[xivzgrev]

I can relate a bit. I also wrote a book that quickly faded into obscurity. The biggest learning I had was I had no audience. I needed to build that first with blog posts or what not, THEN write the book.

I’m surprised that’s not covered here in this article

[Aerroon]

Writing a book is like creating anything else. Whether you're writing a book, making music, producing goods or offering services, people need to actually try what you've made. This is why "advertising" is so important. Not necessarily traditional advertising, but some form of getting the word out about your amazing creation.

[dkarras]

With books, the time commitment you need from people for them to "try" what you created is immense compared to other efforts. Like if you are a painter, it takes a couple seconds for someone to have a look at what you created. If you are a musician, a few minutes spent on a track is enough. For a book, you need someone to sacrifice a few hours of their life for a non-guaranteed return, time they could spend reading something that they are practically guaranteed to enjoy. I don't write fiction, and don't read it, but I imagine it must be very hard for someone creating works of that sort.

[Aerroon]

I'm not so sure about that. I think most people won't continue reading a book that they don't like after the first few minutes while taking the description/summary into account. It would have to be well recommended for me to consider that.

I think fiction is going to move more and more towards the web novel model, where extremely long stories are published on a chapter by chapter basis. It has a far higher chance of attracting new readers, because new stuff is constantly happening surrounding the work.

[mikro2nd]

This is not the writer's job. It's what publishers are supposed to do.

[wayoutthere]

Maybe in 1995; but the industry has not worked like that since Amazon set up shop. Publishing was the first mass media industry to get disrupted. Non-essential work gets pushed down to the author / creator in such scenarios.

Music is the same; there was a time when your record company would pay for studio time, mastering, publicity, etc. Today? If you’re a serious artist you’re just expected to have $10k in recording gear and the knowledge of Logic Pro to produce your own songs and run a Twitch/Twitter/insta/tiktok account to connect with your fans. You honestly don’t even need a record company anymore since you can book a tour off Spotify listener count alone (touring is where the money in music is these days).

[pbhjpbhj]

So ebooks are much cheaper than printed books then, right. Obviously not. All the work the publishers aren't doing on them, and the material savings in not even publishing them to paper ... but ebooks cost more.

So what are publishers doing in return for the higher sales price of ebooks?

[wayoutthere]

Honestly? Book reviews. A literary agent will know lots of other authors who might be willing to write a review of your book. Good if you’re just starting out, unnecessary if you’re established.

And ebooks generally are cheaper; there’s a ton of $0.99 genre fiction available on Amazon.

[chillfox]

They might disagree about that though.

From the outside it looks like they operate more like VCs, publish lots of books, see what sticks.

[ghaff]

In fairness, making things "stick" includes things like marketing, sales, and distribution. Most publishers these days do the latter two but not so much the marketing and promotion part. For example, they're not setting up book tours or sending out review copies for the most part these days.

[SunlightEdge]

Yes that's a very good point. I was aiming for getting picked up by a big publishing house. These days though It's pretty essential you have some kind of audience first.

As I'm sure you know, marketing really is the worst. After years of work it's hard to be motivated enough to do too. But it's pretty essential.

[rjyoungling]

I had an interesting reply on Reddit a while back from someone who went the publishing route and regretted it.¹

"This is incredible advice. Great write up.

I want to reiterate and add to the first point: signing with the publisher before you have leverage.

I got really “lucky”. I was writing a non-fiction technical book and actually got in a competition between two publishers. I had never written before. Never published. I didn’t know what I was doing. But I knew that most first time authors end up self-publishing out of what I thought was desperation. But here I was sitting between two publishers who were fighting for my book.

I worked them a little against each other. I eventually got royalties up to 17.5% and got triple the advance of the original offer. At the time I thought that I had “made it”. I was guaranteed success. Not only did one publisher want me as a first time author, but two did and they even showed that support by increasing royalties and advances. I told everyone I knew that I was getting published. I figured that as soon as my book officially published that the publisher was going to go out and sell it like crazy. I figured I was the author, my job was to write it and the publishers job was to sell it. Now that I had a publisher, they would go sell it for me. I would be rich, my publisher would be rich. Everyone wins.

Oh how wrong I was.

To this day, I’m honestly not sure what a publisher does. I was harassed on the daily about my progress with the book. Then they needed changes all over the place. The book scope started to shift far away from what I originally intended it to be. The publisher was demanding a different book, claiming market research (which I don’t think was real). The book kept shifting and shifting. At the end, I was so glad to be done. I hated what I had written. It wasn’t the book I wanted. I wasn’t proud of it. But I figured it was my first book. No one loves their first of anything. So I was happy to be done, my first one was behind me. I learned a lot about the process. It was time to reap my reward, let the publisher sell the book, and start making money and work on my next one.

