Self-publishing income breakdown

Derek Canyon has been providing monthly stats of his sales for the past months. He openly breaks down the numbers of each of his four titles and provides an average income.

It's an interesting read, as Derek is a "new" writer, self-published, having sourced his own editing and book cover designs and is projecting around $14k per year from his current titles, based on to-date data.

That sort of money is not shabby at all when you consider the likely advance for a traditionally published novel for a new writer. Let's say $5k, $10k or even $20k as an advance against royalties. This is a one-off payment, and by most accounts, novels generally do not sell enough copies to provide the author with royalties beyond this payment. Compare four titles at $10k per, or $40k total, and Derek will have made this amount in 3 years and still have all the rights and control of his books forever.

Intoxicating stuff. Of course, I doubt most new writers who are self-publishing are making anything like his sales of 30 - 40 per day, but it is definitely an achievable target.

e-book conversion

Slowly, but surely, e-books are becoming a fixture in my reading life. I’m not particularly wedded to hardcopy, paper books – I’m used to reading electronically – but a physical book is more convenient to pick up and more pleasant to hold... but, but, but. The advantages stood out like a sore thumb on my recent trip to the States. Instead of carting around one or more books to read, I had half a library’s worth in electronic form. That 700+ page door stopper of Justin Cronin’s (The Passage – fantastic read) wasn’t weighing down my hand luggage, I read it on the screen. Reading China Mieville’s The City and the City meant I didn’t have to reach for a dictionary for all those words I don’t know, I just highlight with a tap and the e-dictionary tells me the meaning. Bored, and look for another book, I just browse through genres, categories, authors and find books to sample instantly. If I like it, and the price is right, I might buy then and there.

Amazingly simple and convenient.My friend browsing the e-reader displays at a New York Barnes & Noble store. Note how large the display is, and that is located front and centre of the store.

Contrast this with books I have bought in physical form recently, and I am completely in love with sampling. Any chance I have to avoid shelling out $20 for a novel that just doesn’t hold me past page three, or page fifty, is money saved, paper saved, shelf-space saved.

I had many discussions with friends in the States about e-books, and their disbelief that it could ever replace paper books, and was generally playing devil’s advocate, but more and more I was advocating my own opinion that e-books are an overwhelmingly positive phenomenon for readers and authors. With them, authors can potentially make a reasonable living and control their own creative brand. With them, readers can sample books, enjoy their choices at a much reduced price, have the convenience of a virtual library in their bag, buy books anytime and anywhere there is an internet connection. The main downside is the loss of a physical object, the tactile pleasure of holding a book, turning pages, smelling the paper and ink, running your fingers over a glossy cover. But paper books won’t disappear. Vinyl records, cassette tapes, CDs are all still with us. Paper books may be marginalised to collector’s items, or speciality goods or a reduced niche market for holdouts, but they’ll always be around. If there is a quality version of a book I love, I’ll buy it.
Jeff VanderMeer's The Steampunk Bible - an example of book that will always be better in hardcopy. Here shown on the shelf with other "bibles"...
David Cornish has written three volumes of his YA fiction “The Monster Blood Tattoo” series and his publisher has a hardcover version complete with additional illustrations (by the author), attached ribbon book-marks and expanded appendices. A beautiful package and well worth the few extra dollars. This type of book-as-artifact product will always sit on my book shelf. The rest will likely be a mixture of cheap imports from The Book Depository and e-books sitting on my reader.

A bookseller's view of self-publishing

Steph Moriarty (Clarion South attendee and long-time industry employee) gives her thoughts on self-publishing, particularly with regards to print publishing.

A boy I used to date once asked me, “What do you think of South African accents?”

To which my response was, “What kind of question is that?”

“It’s not a rascist thing. It’s just personal experience. Every South African person I’ve encountered at work has treated me like crap. Now whenever I hear the accent, I cringe. It’s like a Pavlovian response.”

As a bookseller, my Pavlovian response to self-publishing is somewhat analogous. I don’t hate self-published writers on principle, but in my experience, most of them have been awful to deal with.

