Well, it makes me angry to see someone being cheated. I suppose you could call that taking it personally. When I hear of someone being taken for all their money in a Nigerian email scam, for example, you could argue that my reaction means that I'm taking it personally. I would argue that my reaction is about normal human empathy. And i think that most of the people with good books who are going straight to self-publishing are being cheated. They're being cheated mostly by themselves, with some assistance from the lack of good statistics about self-publishing. But they're being cheated all the same. If you want to call that taking it personally, I can't stop you. But let's say that my reaction were about vanity publishing, where an author pays a big bag of money to someone to get his book published, and usually loses every penny, and loses control of his copyright, too. If I advised against vanity publishing, would you say that that was because I was taking someone's decision to make that choice "personally"?
@BayView I don't think that's what we're saying. People have hashed out opinions on which is better and why, but people are diverse and even given the same set of facts two people might choose different options. So the second, and I think separate, issue is why some people seem to take it poorly when another person chooses a different option. That's all I was pondering, above, and I think that remains a question even if we could all agree on the hard facts.
Seems like an insulting way of looking at it, and one that assumes the other party is so stupid or ignorant as to cheat themselves. Again, this is precisely the sort of thing I'm referring to. It can't possibly be that another person has looked at the same facts and, using their reason, arrived at a different conclusion from you. Instead they have to be fooling themselves. That doesn't make senses to me. As I said, above, I had an agent ask me to send over my self-published book, which I decided not to do for various reasons. It's still just self-published. I haven't cheated myself. I work with traditional authors and publishers (though it's not the primary part of my practice). Also, by the time I spoke with this agent, the book was already self-published for some time, so I had no illusions about it going viral and making me rich (which I never had, even from the start). The fact that you assume such negative things about the reasoning capability of someone who chooses a different path than you underscores my point completely. There's no rational basis to leap to that conclusion, so I perceive that there must be some emotional reaction at work. Maybe there is, maybe there isn't. I'm just telling you what it looks like.
I think if we could agree on the hard facts, then anyone who decided differently would just be... making a bad decision. Oh, do you mean like a different personal decision? Like if we all agreed that there's more money in Big-5 publishing but more freedom in self-publishing, then we could say that someone who chooses the Big 5 is primarily profit-driven while someone who chooses self-publishing would be primarily freedom-driven? Is that what you mean?
I think that you were probably fully informed, and that you made a decision that, while it wasn't the one that I would make, was the best decision for you. But the fact that many people come here to ask, "How much will it cost me to get my book published?" or say, "I wrote a book, but I can't afford to have it published yet," means that there are plenty of people who know nothing at all about publishing. So I want to make sure that a person who is thinking about self-publishing knows that (1) that's not the only publishing avenue, (2) it's not the publishing avenue through which most books are sold and (3) there are many, many people who think that it's the avenue less likely to make them any money. Would you prefer that I be so respectful that I make no effort whatsoever to make sure that those people are informed, that I just celebrate their ability to make a decision? ("On Venus! That sounds great!")
I think that the big problem here is that we don't have facts. I don't know if we'll ever have facts. We don't even have facts about the sea of self-published works, right, much less facts that are narrowed to the self-published works that fulfill some minimal measure of quality. I want to know: - The average non-free sales (number of sales) for published works. - The median sales. - Both figures with authors who make fewer than two sales removed (I say fewer than two instead of fewer than one, because the author probably bought his own book). That would probably eliminate a huge percentage of self-published works. - All three figures with the top one per cent of sellers removed. - All above figures with the top five percent removed. - All above figures where the price is above one penny. - All above figures where the price is above one dollar. ...and a huge number of other permutations. We don't have those. And for those to be meaningful, we'd need to narrow to works that fulfill at least a minimal standard of editing and coherency.
The other problem is that past performance isn't necessarily indicative of future performance. I think a lot of this is like playing the stock market. You can do your research, examine your goals and motivations, plot every single variable you can think of, but you still can't predict the future. Which doesn't mean you shouldn't examine all the facts available, and look at the sources of "facts" with a critical eye. But no matter how much research you do, there's still going to be an element of chance.
