How much can you realistically make e-publishing?

Discussion in 'Electronic Publishing' started by Ursa, Jun 15, 2015.

  1. Cave Troll

    Cave Troll It's Coffee O'clock everywhere. Contributor

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    @Tenderiser

    Ok, I will concede to most of those.
     
  2. Laurin Kelly

    Laurin Kelly Contributor Contributor

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    Yes, Under the Knife is a trade, not mass market paperback. At that price of course, print has made up a very small percentage of my sales (just under 10% based on Q1-Q3 2016).
     
  3. Laurin Kelly

    Laurin Kelly Contributor Contributor

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  4. Cave Troll

    Cave Troll It's Coffee O'clock everywhere. Contributor

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    @Laurin Kelly

    So it is their novelty of specialization that gives them more room to fetch a higher price.
    Interesting. Had no idea genre specific or niche publishers could do that.

    Though I can see how that would make sense in one aspect or another, even though
    it is a highly popular genre in the market place.
     
  5. Laurin Kelly

    Laurin Kelly Contributor Contributor

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    I would imagine that the specialization is a good part of it. But in the end, if they couldn't sell books at those prices, they'd be out of business. Obviously the market is willing to pay those prices.

    As a reader as well as a writer in the genre, I'm more than willing to pay $6+ for an ebook. It costs me about that much to rent a movie from Amazon or OnDemand, so that price for something I get to own permanently seems very fair and reasonable.
     
  6. Cave Troll

    Cave Troll It's Coffee O'clock everywhere. Contributor

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    @Laurin Kelly

    Provided your device has a large enough hard-drive to store all the files.
    The first kindle, does not offer such a luxury. :p

    Understandable that they would have to be higher priced. A consequence
    of being smaller makes it harder to compete with bigger companies.

    On a personal note, I would expect a better quality product for the price
    differential and not because of brand name. So I would like to think a
    smaller company would have a better quality product to offer, since they
    have to compete with much bigger mass marketers.
    Having said that, the price better reflect the overall quality of the product,
    and be a bit better than what the competition offers.
     
  7. BayView

    BayView Huh. Interesting. Contributor

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    I don't know that you can really compare "overall quality of the product" for fiction, not in an apples-to-apples way. If I don't like SciFi, the best SciFi story ever (according to some authority or another) will be worthless to me. Even if I do like SciFi, there will be some stories that "work" for me and some that don't, but my ranking may not match up with someone else's rankings.

    If I read reviews of a book that make me think I'll enjoy that book, I buy that book. It's not about overall quality, it's about the likelihood of matching my reading tastes and interests.
     
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  8. Cave Troll

    Cave Troll It's Coffee O'clock everywhere. Contributor

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    True enough. Though you might agree that some pretty awful books get some stellar reviews.
     
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  9. BayView

    BayView Huh. Interesting. Contributor

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    Well, lots of books get very conflicting views, for sure. I don't know that I really feel qualified to say what books are "awful", once we're beyond elements like typos, not making sense, etc. But most books that are coherent enough to be published? They're probably "good" books for some readers, and probably not "good" books for other readers.
     
  10. Laurin Kelly

    Laurin Kelly Contributor Contributor

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    Yeah, as long as you mean "overall quality" in the respect that the end product is polished and professional I agree that you should get what you paid for. If I pay 6 bucks for an ebook, I would expect aesthetically pleasing cover art, a read that is relatively free of typos, spelling, grammar and insane continuity errors, and contains a story that accurately reflects the blurb that enticed me to buy it. For free or 99 cents I would expect to really be rolling the dice on the above.

    From a reader enjoyment level though, I couldn't promise that someone would enjoy my $6.99 book any more that say, that Zootopia fanfic they read the night before for free on AO3. Reader enjoyment is waaaaay to subjective to draw those kind of lines.
     
  11. Laurin Kelly

    Laurin Kelly Contributor Contributor

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    ^^^This.

    I find 99.9% of Country music terrible (I make an exception for the Dixie Chicks), but there's a whole lot of listeners and reviewers out there who find it to be high-quality, extremely consumable entertainment.
     
  12. BayView

    BayView Huh. Interesting. Contributor

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    And I enjoy some Country music (including the Dixie Chicks, but others as well). I don't care for most modern pop. Yet Laurin and I both write in the same genre and probably have similar opinions about at least some of our favourite authors in that genre. Personal taste is hard to understand/classify/define.
     
  13. Homer Potvin

    Homer Potvin A tombstone hand and a graveyard mind Staff Supporter Contributor

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    True dat.
     
