Trying to decide whether or not you should self-publish your book? If making money is your goal, then the bottom-line numbers are the deal-breaker.
Do you understand how book royalties actually work in mainstream commercial publishing?
I’m about to share with you the skinny and the ugly on exactly how much you can expect to make when your Dream Book Deal finally happens.
Source: Entrepreneur Magazine’s Special Report on Self-Publishing
Commercial Publisher Royalty Breakdown
According to Entrepreneur here’s what the bloody Numbers look like:
Author’s Profit: 3% to 7.5% of net — NOT gross.
If your book never earns more than the advance… Oh, well. That’s the last penny you may ever see. This is usually the case.
An author who solidifies a deal can expect an average $3000 advance for 50,000 words.
Let’s say the book sells for $14.95 on the shelf:
- the retail book store chain buys the book at 60% off
- the retailer pays $8.97 to your publisher
- the author’s 7.5% royalty comes to a horrifying .67 cents per copy!
This is typically AFTER sales of the book have exceeded the advance amount you were paid at contract signing.
Your agent has already taken out his 15% cut from your advance.
Your book must sell through its first printing, and make back at least what the publisher paid you in advance, to put your deal in the black.
Your book’s first edition must perform well enough to warrant the publisher ordering a second printing, or to make it into an additional paper-back edition.
Basically, your book needs to be a bestseller before there will be enough additional printings to start generating royalties.
If all that happens, THEN you start making your $0.67 per copy.
Discouraging as hell, ain’t it?
Sorry, it gets worse…
Who’s paying for the Marketing?
You can’t expect the book to perform well enough to reach additional printing and royalties unless it is marketed.
Your Big Guy Publishing Company invests the majority of all their profits from all their authors and titles — pooled together — into marketing their top 3 titles for the year. That ain’t you, honey — that’s Anne Rice, Stephen King, and John Grisham…
Your contract will most likely include a whopping $300 marketing budget.
Whether you publish your book or sell your book to a publisher — the financial responsibility for marketing and promoting the book is yours.
Let me rephrase that — you no longer own the book, you are last in line to receive profits from sales, and YOU are responsible for marketing the book.
So, if you’re going to have to get the word out yourself in order for your book to sell, the question boils down to this:
If you personally market and promote the book out of your own pocket — and if the energy driving the book’s performance is based on your personal blood, sweat, and tears –
Do you want to make 67 CENTS per copy or $14 per copy?
The math is really quite simple.
When you sell a book to a publisher it is no longer yours.
You are under contract to work for the publisher, but they own the rights to your book. You can’t publish it elsewhere.
When you still own the copyright to your book…
You can always initiate the beginning of your book’s life-cycle, retain ownership, make close to 100% net profit — whatever is left over after physical overhead, such as Print-on-Demand publishing, or the cost of secure online delivery for ebook formats — and STILL sell it later to a commercial publisher.
Depending on the type of book you’re looking to sell — and this example assumes you have authored a non-fiction or how-to topic — if you’re going to be doing close to 100% of the work, shouldn’t you control 100% of the decision-making process and 100% of the profit?
Note: That’s CLOSER to 100%. When these figures were reported in 2004, they claimed ebook site royalties averaged 30% to 70% — that’s still talking about selling your book to someone else — not promoting and selling the book yourself, such as via your own web site and shopping cart system. Even the most low-balled figures beat the hell out of 3% of net, and $0.67 per copy…
Non-Fiction Niche Markets
According to Publishers Marketing Association, the following niches and topics are the most promising for self-publishers:
- Business/Career
- Personal Finance
- Health / Wellness
- Psychology /Self-Help /Personal Development
- Parenting
- Specialized Crafts
- Cookbooks /Dieting /Nutrition
- Religious /Inspirational
- Animals /Pet Breeds
- Gardening
- Home Improvement
- Technology /Instructional
In any publishing scenario, the Web is your marketing might.
A successfully self-published and self-promoted title also increases your bargaining power if and when you DO negotiate a contract.
