of the 30,000+ books our company has published. Less than 1% of the total.

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