On Robin Sullivan’s Author Comparison
Several people have e-mailed me about Robin Sullivan’s Midlist Author Comparison, wherein she compares my writing income to that of e-published author David Dalglish.
Tangential disclaimer: back in January, I pointed out some errors in Sullivan’s guest post at J. A. Konrath’s place. She recently responded that the errors were part of Konrath’s introduction, and were his mistakes, not hers. Konrath’s post was edited within 24 hours of my post, but looking at it now, it does appear that the mistakes I pointed out are Konrath’s, not Sullivan’s. My apologies to Sullivan for that.
Sullivan’s new post has its own erroneous details, like “Thomas Buckell’s” survey on advances, or my book “Step Sister Scheme” being book #2 of the Faery Taile Project. But the numbers she gives regarding my writing income look correct. I assume the numbers she cites for Dalglish accurately reflect his self-reported sales as well.
Her conclusions:
- “Jim’s six books has taken him 4 ½ years and he still is not earning a living wage. His income is impacted substantially by his foreign sales … and without that his income would be dismal …”
- “David’s six books took 1 year to get to market and while his income initially appeared to be modest within 10 months he has grown to a substantial six-figure income that certainly would classify as a ‘living wage’ … if the current trends for both of these authors continue there will be a significant gap with David outperforming Jim by a substantial margin.”
- From her post at Absolute Write, “It took Jim 4 years to release six-books and he can’t make a living wage on his writing. David Dalglish has been at it less than a year and gone from making a few thosand a month to making a six-figure income.”
I initially planned to ignore the post. I’m getting more and more bored by the “Indies vs. Traditional” thing. I’ve got a friend whose updates have turned into nothing but advertisements of his own books, retweets of other self-pubbed authors, and slams on commercial publishing. It’s tiresome.
My guess is that people who want to believe Sullivan’s conclusions will do so. But here are some of my thoughts as I read her post…
- If Dalglish’s numbers are correct, then he and his books are doing quite well, and I’m happy for him and his success.
- A comparison of two individuals doesn’t do much from a statistical standpoint (though I recognize the difficulty in gathering larger samples of this sort of thing).
- Sullivan’s conclusions are based in part on the assumption that both Dalglish and myself are representative of the “midlist.”
- Her analysis of Dalglish’s data appears to omit a few months.
- Her projection of Dalglish’s future income assumes his February/March sales rate will continue.
Some of her comments about commercial publishing also jumped out at me:
- “Typically when published through a traditional publisher a book can take 15 – 18 months to be released and they generally stagger offering from an author at 12 month intervals. For those who write a great deal this can be problematic.” Counterexamples: see Seanan McGuire, Jay Lake, Elizabeth Bear, and many others.
- “[I]ndustry standards are that only 20% of authors earn out their advances so in many cases the advance is the ONLY money they will see.” More statistics without citations. If she’s correct, doesn’t that imply that 80% of traditionally published authors end up with more money than if they were getting a strict per-book rate?
- “The traditionally published author will get an advance but it is woefully small … I’ve done a ton of research on this and it really hasn’t changed much over the years but generally ranges from $5,000 – $10,000.” She only cites Buckell’s survey … but that survey appears to contradict her numbers if you read past the section on first novel advances.
Draw your own conclusions.
Stephen Watkins
April 6, 2011 @ 2:29 pm
I’ll take a whack at this one. It’s not a question of whether they went down, up, or stayed the same. The problem is, there’s no evidence other than your saying so that he is in fact in the middle-of-the pack.
What Jim is pointing out is that the logic that you used to pick him – that you picked him when you thought he was middle-of-the-pack before his sales increased dramatically – doesn’t make sense. You picked him then, but were his results – the sales increase – really typical and middle-of-the-pack? Or was that dramatic sales increase really more unusual. That was the point of comparing your pick of David with picking J.K. Rowling. At one point, before Rowling’s sales took off, she was “middle-of-the-pack”. And then her sales took off (admittedly a great deal more than David’s). Are those results typical? In Rowling’s case, we know the answer: no. In David’s case, it’s hard to say, because there isn’t enough aggregate data to say.
