Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Yep, she also got a $50k advance for that book.
Keep in mind, 90k in sales is a home run for most publishers / authors. Most titles don't break even, and publishing has terrible margins. So the publisher may generate $450k in revenues from her, and I'm sure they are happy with her performance (even if it didn't hit the advance), but they aren't making $250k in profits off of every author out there.
Plus, there's the open question of what kind of sales she would make if she didn't have a publisher. E.g. let's say she sold ebooks directly via Amazon DTP at $7.50 each. With the new arrangement (announced last week), she gets 70%, Amazon gets 30%, and prices need to be $10 or less. She'd still have to sell 10k copies to equal the $50k advance. Add in the cost for a freelance editor ($3k?), cover art ($2k?), and marketing, and she'd need to sell 15,000 copies.
That's doable -- for an established author with a good reputation, a following, good business savvy, and interest in doing all the work typically handled by publishers and agents and the like. AFAIK, no one has gone from zero to 20k in sales as an unknown self-published author. It could happen one day, but IMO that's a long ways off.
But I agree with her general point, that it is very tough for a writer to earn a living (except for the mega-sellers). Always has been, always will be -- no matter what starry-eyed Internet prophets tell you about a possible world without intermediaries....
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That is the one question about authors going straight to Amazon, and bypassing publishers..would Amazon pay advances to allow the writer to eat while they are writing?
