Our current wrap-up on print versus indie publishing will hold some surprises, and every element is important in your decision-making process. So, listen up, and read the entire blog, plus the past blogs, before you make up your mind about which path to choose.
Stay with us. We’ll continue to chime in on this as situations change and when we receive questions.
SURPRISE # 1
THE DOLLARS IN TRAD PUB
VS. THE BUCKS IN INDIE PUB
Money the Traditional Publishing Way
Let’s assume you get an offer to sign a contract with a New York print publisher. You’ve spent time, and probably money, getting an agent and a deal, but those costs are impossible to estimate. You’ll be offered an advance, probably on the basis of several chapters and a proposal. (Advances at regional and academic houses are seldom worth talking about.) Assuming you’re a newbie, you would start at the bottom of the food chain. Your advance would likely be five thousand bucks. To get higher, you must demonstrate that your sales justify the outlay.
Generally, if your first book appears to be headed toward earning five grand in royalties, you’ll get offered the same or somewhat more for a second book. The first big step with any publisher is for you to earn back your advance.
This advance will be paid, generally, half on signing the contract and half when the manuscript is delivered and accepted (D&A in publishing lingo). Sometimes you may not get the final payment until publication day.
What does this mean to you in practical terms? That you get $2,500.00, for instance, this month and another $2,500.00 next fall, after you’ve turned in the book and the editor has said yes. (“No” is rare when the publisher has already invested $2,500.00) That five grand should have given you a month or two of relief from waiting tables or tending bar or whatever you do to support your writing habit. That’s worthwhile.
About a year later you may get word of a foreign sale or paperback sale that will pay back a big chunk of your advance, or all of it. If you’re lucky, there might be a movie option for about five grand. Thinking of an outright movie sale is star-gazing.
On the other hand, the book won’t be published until autumn of 2015 or spring of 2016, and royalties, if any, won’t start coming until about a year after that.
In sum: at least five grand from January, 2014 until about three years later. Slender, but it’s a start. And in those three years you should have written at least three more books, at increasing advances, and have a career beginning to roll.
Summary of bucks the traditional way: After the effort of getting a deal, a start of $2,500, then another $2,500.00 after a few months. Altogether so far, five grand minus 15% for your agent. In two or three years an unknown amount more for royalties, probably still in four figures, again less 15%. So five to ten thousand dollars over several years.
Money the Digital Way
Now let’s suppose you want more than to be able to tell your family and friends that you’re published and you want a career writing books. You think digital publishing is free. So this month you put your book up on Kindle and see how the effort and monies compare.
Instead of getting an advance, you spend time and some money to get started. You must write the entire book to have something to put up, increasing your time and effort. If you’re savvy, you’ll spend several thousand dollars to have it edited and copy-edited (and this estimate is low). Plus the time for editing, rewriting, and copy-editing. You’ll pay several hundred dollars to have a cover designed. You’ll spend a couple of thousand dollars having a good web site built. On publication day, you’re out a bunch of time, just as though you’d gone the trad route, and you’re in the hole more than five thousand dollars.
Your counterpart who went the print route is up five thousand dollars. Maybe after a number of years you’ll catch up with her, maybe not. But money in the pocket now is worth a lot more than money that arrives several years later. Ask your accountant.
So, where are you, comparatively?
Here are the advantages of the woman who took the print route:
- She’s ahead of you in her bank account, and so has more time to write the next book.
- She’s vetted as a professional writer, given a seal of approval by a real publisher. You’re not.
- In the eyes of the industry, she’s a member of the writing community. You’re a wannabe.
- In the vast majority of cases she’s earned her advance back (publishers don’t stay in business by over-paying on advances) and so has readers who aren’t just family and friends. She has the start of a reputation, and a finger hold on a career. You don’t.
- She has reviews in legit newspapers and magazines. You don’t.
- She’s one of maybe a thousand of the year’s new writers. You’re one of the million new wannabes.
- She’s probably spending a substantial amount of time doing social marketing to supplement the publisher’s marketing. On the other hand, you’re learning as fast as you can to blog well, how to post on different sites, how to use PhotoShop, etc.—in short, doing all the marketing for your book, and taking away time you need to write the next book.