KatG
April 6, 2011 @ 2:31 pm
You’re trying to paint a picture that isn’t correct by claiming that “typically” doesn’t mean majority? It’s very “typical” in SFF, Jim’s baliwick, for a publisher to bring out the first two to three books in a series within a year, depending on the author’s output and readiness. More to the point, the amount of time it takes a publisher to schedule, produce and ship a printed work has very little to do with what’s going on in electronic self-publishing.
The 1 in 5 figure is for debuting books, which indeed “typically” don’t earn out their advances. Publishers up front the advance credit to first time authors knowing they probably won’t get that one back but hoping to eventually make it up and more on the back end as the author they’re investing in grows an audience and creates an income making backlist. That’s a large part of why first book advances, when there is an advance, are low on average and have remained low. But mid-list authors with books under their belt who aren’t getting that audience increase and earning out won’t be on the list for long. Your numbers here would crash the non-fiction market, a marketing dependent area where books are more likely to earn out than the more uncertain fiction market, where book sales are driven by word of mouth and luck as much as anything else.
Which again is the point I’m making that you keep ignoring or trying to slant away from. Comparing two random authors’ book sales, and in particular an author who is working with a publisher mostly in print to an author doing electronic self-publishing — both of them having completely different business relationships and payment systems and circumstances and novels — has no value as information whatsoever.
It seems very likely that it may become common for publishers to start a lot of debuting authors out in electronic publishing first, adding print later, just as they now often start them in mass market paperback until they build up enough of an audience to merit trying a trade paper or hardcover edition. A number of romance publishers have in fact been doing this for awhile, so if you absolutely had to compare somebody, it would have made a lot more sense to do it between an author who is working with a publisher and publishing only electronically and someone self-publishing electronically. But even there, all you’d really be saying is that some authors make decent money out of it self-publishing, which we already knew. That didn’t require using Jim as a whipping boy, a guy who is incredibly nice, very supportive of the promotional efforts of other authors, and who was generous about sharing sales information — a habit I told him he should drop and this is a perfect example of why.
And to David Dalglaish — my apologies for dragging you in peripherally, I wish you continued success.
Stephen Watkins
April 6, 2011 @ 2:39 pm
“Comparing two random authors’ book sales, and in particular an author who is working with a publisher mostly in print to an author doing electronic self-publishing — both of them having completely different business relationships and payment systems and circumstances and novels — has no value as information whatsoever.”
I’m going to disagree with this assertion here. As an aspiring author looking toward the future and anticipating making a future decision about whether to try to shop my works with a traditional publisher or cut to the chase and self e-pub, there is value in understanding the different expectations of what can be achieved via the different possible routes.
Understanding what an average result from either path is would be incredibly pertinent to me and many others.
The problem is, comparing one point-estimate with another point-estimate is, statistically speaking, entirely erroneous. You only get meaningful analysis of the options when you’re able to compare distributions (i.e. bell-curves) and evaluate the possibility of being in one part of a distribution versus another. (Note that the actual distribution needn’t actually look like a bell curve, but this is the most familiar shape of a distribution to the non-stats inclined.)
Nikki
April 6, 2011 @ 4:01 pm
I wanted to chime in here because there seems to be this misconception in these arguments that if you’re ‘FOR’ Indie publishing (or vice versa) that you’re against Traditionals and they are the evil empire.
For the record, I have followed Robin and I have never seen her downgrade or dismiss trad publishers.
Just because Indie publishing seems to have its advantages (and disadvantages) over trad publishing doesn’t make it an Us vs. Them. As it has been stated already, that gets very tiresome.
Moses Siregar III
April 6, 2011 @ 4:29 pm
I’m in agreement with most of what Robin has posted, but David Dalglish is not “middle of the pack” in terms of indie authors. Making over $10,000 a month means you’re probably in the top 1%.
Then again, David hasn’t been at this very long (a little more than a year) and ebooks are continuing to gain market share, so it’s amazing to see what can be achieved not through luck but by hard work and some intelligence. I’ve seen estimates that say ebooks are 23% of the fiction market right now and a B&N exec recently predicted they’ll be at least 50% of overall book sales in two roughly years. I fully expect David’s sales numbers to continue to grow at a remarkable rate.
