self-publishers – Percival Constantine

Last night, I was shown this blog post by Claude Forthomme. The link was shared with me by a fellow indie who was surprised by Forthomme’s headline, “Only 40 Self Published Authors are a Success, says Amazon.”

Only forty? That seems pretty low. Especially because the definition of success is extremely subjective.

One author may define success as winning awards. Another might define it by the size of their mailing list. Still another may say they aren’t successful unless they become a New York Times and/or USA Today best-selling author. For another, it might just be consistently hitting the top ten best-sellers in their genre on Amazon. Or earning a full-time income. Maybe attracting a movie deal.

Some feel successful just having published a book.

So let’s continue on with this post and look at the criteria for success:

40 self-published authors “make money”, all the others, and they number in the hundreds of thousands, don’t. This interesting statistic, recently revealed in a New York Times article, applies to the Kindle Store, but since Amazon is in fact the largest digital publishing platform in the world, it is a safe bet that self-published authors are not doing any better elsewhere.

“Making money” here means selling more than one million e-book copies in the last five years.

Okay, so “making money” is only defined as selling more than one million ebooks over the course of five years. That seemed awfully high to me, so I pulled out my calculator because I’m a writer and bad at math:

1,000,000 ÷ 5 = 200,000

So we need to sell 200,000 copies a year to be successful. Now break down the royalties for that. Every ebook retailer pays self-published authors 70% of every sale. The average price of an indie book falls between $2.99-$4.99. There are some exceptions, but that’s where you’ll find the majority. Let’s go with $2.99 for the purposes of this demonstration. For each $2.99 book sold, the author gets around $2. Fluctuates a bit when Amazon plays shenanigans with the price (sometimes it will show as being $2.90 or something), but $2 is a good number to work with.

200,000 * 2 = 400,000

Wait, so to be successful, we have to be making $400,000 a year in sales?!

Now don’t get me wrong, I would absolutely love to be making $400,000 a year. With that kind of money, I would do…well, I don’t even know what I would do, because I’ve never had that much money.

But if that’s the criteria we’re using to define success, then of course there are only a small percentage of writers who are pulling that down. Expand that beyond the writing profession—there are only a small percentage of people pulling that down!

So how do we define “making money” or “success”? For the purposes of this post, I’m going to define success as making a full-time income off book sales. The median income in the United States is around $50,000 a year. You don’t need to be making that much money in order to survive—if you’re living in Oklahoma, you can get by on a lot less per year than if you’re living in San Francisco. But $50,000 a year is a good number to use for our purposes.

50,000 (our annual income goal) ÷ 2 (royalty per book) = 25,000

We need to sell 25,000 books a year in order to make $50,000. Of course, this doesn’t take expenses into account, such as the cost of advertising and book production plus the additional expenses of maintaining a website and mailing list. But those expenses vary per author and this gives us a base idea to work with.

Selling 25,000 books a year may seem like a lot. Especially if you only publish one book a year. But most indies publish more than that. Say you publish five books every year:

25,000 (target ebook sales) ÷ 5 (number of books per year) = 5,000

Now we only need to sell 5,000 copies of each title every year to make a full-time income. If you have a series that draws your readers in, this becomes even easier. Readers who loved book 1 already know they like your writing and your characters, so it’s far more likely that they’re going to continue on to book 2.

You aren’t just going to leave your entire income dependent on those five books, though. Each year you’re publishing, you’re also building up your backlist, which gives you a way to generate even more passive income. Writing’s different from other jobs in that not only can you work without pants, but you can still make money off the work you’ve completed in years past.

In year one you’ll publish five, then in year two you’ll publish another five. So now you have ten books generating income. This lessens the amount of copies each book needs to sell in order to get us that $50,000 a year income.

25,000 (target ebook sales) ÷ 10 (books from years 1-2) = 2,500

In year two, we only have to sell 2,500 copies per title to make $50,000.

So let’s jump ahead to year five since the Forthomme used five years as the barometer. If you write five books a year, then by the fifth year you’ll have twenty-five titles generating money.

25,000 (target ebook sales) ÷ 25 (total books in your catalogue from years 1-5) = 1,000

We only have to sell a thousand copies per title per year in order to make a full-time income.

And if you’re selling at the $3.99 or $4.99 price points, you make more money per sale, so you need to sell fewer copies per title. This income also doesn’t take into account other formats, like audio or print.

Of course there’s no guarantee this is how it will work out. The first book in a series is usually the one that sells the most and there’s drop-off as the series continues. Few people will start a series with the fifth book. I don’t know any author who sells the same number of copies across all their titles.

But the point of this is that the definition of success as selling millions of books isn’t really an accurate number for indie authors. You don’t need to sell millions of books to be a success. You don’t even need to sell hundreds of thousands of books. You only need to sell tens of thousands of books in a year to be successful.

“Oh, only tens of thousands?”

Okay yeah, it’s still a lot and a difficult bar to reach for many. There’s a lot of work you have to do in order to move those tens of thousands of books per year. I know I’m definitely not there yet. I hope to be one day. But I just wanted to point out that it’s not as insurmountable a gap as it seems.

EDITED TO ADD: The New York Times article that prompted Forthomme’s comment about only forty authors being successful actually said something quite different:

Over the last five years, close to 40 independent authors have sold more than a million copies of their e-books on Amazon, the company said.

The wording is pretty different from Forthomme’s comment. Neither Amazon nor even NYT said that only forty indie authors are successful, but that forty have sold more than a million copies.

