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Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
Cost one - agent goes away. Author keep agent fee.
item two - a dirty little secret they don't tell you about as a writer. Three strikes and you're out. If you don't hit (or come close) to your advance, you may find that no publisher will buy your next book. At which point your career goes pffft. If you're self publishing, the only one who can make your career go kaput is you. (And you may, or scale it down to a hobby. Despite what you hear, some very famous works were done as "hobby".)
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LOTR was a hobby sure. In this case this was her 7th published work or thereabouts), and her net take was usually 30-40% whatever that means. Tobias Buckell gathered data on first advances and IIRC those were around 7k.
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So...If you tend to earn out your advance, as described (at 32 cent a copy, which is actually about 50 cents before the authors expenses), it'll take around 100,000 copies. If you sold 10,000 copies, self published at $3.50 a copy (out of 5 dollars) you make about the same money, as you forgo the agent expense, but include the other overhead expenses. If you sold the same 100,000 copies (unlikely) you'd net around $350,000.
These are the same calculations indie musicians have to make, determining if they should sign with a major label. They often find they make less money after major label hits that before they signed....
This is not the stuff big media wants to talk about...
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Lots of assumptions and really big targets, especially for an unknown writer. She'll still need an editor/proofreader to look at her work, make sure people can find her work, be able to sell the copies for the amount you suggest ($1 to $2 seems more prevalent to be honest).
Writing is still more difficult to sample than music.