Here’s what I think doesn’t get said enough. If you take the whole sample of indie authors, David is very much an outlier. But if you take the number of authors who take indie publishing very seriously (good books, good covers, good promotion, etc.), David’s still near the top, but the pool is much, much smaller.
Personally, I think any new author who has some talent, a strong work ethic, and who takes the business side of publishing very seriously, has roughly a 50% chance of making at least a decent living as an indie. And that’s probably a much higher percentage than is true with traditional publishing right now. I think Robin is absolutely right to point out the viability of indie publishing, even and perhaps especially for first-time authors–as long as they have the temperament to be both publisher and writer.
People can ask for more data, and who wouldn’t like to have more data, but if you pay close attention to indie publishing (I can say that I do), you’ll find that many, many authors are having significant financial success. The thing is that not many indies take publishing seriously enough, and of course they’re going to fail.
I do think the best purely financial move for most new authors today is with indie publishing (again, only if they’re cut out for it), but traditional publishing offers many other benefits. I don’t think money is one of those competitive benefits, though, at least not for most new authors.
Thanks for hosting a good discussion, Jim.
KatG
April 6, 2011 @ 8:24 pm
And that would be spiffy if you were selling beer, as Margaret Atwood points out. But for fiction publishing where you are selling individual novels that all sell primarily through word of mouth, it’s not, not the least because electronic self publishing, electronic publishing and print publishing are not three separate types or formats, but three completely different industries with different business arrangements, all of which are shifting around. You could boil down a potential average income for fiction authors — and it will be far lower than you probably expect it to be — but there’s no way to know if you’d hit under or over it or around it until you are out in the market. A good number of authors working with publishers will sell in the neighborhood of 10,000-40,000 copies, but that another author is in that range does not mean that you will be. There are no guarantees of sales and while publishers make estimated guesses, nobody actually knows what will happen with a book. J.K. Rowling’s publisher believed in her book and acquired the license, but they paid her a low four figures advance — which was credit for her based on what they thought she’d likely make, and told her to keep her day job. Amanda Hocking wandered into self-publishing to try and earn $2,000 for a vacation trip. Her sales took off not because she promoted like crazy but because of word of mouth.
Once an author has established sales, it’s easier to estimate what sales on other books are likely to be. But as authors like Jim and Bucknell will tell you, their books don’t all sell at the same rates. For non-fiction, which has actually always been the backbone of self-publishing, it’s a lot easier to estimate. You can look at what diet books tend to sell at and be reasonably sure that you might sell in that ballpark then because that’s the market for that information. But stories in the market is pure gambling.
So there’s no point in approaching the question like that. Instead, you need to look at whether the different options for getting your product to market will work for your life, for what you want to do. Working with publishers gives you someone who will pay you for the license, pay for the upfront costs of print and widespread electronic conversion, etc., and distribute your books into bookstores, which is a wider market than Amazon’s Kindle. But if you can sell to thousands of Kindle owners electronically, that may be more than sufficient and it’s faster. But you will not have a team working for you with vendors and the leverage of a full list of authors and Amazon is making a mint off of these authors for essentially doing very little. It’s not really how much will I earn — a question no one can answer — but what specifically do I want and am able to do, what would work for my particular project best, etc. Most authors are probably going to end up with a mix.
Stephen A. Watkins
April 6, 2011 @ 9:34 pm
“electronic self publishing, electronic publishing and print publishing are not three separate types or formats, but three completely different industries with different business arrangements, all of which are shifting around.”
With about 3 weeks to go before I finish an MBA (I know creatives hate MBAs… but I’m a creative with an MBA, and I have to say it helps to understand things from that perspective), I hate to tell you this statement is wholly and entirely false. These are absolutely all part of the same industry – an electronic book and a physical book meet the same consumer needs. They do so in slightly different ways, and with slightly different combinations of attributes. All that means is that they are propogated through different channels. Some consumers will prefer the electronic channel, some the physical channel, and for different reasons. But that doesn’t mean they are separate industries. That’s like saying DVD rentals at Blockbuster and Netflix instant downloads are in different industries. If that were the case, Blockbuster wouldn’t be going bankrupt right now.