I did a few launch events at the request of my publisher. I organized these entirely. All my publisher did was demand that I figure it out. The publisher never sent a marketing team to sell my book. It was ALL on me. I started getting emails every week from the publisher asking what I was doing to sell the book. They started giving me lists of ideas for how I could go out and sell it. But they never really did anything to promote it themselves. I played along for a while but eventually just got annoyed. I was doing 100% of the work. They emailed it out to their email list a few times. Maybe the occasional mention on their site. But nothing significant.

Now I realize I might sound privileged and stuck up that I was refusing to go sell my book that I had written. Many people on here probably are thinking “well duh”. But here’s the thing, the finances don’t work out for me to grind away to sell my book. For example if I organize an event and sell 20 books, I’m making $60 or so with royalties. (I only get 17.5%). So for that event it might take me 2-3 hours to organize it. Plus a few hours to attend. Plus various other administrative stuff. I’m spending 6-10 hours to make $60. Meanwhile I make the publisher about $500 for all that work that I did by myself. Remember, I’m doing nearly all the work other than printing. So it wasn’t as much that I wasn’t willing to go run an event, it was just that I hated doing an event that made the publisher $500 and made me $60. I spoke at a conference once and sold around 100 copies. It was a “success” but I had to negotiate the speaking gig, plan the speech, go early to the event, wait around all day, spend 40-50 hours practicing, writing, prepping my speech, transport to and from the event. So I spent a whole day at the event and doing the event, plus another 50-60 hours of planning and preparing. Just to make around $300 for myself and my publisher $2,500. I really resented the publisher.

I actually somewhat enjoyed doing the events and selling the book. That’s not what bothered me. It was the amount of work to reward ratio. I also hated knowing how much money I was making the publisher who I felt wasn’t earning that money. If I self-published instead, then I would be keeping closer to the $2,500 for that speaking gig! That would be worth it! I could have done more speaking gigs and reused my speech and scaled it. It would have been worth it. But with my current arrangement of 17.5/82.5% it simply didn’t make financial sense for me.

Like OP said, the publisher needs to be able to make you 7x the sales that you could get yourself by self publishing. In this case I think my sales and the publishers sales were around 50/50.

It got worse as the publisher wanted me to do lots of one on one support with people that had bought the book (it’s a technical book so they essentially want consulting advice). Again, I hate to be rude here. But I’m only making $2-$3 per book sale. I can’t really sit down with every person that buys my book individually for 10 - 30 minutes. It just doesn’t make sense. If I was self-publishing and making $20+ per book then I’d be more willing to consider it. But at $2-3 it’s just a waste of my time.

I started to see that the publisher had a lot to gain here and almost nothing to lose. At first I figured that the advance was their risk. But after doing some math I realized that they earned back their advance on the first day. Remember they keep 82.5% of the sales. They earn back their advance far faster than I work over it.

In the end, I actually was “successful” for a first time book. I broke through my advance and started getting real royalty checks. I wasn’t quitting my day job (which I had btw), but it was nice extra money.

But this goes onto OP’s second point. A book with an expiration date. My nonfiction book was a technical book. It had an expiration date. The technology I was writing about becomes less relevant over time. I got about 1 year of solid royalty checks (after breaking through the advance) before hitting that expiration date. A book without an expiration date would make all that upfront work more worth it because I’d get the payout over the long tail. I will admit though, that even though my book had easily “expired”, I still get royalties on it. I just got a quarterly payment 2 weeks ago for $223.17. So it’s still making me about $1,000 per year. It’s not much, but it’s free money at this point. I’m not doing anything to support it.

The reason I wanted to tell this story is that in the end, as a first time publisher I think you should self publish. I got published and regretted it. It got me stuck in a position where I didn’t even want to sell my book a lot of times. I kept thinking I would write another one that more closely reflects what I wanted to write and then go self publish and sell that book.

I did the math about two years ago on that book after getting one of my quarterly royalty statements. I calculated what I would have earned if I had self-published the book given the numbers on this book from launch to that current date. My jaw dropped. I estimated about 80% margin (the book sells for $30 and costs about $7 to print self published). I would have made a ton of money if I had self published and done all the same work I did with the publisher.

I really recommend self publishing your first book. Publishers really don’t make sense unless your book is going to sell at a scale that you can’t manage yourself. I also highly recommend that anyone who is considering a publisher right now should interview them. Ask the publisher what they can do for you. We often are afraid of publishers because we feel like they hold our destiny. But they don’t. You’re going to make them a lot more money than they will make you. So make them earn it. Ask what they can do to sell more books. They should have a plan."

