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Self Publishing: Interested?

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
£X is a known figure, "great book" is not. 50 Shades, IMO, was not a great book but made millions. There are "great books" as judged by literary awards and whatnot that sell only a few thousand copies. No joke. They may not even earn back their advance, but the publisher doesn't care because it wins awards and earns literary points, heh heh.

If you put 70k into a single book, you will sell copies, probably lots of them. Here's the blunt hammer: advertising is NOT designed for selling one book and making a profit on the profit margin of a single book. Can it be done? Yes! Is it a guarantee? Oh, hell no.



Surely it's also just a numbers game? If you have a great book, and £70k to drop on advertising (and editing etc etc), your work is going to shine through the saturated mess?
 

Devor

Fiery Keeper of the Hat
Moderator
So you're saying, if I'm confident a publisher will publish my work, forget about the 70-30 royalty, I should reconsider/go with them?

No. That's not what I said.

Getting anywhere with self-publishing takes a special mindset. That mindset - it's like a lifestyle, an attitude that you develop early on that stays with you... the people who are going to be successful are the ones for whom Doing It Yourself is the whole point of doing it at all. They drip with enthusiasm at the challenge of figuring out what makes everything work, and doing as well as the professionals is itself part of the drive.

If you're focused in on the money - and, you know, that's for you to decide, as it's a natural question and starting one thread doesn't really mean that much - but if it's the promise of a higher royalty that's motivating the path of self-publishing, then well.... that's not what the DIY mindset would focus on.

The overwhelming majority of self-published books sell fewer than 200 copies. Getting a book to do better than that is not just a lot of work, but figuring out exactly how to do it is downright mystifying to most people. The job is to figure out how to be noticed when your book is essentially a internet thumbnail among hundreds of thousands of others. How many of those do people even read?

And it takes a mindset because books start picking up mystifying death flags before you even start the first page. There are hundreds of these mystifying challenges that you have to overcome to succeed. What makes a good protagonist? What's a clever play on a trope versus another bad cliche? How long should a sentence be? How can I email potential reviewers so that's it's compelling not pushy? Over-and-over you have to make these decisions, and build up these skills, and it's just not easy.

And you're doing each of these tasks, alone, whether you're good at it or not. A professional book routinely goes through about eight rounds of editing over six months. You can grab a decent editor on the internet, but eight rounds is a lot more work than most people are up for. And it's a special skill you have to figure out to even recognize when that person is doing a good job of it. But self-publishing, you're on the hook to somehow match the quality of those eight rounds of editing.

The person who's going to be successful here is the one who read all that and thought: Hell yeah, sounds like fun.
 

pmmg

Myth Weaver
Surely it's also just a numbers game? If you have a great book, and £70k to drop on advertising (and editing etc etc), your work is going to shine through the saturated mess?

I dont know, maybe. Would not hurt to have a bank to drop on it.
 

pmmg

Myth Weaver
No. That's not what I said.

Getting anywhere with self-publishing takes a special mindset. That mindset - it's like a lifestyle, an attitude that you develop early on that stays with you... the people who are going to be successful are the ones for whom Doing It Yourself is the whole point of doing it at all. They drip with enthusiasm at the challenge of figuring out what makes everything work, and doing as well as the professionals is itself part of the drive.

If you're focused in on the money - and, you know, that's for you to decide, as it's a natural question and starting one thread doesn't really mean that much - but if it's the promise of a higher royalty that's motivating the path of self-publishing, then well.... that's not what the DIY mindset would focus on.

The overwhelming majority of self-published books sell fewer than 200 copies. Getting a book to do better than that is not just a lot of work, but figuring out exactly how to do it is downright mystifying to most people. The job is to figure out how to be noticed when your book is essentially a internet thumbnail among hundreds of thousands of others. How many of those do people even read?

And it takes a mindset because books start picking up mystifying death flags before you even start the first page. There are hundreds of these mystifying challenges that you have to overcome to succeed. What makes a good protagonist? What's a clever play on a trope versus another bad cliche? How long should a sentence be? How can I email potential reviewers so that's it's compelling not pushy? Over-and-over you have to make these decisions, and build up these skills, and it's just not easy.

And you're doing each of these tasks, alone, whether you're good at it or not. A professional book routinely goes through about eight rounds of editing over six months. You can grab a decent editor on the internet, but eight rounds is a lot more work than most people are up for. And it's a special skill you have to figure out to even recognize when that person is doing a good job of it. But self-publishing, you're on the hook to somehow match the quality of those eight rounds of editing.