Also, your assertion that having a statistical analysis won’t help us in decision making just doesn’t make sense, but I suspect you make that assesrtion because you have no understanding of statistics. Certainly you’re entitled to your opinion on that, and you’re under no obligation to use a statistical analysis in your own decision-making, but for me as someone who does understand statistics, I definitely would find it useful as a decision-making tool.
Of course, no, I can’t tell exactly where in the distribution I’ll actually end up. What I can do is make a reasonable judgement on where in that distribution I will probabalistically end up. If, for instance, the distribution follows the recognizeable bell-curve, there is a 98% probability that my results will fall within a certain range. If I know what that range looks like for one option versus another option, and if the ranges for the two options are meaningfully different, that definitely would be useful in making a decision between selecting two options. I realize that the two options aren’t wholly mutually exclusive, but within a limited fram – i.e. what do I do for this book, they effectively are mutually exclusive. So if, for instance, successfully attaining a publisher is likely to net me much less when releasing my first book – let’s say, for argument, by half the net income – than releasing the first book as an e-book online, that would certainly color my perception on which way is worth effort to pursue initially. It needn’t be the only factor in my decision making. But having that information definitely can’t hurt my decision making. More information is almost always better.
You make a lot of very extreme statements and say things can’t be this way or must be that way. It’s very similar in nature to the sorts of extremism that the Konrath’s of the world are propogating. But that just doesn’t reflect reality. “Different strokes for different folks” is one of my favorite sayings – some of us like and use data. Just because you don’t like or use data doesn’t mean it won’t be of use or interest to those of us who do.
KatG
April 7, 2011 @ 2:30 pm
Mr. Watts:
That’s not what I meant. They are all part of the book publishing industry and the e-books overlap with the electronics industry. But they are operating under entirely different procedures, not the least of which is because print is a physical object that has to be made, stored in a physical location and shipped for distribution, and e-books are electronic files that have to be assembled and proofed, are stored in databases and downloaded. Print has an entire consignment distribution, sales and accounting system — one of the main reasons big publishers give authors advances — all of which is completely irrelevant for the e-books except for publishers managing print and e-book editions together in terms of releases and pricing. For this reason, e-books require an additional accounting system and different procedures. Self-publishing authors have completely different business arrangements with e-book vendors than publishers do, are selling in fewer places and sometimes from their own website. For e-books, publishers have to deal with vendors who are just selling e-books, others selling both print and e-books, some acting as a wholesaler or acting as a retailer, are electronics firms with loading devices or book companies with devices or no device but a sales platform for the e-book files to multi-devices, etc. E-book royalties are not at all standardized as the retail industry is new and was previously just a sub rights market, and are effected by different e-book vendors and contract negotiations with authors and vendors that are going on now. Self-publishing is usually mostly e-books, only doing a few titles, and with less variety of vendors who are acting as electronic printers, so the contracts are different and the terms are different. So they are separate businesses within the same industry that operate differently.
I would love it if more authors learned more about the industry in which they are trying to operate and were more business-like about it, especially before they go making claims about industry stuff they don’t even know how to define correctly. But instead, they just try to view it as like some other business they’re more familiar with, like music, movies, selling videos or beer that are incorrect. And most new authors ask the newbie question that you asked — how much on average can I make as an author, published author, self-publishing author? The answer to that question is, again, that we don’t know. That you could statistically map every other fiction author’s sales if you could get the data, and it still won’t tell you what your sales for your novels will be in the marketplace, whichever version of the marketplace you go for. Knowing what Jim’s sales are doesn’t help you determine what sort of deal you might be offered by a publisher, how long it’s going to take for a print book to be released except that it’s longer than just an e-book, how much editing the publisher will be working through with you, what your subsidiary rights situation will be, how many copies print or electronic you’ll sell, what your return numbers will be for print, whether Amazon will agree to co-op advertising with your publisher for your title, what the word of mouth will be, etc. Likewise, if you self-publish, that someone did really well selling on Barnes & Noble doesn’t mean that you will. Or you may do way, way better than that person.
