ACSmyth
Minstrel
She also caught the crest of the wave with the free and 99c promotions, which most people agree have pretty much burned themselves out now.
That said, there is another important factor to consider. People talk about how "80% of indies make less than $X", or "the average indie makes only $Y".
Here's another one: the average self published book makes more money than the average work submitted to traditional publishers.
Not a lot of real marketing advantage to being trad pubbed anymore (for most writers).
ETA: Should also say: you make some great points, especially about how difficult it is to tell which books are self-published. I also spend a lot of time trying to work that out. It really isn't obvious in many cases.
This is a serious question as I don't know much about these kind of things (I'm learning more and more everyday), but what about having your books in print in stores or in libraries? While I do agree e-books are the way of the future, there has to be some advantage to having your book both in print and in e-book format.
But there aren't all that many sp books with really bad covers any more.
Besides, I'm told many trade publishers have begun to use stock images for their covers as well, so the difference between sp and trad becomes even smaller.
About getting your book in a library or book store. I've no idea how that works in the US, but over here it's nearly impossible to get a fantasy book in a book store, unless you have something like the Wheel of Time or the Hunger Games. The others sell only online. And every book with an isbn is in the online stores. I can't imagine it being very different in the US. Go to any library and check the amount of trade published books. How many will that be?
In NL it is interesting to get your book in the libraries. US, I don't know.
I do know that I can make my sp books available for US libraries and book stores, by using an Amazon isbn instead of my own. I won't because I don't think it will make much difference.
Print distribution is virtually the ONLY big advantage that trad publishers have over self-publishers these days. Self-pubbers can have print versions of their books, it's not that hard to do, and sell them online. But only trad publishers have the distribution network to get an author's book into every bookstore in the country.
There are perfectly good reasons for authors to sign with traditional publishers (large or small), but it's nothing like the no-brainer it was even 5 years ago. Authors should go into it with their eyes wide open, keep themselves informed of the ever-changing landscape, and read every word in the contract very, very carefully.
This is a serious question as I don't know much about these kind of things (I'm learning more and more everyday), but what about having your books in print in stores or in libraries? While I do agree e-books are the way of the future, there has to be some advantage to having your book both in print and in e-book format.
Important to remember though: almost no traditionally published books get into major brick retail channels. Most are from small presses; most small presses can't get into chain bookstores and other chain stores. If your work is published by a company that CAN get into B&N, then you're getting some value from it, of course. But even then - you're only making maybe 50 cents or so per sale on MMP print books. It takes a LOT of fifty cent sales to make up for the 3/4 of the income the publisher takes on ebooks.
want to go back to the original posts in this thread for a second.
First, the OP said she ""looked inside" about three dozen self-published books".
Nobody else here picked up on the fatal flaw in that statement, so I'll share.
How did you know they were self published?
We know this, because having a book on a genre or even sub-sub-genre top 20 list has an enormous effect on sales.
Brian, if you look at sales vs rank, the graph looks like a geometric scale. So at 10k rank, you're maybe making 500 sales a month. At 5k, maybe 1000 a month, or about 30 per day. By rank 1000, it's gone up to hundreds per day. By rank 100, it's hundreds more, maybe as many as 1000 a day. By the top couple of ranks, you're looking at 5-10k sales per day.
(Above is a bit dated, could be higher by now - but illustrative of the way it flows.)
I don't know the precise jump for placement on a given page. I've heard about people whose sales have doubled by going from rank 21 in a genre to rank 20 - just moving from one page to another - but i think that's extreme.
Getting onto a top ten list probably does very little, since Amazon defaults to 20 books per page when browsing. It's the top 20, 40, 60, etc. that counts most, i think.