Amazon has a deal for writers who decide to put their books up for sale in their e-books store. The concept is, that you get everything formated and ready to go on your own, and put it up for sale.
To do this, you choose a price point. If you sell between $2.99 to $9.99 you get 60%, but if you go over $9.99 you only get 30% of the sale, which means you need to sell it for over $20 to get an equal amount of money from the $9.99 sale.
To me, the over $20 sales would only go to technical books, that teach some programming language or other useful skills. That means, for fiction writers you would be deciding between a $3 or a $10 book to sell. The usual paperbacks, sell for $5.99+ if its been out for awhile, or $17.99+ if it is more recent. To compete, you'd have to go under that, so practically, you would be selling your books for $2.99-$4.99.
That means per sale, you're netting about $2 average per sale. For me, with both me and my wife working, I'd want to be bringing in, $1000 per month, which means selling 500 books a month.
With that in mind, an independently published book is considered "a hit" if it sells 2000 copies. Extrapolating from that, I would be a successful independent writer if I completed (wrote, revised, put together, and published) a book every 4 months, or 3 books a year (and that's if it was a success each time).
I've looked into self-publishing in the past, books on demand is another such option, but the truth of the matter is that it's very few people that can make a living out of writing books and even less get rich from it. like you said, you'd have to be a very productive author, I've worked for a book retailer during my student years and the few that actually manage this and are regularly in the fiction top 10 here where I live, don't exactly produce the sort of books I'd write anyway.
ReplyDeleteI will certainly not give up on my dream to publish my silly writing some day, but I know it's never gonna be for the money rather than for myself. writing is a tough business and it's a lot easier to start a hundred books, than to finish a single one. that is often forgotten by all those dreaming romantic dreams of authorship, the reality is different.
I'm a big big fan of Neil Gaiman's work and there's a few very wise and true pieces of advice for other aspiring writers in his biography.
I'll have to look up that biography, thank you.
ReplyDeleteThere is plenty of advice out there, I've gotten really good advice from Randy Ingermason's Newletters, which you can get for free:
http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/ezine/
His snowflake method also helped me with a transition challenge that kept holding me back from concept to execution.
I've been reading a lot of Coleen Duran recently (thanks to a sidebar link on I ship things :P )and she talks about starting out in writing as well. she mostly gives advice on dealing with publishers and legal side of it, but its still fascinating, probably helpful reading
ReplyDeletehttp://adistantsoil.com/tag/101-things-your-publisher-doesnt-want-you-to-know/ etc.
one thing to note about book prices - for few years now, average paperback prices range between 7.99 and 9.99 with e-book versions going for about the same money. 17.99 and up is a cost of a trade paperback, that's basically a size of a hardcover without the actual hard cover (which is why I personally don't buy those things unless I have no other formats to chose from and still want the book) specialized e-book publishers (the ones that sell specific genres) generally sell their e-books at about 5.99 for full length novel (50 to 80k words) and 2.99 for short stories, though they do take care of cover art, editing etc.
http://www.lulu.com/publish/ is another interesting site - basically a self-publish all in one. from personal experience as a book buyer, they are legit, but I have no idea how well their editing etc services work. still, something to look into.
Thanks for the comment!
ReplyDeleteA Distant Soil blog is pretty good.
From my research, http://www.smashwords.com/ , seems to be the most recommended of the self-publishing options, though... it doesn't seem to have the best SEO.
Reviewing the distribution options, it pays authors/self-publishers, the biggest cut for much less of a cut/loss, over LULU and even Amazon's Createspace.