[peterarmstrong]

One thing to consider is royalty rate. If you sell 5000 copies for $20 and earn a dollar per copy, you've earned $5,000. (This math is based on 10% royalties on the publisher's portion, which is about half of retail. And no, fiction books don't sell for $20 typically, but I'm using this number to make the math easy.)

Now, if you sell 5000 copies of an ebook for $20 and earn 80% royalties, you earn $16 per copy, and earn $80,000. This is the royalty rate on Leanpub (disclosure: cofounder), but with Gumroad or blog + Stripe approaches you'd earn an even better percentage (if you want to run your own store).

For fiction, however, the dream combination is probably publishing in-progress with subscriptions. Currently it seems that Substack is the best for that. If you can get a few thousand people to subscribe for a few bucks a month, you could do well. The people at the top are doing really, really well: https://stratechery.com/2021/sovereign-writers-and-substack/

[markwisde]

Indeed. Royalties are the issue. I just published a book with a well-known editor and I’m making 10% per copy (ebook or print). The book is priced at more than 50$ and yet I’ll only make this amount by selling 10 copies (of course this is before tax).

Interestingly, if your editor has an affiliate program you can make as much money by advertising some link that leads to purchases. So as a writer, if you do both you end up getting 20% on these. It’s still not that much.

Recently, I wrote a small handbook about security and the mindset you need to care about security in your company (https://www.securityhandbook.io) and I self published it for 20$ using stripe checkout. Every purchase yields me a bit more than 19$, which feels amazing every time as I directly get the money. I actually made more money selling this self published book than with my big editing company.

[beezle]

I have had a 300 page, trade sized (6x9)soft cover book in publication since late 2012. Lightning Source/Ingram Spark handles the printing and distribution. It is a very niche title that has sold about 1500 copies with the only advertising a max $1 daily limit google ad that runs only a few days/hours of the week.

Ingram allows publishers (I wear both hats) to set the wholesale cut and whether or not to take returns. Bricks and mortar book stores require you take take returns and give them at least a 50% cut. I never wanted to go there so do not take returns and give a 26% cut, 1% over the Amazon minimum.

My print cost is roughly $5.25 and I clear a little over $6 a copy. I also have a kindle e-book edition available directly through Amazon at a list of $9.99 that nets me $6.70 a copy. I sell print copies about 3:1 over the e-book.

Unless the title is a tome, it can be printed as b&w with a print cost in the $4-8 range. Everything after that depends on your competition (for retail price) and your wholesale discount.

At the end of the day I don't see anyone getting rich on any book sales, print or electronic, that are not best sellers from known authors/celebrities. However, as supplemental income you can definitely make some coin with little post authorship effort whether print or e-book.

[la_fayette]

Ok cool, congratulations to the security handbook! I have checked prices for printing books, because I am in the process of writing a regional mountain bike guide book. Although, I only find deals for 3-5$ per book... 1$ seems quite cheap to me.

[panopticon]

It's hard to tell based on the material available on the website, but it looks like their book isn't physical. If you go through the checkout process, it doesn't gather shipping information. I assume the <$1 figure was just the Stripe transaction costs.

[markwisde]

Yes indeed! It is an ebook. I should probably write that in the landing page :)

[dorchadas]

Can I ask how you went about self-publishing and selling via a website? I'm considering this with a couple of short guidebooks I've written for learning a specific language, among other things, and am very curious how you got started and set it up with Stripe checkout and manage delivery, etc.

[markwisde]

- Create a landing page via Github and use Github pages or Cloudflare pages to automatically update your domain when you push to your repo

- set up stripe checkout on the client side only (so you dont have to deal with server logic)

- simply send the book by email when you get a customer

This was my MVP as I didn’t get the time to automate things on the server side. As it’ll get more tedious I’ll find the time to implement that, but so far it’s worked well!

[tidenly]

I beg you, please - add padding-left:0; to that Table of Contents section ul

[markwisde]

You mean text-align: left?

[underdeserver]

I'd wrap the ul with a div with display: inline-flex and set text-align: left.

[u678u]

This model assumes the publisher does nothing. At least if you buy a OReilly or Wiley book you know it will be a decent standard. Many ebooks are junk and its not always obvious which ones.

[sdgasg]

Yup, having been burnt by a few bad e-book purchases (both, fiction and non-fiction), now I stick with big name publishers. Unless books are recommended by trusted Twitter or hn accounts.

[benibela]

And advertising is a big expense (when you cannot post it on HN)

Afair I read a post about self-published fantasy authors, and the only author who earned over 100k, also paid like 50k for ads

[mritchie712]

This is self promotion done well. Provide insight into the problem you solve and explain where you fit into this story. Nice job.