But how do you know this is still true? I'm sure it was at some point. I'm not sure it will be in the future. At some point that shift might or might not occur. How do you know it hasn't already unless you stay open to the possibility? How is honestly discussing the changes and limitations of traditional publishing in the digital era seen as a dishonest representation of the facts? There is reality: the facts and figures. There are limitations to the ability of the facts and figures to describe reality. And then there is our perception of the facts and figures through the filters that our brains use to sort the data. If you find yourself dismissing the facts and figures, or not rechecking to see if they've changed from the last time you looked, you have a chance of missing the changes in reality. Seems to me most people self-publishing, either rightly or wrongly, have no confidence a publisher will want their work, or know they aren't there yet but want the experience that comes from getting the work out there, or they have been turned down by traditional publishers. When it is argued that self-publishing is an option for people who can't get through the gate, and as such self-publishing is heralded as a good new thing giving more authors a chance to have their work seen, why is that seen as 'misleading new authors'? Why is discussing self-publishing options interpreted as promoting one means over the other when no such thing was said? What I hear is the judgement, 'if you can't get published your work isn't good enough'. Yet there have been multiple citations in this thread proving not only that such a judgement isn't sound, but also that getting published is no guarantee of good writing either. If you are telling a writer they need to find a publisher, aren't you limiting them to the one option? And shouldn't you be careful to not insult the writers who didn't or haven't yet gotten past the gate? I posted a link above that discussed the problem the gatekeepers caused by their biases. Here it is again, look at these implications: Self-publishing lets women break book industry's glass ceiling, survey finds I just finished reading The Brass Check by Upton Sinclair. While Wiki calls it "a muckraking exposé of American journalism," what struck me was how publishing his work was suppressed by corporate and political forces that accused him of being a communist, often falsely. The Jungle was eventually published by going around the usual gatekeepers. Sinclair describes the entire affair including the power of the slaughter houses in discrediting Sinclair and his damaging exposé of their industry. The gatekeepers' goals and preferences for choosing a book are anything but pure. Be it what they think will sell or what one of them doesn't like for personal or political reasons, there are limitations to the gatekeepers' neutrality. What I think is fantastic is, if not chosen in the publisher lottery (because luck and skill are both involved), writers today have access to all the little microphones in the digital world. The guys with the big microphones no longer have the monopoly.
Lots of 'facts' have been posted in the thread, many of which are being ignored by some. If you don't consider the qualitative differences between traditionally published and self-published books, you don't have the same denominator and you cannot compare the variables. You can work around that limitation. You aren't going to get there, however, with those questions. You need to look at authors with a baseline minimum writing skill. Being self-published is not a measure of maximum writing skill but for the most part the worst stuff is all going to be self-published. So first you need to take that into account. You need to look at the problem the way we study multiple variable problem. The questions you should be asking are: What effect does traditional publishing have: Cover up-front costs Reputation of publisher carries over to the author Marketing DistributionWhat effect does self-publishing have: Pay for up-front costs like professional editing and cover art. Marketing Distribution You need to compare these variables, not just, how many self-published books succeed vs trad. published. Comparing the latter can't be done because the denominators are not the same. You can look at marketing and distribution. There is data that in certain genres, the publisher is making less difference in this arena. In other genres, the publisher makes a huge difference. It reflects on where the reader market is and on what influences them to buy a book.
What I mean is that we've seen some numbers thrown around, some of which contradict one another and some of which seem to be in the same ballpark. Some figures are outliers, some are presenting averages. But even if we agreed on what those numbers were, we wouldn't know in advance how a given case would turn out. We could say something about the chances of it, and that's about it. And yes, I'm talking about personal choices, as I said above, depending on how risk adverse you are, how much you value control, and so on. I don't know I'd say one is primarily profit driven. It's hard to know that, because people have different reasons for choosing one over the other. Some people are more risk averse and some are less, for example.
No, I think those are perfectly legitimate points to make, and new authors who aren't receiving those points aren't going to be able to make an informed decision. But I think it can be done in a way that isn't derisive of others who might chime in favoring self-publishing, presenting counterpoints, or who have chosen that route for themselves.