The person who's going to be successful here is the one who read all that and thought: Hell yeah, sounds like fun.

Sounds like the plan to me.
 

Svrtnsse

Staff
Article Team
Can I ask, how much did you spend on your self publishing? What is 'tons of money'?
I don't have the exact number, but the money was spent on advertising, and I probably spent about five to ten times more on ads and marketing than I made back in sold books.

The actual publishing cost was tiny.
I was able to get a friend who enjoys the task to proofread for a symbolic $50 per book.
I used beta readers (free) rather than an editor to get feedback on story and pacing.
I made the covers myself using stock images and free software.

I paid less than $100 for creating each book, and several hundred dollars on advertising, before I stopped.

Going without an editor probably wasn't the best idea in retrospect, and I will be hiring one for my next book, so that's going to cost a lot more. However, I'm a different kind of confident in my writing this time around, so paying for editing seems much more sensible now than it did back then.

I've also saved a lot on making my own covers. They're perhaps not as good as if I'd hired a professional designer, but I dare say they're better than the average non-designer's homemade covers. The covers can be viewed here: Lost Dogs Series by Nils Ödlund
Like with the editor, I'll probably be getting a proper cover for my next book.

In my case, publishing the book is cheap and easy, making people want to read it is difficult.
 

ThinkerX

Myth Weaver
Four or five months back, after repeated marketing flops, I set some modest goals for myself.

First, because of constrained finances, I simply cannot afford to consistently spend more than $300 a month on the whole book publishing thing, barring the occasional bit of extra money. That is combined publication and marketing costs. (I did get one such minor windfall over the holidays, so...)

Second, the overall goal is to sell an average of a book a day. If that means selling fifty books one month and ten the next, then so be it. This is for all of my books. Thus far, I am consistently running at just over half that amount - average of four sales a week or thereabouts.

Third goal is to sell 100 online copies (digital or print) of each title within a year of its release. At the current rate, it'll be more like 14-16 months to reach 100 sales per title.
 

Righmath

Troubadour
No. That's not what I said.

Getting anywhere with self-publishing takes a special mindset. That mindset - it's like a lifestyle, an attitude that you develop early on that stays with you... the people who are going to be successful are the ones for whom Doing It Yourself is the whole point of doing it at all. They drip with enthusiasm at the challenge of figuring out what makes everything work, and doing as well as the professionals is itself part of the drive.

If you're focused in on the money - and, you know, that's for you to decide, as it's a natural question and starting one thread doesn't really mean that much - but if it's the promise of a higher royalty that's motivating the path of self-publishing, then well.... that's not what the DIY mindset would focus on.

The overwhelming majority of self-published books sell fewer than 200 copies. Getting a book to do better than that is not just a lot of work, but figuring out exactly how to do it is downright mystifying to most people. The job is to figure out how to be noticed when your book is essentially a internet thumbnail among hundreds of thousands of others. How many of those do people even read?

And it takes a mindset because books start picking up mystifying death flags before you even start the first page. There are hundreds of these mystifying challenges that you have to overcome to succeed. What makes a good protagonist? What's a clever play on a trope versus another bad cliche? How long should a sentence be? How can I email potential reviewers so that's it's compelling not pushy? Over-and-over you have to make these decisions, and build up these skills, and it's just not easy.

And you're doing each of these tasks, alone, whether you're good at it or not. A professional book routinely goes through about eight rounds of editing over six months. You can grab a decent editor on the internet, but eight rounds is a lot more work than most people are up for. And it's a special skill you have to figure out to even recognize when that person is doing a good job of it. But self-publishing, you're on the hook to somehow match the quality of those eight rounds of editing.

The person who's going to be successful here is the one who read all that and thought: Hell yeah, sounds like fun.
Ok, understood (I think)! Basically, you should be doing it if you're in for the long, tedious, game of self-publishing and hands-on marketing, but if you're just looking at the profit margins and not considering the whole DIY aspect, then trad publishing might be best?
 

Righmath

Troubadour
£X is a known figure, "great book" is not. 50 Shades, IMO, was not a great book but made millions. There are "great books" as judged by literary awards and whatnot that sell only a few thousand copies. No joke. They may not even earn back their advance, but the publisher doesn't care because it wins awards and earns literary points, heh heh.

If you put 70k into a single book, you will sell copies, probably lots of them. Here's the blunt hammer: advertising is NOT designed for selling one book and making a profit on the profit margin of a single book. Can it be done? Yes! Is it a guarantee? Oh, hell no.
Yeah, gotcha. Do you have any idea how much was spent on marketing for a single book of yours which made the most? Or is this a figure trad publishers keep from you? (I think you said you've done both, trad & self, right?)
 