The thing is – and this may sound obvious, but bear with me – when you self-publish, you’re taking on the role and duties and responsibilities that would traditionally belong to your publisher. The impression I get is that too many writers, not just the ones who self-publish, don’t understand and don’t take the time to try to understand, what exactly publishers do. Publishing companies are not hungry monsters who eat Word documents and spit out bound and finished books. They’re not just there to make sure all the words are in the right order and slap a pretty cover on the front. They also do complex and mundane things like sales research and find markets and organise publicity and marketing campaigns and, perhaps most difficult and mundane of all, fatten up (metaphorically speaking) the sales team with reasons your book is great but, more importantly, reasons people might by your book, and then send them off to clash with the retail buyers. These are the parts that self-published writers don’t tend to do as well, partly because they don’t know they have to do them, or don’t know how to do them, or are not qualified to do them, and partly because it’s hard to do a company’s work when you’re just one person. Which is not to say it can’t be done. But it is not easy to do well.

When publishers take on a book, they do so because they think it will sell. They may also think it’s a work of literary and creative genius, but the tipping point will always be if it has selling potential. When writers self-publish, the motivation should be the same: they should believe that they can sell it – and by “believe” I mean, have years’ worth of business and industry knowledge, preferably with the figures to back it up, to be able to make a rational, unbiased and qualified assertion that this venture is going to turn profit. Or, at least, you need to be able to talk convincingly about why people might want to buy the book. One writer I encountered in the bookselling trenches of not that long ago came to the shop unsolicited to hawk his expose on freemasons because, in his words, “Father’s Day is coming up”. Presumably his book contained new insights into contemporary freemason society, but not only were we not that kind of bookstore (we specialised in cooking, lifestyle and kids books), I remained doubtful as to whether I could imagine myself giving that book away to someone, let alone buying it myself. It also had an awful (though thankfully minimalist) amateur cover, which did not help. This is another aspect of self-publishing that people tend to think is easy to get right. Good book design is expensive, because good designers who know what they’re doing and who know their genres, and who have the time and good will to read books and come up with ideas, and absorb other people’s ideas, are in demand. Mainstream publishing does not always get covers right by any means, and they may very well not give your book the cover that you had in mind, but they will give you something that many people have looked at and worked on and thought hard about. It is, after all, not in any publisher’s interest to see your book not sell (unless you have been rude to them). Obviously. They want it to do well as much, if not more, than you do, because they are as invested – if not more – as you.

I’m going to try to keep the sales and marketing rant short because it’s pretty common knowledge that every writer these days should be doing at least some self-promotion if they want to see success. Marketing is hard, but fun. Sales is harder. Retail buyers are the gatekeepers of bookshop inventory, and they can be mean, lean and, more relevantly, on an annual budget that is both. Understand that no bookshop can stock every book or every kind of book. Understand that the buyers love books as much as you (hopefully) do, but that the first rule of poker is “leave emotion at the door”. Be prepared to leave a reading copy, at the very least, and don’t expect to get it back. Ever. This does not mean that the longer you leave it with them, the likelier it is you’ll get it back. The inverse is true. The longer you leave a thing in a bookshop – whether on the shop floor or in the back room – the less likely it will ever be found again.

Don’t try to guilt buyers or booksellers into taking your book. It’s this kind of behaviour that makes them hard-hearted. Don’t ring every few days to see how sales are doing and to offer to replenish stock. It’s annoying, and booksellers are busy, and they’ll think you’re desperate. If they need more copies, they’ll contact you. And DON’T rearrange shelves to put your book in a more prominent position. If you think it’s a reasonable request – ie. the bookseller has taken a significant number of copies – ask an assistant. Always be courteous. Whether you get the outcome you want or not, be professional and thank them for your time. This goes for all authors, not just self-published ones. And even if you do get your book on shelves, don’t expect them to miraculously fly off on your own.

Thought your job was done when you wrote the damn thing? You wish.

e-Books, starting somewhere

So what do you do now if you have a manuscript (or several) to sell? Traditional publishing (agents, publishers, slush piles, querying) or the untamed frontier of self e-publishing? The question seemed pretty clear not too long ago, particularly if you were serious about your writing, were persistent, were willing to make contacts and put your work out there. Traditional publishing, normal publishing was where all the cool kids were.

I'm not sure that's the case anymore.

Moving forward, it seems to be fairly clear that the answer will be different for every writer, but that almost certainly writers will utilise a combination of institutional publishing and their own efforts. Many already are.

What will I do? I don't know.

I’m a published writer but am yet to publish enough or works significant enough to make a living from writing. I say “yet” because I will get there. It is not a dream. It’s a goal I am working to achieving.

Essentially, I’m a beginning or emerging writer, or whatever other epithet you care to use to describe a non-professional, but serious writer.