Imagine the difference in approaching a publisher after you have built a list of 10,000 subscribers to your blog and/ or email newsletter…
Examples of Best Sellers that began as Self-Published Titles:
via: Self-Publishing and POD Myths
- John Grisham: A Time to Kill
- Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass
- Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn
- Richard Bolles: What Color is Your Parachute?
- L. Ron Hubbard: Dianetics
- Irma Rombauer: The Joy of Cooking
- Richard Nixon: Real Peace
- James Redfield: The Celestine Prophecy
I’ll be over-joyed to find myself among that company. These titles have achieved so much more than sales figures — they’ve reached into the collective of human wisdom and made an amazing impact.
And we’re just talking numbers, here. Where do your priorities fall in intangible areas, like personal investment, creative control, integrity, your relationship with your characters…?
I stopped waiting on someone else’s permission to make that impact. The little pool of attention I’ve managed to gather and sustain is enormous compared to the jigger I might still be holding were I still languishing in obscurity and tending bar.
I’m not the only one who’s come to this conclusion — Galba Bright of TuneUpYourEQ.com shared a post by David Maister about his decision to self-publish.
Slade Roberson is an intuitive counselor, ATP®, professional blogger, and the author of Shift Your Spirits, Automatic Intuitive Response, and the PageCoach Problogging Tutorial Series. Slade on Blogging shares behind-the-screens internet marketing, self-publishing, and blogging strategies with other personal development writers, coaches, and healing arts practitioners.
Hi Slade, this is a great post: a welcome and refreshing splash of ice water in the face of reality. The self-publishing option is very encouraging news for new writers and authors, and you did a fine job of promoting its promise.
Christopher,
Thanks man! This is an older article that I’ve been sharing with other writers more off-line than on-line. When Galba sent me the David Maister post, the timing seemed right to publish this argument here.
I hope the facts and figures hold up — I first made the notes in 2005 after reading the Entrepreneur Magazine book on Self-Publishing and Direct Mail business (which was published in 2004).
I whip it out whenever I need to splash some cold water in someone’s face — or dunk my whole head in the bucket for a fresh dose of motivation!
: )
I definitely intend it to take apart the Big Mythic Dream a bit and replace it with “do-able” goals.
Hey Slade,
I’ve been contemplating these same ideas, but haven’t really broke it down.
My book is called 92 Things To Do Besides Suicide. It’s a picture book that publishers are afraid to touch. So I’m going to go ahead and publish it myself.
After seeing your diagnosis of making money from going with a publisher, you’ve helped me garner all the motivation I needed. Thanks for making my decision even easier.
Keep up the great thoughts,
Karl
Hello Slade:
That list of books that were initially self published is amazing. What Colour Is Your Parachute is an awesome book-it guided my journey into self employment. Celestine Prophecy certainly went viral aw well. Of course, the numbers that you mention speak volumes. Thanks for the mention also.
Slade, though I’ve never had thoughts of publishing a book yet, definitely not now, I must admit that your article has given self publishing a refreshing perspective… It’ll be great if you can list out some self publishing options/alternatives because I know you’ll definitely provide very effective and low cost solutions
Karl,
A picture book, with a strong illustrative or graphic context, is likely to bring up issues of “creative control” — mainstream commercial publishers, even with children’s books that have a dominant graphic component, will often prefer text/stories with the option of putting their own visual team behind it. Picture book ideas will often result in an author’s being paired with an illustrator already under contract with the publisher.
It could be this issue that makes the book “less attractive” to the publishers you’ve approached.
Your best course in going after a book deal would be to find an agent first, and let the agent place or negotiate the interactions.
But, should you have strong ideas about how you want the book to appear, the technology available through print-on-demand is amazing — the sizing/formats available, the weights and rags of paper, cover art, binding styles, etc — you’re limited only by your vision and the PDF you create.
ALL publishers — book, magazine, newspaper, digital/ebooks — send PDF to the printer.
Of course, print publication still has overhead in physical materials.
Galba,
Those books in particular are perfect examples — in our greater shared niche — of what happens to great books, period. It’s very inspiring to know that they began as self-published entities.
Let’s not forget the publishing successes that were commercial from the beginning, but still had “humble” origins in terms of profit — the first Harry Potter book sold for — what was it? — about 10,000 USD? But it sparked a bidding war among American publishers who drove up the deal.