Last month, Chuck Wendig posted an entry on his terribleminds blog, entitled Self-Publishing Is Not The Minor Leagues. Like a lot of Chuck’s posts, it’s a great read. I’m just going to quote a small portion of it, because you should read the whole thing:

The attitude that pervades self-publishing is that it’s a good place to test your craft, to hone your work. We are reminded constantly that the cream floats to the top, that all the crappy self-publishing efforts have no effect on anything or anybody ever despite evidence to the contrary. The culture forgives and sometimes congratulates even the most meager of efforts because of how courageous someone is to take the plunge to publish their own work. The culture says, “Just click publish!” The culture criticizes the faults of traditional-publishing, but excuses (or celebrates) its own. And yet, sometime in the same breath, self-publishing gets painted as a path to traditional publishing, not as a path separate and scenic all its own.

The culture is full of contradictions.

One of the things that he talks about is that self-publishers should be more critical. The basic gist of it is this: if you think your writing is good enough to complete with traditional publishing, then you should make sure that it is presented as professionally as traditionally-published books.

That means revising. That means proofreading. That means editing (and that means getting someone else to edit it as well). That means formatting it properly. That means either designing a professional cover or hiring someone to do it for you.

Now to me, that all sounds pretty non-controversial, right?

Well apparently, I was wrong. Because it has set off a firebomb in the self-publishing community. The entry generated 217 comments, and not all of them were agreeing with Chuck. Over at kboards, there was a lot of pissing and moaning about it, so much that Chuck posted a follow-up. Then there was another post. And another.

You can read some of the comments from people who vehemently disagree with Chuck. As usual when someone suggests a bit more self-criticism, there have been cries and shouts of, “YOU’RE TRAMPLING ON OUR FREEDOM!” One person said that mediocrity and half-assed books should be celebrated and then, in the same post, said that no one is suggesting that self-published books shouldn’t be the best they can be.

Yeah, I know. I was confused, too.

Here is a fact about self-publishing: it has a terrible reputation. Fairly recently I had a conversation with someone who said that if it’s not good enough to be accepted by a publisher, it’s not good enough to be published, period. Yes, that is a very ignorant way of thinking, but it’s also, unfortunately, not uncommon.

And this race-to-the-bottom, anything goes, “it’s okay if your book looks like shit” mentality does not help. It only encourages the thinking among the general public that self-publishing is a toilet. The fact that a site like Lousy Book Covers even exists is not encouraging.

Is it true that all self-published books are crap that no self-respecting publisher would ever touch? Absolutely not. Is it true that all traditionally-published books are staggering works of brilliance? Hell no. There are both self-published books that are far superior to traditionally-published books, and there are both self-published and traditionally-published books I wouldn’t deem good enough to throw in my fireplace (if I had a fireplace).

If you want to be taken seriously as a professional writer, then you need to start approaching your work with the mindset of a professional.

I’ve seen some retorts to this. Like “well people can browse free samples on Amazon and then they’ll know if a book is worth their time.” Say you need five pages before you decide whether or not a book is worth your money. So you read five pages of one book. It’s poorly edited (if edited at all), there are grammar and spelling mistakes that would cause your high school English teacher to smash the blackboard, and the formatting is sloppy. So you then go to another book. Same problem. And another. And another. Say you go through the first five pages of ten books and they’re all terrible. That’s fifty pages you’ve just read. Would you keep going or would you stop and jump over to the best-seller lists?

This isn’t just speculation—this is stuff I’ve heard from readers. There are a great many people who have sworn off self-published books because of problems like this.

Yes, you learn things over the course of a writing career. Yes, your first book will be much different from your tenth book, because you’ve learned a lot over that time. You learn more about characterization and description. You learn more about pacing and plotting. You learn more about marketing. But one thing you should not be learning as you go is, “wow, I guess Comic Sans is not a good font choice for a cover.” One thing you should not be learning as you go is, “huh, maybe it would have been a good idea to revise this before I published it.”

Here’s a little test you can do: go to your local bookstore or library and find a traditionally-published book that you think is terrible. Look at the cover. Flip through the pages. Regardless of the quality of the story, do you know what you will not find? You will not find an abundance of grammatical and spelling errors. You will not find poor formatting. You will not find Comic Sans anywhere on the cover. Regardless of the story inside, the product has a professional standard. That’s what I’m talking about—hold your book to that same standard.

Self-publishing is easier than ever. You could drink an entire bottle of tequila, bang out a few thousand words on your computer, and then upload the file to KDP without even looking twice at it. You could also spend your entire weekend sitting in your own feces because you don’t want to get up from the couch while binge-watching Breaking Bad on Netflix.

Or in other words, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it.

The point of turning off your internal editor when writing your first draft is so you can just get it out there. But once that draft is finished, you have to turn that internal editor back on and let him go ape-shit on your manuscript. Then you should revise it and hand it over to someone else. And you should format it to a professional standard, regardless of if it’s an ebook or a print book. And then you should design a professionally-looking cover.

And yes, if you cannot do this, then you may have to pay someone. Don’t give me that crap about how “it’s too hard” or “I can’t afford it”—either buckle down and do the work, or save up until you can afford it.

There is no excuse for shoddy products. Self-publishing is great, it’s opened a lot of doors for me that would have otherwise remained closed. If you want your work to be taken seriously, then you have to take it seriously yourself. If you want to be treated like a professional, then act like a professional.

If that’s too much to ask, then please go somewhere else. Because you’re only hurting the rest of us.

EDIT: This post has recently gotten some new traffic. And since I’ve already had to deal with one person who evidently thought it would be more fun to simply skim the post and then call me to task for things I never even said (all while ironically badmouthing me for making false assumptions), I’m going to lay a new ground rule: comments are moderated. I don’t put up with any bullshit here. If you’re not going to play nice, then your comments will be marked as spam. Simple as that.

Tag Archives: self-publishers

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Self-Publishers: Hold Yourselves to a Higher Standard