Here's the Author Earnings link:
http://authorearnings.com/report/the...author-report/
They found a *lot* of interesting "hidden" facts about tradpub, like how two thirds of tradpub profits (and authir earnings) come from ebooks or that a similar amount of their gross comes from a small group of old, established authors. Everybody else is just catalog filler and has minimal importance to the bottom line individually.
Worth a detailed reading.
Quote:
While only 32% of the publishing industry’s gross revenue currently comes from e-books, nearly 64% of the average traditionally-published fiction author’s earnings is coming from their e-books. Earnings for the average genre-fiction author will skew even further toward their e-book sales. Perhaps an e-book-based comparison between publishing types is not so unfair a comparison after all. Especially when considering that the gain of 8% – 15% royalties on print sales means taking a massive cut in e-book royalties—from 70% of gross to 25% of net. (We demonstrated this tradeoff graphically in an earlier supplemental report.)
So if you’re a new author trying to decide which publishing path to pursue, it’s worth looking at the following graph one more time while keeping in mind that even for traditionally-published authors, 64% of earnings now comes from e-books.
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Quote:
Of the 500 or so Big-5 debut authors in 2013, only 245 (fewer than half) are today earning $10,000 or more from their Kindle e-books. Surprisingly, despite having more books published and on the market, even fewer of the roughly 1,500 Big-5 authors who debuted in 2012, 2011, and 2010 are earning $10,000 or more. Referring to the earlier blue-and-orange pie chart showing what portion of the average traditionally-published author’s earnings is from e-books, we might convince ourselves that print and audio (as well as other e-book retail channels) could on average double this author-earnings number. But few folks would consider $20,000 per annum a living wage, and only 637 (fewer than a third) of the Big-5 debut authors from the last 4 years are earning that much today.
After years and years of querying and jumping through gatekeeper hoops, it appears that even the less-than-1% who are lucky enough to land an agent and a Big-5 publishing contract can’t manage to quit their day jobs. (This is an observation in the data that matches what we have seen anecdotally in the publishing and bookselling trenches).
By contrast, we see over 700 Indie-published authors who debuted in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013 who are today earning more than $25,000/year from their Kindle e-books alone. For these authors, e-book sales on other platforms and POD print sales will add another 20%-30% on average to this total. It’s easy to see that, for the past 4 years, and even taking lost print sales into consideration, far more Indie authors than Big-5 authors are earning a living wage from their writing.
Again, this is something many of us have seen evidence of in the trenches for several years. Very few aspiring authors who query agents end up with publishing deals and their works displayed in bookstores. Having worked in bookstores for years, we have personally seen how seldom a debut author breaks out and sells enough to make a living. Advances are no longer high enough to support debut authors. And yet, at the same time, we have met and heard from hundreds of self-published authors who are not household names but are making a full-time wage from their works. All we and others have had to go on thus far has been anecdote when making the decision on whether or not to self-publish. But now we are seeing the same answer in the data that anyone can see in the trenches: The number of seats on the full-time writer bus have greatly expanded.
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With the proviso that nobody gets to choose to publish traditionally (the choice is not theirs to make, they only choose to *try* to be chosen)today, the fastest way to ramp up an actual *career* as a writer is through Indie ebooks.
It is not a path to instant riches (neither road is) just the higher probability road even *after* getting selected for traditional publishing.
That particular author's chances of getting a second book published now depends on how he got the contract (does he have insider relationships), what type of contract he was given (multibook or single title) and what expectations the publisher had af the time. The higher the initial expectations, the higher the chance the book will be considered a failure and be done.
Put another way: unless a newcomer author thinks they're another Patterson or King, the higher probability road to success (for whatever value they attribute to "success") is to start out with Indie ebooks.