Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Well, now.
Definitions matter: what you consider success and failure.
Context matters, too.
How about if we add some other numbers to the mix?
Numbers from the traditional establishment?
If a new writer chooses to go traditional he'll need an agent.
Well, agents reject 90% of submissions. They say that themselves. Some because they're bad, others because they're good but they're too different from whatever is currently popular, some because even if it sells it won't generate enough to be worth the agent's time.
Now, lucky writer got an agent and he even got a contract (standard terms) and after 18 months the book is published and he finally gets the last of the advance. And he waits another six months to see if the book earned out over the three month release window or if the gig is up.
By the publishers own words we know that 80+ percent of their books *never* earn out the advance.
So what's the "success" rate for going trad pub? If every agent sells every manuscript they take on, that would be 2% "success". If the agent sells half, maybe 1%.
With success defined as earning out a high 4-digit advance, maybe a low 5-digit advance.
I'm not sure how many writers would consider earning $8500 over 2, maybe 3 years off a book successful, but that's how low a bar you need to set to get a 1-2% success rate in the tradpub game today.
So, now, let's unwind that definition of success and hit that same per book benchmark from the other side.
An indie publisher selling books at $2.99 (the lowest price that qualifies for the 30% distribution fee) will net $2 or so per book so earning $8500 over two years requires selling 5.6 books a day. Or about 160 books a month. That corresponds to an Amazon sales rank in the 30,000 range. Amazon carries around 2-3 million books (including PD titles) so a ranking of 30,000 puts the author in the top 1-2% range, just like the trad pub path.
But...
If the author goes trad and fails to make the cut, they get nothing but rejection slips.
If the author goes indie, they could be a "failure" by traditional measures, part of the 99%, and still be making $3-4000 a year, per book.
And, while traditional publishers will not publish more than one or two titles per author a year, prolific indie authors have no such restrictions.
It has long been a matter of public record that writing is a crappy business to be in. Not much has changed there.
What is now being documented is just how crappy it is.
And that it is slightly less crappy to go indie and even to forgo print entirely than play trad-pub roulette: the odds are never with you, either way, but the indie road offers consolation prizes for most of the "failure".
Not. Simple.
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I think you're missing my point, I'm not saying that self-publishing is bad, I'm saying that this study is flawed and that those flaws make it impossible to use it to draw meaningful conclusions. It's cheerleading presented as analysis.
I want self-publishing to do well; I'm a self-published author. I just want much better data than we're getting, and most of all I want data that's not skewed towards either side.
I'm also not hung up on terms like success or failure.
As you point out $3-4,000 a year or 1500-2000 sales, however you want to put it, is much better than nothing. Nobody's arguing that. However, the important question the study is missing is where on the overall spectrum does that lie?
Let me put some commercial numbers back to you... purely as a thought experiment.
Let's say that 10% of all manuscripts find an agent, and those agents sell half of what they get. Further, let's posit that each such book earns a minimum advance of $5,000 of which the author gets $4,250 and that's all the money they see from that book. We'll further assume that the author is producing 1 book a year.
So in this scenario, the top 5% of manuscripts submitted to commercial publishers generate a minimum of $4,250 for the author over a 1 year term.
Now the question that comes to my mind is what proportion of self-published authors earn $4,250 from either a single work, or all their works over the course of a 1 year term? What proportion earn $1,000, or even $100?
If it turns out that 10% of all self-published authors make at least $4,250 per year, then it's clearly a better financial decision, particularly if it's from one book. It's a little harder to compare if the self-published author has multiple works out there, because of the amount of work involved, but even so, this is a win for self-published.
On the other hand, if it turns out that only the top 2% of self-published authors make $4,250 and everyone below the top 5% makes less than $100, then I'd argue that it would be a win for commercial publication.
Unfortunately, there's a problem. Nobody has the numbers. That's the elephant in the room that everyone's dancing around. The numbers just aren't there, and without them it's impossible to draw truly meaningful conclusions.
We can see the benefits of both choices, we can weigh them against our own interests, desires, and situation, but we can't make concrete statements, particularly regarding self-publishing without numbers that just don't exist.