The Ease of Publishing an Ebook 184
ISoldat53 writes "This article describes how easy it is to publish an ebook. The author details the costs to the writer for a major publishing house to publish a book and the savings to the writer by self-publishing. He looks to make the same profit selling the book at $2.99 on Amazon as he would going though a traditional publishing process. The book is formatted only for the Kindle right now, but the author explains how it can be converted for other readers, since there's no DRM."
Missing (Score:2, Interesting)
Important things a publisher provides:
1) Editing
2) Marketing
3) Cover and format
4) Industry connections
to name a few. It's possible to publish without a publisher for sure, but it's also easy to make your own band, doesn't mean you'll be rich and famous.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Missing (Score:3, Interesting)
Hrmm...
1) Editing: Have you read any recent books? Between word usage, entire sentences cut off, and flat basic gammar errors many newer novels don't appear to have anything beyond the basic spell check run, if that. Add that to the mistakes added on purpose to "detect illicit copies" and it's painful to read some books. Not just small publishers either - larger houses such as Tor have this problem.
2) Marketing: In this case it'll be handled, for free, but your readership. Get some decent reviews on Amazon, end up on their "You might also like" list, and things go from there. Classic word of mouth only with a much larger potential base. If you get mentioned on a blog with a decent reader base things will move even quicker.
3) Cover/format: Format can be handled by any modern word processor with templates (search online - free ones abound, for everything from novels to screenplays), and cover can be done for a small fee to a decent artist or (if you have them) friends with talent. Why pay the publisher rate?
4) Connections: See 2. This, again, is obviated by skipping the industry entirely.
Much like the music business, it's much easier for amateur writers to get their stuff in front of the public. If you're decent, get yourself on even one decently read blog and you'll get yourself started. Yes, there's a lot of "if" coming off this plan but it's just as bad with an agent/publishing house, only you're less likely to get screwed with a bad contract.
Re:Missing (Score:4, Interesting)
The big difference: you actually have to write a good book for this to work.
If you can get a big company behind you mediocre is good enough.
Re:As easy as a first post! (Score:3, Interesting)
I've already read several of J.A. Konrath's books on my Kindle. He is a great writer and I'm sure this new book is worth more than $2.99. I just went to Amazon and pre-ordered it.
Yet another article that didn't run the numbers... (Score:5, Interesting)
I never like articles like this - it reminds me a bit too much of the earlier adopter chatter back in 2000 when my own e-book was published (and, despite having everything going for me except not being Stephen King, proved to have an almost non-existent market). Certainly Konrath is describing some benefits to self publishing, so long as you have the savvy and editing skill to pull it off. But when it comes to trumpeting e-books as a better way in general than the printed book, he's giving a very skewed picture.
Will he get a greater percentage of the royalties by self publishing an e-book through Amazon? Absolutely. Part of self publishing is keeping all the profits. Will he make more money than he would releasing a printed book?
That, however, is a much different question. And for that, you have to run the numbers.
Depending on the time of year, the total American book market (net sales) can be anywhere from around $450 million to $1.5 billion per month (there are large peaks and valleys, which is why you get the huge variations). The e-book market occupies around $22 million of this per month (it, oddly enough, has a general but very slight upwards slope, and does NOT have large peaks and valleys). As far as I recall, the audio book will take up around $15 million or so per month, but that's not a number I pay too much attention to, so don't quote me on it. So, for every dollar earned by an e-book, print books will earn anywhere from $20 to $65, depending on the time of year.
Now, these are all very rough figures. The Association of American Publishers tracks this in far more detail on a month-by-month basis. The point is, though, that while a well-established author with a loyal fanbase can mitigate a large portion of this disparity, an average book published only as an e-book can deprive itself of over 90% of its potential income.
(That, for example, is why in my business I use e-books mainly for promotional stuff - they just don't have a large enough market base to support them outside of marketing for what I do.)
So, will Konrath keep a greater percentage of the profit per book? Absolutely. Will he make more money than he would publishing a print volume? Highly unlikely.
