Um the link that says: In post #106 I went on to say: Lee Balantine is lumping self published with traditionally published but he's certainly including traditionally published. Post #122 was me asking you to back up your claim, which you have yet to do other than to say it's not logical to you. I'm not going to go back through half a dozen hour long publisher panels in CSPAN's Book TV. That's why I looked for additional data on Google. I've seen this graph before: It looks like while traditionally published books are still earning more, the figure is falling and clearly very few books of all those published are making money if author's earnings reflect on the percentage of successful books. You can argue it's 80%, not 99%. I quoted that caveat from the link so I wasn't trying to distort the number. The bottom line, sure, self-published earn less in total. But traditionally published is no guarantee of sales either and if you took the bottom stuff out of self-published (because we've all seen absolutely atrocious writing in the self-published category), and you just compared reasonably well written books, the difference would not be so great. My book is at least reasonably well written. From the UK: Traditional publishing is 'no longer fair or sustainable', says Society of Authors
God only knows why I'm wading into this, but on that 99% thing - a few years ago I worked in a couple of publishing houses (non-fiction, but the business model is similar), and in both of those, 90% of the titles either made a loss or broke even. The remaining 10% were where the publishing house made the money. That's a whole lot of generalisations there. And I suspect @BayView crafts and plans her stories as much as anyone else here.
I was hoping you DIDN'T mean that link, since the author of it admits that the number is made up! How can you use a link that admits that the number is totally made up in order to prove that the number is accurate? And how can you ignore the fact that the entire post is about how poor sales are in SELF-PUBLISHING? Seriously, what do you think is proved by that link, other than that Lee Balantine feels that sales in self-publishing are very low? So, you're expecting me to back up a claim that something you cited doesn't make sense, but you're not willing or able to give me a link to the claim so I can figure out what it said? I'm just supposed to disprove... something... that somebody said on CSPAN... about something...? How can I disprove something when I don't even really understand what it was? Why don't we start with you trying to prove it, and then I can worry about countering it? I can absolutely argue that. I can also argue that there's no clear connection between author income and per book sales, because we have no idea how many, if any, books the author released in a given year. So this data really doesn't establish much about the profitability of either 80% or 99% of books. Okay, so, earlier when you were getting bent out of shape about me making strawman arguments? You liked the phrase so much you thought you'd give me an opportunity to use it myself? Very kind. Again, median author income doesn't really translate to profit per book. Right?
Can you remember what the break-even point would be? Like, approximately how many sales (or what gross income) was needed in order for a book to break even?
According to the NY Times, about 70% of books fail to earn out their advance, so at least in those cases it seems the publisher isn't breaking even. EDIT: I believe that figure was limited to fiction.
Except that there's no real connection between earning out an advance and the publisher breaking even. Big writers like Stephen King get multi-million dollar advances that they never earn out (it's one of the reasons the big authors don't worry too much about what their royalty rates are - they're never going to be getting royalty cheques b/c their advances are so huge). That doesn't mean publishers don't make money off Stephen King's books. At the other extreme, I have a favourite small publisher that only gives me a $1K advance per book. I earn that out in the first month or at least the first quarter of sales, but that doesn't mean the publisher is making a profit that quickly. For me, the royalty rates at that publisher are super-important b/c almost all of my income comes from after the advance is paid off. The 70% number is interesting, but it's totally possible for a book to pay out its royalty without making a profit, and also to not pay out its royalty but still make a profit.
So 90% from the publishing house failed or broke even and only 10% of the same publishing house made profit. That seems like a reason to self-publish right there. Maybe, but even talented writers have fretted over how a book would be received to the point where they would throw the months they spent writing it away. If you can't understand how intimate writers are with risk then maybe you should recall the many times you were told how unbecoming a fiction writer is. To someone who sees it as a hobby I can see how that risk is softened, so it is an outlook, I won't argue that. Just that it is always their, magnified or dulled.
@BayView yeah, I can see that, given the percentage going to the publisher as opposed to the royalty.
No, you can't really equate the publisher's profits with the author's profits. If the publisher gave an author a huge advance, the publisher might lose money on the book; that doesn't mean the author didn't make lots of money. There are lots of other factors that could apply as well. There is no direct connection between publisher profits and author income. "Unbecoming"? Like... being an author isn't flattering? Did you mean a different word?