And because of who I am and what I am, I am in the middle of the e-books and e-publishing quandary. I don’t have the new opportunity of releasing my back-list of published works dating to 1970 in e-book format to take advantage of these new methods of distribution. I don’t have the ready-made audience of an experienced and veteran writer. I don’t have the industry contacts or past relationships with publishers, agents and editors. I have grown up hearing of and dreaming of the traditional mode of publishing: slush-pile, agent, network, persistence. But I have not lived it to any great extent.

In other words, I am not particularly beholden to any model of publishing. My natural caution is sceptical of the promises being thrown out there by advocates of e-publishing and particularly self-publishing, but my interest is of course piqued by the tempting thought of being able to bypass a lot of the gate-keeping in traditional publishing. Skip the agent, skip the slush-pile, distribute your work directly to the reader.

The corollary to this of making thousands of dollars proclaimed by self-proclaimed self-publishing gurus seems like the promise of a pyramid marketing scheme. Or the promise of a dodgy real estate scheme.

I’d like to believe it, I’d like to think there is a possibility I could promote and market my novels to such a readership that would get me to that goal of part-time income for writing, but it does seem too good to be true.

Whether it is or not, the fact is e-books are here to stay and are likely to challenge paper books for supremacy if not completely obliterate their dominance. As such, my excuse to stay on the sideline for now, concentrate on writing and more writing, seems naive. I want to know, I want to try, I want to get out there and see what could happen. If nothing else, I’ll learn about it more than I would otherwise.

Borders without customers, Part II

Myth number 3: Book prices are expensive in Australia because publishers are evil money-grabbing, faceless conglomerates who want to take over the world.

This is a complicated one to unpack. Firstly, there’s the issue that a lot of book prices are left over from a twenty year-old economy where the Australian dollar was 40 or 50 cents to the American greenback. The book industry is also one of those rare, strange beasts where the identical product that was released twenty years ago is still being made and put out into the market, and the truth which everyone knows but few people have been willing to articulate is, well, things never really ever get cheaper. Which leads me to my second point: things have never really been cheap in Australia. We’re isolated, so we have to factor freight costs onto everything we import, and our population is tiny, which means we can’t produce in bulk and get the same wholesale discounts as the other bigger consumers. Our food, rent, and wages are all three times, if not more, than the dollar-equivalent in the US, another as a relic of that 1990s economy, though I’ve heard time and again the comment that the quality of things here is better, which could all be placebo effect, but the quality – the physical quality – of books certainly is. So many of my imported books are either printed on clumsy, public toilet paper-esque pages, or the thinnest Bible paper. I understand this may not factor in for a lot of people – they’re not buying a book for the paper stock, after all, but for the words and ideas contained therein – but it’s definitely a factor as to why locally produced and printed books cost more.

Thirdly, we are one of the only countries in the world to tax our books. The GST, that deceptaively doe-eyed 10%, knocked the wind out of the bookselling industry for years. Yeah, I know, anticlimax, but people never seem to factor this in either.

Remember when there was this whole movement about buying Australian products because even though they might be a more expensive, you were supporting local industry and jobs and your own economy, yadda yadda yadda? I must be getting old …

Myth number 4: The music industry went digital, survived piracy and hasn’t completely died, so what the fuck are you guys afraid of?

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Borders without customers

Steph Moriarty was a flat-mate and fellow Clarion South attendee in 2009. With a razor-sharp critiquing knife and a look that can freeze you in place in terror, she's also worked for years at the coal-face in the book-selling business. She knows her stuff.

In two parts, below is her response to the many opinion pieces and speculation about the Borders / Angus&Robertson debacle in Australia.

I’m pretty deeply vested in every facet of the book industries, so it’s particularly frustrating to see so many people hypothesising about why things are the way they are, and how Borders and Angus & Robertson had it coming, etc. with only a speculative understanding and no insight into how things actually are.

I have worked as a bookseller for seven years, with experience in chain stores as well as independents. I am a professional writer who reads not nearly as much as some people I know, but I would venture a reasonable amount. Which means I buy a reasonable amount of books from wherever I can get them: big bookstores, franchises, indies, second-hand bookstores, and yes, because I’m frequently poor, online. This is my explanation (and occasional angry digression) on a few popular misconceptions on recent book industry events.

Myth number 1: REDgroup went bankrupt because of rising ebook sales/internet book sales.

Click to read more ...