- Though she’s getting a much smaller royalty than you are, she’s probably selling a lot more books. She’s taking a significant risk in trying to establish a writing career. You’re doing the equivalent of trying to win the lottery.
IMPORTANT: There are workable alternatives for you in indie publishers. You can work with one of the companies who assist self-publishing writers to distribute their books. Two we believe to be valuable are Draft2Digital and BookBaby. Both will format your book for retailers other than Kindle alone, saving you a good deal of work, and arrange distribution through these retailers. Draft2Digital offers these services for 10% of your royalties, BookBaby for $99.00 in advance and 15% of the royalties. Wider distribution will probably mean more sales—if you do the marketing.
SURPRISE #2
LOOK AT THE RIGHTS YOU GIVE UP IN PRINT PUBLISHING
There’s another side to this story, and it’s a big advantage for self-publishing. When you put a book up on Kindle, Nook, or any of their cousins, you give them no rights at all. They’re just retailers. If you get a good shot at print publishing and want to get your book back, you can take your digital book down in about two minutes. Or if you just don’t like a book, in no time the whole thing can be fini, kaput, done and gone.
In traditional publishing you give up a boatload of rights, often for a century or more. Incredible? We think so, too. So do lots of writers and their agents. But right now this is the way things are, and you’re entitled to say, “Hell, no.”
Here’s the current situation. Most big New York publishers right now are avid to get all the rights to your work they can. E-books and PODs have brought on a huge change. Publishers no longer have to pay to manufacture books, customarily an average of about three dollars on a $24.95 hardback. But on e-books the manufacturing cost is next to nothing. The warehousing costs are nothing. The returns from book stores are zero. Publishers’ expenses are disappearing like smoke in a gale. That’s why they can make a profit selling e-books at half the cost of print books.
Just as important, or more, they’ve learned from the digital revolution that any new technology could be next, and they want to be in a position to take advantage. That means they want to keep literary rights as long as possible as a hedge against the unknown. Why not a hundred years? Or more?
Result—a big change in policy. For more decades than anyone can remember, when a book has gone out of print, the rights have reverted to the author. And writers made a lot of money from these reversions. My first book, Give Your Heart to the Hawks, in print for four decades now, has come out from five different publishers. Those publishers have paid over a hundred thousand dollars in advances and royalties for the privilege of selling my book. Which has helped me put food on the table.
The new contracts of most New York houses, however, make reversion more unlikely than a strip tease by an octogenarian. Here’s the provision:
If a book earns a minimum of $150 in either of two consecutive royalty periods, it is considered in print. So the rights don’t revert to the author.
In print? It’s odd to think of some dots on a computer as being in print, but maybe. Same for the power to convert electrical impulses into a POD.
A hundred fifty dollars, even at the low royalty set by publishers, will require the sale of only about a hundred books over an entire year. That bar is so low that from now on the chance of reversion is nill, and the income from repeated publications will be zip. Millions of dollars that used to support writers’ families will now enrich giant corporations.
Example of what this means: A Utah colleague of mine, author of a hugely popular series just completed, is in his thirties and probably has a life expectancy of, say fifty more years. The law provides that these works are covered by copyright for another seventy years after his death. That means that publisher, on the basis of a trickle of sales, can keep the rights through the year 2134! This writer’s estate is diminished, his great-great-great-great grandchildren stripped of family wealth.
We are unable to believe that such money-grabbing will be allowed to last. We hope that even the giant companies have more conscience than that.
But it raises a big question: Though writers get a big advantage in dollars and in reputation by being in print, is it worth surrendering a century of rights for the privilege?
THE THIRD AND LAST SURPRISE—
WHAT ABOUT THE REST OF THOSE RIGHTS?
In a long-established industry tradition, sub-rights—foreign sales, audio rights, and the like—have been divided equally between writers and publishers. Suddenly, and without discussion, publishers have changed that radically. The royalty for writers on e-books is 25% of the net to the publishers.
Look at what this means. A big publisher puts out a hardback at $24.95 and on the same day releases it on Kindle at, typically, about $12.99. Kindle gives the publisher a 35% royalty at that price level, and the writer get one-fourth of that, a little less than 9% of the retail price. From 50% to 9% in one short legal phrase.