I don't think that's what the number means. While yes, your profits can be calculated in a different pile, but those profits are going toward other expenses, not just the advance if one was paid. Net profit is gross sales less expenses of which the advance is only a fraction. The number we are talking about here is at what point the publisher's gross income exceeds costs. No one in business says, well I collect X number of dollars when I sell my goods, ergo that is my profit. That's just silly.
@GingerCoffee yeah, the profits go toward all expenses. The advance is one of the expenses, and I was initially thinking if the advance isn't even earned out they must be losing money. But given the small percentage that goes to the author per sale, I suppose it's possible that the author hasn't earned enough to earn out the advance and start getting royalties, but that the publisher's income on the book has been enough to pay for the advance and other expenses.
Interestingly, I saw an article in Forbes where the writer predicted that as time goes on, mid-list authors are probably going to move to indie/self-publishing. If that happens, will traditional publishers (at least the big ones) be more and more focused on the big brand authors in fiction?
Or they might start making better deals with their midlisters and hang onto them. It's an interesting time to be an author, for sure!
There was quite a lot of variance, probably more than there would be in a primarily fiction publishing house, because the books were significantly different lengths, some had diagrams, some had photographs etc. At the low end it could just be a few hundred pounds - outsourced typesetting and a cover, and a small proportion of general marketing. When the book was considered a good enough bet to warrant specific marketing, that would rapidly increase to the thousands or tens of thousands. There was also a proportion of the expected turnover of the book allocated to 'overhead' - paying the staff, rent etc - everything you had to pay whether the book was made or not. If a book didn't cover the amount allocated to overhead in the initial planning it wasn't considered profitable, even if it covered the costs of production. Publishers need to keep a close eye on opportunity cost - every penny and hour they spend producing Book X is a penny and hour they can't spend producing Book Y. So they're not interested in your book just making money, they're interested in it making enough. Obviously I'm not sure if that's the way people are defining 'profitable' in the various stats that have been thrown around here. Well... not really. Because that's not how numbers work. The 90% (again, based on my non-fiction experience) aren't counted as failures. The publisher is making a bet on every book they agree to publish. They're not thinking "I think we can make money on this book." They're thinking something like "we've got a 1 in 5 shot of making 10 times our investment on this book." Call enough bets like that corectly, and you make a profit. The publisher is well aware that they don't really know what'll sell, they're just playing the odds, but they get to roll the dice a lot. You're playing the same game, but you get far fewer turns and fewer resources. Of course, the numbers change - you make more per book when you self-publish, but you also get all the costs so you start from -whatever rather than 0. You get to control what marketing you do, so if you're good at marketing and have the time for it, that could be another advantage. Self-publishing isn't a bad thing. I've self-published, it was brilliant. I've even sold a few dozen copies of a £9 paperback, so I'm living testament to @Steerpike's comment above that any idiot can sell a few. But I don't think the odds are with the average writer for making more net profit self-pubbed than trade-pubbed. Your own situation might be different. It's a risk to declare 'OK, World - I am a WRITER and WRITING will be my only source of income!'. To have writing as one way you make money, or one way you're attempting to make some extra money... not so much. I don't really fret over how my writing will be received, because getting comments is a learning process. I'm not putting anything up for sale or submission before I'm pretty convinced it's worthwhile.
For that to be true the advance would have to greatly exceed other expenses. And for print books, that is only going to be advances paid to the highest paid authors. Getting back to the bottom line, it's not like traditional publishing is the magic bullet to success. This debate started with: To which I've been pointing out, most traditional publishers also have very poor sales if you look at sales by proportion of authors Quibbling with the percent of books that don't make the publisher any profits aside, sales of traditionally published novels are not so much better than self-published novels once you look at comparable denominators.
Can you clarify your terms, here? What do you mean by "sales by proportion of authors" and "comparable denominators"?