Royalties — the author’s cut for supplying the product and doing promotion — for print with a publisher have gotten pretty standardized among the different physical formats and types of vendors, as all the costs are known and the systems in place, though negotiations and changes per deal do go on. So we can tell you what those average royalties are, tell you about escalations, heavily discounted sales riders, sub-rights money splits, and advance pay-out schedules and how royalty statements work and things like reserves against returns. (That’s assuming you end up with a publisher who can do advances, which isn’t something we can tell you.)We can tell you what Amazon’s standard terms are for self-publishing. But tell you how much you’ll make? No. What you need to look at first is, do you want to be in print as well as e-books or just e-books? What sort of promotional work do you want to do, can you do, as there are promotional things for print that aren’t done for e-books? Have you got time to go searching for an agent? Do you want to get books out in the market right now? If the e-book doesn’t sell, it will be harder to get a print deal later. If they sell really well, then you can probably get a reprint deal or a publisher sale for new works, if you want. Do you want to pursue both avenues at once, if you have more than one project available?
Learning about what other people have done and how it’s gone for them is certainly useful data about what’s happening in the marketplace and helps you learn the industry so you can try to plot your own course. But comparing sales data between fiction authors like it’s a sporting event is not useful data. And next time, don’t assume that just because someone says that you are asking the wrong question that she must hate all statistical analysis. 🙂
Stephen A. Watkins
April 7, 2011 @ 4:38 pm
A few things:
1) It’s Mr. Watkins, if you please. Not Mr. Watts.
2) I’m well aware that trad-publishing and e-self-pubbing and old-fashioned-self-pubbing are all different business models with different business needs and different business realities and so on and so forth. I don’t make the argument that they aren’t. I only argue that they’re in the same industry. (I also believe it is naive to say that “fiction authors don’t compete with each other”. Of course they do. Perhaps not in an antagonistic way like most corporations because, after all, they’re people and most of them are nice; but the book-buying public will only buy so many books in a year, and every fiction author would love to be the writer of one of the books you buy.) I’ve heard this lecture ad nauseum, and it’s fairly well engrained in my brain, thank you. Within this thread alone it’s been spelled out at least thrice.
3) I may be an unpublished writer, but I’m not a “newbie” writer. I’ve been writing for over twenty years and I’ve been actively following the industry for the last five. I’m sure I don’t have to point out that the use of the word “newbie” in this context can come off sounding just a little offensive. I’m unpublished. I’d prefer I wasn’t, and I may never not be, but that I want to be published oughtn’t make me or others like me the object of scorn.
4) I do not anywhere ask to know what the averages are. I make a statement as to the usefulness of statistical data in this regard, which includes averages but is not limited to averages. I’m not interested in solitary point-estimates such as the sort that prompted the original posts. I’m interested in full, rich statistical data with distributions, etc. Further, I’m well aware this data doesn’t exist – at least, there’s no easily reached spreadsheet out there. I’m merely commenting on the potential usefulness of the data, to unpublished writers who are working on writing careers, were it actually to exist. It’s impossible to say what the data would tell us without having it available. But if we did have it, it would undoubtedly tell us something, even if that something were as simple as: there’s no typical result. It might tell us a whole lot more. It might be that writing incomes follow a very predictable pattern. Your claims about what it can or cannot tell us are made in the entire absence of the data. You can’t know what it can or cannot tell us because you don’t have the data.
5) Your continued assertions that the statistical data would be of limited or zero worth as a decision making tool, your continued focus only on the reference to “average” and the point estimate comparisons of authors like Jim and David suggests either that your last point is not entirely correct – and you really don’t understand statistics – or you’re not reading what I’m saying. There’s nothing wrong with the former – lots of people don’t understand statistics, and that’s not a deficiency. Statistics isn’t easy to grok. Nor is knowing anything about statistics a reason to gloat, just to be clear. The latter, well… there’s nothing I can do about that. If you really are a stats whiz, well, my hats off to you, and my apologies for suggesting you aren’t one. But if you really are a stats whiz then I can’t understand your insistence that the stats are useless because you would know just how useful the stats would be.