Since publishers have almost no manufacturing costs for e-books, their taking the lion’s share is hard to justify.
Many industry observers, perhaps most, think this inequality will not last. We can only hope it doesn’t.
—Win
About Meredith and Win Blevins
Faith, how about joining us in WHAT IF? Friday. (Although, for our mailing list, it will probably be later. Apparently AWeber came down with the flu)
http://wp.me/p2xhqz-iQ
We’d love to see what you come up with. Feel free to use the scenario as your first sentence, or bag it and just use the scenario. Thanks!
W & M
Oooo, that looks fun, and good for me, since my writing weaknesses are titles, log lines and opening paragraphs.
But not tonight, Josephine. I am WAY late on 3 manuscripts, so must defer the pleasure till next week /:-(
Thanks for the invite, tho. Looking forward to playing soon.
Cheers
F
Great information. As a traditionally published author of 11 books, thinking of going Indie for my next book, the material is invaluable, and the best I’ve yet to come across. The comments from readers are also terrific and valuable. Thanks so much. — Rita
Dear Rita —
Big THANKS for your good words. We do our research and then try to be even-handed about what we’ve discovered.
It’s a juggle, and can be a jungle, for writers who have been published by traditional houses. We sometimes rock that same boat, too.
And, yes, we’re fortunate to have some terrific people adding to the discussion. The more intelligent information we have, the better our choices will be.
Rita, please write in again if you have any particular beefs, loves, questions that you’d like to see addressed.
Best to you — M & W
PS – pardon me for not taking the time to edit my own post!
Before I go slit my wrists for screwing up in public, I should correct “That kind of background and experience aren’t worth much” to ISN’T worth much. “Kind” is the subject, not “background and experience.” Ugh.
Cheers,
Faith
I do that all the time, and so does Win. In our world, you only need to be a grammar Nazi when you’re editing a book.
best — M & W
No one would have noticed if you hadn’t ratted yourself out, Faith.
LOL! Pretty sick when you serve as your own stool pigeon, huh?
Win and Meredith,
Your blog is the most lucid and informative thing I’ve read on traditional publishing vs. e-books.
I had no idea that copyright reverting had changed so much. I want to drag out my most recent contract and see what I signed; maybe it was drafted before the changes.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge and experience. You manage to slip in bits of humor and enliven what is often a dry subject.
BIG THANKS.
Give Meredith the credit for the humor. Well, actually, I try…
Win
This continues to be a fine series, an eyes-wide-open examination of issues from all sides. I have found, concerning Secret Number Two, publishers hanging onto rights more or less forever in the digital age, that in most cases they aren’t worth keeping. Books simply croak. They’re published, they’re gone, the world moves on to other things. Moby Dick, a dead and forgotten book that was revived in the 20s, after a long hiatus, is the rarity. Most other dead titles are mere curiosities without market strength in future times. That’s because tastes and perceptions evolve. This is especially true of genre fiction, which is usually defunct about a year or two after publication. It’s gone. The author loses little if the house hangs onto rights for a century. In western fiction, I’m aware of thousands of titles published in the 30s, 40s, and 50s that won’t see daylight. A few, mostly Zane Grey and Max Brand, have achieved some sort of ongoing market. But they are the exception. I have a number of reverted titles that I have not put into electronic form, simply because they won’t recover the cost. The presumption, often stoked by an author’s night-time fevers, that a book is deathless unto the seventh generation or so, is mostly just wishful thinking. So traditional publishers aren’t walking away with much of anything except in rare cases.
Another wonderful addition to the series (did you consider making THAT the base for another book??). It is informative and balanced and allows people to either go into this with (somewhat more) open eyes, or to be more aware of where they are and what decisions they have ahead (or can make). Great stuff! Thank you Win!
YOU’RE WELCOME, NA’AMA. That’s what we want, to open eyes.
–Win
A PS to my earlier post: one author I work with is a “hybrid,” still has one major and two smaller traditional publisher contracts, and s/he’s working hard and fast to convert to solely indie.
On the other hand, a number of authors on the industry discussion group I belong to plan to keep a foot in both camps and find that doing both enhances their standing, name recognition and profits. And, of course, a fair percentage of the indies who are doing well (but not a majority) already had some success traditionally published.
