Quote:
Originally Posted by speakingtohe
Just to try to get a bit back on topic:
Amazon pays more per copy in general as do other self pub methods and they will pretty well market anything legal AFAIK.
Hachette et al pick and chose, pay less per copy, but may give a better overall return for a slightly successful author. And for the less than intrepid reader, there is a fairly strong likelihood, that the book will not be an overall disappointment.
Still there are statistics indicating that there is more money to be made selling through Amazon.
I'll know which is true probably when established authors (and I don't mean great authors, or better authors, just those who do well already) start switching en masse to Amazon or self pub.
And I hope for the best outcome for authors, readers, and even publishers.
Helen
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A lot of them are switching to self-pub'd but you can't necessarily tell. The latest two examples I ran across are Ilona Andrews and Leslie Caine. They don't appear to have self-pub'd works...but when you do a bit of research their "publisher" is actually their agent from what I can tell (in the case of "Cleansweep" for Ilona Andrews and Death by Inferior Design by Caine.)
There are also multiple previously published authors banding together and publishing under an 'imprint.' It's going to be harder and harder to tell just who is self-published, especially when they go through their agents or get together and publish under group efforts. There's another agent out there who is publishing his clients' backlist--but they don't use the individual author names, they use a name the agent came up with. Those particular ebooks were never under any publisher obligation because they were in print too along ago, and apparently it makes more sense for the agent to get the publishing done for them rather than give the rights back to the publisher.
I don't know if that counts as self-published, but in the case of Caine and Andrews, there were enough typos in both (Not bad--there were only a few) that I noticed and wondered just who the NYLA publisher is/was and near as I can tell it's an agent or something like that. But I know Ilona Andrews wrote the book as part of a blog release and she's doing the second in that series the same way.
(I could be off on some details. I did not research thoroughly, but I do believe the point is that Helen is right: It makes sense to try both avenues and there is money to be made going it alone or more alone than through just trad. This may all change too as no one says Amazon has to keep paying 70 percent. But Ilona Andrews is a very popular author and if she gets even 50 percent from the sales of ebooks, that has to be a larger percentage than she sees from her publisher. It also allows her/team to publish more books if they can be churned out. Publishers have a schedule and calendar--they aren't going to take any book dropped in that the author happens to have finished.)