6) Just to reiterate, I am not asserting that such a statistical analysis should be the only factor, or necessarily even the overriding factor in an unpublished author’s decision on how to pursue their career. I’m not asserting that the data should suggest an either-or career decision. I’m not suggesting anything about mutual exclusivity between options. I am only asserting the potential usefulness of the information, were it to exist. This is not comparing data like sports statistics. (In fact, sports statistics is possibly the worst analogy for how this data will be used; as unpublished authors we’re not rooting for one team or another, or deciding to buy one player or another for our teams, or anything like that, we’re trying to make decisions about our own personal careers, and get the lay of the land before we do.)
That said, I’m not going to convince you how the data would be useful. That’s fine. As I said above, you’re under no obligations ever to make use of it, should it ever become available, and neither is anyone else. Thankfully, I don’t believe anyone’s insistence that the data is useless will be the primary factor in deciding whether anyone else ever collects such data and makes it available. (The real overriding factor will be the difficulty in obtaining good, rich data.)
I’m not trying to be offensive (despite the sometimes offensive tone of your posts – even when I was agreeing with you I was cringing at the rather offensive way in which you were saying it, though I wasn’t the object of your disagreement). I realize you work in the industry, and you have valuable insights that would be of use to those of us who are looking to break into the industry at some future point. I, for one, am appreciative of how many like yourself are willing to share those insights with the rest of us. But I don’t think that entitles you to shut down certain lines of inquiry because you disagree with the premise on which that inquiry was made.
Jim C. Hines
April 7, 2011 @ 5:13 pm
Heh. Sorry about the limits on comment threading here. I need to look into an alternate comment setup.
As things get a bit tense here, I just wanted to check in and ask whether this conversation is going anywhere productive. If so, then by all means please carry on. But if not, it might be time to walk away from this one.
Thanks!
Stephen A. Watkins
April 7, 2011 @ 9:39 pm
Sorry about that, Jim. My apologies for escalating this, though I’ll admit to having been a tad offended, at which point I probably shouldn’t have responded at all.
I think you’re right, and that’s sort of what I was getting at with “I’m not going to convince you how the data would be useful.” It was sort of my signal that I realized this discussion wasn’t going anywhere.
I believe Ms. Kat and I are at an impasses with respect to our differing opinions on the subject at hand. Hopefully we can just agree to disagree?
Stephen A. Watkins
April 7, 2011 @ 9:40 pm
That would of course be “impasse”, not “impasses”.
Jim C. Hines
April 7, 2011 @ 10:28 pm
No worries. I’m not grading on spelling or grammar here 🙂
(Punctuation, on the other hand… Y’all best be minding your semicolons!)
KatG
April 7, 2011 @ 10:28 pm
You mistake frustration for offensiveness. Also, you misunderstood what I said — felt that I was saying they were separate industries — and so I was clarifying in my second post to you. My issue with Ms. Sullivan is that she’s using data poorly and at Jim’s expense. If you feel, however, that comparing Jim’s print sales figures to the other author’s e-book sales is going to yield you some sort of useful information about what your own sales figures will be, then go to it. My suggestion was that business issues about what is feasible for you personally and your own particular project in regards to different market approaches, and relevant data like Bucknell’s experiment with price points for self-published e-books if you’re self-publishing, would be a lot more helpful to you.
Stephen A. Watkins
April 8, 2011 @ 2:30 pm
My apologies if I misunderstood you. I was only ever trying to demonstrate that certain kinds of data can prove useful to those of us who are considering our options for the future. I agree and have consistently agreed that single point-to-point comparisons between individual authors don’t reveal terribly much, and by themselves aren’t terribly useful except in advancing a certain narrative. I’ve been talking about looking at aggregate data. Ideally, aggregate data for the e-pubbing side would include things like the affect of different price-points, genres, the quality of the editing and cover-art, time spent promoting, and so forth, but I realize that much useful data is unrealistic to expect.
On the other question, that of the “different” industries, you did say, and I quote: “electronic self publishing, electronic publishing and print publishing are not three separate types or formats, but three completely different industries with different business arrangements”. Inasmuch as that was meant metaphorically or illustratively, I did not catch that, so my apologies there in that case. I realize, of course, that the business realities of each are very different. That’s part of why someone like me is so interested in good data that would help expectations for each. Since the work involved is so different, it’s not that easy to just decide to do both or to decide how to approach which way to take a career. If there is a dramatic and meaningful difference in expected results, that would be good to know. Otherwise… I’d probably default to the traditional path because that’s what I’d always imagined for myself… but I’d want to know if there was something that could reveal that’s not the right path for me, afterall.