An interesting recent development is the number of major, NYT/etc bestselling authors who are raking it in self-pubbing titles that have reverted to them recently.
Yes, Faith, we see the same trend. We ourselves publish both ways for new books, and we’re exploiting our back list in self-pubbing venues.
How many of your emerging writers intend to start with indie pubbing and hope to end up in print? I think a majority of my students and clients want to end up in print sooner or later. A matter of validation.
–win
All the authors I work with publish both print and ebook, but if you mean “in print” as issued by a traditional publishing house, then I’d say only two so far have that as a goal. But I know darned well that if any one or them was approached by a major house, they would of course be very interested what the publisher has to offer.
I also work with one author who turned down a major NY contract just last month. Although I think he still might change his mind. That validation is a mighty big carrot.
Meredith here:
1) There is a reason it’s a mighty big carrot.
2) A writer can go with indie publishing at the same time they are being published by a major house and getting reviews by the trades. They still matter. Example: A good review by Library Journal can sell a lot of hardcover books to libraries. That’s terrific.
3) Something is getting lost here. An editor at a house is more than a person who helps you make your book what you want it to be. After your ms. is polished up and everyone is happy with it, with the help of your editor, the sales cycle begins. Your editor is your proponent. Your editor is the person who talks to the sales staff. First they sell your book to the house. Then they sell it to the folks on the ground. They get marketing and publicity on board. This is never going to happen with a book that is self-published. There is no shepherd. The writer must market like crazy in any case, but when you are self-published, it can be pretty overwhelming. And, caught up in the fear of failure or lure of success, it can cost a lot of time and bucks. We’ve seen it.
–Meredith
THANK YOU for writing, Faith.
Glad you made that point Meredith. Since I’m outside that culture, it’s all too easy for me to forget the role of editor as advocate, or shepherd, which must definitely be added to validation and industry connections as very large, succulent carrots. There’s nothing like it in the indie world. Buck definitely stops with the author, which can feel pretty daunting.
This has been a fun discussion, you two. Thanks for letting me play!
We love the play and great interchange.
Please get on the playground often!
Best to you — M & W
THANKS for chiming in, Richard.
It’s hard to respond, because some of our books are genre and some not. But we’ve put almost half of our 35 on Kindle, ones reverted by the publishers. After about four months, the income from them is increasing about 50% a month, and this last time was enough to make the house payment. That ain’t nothin.’ And as you know, some books have a long life. My first, GIVE YOUR HEART TO THE HEARTS, has been in print for 40+ years and is still producing income. My STONE SONG, nearly twenty years, the same.
We do find that active social marketing makes a big difference.
Win
First, thanks to both of you for this series. It has been very informative and will definitely be taking serious thought about which way to go. Still deciding on how serious to take my writing. With the traditional route, once you have signed a contract, do they have first shot at everything you write or could you be submitting some works through a publisher and at the same time put something else out digitally and sell it yourself through Amazon, etc?
Good information, Win. Appreciate it,
You’re WELCOME.
–Win
I work mostly with genre authors, but many of them put out a fully professional product, web site and marketing program for far less $$ than you estimated.
And also don’t forget that a self-published author isn’t spending years knocking on the doors of agents and publishers, so they start earning that much sooner. By the time your traditionally published author finally gets her/his full advance, not even counting that search time, an even moderately successful indie published author can easily equal that income, and far exceed it if you count door-knocking time.
Also, POD (print on demand) means there are NO up-front costs for print copies besides a fee of about $25 for setup.
Also, I think one of the two biggest reasons to go traditional – marketing – is no longer relevant. These days new authors seem to need a marketing plan and a web presence in place before they can even get an agent to talk to them, much less a publisher.
Of course the other big reason to go traditional – industry connections – still applies, but at least in genre world, the networking and community-building has resulted in some amazingly strong, intelligent support structures.
Betcha can’t guess which side of the fence I’m on!
But thanks for the great discussion. I have a few editing clients who really want to go traditional, and I’ve been sharing your posts with them.
Dear Faith–
THANKS for your note and your thoughts.
At TOR, where I worked, we editors thought as highly of genre writers as “literary” ones, or more highly. But the effort and cost of editing each is the same. And these costs seem well established by the Editorial Freelancers Ass’n, Kirkus Media, and similar organizations. A look at these sites will confirm that.
