http://www.thepassivevoice.com/02/2014/i-turned-down-over-a-million-bucks-in-trad-deals/ From author H.M. Ward on Kindleboards: Over the past year I’ve been offered over 1.5 million bucks in advances offered by huge publishing houses. I told them to show me a marketing plan that knocks my socks off and I’d consider their offer. I had this notion that they knew what they were doing and could do it better than I could. They said they had all these ideas and they’re gonna blow my mind, which was a requirement for the deal, b/c the pay was too low. About the money – if you have a book that hits #1-10 on the Kindle store, tons of people have the mistaken notion that it’s gonna blip and fall and you’re fun in the sun will end…unless a trad pub picks you up. It’s math time! A book in the top ten sells around 5-10K copies per day. Let’s take the average and give the book some wiggle room and say it’s selling 7K copies a day @ $2.99. In 7 days you’ll have made (net, not gross) over $100,000. So BIG TRAD HOUSE offers you $200,000 for a three part series. ‘Sign here,’ they say. ‘Sign fast! You want to strike while the irons hot.’ ‘A bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush.’ ‘It’s a sure thing and if you don’t sign, then you could loose everything.’ <–They actually said all the crap to me, and its crap. If the book nets $100K in a week, what will it do next week? What about next month? What about next year? Never mind those other 2 books. Bad deal. The most recent offer was for a high six figure deal on my next novel, on spec, sight unseen from one of the big 5. I gave the same terms – show me a kick *ss marketing plan and I’ll consider it. They were excited and on it! They were going to wow me. Like I was gonna be so wowed that I’d die of the wowness. True story. Dude, the marketing plan I got back was the equivalent of, ‘we’re gonna do stuff.’ Their email list – yeah, they don’t personally have one, but this archaic place does – had 2K people on it. That was the bulk of their plan. My email list has over 30K ppl on it and I do a ton more stuff than they presented.
Yeah, another "If you sell X amount, you'll make oodles and oodles of money and that won't possibly happen with a trade publisher." If her decision works for her, great. As an "Everyone should do this!" piece of advice, it's worth the paper it's written on.
I'm pretty certain anyone with a 30k e-mail list and a bit of marketing nous should self publish. So... hands up all here who can get their hands on that?
Where is the "everyone should do this!" advice from? I don't ever see H.M. Ward advocate that everyone should self-publish. The advice I read from self-publishers who make a full-time living can be summed up as this: Do a thorough research, find what path work best for you, and go for it. And if you do self-publish, it will take a lot of hard work to succeed.