Interview with Trent Jamieson

Trent Jamieson, Brisbane short story demi-god, local luminary of the writing scene, University teacher, Aurealis Award winner and Clarion South tutor, has written his first novel: an urban fantasy “Death Most Definite”, and soon to be the first in a trilogy.

How did you get your start in writing fiction?

I’ve always written fiction, well, since I could hold a pen and write. And I’ve always written Speculative Fiction. It’s what I grew up reading. Everything from the Magic Pudding, Lord of the Rings, and Lud in the Mist, to Dan Simmon’s Hyperion Cantos. Spec Fic has marked the important moments of my life: it’s been a comfort through some pretty horrible things, and an accompaniment to some wonderful stuff as well. So it’s natural, I guess, that I’d want to write it too. Not that I don’t read other literature as well, but Spec Fic will always be at the heart of my reading and writing.

You have an impressive number of short stories publications. Was it a big leap to moving from short stories to the long form of novels?

Not so much a big leap, just a different direction. They’re two very different modes of writing. But I’ve been writing both for a very long time: it’s just that the short stories started selling earlier.

How did you get your break with the Death books?

Persistence. Seriously. Orbit opening their offices in Australia certainly helped. It’s a bit easier to get your foot in the door, if there’s a door to put your foot in. I found Orbit to be very approachable and fortunately they liked the idea of this series and loved the first book. Hard work, lots and lots of hard work, luck, and good timing all played their part too. And my biggest break was marrying Diana. My wife has always supported my writerly aspirations. That kind of belief is incredibly important. Without her I may have given up a long time ago. And Diana is the reason I fell in love with Brisbane and ended up writing a novel(series) set there. Diana is the keystone to all my fiction.

Your trilogy is essentially being published back-to-back over the next 2 years. Has it been difficult writing each novel in such a short period?

I’ll let you know when I finish the third book. Like any long project it has its ups and downs, but, in the main, I’ve loved writing the books. I think novels suit my temperament.

Have you had any issues with maintaining consistency between the novels?

Not consistency, my stories are very much about voice, and I think I’ve got a very clear idea who my protagonist is and how he sounds. Steven de Selby is the glue that holds those books together and, while he changes, and grows up a bit, he has very peculiar world view.

Can you tell us about the process of deciding the style of covers?

I’ve not had that much of a say in it – though I love my cover. Of course, I’ve been shown it at various stages of its development, and my opinion’s been sought, but the decision hasn’t really been mine. And, to be honest, I really don’t think it should be. I’m not really about having a cover that I love and everyone else hates.

You were a tutor for the first time at Clarion South in 2009 and we have often heard of Clarion experiences from its students. What was it like from the other side of the desk?

It was wonderful, exhausting, and exciting. I’m quite sure I learnt much more than I taught. The worst bit for me was that I had caught some sort of virus and I had to push through the fatigue – you don’t get a lot of sleep when you’re tutoring. The best was seeing all that potential in the room, listening to all those insightful critiques. You really start to feel invested in the student’s future. I’m always so excited to hear of a sale or some other milestone reached. Oh, and jealousy, definitely jealousy. I forgot about that, you’re all so much more talented than me, damn it.

Is Clarion South comparable to the QUT short story writing course you teach?

Well, this year I haven’t been doing much teaching, so many deadlines! Though I’m back in a month or so. But not really, they’re two very different things. At Clarion you are living and breathing short stories, meeting tight deadlines, and getting in each other’s faces 24/7. The short story course is one of many units a student will be doing that semester, it’s part of an integrated whole. I think either would compliment the other.

You have been writing to various deadlines for the Death books in the past months. How do you motivate yourself each day / how do you ensure you achieve the progress you need to meet those required submission dates?

It’s just a matter of breaking it down into achievable targets, knowing there’s a bigger picture, but not thinking about it too much. I’ve still got a couple of deadlines to meet yet on this series so I don’t want to be too smug about it.

What is your opinion on the recent debate over e-book pricing? Are there plans to release your Death books for e-book readers as well as print?

I must say I don’t have an opinion, but I guess it comes down to content, and what the-book contains that the paper-version may not. E-books certainly allow for a richer environment – though that makes them somewhat different to books, more book as app, then book as book. Regardless of format the e and hardcopy books go through the same editorial process, and that `ain’t cheap. So, hey, I do have an opinion. Yes, my books will be available as e-books.

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Trent’s own site can be found here and a review by Australian Speculative Fiction in Focus here .