Re:Konrath Fails to Give Credit Where Credit is Du (Score:4, Interesting)
If you start out trying to get a big publishing deal with a big6 house you would likely take many, many years to even get a legitimate read of your draft, let alone a single book published. And after you get that first book published you'll likely not make any money apart from your advance. 5 books later you may be sitting pretty, but only if the publisher decides to non-publish your latest effort because they have too many books in X genre this quarter, and the bigger fish gets more attention.
Don't pay any attention to any author out there.
Re:Yet another article that didn't run the numbers (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Yet another article that didn't run the numbers (Score:3, Interesting)
So, what I'm saying is this: If a thousand people buy my e-book, and they are all people who only buy e-books and not printed books, then me getting with a publisher to have my book published isn't going to achieve a single thing for me.
And, as a related note: Your numbers quoted do not take this factor into account.
Re:Yet another article that didn't run the numbers (Score:5, Interesting)
That is a part of it, and large publishers can do much more on that than smaller publishers. However, there is advertising out there. Every time my publishing company publishes a book, I pay for an advertisement that goes out to tens of thousands of bookstores and libraries (I also do a decent amount of advertising with free online samples, book reviews, etc.).
But, actually, that's not the big problem with self-publishing a book.
Self-publishing tends to have a stigma against it, but that stigma is there for good reason - and that reason is that 95% of self published books are utter crap that didn't get past the gatekeepers in the major publishers due to basic quality control. There is, unfortunately, an entire industry based on publishing writers who have more money than brains or talent - these are called vanity presses. Most of these books are terrible, and the publisher in question makes thousands of dollars on the fees they charge to the writer before so much as a single copy is printed.
(Just as a rule, the money flows to the author, not the other way around.)
Another problem with self publishing is that most authors are not the best editors of their own work. In fact, very few writers can both write and edit - they're different enough skillsets that there is that little overlap. But even when a writer can, they tend to be workmanlike at best. This is because if a writer writes paragraph X, that is supposed to say Y, that writer will always know that Y is the message. Unfortunately, paragraph X might not have actually said Y, and because the writer automatically reads Y into the paragraph, s/he doesn't catch the error. In short, the author is just too close to their own work to be the best editor of that work.
Those are actually the biggest problems with self-publishing, and why most self-published books fail. If you look at the self-published market, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if the majority of the people who managed to make both self-publishing and e-book publishing successful are the ones who started in traditional publishing, built a readership there, learned the business as they did it, and then transitioned.
Re:Missing (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yet another article that didn't run the numbers (Score:3, Interesting)
No, I'm sorry, I'm afraid you're the one making the assumption. You're assuming that it's an either/or when it comes to e-book and print book editions, rather than an "and." The figures I'm working from are for the entire market, and in a lot of places and genres, there are concurrent print and e-book editions (in fact, these days that's in many cases the rule rather than the exception).
So, if a thousand people want the book as an e-book and not a printed book, then they buy the e-book instead of the printed book, and it gets reflected by the figures. So, sorry, but what you mention is already built into the statistics.
Re:Yet another article that didn't run the numbers (Score:3, Interesting)
Most self-published books fail because most books fail. The difference is that electronic self-publishing is easy and inexpensive so lots of books that would have stayed in the author's trunk under the old system get a chance. Most fail, of course, but some will succeed that would have never been given a chance under the old system.
Re:Yet another article that didn't run the numbers (Score:1, Interesting)
> So, for every dollar earned by an e-book, print books will earn anywhere from $20 to $65, depending on the time of year.
Using the total volume sold or the total retail sales shows that the paper market is larger, yes. But the issue is how much you, the author, personally make.
IMO, the tipping point is the author's popularity. If you know you're only going to sell 10,000 copies either way, you might as well do it electronically and make more money. But there's a tipping point; if you're popular enough, fewer people have ebook readers than the number of people who'd buy your book in print. So at some point the greater volume of paper books sold, even at a lower per unit pay to you, exceeds what you could make doing only ebooks. (This point is moving upwards as more people buy ebook readers, of course). The question is just where the balance point is right now.
Anyone ever use LULU.com? (Score:5, Interesting)