When we see lower offers on the internet, we wonder about the credentials of the editors. I wouldn’t want someone who had not been an editor at a major NY house, edited writers who had won major awards like the Edgar, and so on.
Unfortunately, it appears sometimes that these inexpensive editors may not even be clear about the differences between developmental editing, line-editing, copyediting, and proof-reading.
Our thought, put gently, is that you get what you pay for. And if a writer only wants a manuscript cleaned up a little, that’s fine. The price for that, though, will not get him a full-bore editing job.
–Win
Win, thank you for the reply.
Of course, with your long and successful history in traditional publishing, you would feel uncomfortable with anything less than an award-winning, NY pub house-experienced editor. That is to be expected.
And I completely agree that care is needed if an author is going to work with a less glitteringly credentialed editor. Doesn’t mean, however, that those editors don’t know what they’re doing…or that they do, to be perfectly honest. To me, that’s the important thing to keep in mind when an author decides to step outside the box.
Proof, as always, is in the pudding – in the editor/cover artist/formatter/web site designer’s products and reputation. Authors *can* find a less expensive way to publish a professional product in all respects, but I absolutely agree that, once they step off the well-worn paths, informed caution is mandatory.
Faith, you raise in my mind a question worth addressing. With a lot of people advertising themselves on the internet as editors, how are we to know those who know what they’re doing from those who don’t?
Personal experience: I was editor of my college newspaper, then an English prof for five years, then editor of the entertainment section of a major metropolitan daily. At the time I might have volunteered myself as a book editor. Now I realize I didn’t know diddly.
So what must we ask of people who put themselves forward as editors for our works? I would say, Have you edited fiction (or non-fiction or YA or epic fantasy or whatever) for an established publisher? For me, that is the standard. (Well, it would be nice if the editor had edited best-selling or award-winning writers, but…)
Is there standard that comes close? Probably. If you’ve published at least a dozen books that were edited by a professional, you’ve probably seen enough of how editing works to do it.
But knowing grammar, teaching lit, editing newspapers or newsletters or academic journals–I don’t think any of that means a thing. So maybe it’s not so hard to pick the able editors. Ask what their credentials are and apply these criteria.
–Win
Win,
I agree completely with your final paragraph. Well, with the whole thing, but your final paragraph notes the kinds of credentials that convince authors to make bad choices. That kind of background and experience aren’t worth much in terms of selecting a fiction editor. And the standards you propose make tremendous sense, but leave a lot of us who are really good at what we do…with nothing to do.
I’d suggest some additional ways to evaluate, because there ARE great, and even some fairly renowned, editors out there who don’t have major publisher credentials.
The first is, get a sample edit. Most working editors who haven’t edited for a major publisher are willing to provide sample edits of up to 20 pages at no charge, or for a nominal fee. Even beyond skill level, you need to discover if the editor is someone you’d be comfortable working with. It’s not the only important piece, but it’s a biggie, especially if you’re self-publishing.
Keep in mind that – even with the reduction in staff throughout the traditional publishing industry, and an embarrassing number of top-notch, experienced publishing house editors are freelancing after being replaced with recent and not very skillful (I was going to say not very bright, but scratch that) college grads – editors with the kind of background you recommend are not that easy to find .
Since there’s a huge indie demand for truly skillful cover artists, editors, formatters and so on, so I have two other suggestions:
1) Word of mouth. Get recommendations from fellow authors whose work you respect, and who are successful with your target audience or genre.
2) And take a look at the editor’s recent work, not only in terms of skill, but in terms of results. Check out the reviews on Amazon or B&N. Sales depend on so many things, but it’s not hard to skim reviews and find out whether the editor went beyond grammar basics to help the author put out a product that met or exceeded genre fan or literary expectations.
I’ll add that, in my own experience as an indie pub editor, indie editors literally cannot be held responsible for every little comma, stupid word choice, homophone or other strange anomaly that might creep into a manuscript after they’ve finished their job. More often than not a manuscript is messed with by legions of amateurs, including beta readers, proofreaders, formatters, friends, family, pets and well-meaning fans even after the editor has done their bit.