Here’s an interesting tidbit: Best-selling authors are now turning down publishing deals in order to self-publish. So does that mean the rest of us should too?
You’ll have to read the article, but the interesting thing is this guy turned down a $500,000 advance. That’s a big paycheck. For someone who’s never been faced with that big of an advance, it might seem like a stupid move. But is it? Let’s do the math.
Let’s say your typical royalty is $2.50 per book on a $25.00 hardbound book. How many books do you need to sell to make $500,000? Answer: 200,000. If you don’t sell that many books, then you got a loan you don’t have to repay. If you do sell that many books, then you don’t make any additional money on that first 200,000 copies. You’ve already got it. That’s why it’s an advance. So, if your book only sells 200,005 copies in, let’s say, five years, you’ll make an additional $12.50 on that book for a grand total of $500,012.50. That’s just barely in the six figure range.
But if you are a fairly well known author with a fan base already established, you can self-publish your own book, market it digitally, and keep 70% of the sales.
So let’s say you do this and set a price for your book at $10 per soft copy. You sell 50,000 copies at that price and keep 70% of the sales price. You do this in 3 years. That’s $350,000. Even if it takes you five years – the same amount of time it took you to sell 500,000 copies through your publisher – then that’s still to your advantage. How? Because you still own the publishing rights. You can keep selling that book for the rest of your life. It could potentially make you a thousands of dollars more than going the big publisher route because if your book doesn’t sell enough copies, they’ll let it go out of print.
Now, let’s reduce the numbers for a first-time author. If your advance is a mere $10,000 on your first book, at $2.50 per copy, you’ll still need to sell 4,000 books to earn your pay back. Let’s say your book does really well and sells 50,000 copies. You’ll only get royalties on 46,000 of those, so you’ll make $115,000 on your book. Let’s say you do that in two years.
Now, let’s look at the self-publishing numbers. At $7 per book, you only need to sell $16,500 copies in the digital format to earn the same amount of money. If it takes you two years to do that, then you’ve done a lot better by self-publishing because you’ve got the rest of your life in ownership rights to take your writing to the next level.
Self-publishing makes a lot of sense. Don’t you think?
Tom Higgins Blog 