Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
There are garbage books in bookshops. Half of big publisher books don't make their advance in royalties. Maybe less than 1% of books make a living wage for an Author.
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If a book doesn’t earn back its advance, that doesn’t mean the book is garbage. It could mean lots of things: bad cover; distribution problems; a book that’s ahead of its time; lousy cover copy; etc.
Also, statistics like this change. We have to be careful where we get our stats about publishing. There are some people out there spreading inaccurate stats on their websites because they want to promote their own publishing services or because they don’t know publishing that well.
For example, I looked this up, and I found one saying that it’s 25% of books that don’t earn back their advances.
Also, the stat about successful books being just 0.1% of books being successful doesn’t sound right. How are they defining “success”? Hitting the bestseller list? A book can be successful without hitting the lists.