Thoughts on Self Publishing?

[MichaelSullivan]

You lost me here Michael, could you go further into detail to help me better understand? Please.

Gerald...in your contract they have different royalty rates for different formats. There can be a range - for instance as Kevin pointed out some mass market paperbook (MMP) contracts he's heard of are 6%. To be honest I thought the contract I received was pretty "industry standard" and I still do think it is. One thing to keep in mind whenever you are looking at royalties is whether the percentage is based on cover price (list price or gross) or net (and how is net calculated). FWIW here are the rates in my contract:

hardcover (retail price):
10% first 5,000
12.5% next 5,000
15% all copies after that

Trade paperback (retail price)
7.5% (no escallation)

Mass Market Paperback (retail price)
8% for first 150,000
10% all above that

Audio books (net sales)
10% of CD versions
25% digital downloads

ebooks (net sales)
25%

There are other numbers - slightly different values for UK, Large Print, etc but the above cover the "bulk" of the royalties

[Stuart John Evison]

My first post about my own experience of seeking publication.
The first thing that always gets to me about submitting work to agents or publishers is "submission guidelines", never having been any good at being submissive by very nature I find them too restrictive. I like to illuminate and illustrate my work and they do not seem to be willing to accept this old fashioned idea. This gave me no other recourse but to go the self publishing route in order to make people take notice. I expect the experience of this is different for everyone but for me it has perhaps been relatively easy. I am lucky enough to have worked and still have friends in the magazine publishing world so I just went for it.
"Muddle Puddle and the Whistling Shell" will be available shortly from Apple's bookstore.

[morfiction]

I self-published with Lulu.com. It only costs money to print the books. There are other optional services but they are purely optional.