[peterarmstrong]

Thanks :)

Ironically, I've been talking about the relationship between lean publishing and serial fiction for a long time (for example, this video from a conference talk I did in 2013 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozO0kOnqmyA), but Leanpub has never hit anything close to product-market fit for fiction. We do well in our niche of computer programming / data science / business types of books, but we have essentially no traction in fiction for a number of reasons.

If an author was going to use Leanpub for fiction, the right thing to do would be to use our toolchain to generate the ebook and print-ready PDF, but then to also publish it on Amazon KDP and Wattpad for the exposure. For example, my teenage son did this with his debut sci-fi novel: he wrote it in Word (since he didn't want to write in Markdown, despite my best efforts to convince him that Markdown was superior), did a git push to his book repo on GitHub, generated the ebook on Leanpub (our Word support is an unofficial hidden feature; we just use pandoc to turn the .docx into Markdown first), and then uploaded it to Amazon. Ironically, the worst thing about this whole process was at the end: he also had to copy and paste the chapters into Wattpad when he did an update, and Wattpad wants small chapters for page views, so the copying and pasting was a very slow manual process...

[mritchie712]

My wife has toyed with the idea of writing romance novels. Do you have many romance writers on Leanpub? Her thinking is to keep the "trashiness" of most romance but improve on the story and writing. She keeps saying "I need a publisher", but I was thinking there must be a simple way to publish straight to Amazon, looks like that's Leanpub!

[moron4hire]

DIY publishing through Amazon is dead easy. Source: I once packed up my blog into a Word doc and had it published on Amazon in a couple of hours one night.

Naturally, I did it to win a bet. But the bet was designed to teach a friend of mine a lesson, that he was using the unknown difficulty of self-publishing as an excuse to not work on his book. He finally stopped procrastinating and finished his manuscript within a few months.

The hard part of selling books is the selling part. I similarly goaded my own wife into writing a series of sci-fi novels and we (pre-pandemic) had been going to book fairs to sell them. We maybe did two a year, mostly just for fun. We usually sell enough to cover our expenses (printing fees, booth fees, gas to travel, food while we're out). But along the way, she's earned a handful of loyal readers.

We've never put a lot of effort into it, but she sells a few hundred copies a year of her three books. It's not bad, especially for a vanity project. There is a clear line pointing from "effort in selling" to "books sold".

Most publishers these days won't even look at you unless you already have an active readership. We've met a lot of other authors at the book fairs, seeing the same people every year. The ones who have publishing deals are having to do all their own selling, just like us, but didn't get to choose their own cover and are giving up a huge chunk of cash to the publisher. For what? So they can say they're "published"? Meh.

I've seen a lot of people approach their projects as, "If you build it, they will come". I'm sorry, but that's just not a thing. The movie from which that quote comes from (Field of Dreams) is about a literal miracle. You have to sell the book. You have to get out and beat pavement, whether you get a publishing deal or not. So if you have to do the work, you might as well keep the money.

[peterarmstrong]

Regardless of what type of book your wife is writing, if she uses Leanpub she needs to do the upload to KDP herself: Leanpub doesn't currently do anything here.

There are other companies like BookBaby which do the "publish to Amazon for you" type of thing; Leanpub currently does not do that. We are just a toolchain to make ebooks plus an optional storefront to sell them. You can sell the ebooks you produce using Leanpub on any storefront such as KDP; you own your work. We do not have many romance writers on Leanpub, and a simple look at our homepage will explain why: our storefront looks like a place for computer programming books, not romance novels.

Also, most romance novels are written in Word, not Markdown, and our Word support is a hidden feature, kind of like the secret menu at In-N-Out burger. The way our Word support works is that you write in a Dropbox folder (or using GitHub or Bitbucket), and you make your Book.txt file list one or more Word files (instead of Markdown files) as the manuscript content. Then when you click the button to preview or publish the ebook, we generate the PDF, EPUB and MOBI based on those Word files, and you can do whatever you want with them. It's actually pretty smooth once you set it up, but it sounds really complicated, and we don't market it at all: hence another reason we don't have many romance writers on Leanpub!

Anyway, if that sounds like a useful thing then we may be worth a shot. Leanpub book landing pages look nice and professional, but in terms of attracting an audience of readers for a romance novel, we are not going to be much help. This is why places like Wattpad do well in this regard. (Leanpub does help attract an audience for our computer programming books and similar types of books, of course, primarily through our weekly and monthly sale newsletters.)

Frankly, my recommendation for any aspiring first-time novelist with a small social media following would be to publish in-progress on Wattpad first to see if they get traction, and then to consider Substack and Amazon KDP for places to monetize if they do. Then once they've gotten to that point, if they're looking for tools to produce a nice ebook to sell on KDP, Leanpub is one of the options they can use as a toolchain.