  14. RikWriter

    RikWriter Member

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    To answer the original question, there are people who can and do make over a million dollars a year self-publishing e-books. They are the exception, obviously, and most got in on the ground floor of the groundswell. The people who make 6 figures a year are incredibly prolific, writing something along the lines of 12-20 books a year in genres that engender rabid followings, and put a lot of time and money into promotion and marketing. I could never be like them, for one because I could never write that fast and two, marketing is not my thing and I can't bring myself to invest thousands of dollars into what might be a money pit.
    I personally have had modest success as a self-published SF author. I've had a couple of books that spent a couple weeks in the top 500 books on Amazon, and with eight novels now published, I've turned what started as a source for a bit of extra spending money every month into what could be a steady source of what would make up half of our family income.
    I don't know if it'll last, but I intend to keep writing and start investing a bit more into marketing and see what happens.
    I do know that beyond pure talent, what you make from self publishing depends on the work you put into it. I work a full time job AND write 2,000 words a day minimum when I'm working on a book. Not average, just minimum. If you can't discipline yourself to do that, you're not going to have a steady income from self publishing.
     
  15. M Phillip

    M Phillip Banned

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    E. L. James, author of 50 Shades of Grey, made a bundle by self publishing the trilogy.

    At the other end of the spectrum is me and my debut novella - 12 copies downloaded for free.

    It can be done but not everybody does it.

     
  16. rktho

    rktho Contributor Contributor

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    From what I've read of reviews (not the book) 50 Shades is poorly written and perpetuates an incredibly harmful message to men and women about sex. So basically if you want to write a bestseller write hardcore porn, never mind the quality.

    Jeez, between "women will eventually love you even if you abuse them for sexual purposes" and "all you need to be successful is write smut about a woman coming to enjoy an abusive relationship", I can't tell which lesson sickens me more.
     
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  17. Edward M. Grant

    Edward M. Grant Contributor Contributor

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    It certainly helps, but I skimmed through a few chapters of '50 Shades' expecting the writing to be dismal, and it wasn't that bad. Can't comment on the story, though, just the words; but my girlfriend tried to read it and I don't think she even got half-way through the book.

    Besides, it wasn't really self-published. As I understand it, didn't she put it on the Internet as Twilight fanfic, then file off the serial numbers and sell it to a small publisher, then somehow sell it again to a big publisher?

    There's a book called The Bestseller Code where the authors used some software they wrote to analyze a lot of books, and from what I remember they found that '50 Shades' hit most of the best-seller heuristics that their software looks for. Sex scenes weren't really one of them.

    Money-wise, there seem to be plenty of writers making six figures by self-publishing, mostly those who publish many books a year in big genres like romance.
     
  18. ChickenFreak

    ChickenFreak Contributor Contributor

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    Possibly "plenty" in the sense that you could fill a room with them, but in terms of the percentage of self-published authors, I think that it's a tiny tiny percentage.

    Edited to add: And are you sure they're self publishing, as opposed to e-publishing with a publisher?
     
  19. Cave Troll

    Cave Troll It's Coffee O'clock everywhere. Contributor

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    That is what is known as flinging a ton of shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.
    It is not exclusive to Romance, but the quality of those quick turned out books
    are usually poor the more of them you find, and are usually in never ending series.

    There are a few books out there that claim you can just pound out bad Erotica in
    short stories like a machine and make beer money doing it. Seems even the element
    of even having something with even all the basic elements of a story are a thing too.

    Never trust an author who pushes out books like they are going out of style. It is just
    a wide casting net, hoping to catch an audience.
     
  20. Edward M. Grant

    Edward M. Grant Contributor Contributor

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    Yes. And yes.

    Not a huge number, but probably more than were making that much money in those genres ten years ago. Romance has been notorious for publishers trying to exploit their authors, which is why so many of those authors became such good businesspeople.
     
  21. Edward M. Grant

    Edward M. Grant Contributor Contributor

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    Making beer money with erotica is easy: any competent writer can release a 5-10k erotica story with a $1 cover and make enough to buy a six-pack. Making a living at it is much harder, and probably does involve releasing at least one story a day.

    They're basically just doing what publishers do: release a lot of books and hope one takes off. Or did, until recent years when they've been trying to drop the midlist and only release best-sellers.
     
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  22. Tenderiser

    Tenderiser Not a man or BayView

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    That makes no sense at all. It's like our education minister saying every child should achieve above average results. Think it through!

    In case it's not clear, I'm saying that this isn't true, not that publishers are doing something stupid.
     
    Last edited: Sep 29, 2017
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  23. rktho

    rktho Contributor Contributor

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    There's a great difference between romance and violent erotica.
     
  24. M Phillip

    M Phillip Banned

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    The comment was made as a well known example of a self published novel taking off and making money for the author. I'm amazed anyone could/would make other inferences considering the topic of the thread. Especially those who haven't read it.

    Disappointing.
     
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  25. ChickenFreak

    ChickenFreak Contributor Contributor

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    Well, you're the only person on this thread putting those lessons into words, so you might want to have a word with yourself.
     

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