Well, "profit driven" is just an example, but I'm not sure I'd really know what to do with "risk averse" as a criteria, independent of the others. I mean, if you value freedom really highly, and have good reason to believe that Big-5 Publishers would limit your freedom, then it would be really "risky" to go with a Big-5 Publisher, right? I don't think you can look at risk without looking at other values.
Yeah, I think @GingerCoffee is right about comparing apples and apples, essentially. In other words, if I have a bad book, it'll probably never get traditionally-published, and in all likelihood it won't do very well in the self-publishing arena either. If I have a book that is good enough to get a traditional contract, it'll do better than the above in the self-publishing arena. There's a chance it'll do better for me than if it were traditionally published and a chance it would not. The problem in trying to say much, in concrete, about those two chances is that if you're dealing with someone who actually has a good book, it doesn't make sense to take the entire universe of self-published books, many of which are horrible, and put them on one side of the equation, and then put traditionally-published books on the other. The only way to really get a comparison that is valuable is to take self-published books that are of equivalent quality to traditionally published books (and these do exist) and then compare how well they fare to books in the traditional market. If, hypothetically, I have a book good enough to be published traditionally, then the only way I can get a good sense of how it will do self-publishing is if I have numbers relating only to self-published books of that same professional quality. I'm not sure those numbers are out there, or even how one might go about trying to get them.
I'm thinking of risk averse more in the financial sense. Like if I work 40 hours a week for an employer and make a decent salary, that's pretty safe. If I open up my own business, where I'm going to work a lot more hours and have a chance of making even more money but also a chance of falling flat on my face, that's risky. Entrepreneurs seem to me to be more likely than the average person to go ahead and take that risk. I think some self-publishers who have professional quality products may be less risk averse and willing to go the self-publishing route over what may look like a safer approach.
And here's where things get tricky, because in my experience, this isn't necessarily true. It should be true, but, again, because of the problems of discoverability, it may not be. I posted earlier about my own self-publishing experiments, but as a brief recap - I've self-published a novel in my "home" genre under my "home" penname, and it sold a little worse than the books I have with publishers in the same genre, but the sales are in the same ballpark. And I've self-published a novel in a different genre under a different penname, and the sales have been appalling. I'm confident that the writing quality is pretty similar across all of my books. I pay to have professional covers and professional editing for my self-published books. And I did as much promo as I could think of for the self-published book in the different genre. Honestly, I probably did more promo for that one book than I did for all my other books combined, ever. Free copies, blogging, trading reviews, paid advertising... hours and hours of my time and effort. It did nothing. So, no, my book didn't really do any better than it would have if I'd written it with my toes. I think I sold about fifteen copies. I've seen numbers that make me believe this experience is completely typical. My book might not have been a huge success if I'd sold it to a publisher. But I bet it would have sold a hell of a lot more than fifteen copies, and I wouldn't be out of pocket for editing, cover, and advertising. I think a lot of self-published authors with disappointing sales keep their mouths shut. Partly because they believe the hype that good books will rise to the top, and if they work hard enough they'll find success. So if they admit that their book didn't sell, they think they're admitting that their book wasn't good or they didn't work hard enough. Fuck that. You think it's disrespectful to warn people about poor sales in self-publishing? I think it's disrespectful to pretend that all it takes is a good book and hard work.
Are you saying that I've been derisive? If so, please quote. If not, then why are you saying that I'm taking the issue personally?
There have been many changes in many fields. Not all the changes have had a long life. Back in the 1800’s, all the ships were under sail. One man was a sail maker. He did very well. Over the years his buildings got bigger, and bigger…he was a smart business man, turning his money around into more sail cloth. Overnight, the ships turned from sail, to steam. Our sail maker was in a bad position. In the hills surrounding the harbor were coal mines. Our sailmaker stopped making sails, and started making miners pants…his name?...levi Strauss. The making of movies was once a big thing. When TV came in, the movie companies lost money to TV. But, the movie companies still had their movie lots, their writers, and movie makers, stars, etc…They took over the TV by making movies for TV. With the books being sold on the net, does anybody think the big pulp publishers are not going to make, and sell ebooks, and pulp books on the net? These will be of quality, not just a story written by untrained writers. We all know many of the millions of ebooks, and self-published works are not that good. Yes I agree, the publishing Industry is changing. It will go to the net…but it will be the major publishers who will take it over, and control it…writers, if they want to sell their work, will still have to get an agent, and sell to the big boy. Look at the back up of great books the Standard publisher have. They could give these away for 99 cents, or even free. The Big publisher will go away when cows fly backwards over the moon.