KatG
April 10, 2011 @ 10:09 pm
There is not a dramatic and meaningful difference across the board, no. It’s the same sales pyramid. But that doesn’t mean that some authors haven’t ended up with dramatic sales in self-publishing. There are many issues involved and a lot of circumstances are fluid. For instance, Amazon came up with giving self-published authors a 70% royalty if they would essentially hand over some electronic rights and agree to various conditions as a reaction to accusations that they were taking a very large part of the pie with their price discounts in the business model fight with Macmillan. While it’s potentially a good deal for many self-publishing authors, you do need to look at the terms of that deal and Amazon could change it at any time, as Ms. Sullivan pointed out. So if you’re thinking about self-publishing, the terms you would have with different vendors — Amazon, Apple, the Nook, etc. — with which you have no leverage to disagree, are something you need to look at, as it’s not just self-publishing an e-book, but where are you going to sell the e-book and through which pipes of supply, including selling from your own site, which I suspect is going to become more common.
If you go the publishing route, then you are trying to find a business partner, either by yourself or with the help of an agent who you have persuaded to invest in representing you. That partner, the publisher, will produce a physical print book and pay all costs of that, possibly an e-book, will give you a cash advance if they can and do various outlays pre-sale. The publisher will distribute and ship and handle returns and your contract delineates what you need to do, what the publisher will do and how monies are split. There are a lot of issues about electronic editions, which used to be a subsidiary right and now are a major retail format, so there are a lot of negotiations going on. So if you can get a publisher interested in investing in your work, then it’s certainly worth checking out what other authors have managed as their deals with both print and e-book editions, especially bestsellers who have more leverage and their agents, who have leverage because they have a stable full of author clients and contract precedents with publishers. These are business issues that you have to deal with.
But none of these issues will tell you what your sales will be. 🙂
Stephen A. Watkins
April 11, 2011 @ 10:05 am
See, while I suspect that this may be the case (i.e. regarding the sales distribution), the fact is that no one can legitimately, factually make this claim without support of the data. In other words, this is an expression of your belief about the market. It’s possible your belief is correct. I think it probably is. But neither you nor I know this belief is correct because none of us has seen any data to either support nor deny it except in an anecdotal sense. But anecdotal data is not data, it’s anecdotes.
So, the details of the business and legal realities of the different market routes notwithstanding – and those details (i.e. the nature of contracts and business partners and investment and who does/is responsible for what and what format the final products takes and which channels it is sold through and what distribution of the revenues is made) may very well be of paramount importance to someone considering a career path in this industry – it’s impossible to say with any certainty what’s actually going on right now.
If it were true, however, what Konrath and his cheerleaders were saying – that anyone could make a hefty six-figure income doing this – if that were true and the data supported that claim (keeping in mind that I don’t believe the data will), well, that could and should be a significant factor in the decision-making process. Even if it were only half-true, that might still put a significant weight on the decision. If, however, as both you and I suspect is really the case the distribution is very similar to or identical to what we’d see in the traditional-pub world, well… that could heavily influence some people’s decisions, too. And that’s also worth knowing for sure.
David Dalglish
April 11, 2011 @ 10:10 am
Just chiming in real quick:
Konrath does not advocate some get-rich-quick scheme where any idiot can upload a book and make six-figure income. His general opinion is that most writers will make more money self-publishing than going traditional. It’s a bit of a different claim, and he’s clarified it several times. Someone who would never get published still might make a few hundred dollars self-publishing. Is his claim correct? Of course. But is it the same as a six-figure deal? Of course not.
Same goes for a writer who’d make a $5,000 advance on a book, and then not get a second book deal, nor earn out the advance. That writer could easily make twice that over two or three years self-publishing. Again, is his hypothesis correct? Yes. Is it six-figure income? No.