ThinkerX

Myth Weaver
Ok, understood (I think)! Basically, you should be doing it if you're in for the long, tedious, game of self-publishing and hands-on marketing, but if you're just looking at the profit margins and not considering the whole DIY aspect, then trad publishing might be best?
Getting Trad published is a bit like winning the lottery - and you are almost certain to pile up rejections for years before winning that lottery, if you ever do,
 

Insolent Lad

Maester
I came out of the DIY music scene so putting out my own books seemed natural to me, and for much the same reasons—control over the product, artistic freedom, whatever you want to call it. I've always been a person who makes things (gosh, maybe that's why so many of my protagonists are craftsmen :) ) But the first books were poetry collections to hawk at readings and not intended for distribution. I did send my first novel, a mainstream YA, around for a couple years (and several rewrites) before thinking, hey, I already know how to publish, why don't I just go ahead and do this one myself also?

I don't mind the work of publishing. It's another craft to explore and a printed book is another work of art (sort of). I like creating it start to finish. In other words, I'm the perfect candidate for self-publishing. Or maybe I should say small indie publishing as I have over fifty books out now and not all with my name on the covers.
 

Righmath

Troubadour
I came out of the DIY music scene so putting out my own books seemed natural to me, and for much the same reasons—control over the product, artistic freedom, whatever you want to call it. I've always been a person who makes things (gosh, maybe that's why so many of my protagonists are craftsmen :) ) But the first books were poetry collections to hawk at readings and not intended for distribution. I did send my first novel, a mainstream YA, around for a couple years (and several rewrites) before thinking, hey, I already know how to publish, why don't I just go ahead and do this one myself also?

I don't mind the work of publishing. It's another craft to explore and a printed book is another work of art (sort of). I like creating it start to finish. In other words, I'm the perfect candidate for self-publishing. Or maybe I should say small indie publishing as I have over fifty books out now and not all with my name on the covers.
Insolent, thanks for sharing and giving a glimpse of your experience. Would you be able to shed some light on any success from your self publishing?
 

Righmath

Troubadour
Getting Trad published is a bit like winning the lottery - and you are almost certain to pile up rejections for years before winning that lottery, if you ever do,
Yeah, for sure. Throw mud at the wall and eventually some will stick kinda thing. 🤣
 

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
I am pure Indie. Here's the thing, you only get 1 single book, your first, unless you use a pseudonym. I also was not going for profit and didn't expect any with one book. When money came in, it went back out plus some. So, my numbers are going to be pretty useless, plus they are over 4 years old. FB advertising has changed multiple times and not for the better, in part thanks to privacy concerns in the EU and US. I could probably offset this now that I'm better at Amazon ad targeting. But, the key is to take a simpler scenario and run the numbers. Let's take a look at a hypothetical based on reality. I'll stick to dollars here.

Let's say your profit margin is $3.50 on a $4.99 book, for simplicity's sake. This won't be exact because Amazon robs you by the size of your book with a delivery fee, something Apple and others do not do. VAT fees in other countries. So, it's pretty simple, you must sell a book for every $3.50 you spend on advertising to break even.

Here's where we can advertise in general and track details:

Bookbub Featured Deal: Forget about it until you have 40+ reviews, but if you can get one, do it. It's even better once you have a series. Major profit? No, because with 1 book and a steep discount, your profits are low, but the exposure is big.
Bookbub Ads: Forget about it unless you have a $0.99 promotion. Bookbub recipients expect cheap books. Even then you need an insane conversion rate because your profit margin is going to be 0.70 at best, and cheap clicks on their ads are hard as hell to come by.
Facebook: Here used to be a fun place, when you could micro-target an audience and pick up clicks for $0.16. You might still get that CPC, but the targeting is no longer as effective, so conversions will be down. FB is where I made money, and I don't run a single ad there now, if that tells you anything. I will again in the future, but for now, I'm working Amazon ads. FB ads are colder than Amazon ads, so your click-to-sale ratio is bound to be worse. Plus, you aren't paying directly for clicks here. When I was at profit with a single book, it was FB ads doing the heavy lifting and spending about 1200 per month. However, I could not get it to scale higher at profit. I don't think I would be able to do that with the current FB platform and its targeting limitations.
Amazon: There will be a lot of debate here, some people say go for a pile of cheap clicks, maybe $0.20, while others say pay for quality clicks which can range from $1-$4. Let's assume something practical in the middle, you certainly don't want to pay $4/click on $3.50 profit. Unless you like throwing away money. Let's assume you can get a big serving quality ad at $0.50/click. You now must produce a 1:7 ratio of sales to clicks. That is a serious bitch for a no-name author and no-name book. Eve of Snows had a couple of good pro reviews too, but they only go so far. There is way more to Amazon ads than this, but it's too long of a topic.
Twitter: I never went there, and very few people I've talked to report success.
TikTok: I never went there, but from what I hear, it's whipsawing people left and right with changes to the algorithm. I'm starting up a vlog so I will post there for free, but intend to spend $0.
Google: At least $0.50/click and they are fairly cold shoppers.