In college, in the late 1980s, I was fortunate/disheartened to witness my friend Poppy Z. Brite trying to sell her first book, with an already well-established portfolio of successes with short fiction in a number of mainstream horror fiction magazines and a fan-base in her chosen genre.
She ended up “auctioning” her first novel at a huge New York publishers’ event that’s the equivalent of a big fiction flea market — she walked away with a success, but it was less than $25,000 I believe, and carried a contract for additional titles. (A form of wage slavery for authors) It took years and multiple books before she was free to renegotiate and find a new publisher.
If you run across other specific stories — especially other “viral” best-sellers with humble beginnings in our niche — please let me know.
Ellesse,
The print-on-demand house with the lowest upfront overhead for the author and the most professional-grade product options — that I have personal experience using — is
Lulu.com
Amazon’s own BookSurge seeks to compete in the POD market (ultimately, both Lulu and BookSurge offer distribution through the Amazon network online, and the two major book distributors offline).
There are probably thousands of comparable POD companies and services out there these days — CafePress.com is a giant of the consumer generated media market, and Zazzle.com has been around for awhile. I like these okay for smaller projects like calendars, CD inserts, greeting cards, Tshirts, etc.
Once you have the standard PDF version of your work for printing, then you automatically have a digital version you can re-purpose — depending on the type of book it is, the net profit margin is tremendous.
For my ebook tutorials and other digital-only products, there is absolutely not even a close second to E-Junkie.com
I think it was over 10 years ago that I first saw self-publishing as a viable option. A fellow I vaguely knew on AOL wrote a clever, comedic book on spirituality, self published through whatever online publishers were available back then (probably Xlibris). He set up a website, promoted it through chat rooms and profiles and message boards and e-lists (We didnt have blogs and MySpace). He got it listed on Amazon and sold enough copies that one of the publishing houses made him a much better offer than most first timers get. I’m not sure if he took them up on it or not… and I don’t remember the name of the book, sadly. I do remember it did respectably well, and I decided that some day I’d follow in his footsteps.
I haven’t managed that yet… but I do repeat the story a lot for others. So many of us use “I’ll never get it published” as an excuse not to write. Self-publishing has come a *long* way from the old warnings about vanity presses.
Your break down of the profit margin and marketing costs will now be part of the info I share with them, and think about myself… Thank you!!
MindTweaks Chick,
I went in search of your name but did not find it, Anonymous One…
: )
But thank you for sharing another “real world” self-publishing success story that we can all relate to and use for comparative inspiration.
Your point about using “I’ll never get it published” as a reason to procrastinate or fail is very wise — underscore that one!
Here’s a manifesting tweak for you:
“I haven’t managed yet” only requires a small change to “I am managing” and you’re well on your way to the goal. You can and you will.
Hi Slade,
Oops! I didn’t mean to send you off on a wild-goose chase for my name; I usually sign with “MT” but apparently left it off this time. (The anonymity will fall away when it’s, but I’m still having too much fun with it)
But you’re welcome for the story, and thanks for the reminder to watch wording! There’s a reason I used the wording I did, which I didn’t realize until I saw your suggestion. Awareness is a good thing; thank you : )
MT
Great article, thank you.I feel like you’ve just provided two very important parts of my puzzle today, with two of your articles.
No surprise there!
Much joy,
KL
Hi Slade,
Really interesting post. I’m an aspiring author, and seem to be getting pushed more and more away from traditional publishing and toward self-publishing, though it scares me. I was wondering what you thought of online serial novels, like Aaron Powell has done (and is doing again). I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
Clare,
Your question about online fiction is one of the best I’ve received in a long time — so good in fact that I found in composing a reply to your comment that my thoughts on the subject requires a post of its own.
Please stay tuned — I have TONS to say about it, actually, more than I realized…
Great! I was kind of hoping that would happen… it does seem to happen to you a lot. And I feel all special now! I’ll wait patiently for the post…
Hi again Slade,
I thought you might be interested (I’m delighted and fascinated!) to know that there are actually a lot of people doing a similar thing, and at least one making a living at it.
http://www.pagesunbound.com/