Stephen A. Watkins
April 11, 2011 @ 10:28 am
Frankly (I’ve been following this debate for a while), if that’s the extent of his claim, he hasn’t made it particularly easy for someone like me (who doesn’t hang on every word he says) to find specific examples of him clarifying that position. He’s very given to hyperbole. (Maybe it’s his writing style?)
Regardless, I’m just as dubious of this claim, without supporting evidence, as I am of any other. I dont’ disagree that an individual author can do better – and I don’t disagree that there’s anecdotal evidence of individual author’s doing better. But what does the aggregate data say? We don’t know, because there isn’t any. So, saying the hypothesis is correct is putting the cart before the horse, so to speak.
And if we’re talking the results of the data are that the majority of would-be authors make a couple hundred dollars over their life versus none via traditional publishing – in the grand scheme of things that’s as statistically close to 0 as makes no difference.
KatG
April 11, 2011 @ 4:22 pm
“See, while I suspect that this may be the case (i.e. regarding the sales distribution), the fact is that no one can legitimately, factually make this claim without support of the data.”
Okay, so if I’m following you, the fact that both self-publishing and publishing sales data falls into a visible pyramid pattern that publishing has been dealing with for decades is not sufficient. You want to add up all the print fiction sales of all published authors and all the e-book sales of published authors and all the e-book sales of self-published authors and all the print sales of self-published authors, assuming you could ever get such data, and…do what with it exactly? Because there are also distribution, promotional, royalty issues in that mix which are different for each author, not simply published compared to self-published, but between published authors and between self-published authors, and which ultimately don’t necessarily control the number of sales per book. Mr. Konrath’s circumstances and Mr. Dalglish’s circumstances are very different, yet both have sold. Someone like Mr. Dalglish or Mr. Konrath in circumstance might not sell anywhere near their numbers. What’s most different, besides things like who they sell through and what terms their business deals are and what sort of distribution you’re looking at, is that they write different novels. And if people don’t connect with your particular novels and spread word of mouth about you, they don’t sell, whether it’s published or self-published, however it’s distributed, and no matter what anyone else’s novels are doing. A lot of it is plain old luck.
Written fiction is an outlier market. Unlike other products, it is almost completely symbiotic, with authors not competing with each other for sales and instead helping each other increase sales by drawing in readers, who browse, and teaming up for promotions; its primary selling tool is uncontrollable and unpredictable word of mouth; it relies on variety which allows for room for many different kinds of fiction. The simple fact is that even if the majority of self-published authors are shown to make X amount of money, in fiction, you may not make that amount of money. It’s gambling and there’s no house.
So if you’re trying to assess your likely prospects on sales data, it’s not going to work well in fiction. In non-fiction, yes, as non-fiction is a market that is half-competitive and half-symbiotic in general and very competitive in certain areas because it is offering information. Traditionally, non-fiction has been the backbone of self-publishing. But not fiction. What sales data of individual authors tells us is that there is a decent sized potential market out there for self-published fiction e-books, an audience who may be reached, and so it’s a potential option if the terms of self-publishing fit your life and your product. What aggregate sales data tells us is that 1) self-publishing is growing in number of titles and growing in sales, as are published e-books; 2) that the Kindle platform is still the major player in that market though that is likely to change; and 3)that the sales data for fiction authors falls into a pyramid pattern.
If you manage to get a publisher willing to invest in you, you will be dealing with entirely different factors — a different product list, different distribution, different accounting, etc., than self-published e-books. Potentially, you could sell way more in print than e-books, since it is still most of the market. Potentially, you can sell less in e-books but still make the same amount because you’re only sharing with Amazon. But that might not happen. Each author has completely different circumstances and a completely different product.
So yeah, claims that everyone is making a six figure income in self-published e-books are bogus. Claims that you can possibly make a six figure income in self-published e-books are clearly true. Claims that self-published e-books always make more for authors than publishing deals, or vice versa, is bogus. Claims that you can know what your sales figures would be for self-publishing on the basis of other authors’ sales information are likewise false. But no one is going to stop you from trying. If you can gather the data, quite a few people might like to know it. I don’t know what they’d use it for, but they’d probably still want it. You might start with a survey sent to self-publishing authors and see what they’re willing to say.