Now, remember the old advertising saying, it takes 8 views to sell a product. This isn't precise, of course, you'll hit low-hanging readers who will grab your book right off, but in general, someone needs to see your ad more than once before buying. But let's just take that number and say you get 1 sale per 8 clicks, and trust me, that will be doing great... At $0.50/click you just spent $4.00 to make $3.50.

When you start talking ad saturation, just how much can you spend on ads per day without paying for a bunch of crappy clicks? FB will spend your money! Ho howdy! But they will spam your ad to do it, heh heh. Amazon, again, you don't want to target too wide. The answer here is unknowable, BUT from what I've heard from other successful authors is spending 2-3k per month. Some will drop 5k+ dollars for a few months and then cut the spend, BUT these are people who are established. They have mailing lists pushing or beyond 6 figures. One will advertise for 3 months with a launch and make $200,000 profit.

BUT that is not a single release, they have up to 6 book series ready for a rapid release and have a big following already.

The moral to the story, a single book is going to be a struggle to make a profit on. Hell, trad authors don't often make a living on one book.

You can hire a publicist and drop 10k easily, spend a k on the cover, do everything right and lose money, the question is, are you willing to accept a hefty loss in order to build an audience toward your second book? You might make a profit, but don't plan on it. Even folks with a heavy spend to make the USA Today or NYT bestseller lists are typically spending in order to be able to use that title in their promo for future advertising profit... or just a feather in their cap.


Yeah, gotcha. Do you have any idea how much was spent on marketing for a single book of yours which made the most? Or is this a figure trad publishers keep from you? (I think you said you've done both, trad & self, right?)
 
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skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
Svrtnsse said it's a hobby. I know writers who would bristle at that. Only a hobby? I'm more serious than that! Or so they would claim.

But I like another term: amateur.

It's a great word, maybe even perfect for a certain audience, because it derives from the Latin verb "to love".

Amateur is regularly contrasted to professional, and that is spot on. The amateur does the work for love. The pro does it for money. That distinction seems useful and appropriate to our labors.

Me, I'm an amateur and pleased to be so.
 
You could check out KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH's blog. She's been publishing for decades, both traditional and indie, and she has blogged extensively on publishing and the publishing business. Do note, she has a very strong bias against traditional publishing and towards indie publishing. So keep that in mind while reading. And even with that it's a good resource.

One thing that often gets forgotten in the indie vs trad discussion is the bit about actually getting published at all. With indie publishing it's easy. If I want, I can go to Amazon, upload my book and it'll be live in 48 hours, give or take. With trad publishing, there is no guarantee that you can get published at all. You're querying agents in the hopes they pick you up. Most publishers don't accept manuscripts without agents, and those that do reject most manuscripts they receive. You can spend 2-5 years simply sending your book out and not getting anywhere. And quality isn't always a reason something gets picked up. After all, many succesfull novels have stories of being rejected multiple times before finally being picked up. So just because you chose the trad route, doesn't mean you will actually get published.

As for the financial side. From what I gather, most trad contracts come down to something like: about $5,000 advance. 10% of hardback retail price, 5-7% of paperback retail price, 25% of net for ebooks (meaning, 25% of what the publisher receives from Amazon, so 25% of 70% of the price of the ebook). You only start receiving money once you're earned out your advance (as in, earned more in royalties than your advance).

For indie publishing, you earn 70% of ebook royalties if you price between $2,99 and $9,99, or 35% if you're outside that range. For paperback and hardcover, you get 60% of the list price, after all costs have been taken out. Depending on the size of the book etc and your pricing, you're looking at roughly the same % as with trad books (as in, about $2 per book).

That's only the income side. Expense wise, for trad publishing you're looking at an agent, at 10% of everything the book makes. But that's only once you start selling. That should be the only expense you have to get the book out there though. If a publisher is asking you money to publish your book, it's not a traditional publisher, but a scam making money of authors. Never do that. Ever.