Notes ¹https://www.reddit.com/r/writers/comments/mkhqwg/714456_in_r...

[rjyoungling]

Excellent point.

What you're pointing out is the fundamental tenet our startup is build around.

When writing non-fiction, you start with a very clear promise, and you specify who it's for and who it's not for.

We talk about that in other articles on our site.

[vidarh]

I published a book in November. It's selling. Slowly. I'm not expecting it to be profitable for several years (I've self-published, and so I've had some costs such as a cover design, editing and proofreading). I'm ok with that - I'm writing a series, and everyone I talk to suggests sales for self-published series rarely do much until at least the third volume, and it's a hobby for the most part. It's only worth it for me because I write fast and it relaxes me. Even then, it's only worthwhile because I expect sales to keep dripping in for many years (and that was a key motivation for writing a series, as well).

What I've learned as well is that most self-published writers have not the fainted clue what publishers do to sell books and/or actively do not want to do what publishers do to sell books. E.g. the traditional sales process for a paperback starts 6 months plus before publishing, and involves calling up distributors and retailers, and sending out review copies for months. It takes an upfront investment and time, and that too will only work if people believe your book will sell for them - if you don't have a big-name publisher behind you who can promise a marketing campaign, you're back to needing to have an audience (or a very compelling story).

Most self-published authors don't even know how to ensure they get reviews. It took me ages too, before I found someone to spend time reaching out to potential reviewers (it's a minefield; so many scammers - I was extremely cautious)

Advertising is a total minefield - most ads, including Amazon ads where the purchasing intent is a lot stronger, take ages of tweaking to get a positive ROI, and even then you need an audience to get decent returns, because getting people to buy based on an ad if they've never heard of you is hard.

After all that, you can still expect it to take years to get traction.

Charlie Stross commented on Twitter recently that it took him at least a decade (it might have been longer; maybe 15 years?) before he surpassed 5k pounds a year from his writing. That was with a publisher. Of course he's writing relatively niche sci fi. If you go for an easier market, like romance or thrillers, you may have a better shot (maybe; the competition is tougher too). But even professional authors who eventually make a good living off their writing often take a long time to get there.

One of the things a publisher gives you, that many who choose to self-publish don't want, though, is an objective third party assessing if you've written something that they think is likely to sell. Of course they can be wrong, and frequently are. But they're investors, effectively, considering whether it would responsible for them to put their resources and time at risk to back a book or an author. They're selective because frankly most authors are not very good, and many one the ones that are good or even amazing are unlikely to sell or unlikely to sell to their audience.

When self-publishing you get to ignore that and pretend you're the best ever. Or you can be more realistic, and expect that you most likely won't sell much, but of the people who buy, some portion will be looking forward to your next book. And so unless you're truly awful, sales will at least slowly grow.

But odds are you won't make all that much. You might write far better than JK Rowling and still not sell very much because you write something that just doesn't catch the imagination of book buyers.

But if you're at least aware that being a self-published author means at least half your time will be sales and marketing rather than writing, you'll likely already do better than most self-published authors.

[rjyoungling]

>But odds are you won't make all that much. You might write far better than JK Rowling and still not sell very much because you write something that just doesn't catch the imagination of book buyers.

Really like that sentence. Very true.

>One of the things a publisher gives you, that many who choose to self-publish don't want, though, is an objective third party assessing if you've written something that they think is likely to sell. Of course they can be wrong, and frequently are. But they're investors, effectively, considering whether it would responsible for them to put their resources and time at risk to back a book or an author. They're selective because frankly most authors are not very good, and many one the ones that are good or even amazing are unlikely to sell or unlikely to sell to their audience.

I slightly disagree here. I don't know if this is true for fiction, but I don't think it's true for non-fiction.

Publishers can only asymmetrically help. They're able to somewhat accurately spot which books might work, but they can't do the inverse (spot which books won't).

[pbhjpbhj]

> if you've written something that they think is likely to sell //

Isn't it more "that they think they can sell and maximise their profit above other things they might choose to sell". It's close but has a couple of distinct differences. One is cost to them, the other is sellability (and by that publisher in particular).

[SunlightEdge]

Woh. This is a really fantastic post. Thanks for sharing your thoughts/knowledge.

What's the name of your book that you published in November?

[vidarh]

The Year Before the End. There's a site at https://galaxybound.com (that needs a designer to clean it up.... And contact details etc. in my profile)

I'll give the caveat that I'm new to this too - just spent more time than the typical writer looking into the business side of things...

[SunlightEdge]

Cool. I'll buy your book. Nice title.