Quote:
Originally Posted by Seli
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.
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.
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That appears to be one of the main weak point of the indie authors. I'm curious, though, hasn't anyone thought about setting up shop to work as an indie
editor?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
I certainly seem to have hit a nerve.
Minimum wage in the US is $7.25. If you worked 40 hours a week for 50 weeks, you'd earn $14,500. $26,000 in a year doesn't sound so much. (I pulled $45 W-2P on my last programming contract. W-2P means the company pays your matching Social Security. Hmm...Do writers pay Social Security?)
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To be fair, she does mention that she writes more than one book a year. The question becomes: how long does it take to write a book she can sell under similar conditions?
Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
And what did the publisher make? Well, not 47291*$7.99. 55% goes to the distributor, the publisher's gross income was about 47291*$7.99*0.45 = just over $170,000. Out of which they needed to pay the author's advance - $50,000, and they had to pay for the print run. For 88,500 books, that's (say) $50,000. And the cover artist would be an up-front cost, say $2500.
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I wouldn't know about the rest, but as for the cost of the print run, it costs way less than that with such numbers. To give you an idea, printing around 300 books costs around $1.5 a copy. The way printing goes, you can very safely assume that for about 50000 copies, the individual cost is under 50 cents.