For indie publishing, this is more painful. You'll likely need a cover and an editor. Cover is about $500. Could be less (there are some great $100 covers if you get lucky with a premade cover). Could also be more. Editing is about 1-2ct per word. Something like $1,000 - $2,000 for a novel, depending on word count and editor. That's all you really need though. You could get an ISBN (costs vary wildly depending on where you live), but you can go without and use a free one from Amazon. Same with formatting. Plenty of tools do a good enough job for free. Some require a small investment (like Atticus) for a few more, nicer options, but you can go without if you're starting out.

That's it for fixed costs. Variable costs (as in, the cost of selling 1 book) are actually the same everywhere. Don't count on a marketing budget if you publish traditionally. Especially not after the initial release. Unless you wrote an amazing book that multiple publishers want and they give you a big advance. But chances of that happening are similar to chances of winning the lotery.

Whichever way you go, don't count on selling a lot of books. I forgot the exact %, but last year, news came out that something like 15% of all traditionaly published novels sell 12 copies or less. Total. Most sales are generated by the minority of published novels. Same goes for indie publishing by the way. Without marketing, your indie novel wil sink and never be bought by anyone. ThinkerX 's experience in trying to sell novels is fairly standard. Selling 100 of them in a year takes work. Doing so at a profit is even more work (especially if you only have 1 novel out there).
 

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
12? I wonder what anomaly causes this? I can just imagine sitting on a $5k advance waiting for the money to roll in, LMAO. But I'd have a lot of questions about this. How many books are bought but never reach print? I'm guessing there's a lot of sub-5k advances out there as well, and I wonder if this is big 5 and their imprints, or does it count the dwindling number of small publishing houses? But at the same time, I don't recall the name of the book, but a winner of a major literary award some years back only sold something in the neighborhood of 1200 copies. Eve of Snows outsold/outearned that in its first 6 months... except I think that award had a Big Prize that would smoke me, heh heh.
 
It's a figure that became public because of the Penguin - Random House merger hearings. The number is for the big 5 + a few of the other big publishers (like Disney and Scholastic). So no small publishers in there. The original text (see What a Number… Shocking for instance), was that 'of the 58,000 trade titles published per year, fully half of those titles “sell fewer than one dozen books.”'

We had a discussion on this here: Will I ever get published and become a successful author or am I a deluded fool?. The figures are a bit less extreme, but Mad Swede did some digging, and the numbers he came across were:
>>>0.4% or 163 books sold 100,000 copies or more

>>>0.7% or 320 books sold between 50,000-99,999 copies

>>>2.2% or 1,015 books sold between 20,000-49,999 copies

>>>3.4% or 1,572 books sold between 10,000-19,999 copies

>>>5.5% or 2,518 books sold between 5,000-9,999 copies

>>>21.6% or 9,863 books sold between 1,000-4,999 copies

>>>51.4% or 23,419 sold between 12-999 copies

>>>14.7% or 6,701 books sold under 12 copies


So, if you traditionally publish, you have a 66% chance of selling fewer than 1,000 copies. More if you factor in that most of those selling more than 10k copies will be established authors and celebrities putting out best-sellers to established audiences. And 88% never earn out their advance (assuming $5k advance and $1 royalty per copy sold, so 5k copies to earn out your advance).
 

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
I totally missed that one.
It's a figure that became public because of the Penguin - Random House merger hearings. The number is for the big 5 + a few of the other big publishers (like Disney and Scholastic). So no small publishers in there. The original text (see What a Number… Shocking for instance), was that 'of the 58,000 trade titles published per year, fully half of those titles “sell fewer than one dozen books.”'

We had a discussion on this here: Will I ever get published and become a successful author or am I a deluded fool?. The figures are a bit less extreme, but Mad Swede did some digging, and the numbers he came across were:
>>>0.4% or 163 books sold 100,000 copies or more

>>>0.7% or 320 books sold between 50,000-99,999 copies

>>>2.2% or 1,015 books sold between 20,000-49,999 copies

>>>3.4% or 1,572 books sold between 10,000-19,999 copies

>>>5.5% or 2,518 books sold between 5,000-9,999 copies

>>>21.6% or 9,863 books sold between 1,000-4,999 copies

>>>51.4% or 23,419 sold between 12-999 copies

>>>14.7% or 6,701 books sold under 12 copies


So, if you traditionally publish, you have a 66% chance of selling fewer than 1,000 copies. More if you factor in that most of those selling more than 10k copies will be established authors and celebrities putting out best-sellers to established audiences. And 88% never earn out their advance (assuming $5k advance and $1 royalty per copy sold, so 5k copies to earn out your advance).
 
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