(On the other hand, if they have a reasonable social media following, they could skip Wattpad and go directly to Substack, KDP or even Leanpub and point their followers at the appropriate landing page for their book...)

[Mehdi2277]

There are smaller similar sites to wattpad that are easier to get viewers for new novels. I like tapas, but probably several more worth exploring (unsure if woopread is only translations or supports self publishing). I'd likely submit chapters to several sites at once as a new author just to increase chance of building an initial following.

[hellbannedguy]

I don't know if I should give any advice.

But there are so many publishers/companies that prey on people who want to write, or think they are good enough to publish.

They are called Vanity Publishers.

It's a huge scummy business. It all seems kosher because the customer agrees to the deal.

[webmaven]

Vanity Publishers (and variants like poetry "competitions") are a huge stain on the publishing industry. SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) maintains the Writer Beware website, a set of resources documenting, naming and publicizing such predators and their practices:

https://www.sfwa.org/other-resources/for-authors/writer-bewa...

[cultofmetatron]

you can publish directly. no need for leanpub.

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/

[peterarmstrong]

Agreed! We don't do anything to help with that part of the process: you need to use that page either way :)

[watwut]

Self publishing is easy. Finding audience is hard.

[cmsefton]

> For fiction, however, the dream combination is probably publishing in-progress with subscriptions

As someone who likes to write fiction myself, the idea of publishing in-progress feels incredibly alien. Typically, if I finish writing something, it's a first draft that I would revisit a few months later and rework. How are authors handling this aspect of wanting to re-edit if they're publishing chapters on the go? I seem to recall Stephen King describing locking his manuscripts away for six months before revisiting them. The in-progress model seems to work against this type of workflow, or are there ways of dealing with that?

[inglor_cz]

This was incredibly common back in the early 1900s. Whole books were at first published in one-page installations in newspapers. Including the most famous Czech novel, Good soldier Švejk.

Prior to the advent of radio and TV, this was the best way how to hit a huge audience at once. And for the newspaper, it was a way to entice people to buy the next issue.

[Joker_vD]

That was also common in the XIX century as well: that's how Alexander Dumas and Charles Dickens were published.

[webmaven]

> That was also common in the XIX century as well: that's how Alexander Dumas and Charles Dickens were published.

It wasn't exactly uncommon in the early XX either, during the "Golden Age" of SFF:

https://www.andrewliptak.com/blog/2015/01/22/the-history-of-...

[cmsefton]

Right, so it's basically serialisation. Interesting, I always saw serialisation as releasing an already finished novel bit by bit, but just reading about the history of serialisation, it seems that was not always the case. Thanks for giving me the pointer.

[d0100]

> the dream combination is probably publishing in-progress with subscriptions

If you are into Chinese webnovels you'll be familiar with the subscription predatory practices that big companies like Qidian have, where the real cost of a whole 1500-chapter novel (inflated because of the perverse incentives of subscription-based revenue) ends up being close to 500USD

It is sad watching the transition from fan translations' funding trough donation pooling into predatory big-novel subscriptons/per chapter "tokens"

[Dylan16807]

What's that in word count, and how often are the chapters coming out?

[tpxl]

Chapters are often 1-3 pages long and come out every day/few days.

[d0100]

Usually 2-3k words per chapter and two daily chapters

[kbenson]

> For fiction, however, the dream combination is probably publishing in-progress with subscriptions. Currently it seems that Substack is the best for that.

Depending on audience and how you advertise to them, I've seen people be really successful on Patreon. I outlined some of that in a different comment here earlier, but $15k+ a month (from Patreon alone, not including other publishing that you can also do) is achievable and I've seen it more than once on somewhat esoteric genre fiction at Patreon.

[swyx]

totally. I basically do blog + stripe, selling 1.5k copies with an ASP of $90, and I keep 97% of it. it was a pretty productive use of 2 months (altho i do spend about 2-3 hours a week continuing to market it and to serve the book community)

would have loved to use leanpub but it had issues, as already reported to leanpub support :)

[yesenadam]

> but it had issues

What were they? (Particularly if they're still issues)

[peterarmstrong]

We treat all author support issues to [e-mail] as confidential, of course. For author support issues which are fine to discuss in public, you can see our author forum at https://community.leanpub.com/c/authors ... If you look there, you can see a representative sample of the issues people have had recently. (I don't want to turn this HN thread into a Leanpub author support forum thread, of course! However, our authors typically seem pretty happy with our service...)

[swyx]

i dont wanna air their dirty laundry but go try them out and if you like them then great. they certainly seem to work for most people. they struggled greatly with my 500 page book and after about 6 hours of wrestling with it i just gave up.