I'll try @BayView, but it seems no matter what I say you insist I mean something else. Sales by proportion of authors: Rather than total profits, or total book sales, if you instead counted authors, traditional publishing would have (estimating from the graph I posted upstream) roughly 30% authors with decent sales and 70% without. That's a lot of poor selling authors. Re the denominator: If you consider the heap of junk writing at the bottom of the self-publishing pile isn't really comparable to a decent writer choosing between self and traditional publishing, you don't have the same denominator when you compare sales between the two groups. It would be like comparing ivy league graduates to all other university grads but in that group you included grade school graduates and drop outs. If you accept the premise that not all good authors make it through the publisher gate, and some average writers make it, you have to compare self-published authors who are at least average and above to traditionally published authors or the numbers are not comparable.
But Isn't that a problem? Isn't that why we are stepping away from the gatekeepers? To keep the math simple I'll just say that with self-publishing you get to keep as much of the pie as you are willing to work for. Sure you bring up this happenstance where author makes money and publisher doesn't, but that just means they thrive on their success stories. They need to profit to stay in business so the numbers tell me how much they seep out of their success stories. If your a success story, why not bring it home for what it's worth and put a little more time and effort into it? this is why I'm not published yet lol. Inappropriate, unbefitting, unacceptable, unsuitable... yeah those where probably all better words than the one I picked. Yes I understand that, but if I was going to sell the same amount of copies over a ten year period, why not go with the option that gives me more money for every copy? If I know that my book can sell millions of copies why am I going to sacrifice that value on others failures? The successful author is drawing the shortest stick here. What's the difference between telling the world that and telling yourself that?
I couldn't find hard data on publishers breaking even. But I think we can agree on something based on two pieces of information: 1) most authors aren't getting big advances; and 2) most of them don't earn out their advance. So, it seems if nothing else we can say that most traditionally published authors aren't making a whole lot of money on their books.
But as previously mentioned, we can't really use the data you presented that way. It's entirely possible that some (or possibly lots) of the authors surveyed didn't have a book published that year. So rather than considering those authors "poor selling", wouldn't we consider them "not selling"? This I agree with, in theory, but of course it's almost impossible to do in practice. How do we determine which authors are roughly equivalent from each path? It's not as easy as comparing education levels, that's for sure.
Well, I'm NOT stepping away from the gatekeepers, so possibly I'm not the one to address this, but I think you may be overestimating the effectiveness of being willing to work for something and putting in a "little more" time and effort. I believe there are self--published authors with good books who worked their tails off and still had poor sales. I suspect you disbelieve that, so, okay, go for it. I totally think it's important for all authors to experiment and figure out what works for them. I just think it's important to keep misinformation to a minimum.
Because that is a massive, massive 'if', and you don't know that your book can sell millions of copies. If you do know that your book can sell millions of copies - 100% certain KNOW - you can make far more money selling your market knowledge to publishers than you can even self-pubbing a book. That's the kind of thing they don't so much give you a cheque for as sign you over 20% of the company. It's not so much the telling as the doing. There's no risk in me telling everyone I meet that I'm going to make my money solely from fiction writing, but there's a lot in giving up my job when I've got rent due in two weeks.
Your logic doesn't follow. Not to mention we have more than one line of evidence now, most (it only has to be 51%) traditionally published books don't sell well. No one in this thread has provided any evidence to the contrary. If it's unknowable, then so is your claim that traditional publishing offers a new author a better chance of sales. Frankly I don't think it's all that unknowable. Take 10 or 100 Kindle books at random, read the preview and make a judgement, is this writing ready for prime time or not. I'm pretty sure the not-ready-for-prime-time pile will be more than 50%. I've been reading lots of Kindle previews and most of it is pretty bad.
What do we mean by "big advances"? I definitely agree that most authors aren't getting the multi-million dollar advances. I don't have a source, but I've read that most authors who get advances under $25K are expected to earn out. I don't know if $25K is the right number, but it absolutely makes sense that there is SOME number at which the advance is not the most significant cost of publishing the book, and therefore the book will not make a profit for the publisher until after the advance is earned out. So, even if we accept the 70% number (which I've seen disputed) it doesn't mean that it's the authors at the low end of the advance range who aren't earning out. In fact, it's much more likely that the authors with lower advances are the ones earning out, and the authors with higher advances aren't.