Since all we have is personal experience to go on, this isn't an argument that can really go anywhere. It's definitely worth noting, these experiences I mean. It's not like they have no value, directions, or insight. It is what the market is changing to that you guys are ignoring. Even just 3 years ago, very few people would have argued for self publishing. Expecting an outlook like that to change overnight is asking a little too much. But the shifting of the outlook has begun and trying to stop it is going to take a massive move by the publishing companies. Traditional publishing probably still has more advantages than self publishing right now. I believe I've said this a couple times now. But it's simply hanging on to the past. It's advantages are a sinking rock in the face of this changing market. Once enough people realize that, traditional publishing is going to have to change itself, or lose out to digital social media.
We're not ignoring "what the market is changing to". But neither we nor you actually know what the market is changing to. Should Big-5 publishing change? Sure, all businesses should. Will self-publishing become dominant? I personally doubt it, but, sure, maybe. But right now? As you say, "traditional" publishing probably has more advantages right now, and none of really have any idea of what the situation will be in the future. We'll just have to wait and see. ETA: And I agree, one piece of anecdotal evidence is NOT significant. People should remember that when they look at self-publishing success stories as well as when we look at self-publishing failures.
But there are things one can look for. Just as we might do some research to see which publishers are the in the right market for the genre of books we are writing, we can also see how well the books we are writing are doing on different publishing platforms. We can look into books similar to ours and find out where the target reader market is finding those books and how they re finding them. I thought it was telling in the link to the Guardian's article above about the author's gender and the glass ceiling. So I looked further into the data and found this interesting analysis: eBook sales growth – where it’s really coming from (an analysis of Author Earnings) I'm not sure what the earlier comments about Hugh Howey were intended to say about him. I hadn't heard of the man until this thread, though I had seen the data in various discussions. Here's some interesting data from the latest report. By sampling 33% of all eBook daily sales in the US they found: Then there was this: That suggests with strong supporting data that traditional publishing has less of an advantage than has been claimed by some in this thread. It says there are smaller publishers cutting into the eBook market share, it's still 60:40 published vs indie. But those are some promising Indie numbers.
Well I think what is being missed is that this is an opportunity. A gap in the market has revealed itself and that is always a chance for profit. From a publishers perspective, of course this is an opportunity to improve their gates, like removing some of the gender bias that @GingerCoffee pointed out. Although I don't think they are the only ones that can profit from this situation. Trying to do so will inevitably involve many risks, but the pay offs can be huge! Both monetarily and artistically. I agree with @GingerCoffee that the shift is greater than people here are making out to be. The reason the numbers looked even as skewed as they do is because most self-published books aren't people who went directly to self-publishing; they are people who were rejected by traditional publishing. Once the mindset changes, I can imagine how easily self-publication can become the new standard, changing the role of publishing co. all together.
It would be interesting to know how many indie authors built a reputation first, then went to self-publishing taking their reputation with them, and how many successful indie authors were turned down by publishers before they self-published.
That would be some very insightful information. I'm guessing the former is more prominent, although I'm sure both are rising in number every year. In this changing market, traditional still has an easy exposure advantage; using that to self-publish future works, seems like a good way to abuse traditional publishing.
Thought this was worth looking at: If you add the 5% 'single author publisher' (because a lot of those are indie published) to the Indie Published it exceeds the big 5's market share of ePublishing. Of course if you add the small to medium publishers to the big 5, traditional publishing still has a larger market share, but not by that much.
There is a difference not shown on your chart. There just might be ten million non-big 5 to maybe 400 big 5. Big five is where the money for writers is. Charts like this are suck along for those who think they would do better outside the big 5. Besides, you don't have to be any good at writing if you work around the Big 5, and self publish. My dog could put a paw print on a piece of paper and self publish...get my point?
