Sean_Campbell

Thomas and Mercer typically pay 50% net royalties.

KDP pays 70% above $2.99, 35% for $2.98 or less (and VAT comes off the top in the UK/ other markets where the price is tax-inclusive).

2 million books at 99c = 2m x $0.35 = $700,000... which for 20 novels would be just $35,000 per book. Not bad, but not anywhere near $2.5m. Your low estimate is incredibly high.

At $5 each, KDP would pay $3.50 and T&M $2.50. 2m copies would therefore be $7m / $5m.

So there's your range. 2m books is worth somewhere between $700,000 and $7m dollars ish - but that doesn't account for paperbacks, deep discount sales, translation rights, audio etc, which could skew the number markedly.

Don't forget that's for 20 years of work, and the tax burden of having all that money in a short time frame is huge compared to spreading it out over 20 years. It's also gross of costs which could be significant.

Books are products. Authors like to think of books as something mythical, ephemeral, even special. They’re not. They’re products, at least as far as a publisher is concerned, and when you’re the publisher, you’ve got to sell product.

We can breakdown the ‘book’ into its constituent parts:

Intrinsic elements:

• The plot

• The prose

• The characters

Extrinsic elements:

• The cover

• The blurb

• The sales copy

• The formatting

• The overall presentation including minor elements like the author’s backstory

That’s it. Your product is words. Make them count.

Your books is the combination of these elements, hopefully edited and polished to perfection, and then uploaded to Amazon.

When you sell product, you usually have to think about manufacturing, warehousing, distribution channels for physically moving product, and set up retail partnerships, negotiate contracts, and all that malarkey.

While it is possible to get involved with that if you’re printing a small off-set run of paperbacks/ hardbacks, it is generally much simpler for self-publishers. If you’re one of the handful of people looking to print thousands of copies of your book, and then get them into stores, this guide is NOT for you. Physical inventory is exceptionally risky, and I would urge anyone considering that route to think very carefully about how the numbers stack up (in particular the storage costs incurred for keeping thousands of books in a warehouse ready to ship via Ingram’s or Gardner’s)

Let’s assume you’re not thinking about off-set runs. That doesn’t preclude doing print, but it means you’ll probably be using Print-On-Demand technology for print, with the bulk of your volume coming from eBooks rather than paper.

I can’t tell you what your product is or should be. I can tell you that there are market segments with vastly more readers. While nobody has the aggregate numbers for all retailers in all markets (because retailers, especially Amazon, are notoriously secretive with their data), we can look at scraped data from AuthorEarnings (source http://authorearnings.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/genre- units.png ) to see that the genre breakdown is roughly as follows:

Romance – 39%

Mystery – 9% Thriller & Suspense – 14%

SciFi & Fatnasy – 15%

Literary – 7%

Everything else – 16%

It’s obvious where the money is. Even if you bracket ‘Mystery, Thriller and Suspense’ into one huge category, it’s only a distant second on 23% to romance’s 39%. That doesn’t mean we should all rush out and write romance, but if you’re considering multiple projects and one of them is in a bigger market then it logically follows that you should pursue the 39% over the 9%.

If you’re not writing in one of the big genre fiction buckets, you’ll probably struggle. If you’re straddling the lines between genres, you’ll probably struggle. Selling is first and foremost about your product. We all know there are books people want to read, and books people don’t want to read (or aren’t willing to pay for). As a writer, that hurts. But forget that because right now you’ve got your publisher hat on, and should be thinking ‘yes, I do want a slice of the big market, not a small one’.

There are counterarguments of course. It’s easier to be a big fish in a small pond than it is to swim with the sharks in the big cats. If your product or presentation is off, you’ll sink more quickly in a busy, fiercely-competitive genre like romance than you would if you wrote for a smaller niche.

This game is about volume. You have to sell a lot of books to make a living. And it’s a terribly insecure living at that. You don’t get a monthly paycheque (unless you get to the point where you can vest your IP in a LTD company, pay yourself a salary, and then draw the rest as dividend payments). You will have good months and bad months. Release months will carry you through the winter – if you don’t blow the excess in the false belief that the only way is up. And don’t forget the stuff you’ll be paying for yourself that you would have included in a more typical career (read: a pension, health benefits, a company car, etc).

It’s up to you how to proceed, but my advice here is straightforward: write what people want to read, write it in a way that is compelling and effortlessly readable, and keep it coming out at a consistent pace.

If your book is great, your job as a publisher is easier. Everything starts and ends with having a book someone out there is willing to pay for. The three intrinsic elements matter. Personally, I think readers will forgive lacklustre prose but lacklustre plotting and cardboard cut-out characters are mortal sins. You need compelling, hooky, must-read-more story if you want to succeed. Curiosity is your biggest friend. You have to make the reader want the answer.

Every single chapter must answer a question, and then ask two more. Keep them on the edge of their seat, dying to know who killed the victim, which man our heroine will choose, how they’ll escape from the intergalactic empire’s death squad, and you’ll find readers race through your books and then demand more.

More importantly, follow expectations. In romance omitting a ‘Happily Ever After’ ending is a mortal sin. In Crime, failing to identify the killer is equally off-putting (and some will hate any book where justice isn’t totally served too). You have to balance giving readers what they want with avoiding cookie-cutter storylines. It’s OK to deviate, but do it for a reason. Think about how GRRM kills major characters. That would be a bad move for many authors, but he did it to show nobody is safe (though I’m sure you’ll spot the plot armour later on as he whittles down his absurdly-large cast). You need great characters. The big money is in series not because series are inherently better, but because people like to read more about their favourite characters. People will keep coming back time and time again for the right characters, the right universe. Your characters are your intellectual property. Craft them lovingly, write down everything you need, and keep them interesting. A little light in the dark, a little dark in the light. Everyone has secrets, desires, needs. Feed your readers characters who are as interesting as your plot is.

How do you get there? How do you know you’ve got a good story, great characters? You need a process. Ideally you want your own a-team of editors, but that may not be a financial reality for many.

So here’s what I’d do if you can’t simply hire in:

Step 1: Find your critique partner(s). Everyone needs one or two friends who they don’t mind showing their dirty laundry to. Fellow authors can be wonderful at spotting big picture issues, repetition, and cookie-cutter clichés. But make sure you trust them. Bad advice can be worse than no advice. You want to read the advice, put it aside, and come back to it after the sting has gone. Writing is hard, the book is your baby, but from the moment the first draft is done you need to be Mr or Mrs Publisher, and that means taking a long hard look at what you’re doing wrong, not patting yourself on the back for what you’re getting right.

Step 2: Find beta readers. You want real readers who can tell you if you’re hopefully-polished second draft works AS A STORY. You are NOT asking them to edit your grammar. They might point out typos, but this isn’t their jobs.

Step 3: Pay for copyediting. Good copyeditors are worth their weight in gold. Do not skimp here,

Step 4: Pay for proofreading of the FINISHED book (ideally AFTER typesetting because you can introduce new errors at that stage without meaning to).

Hey,

It's changed. There were about half a million Kindle books back then. Now there are four and a half million.

Back then free / 99p was a big deal. It was new. Now it's pretty saturated. I think new authors have it harder than I do. They've got a bigger hill to climb in a more a crowded market with fewer levers (like price) to rely on.

Previous jobs.. I've done quite a bit. I was a tour guide, made (rubbish) Drupal websites during Uni, and even worked as an event photographer for a while. That paid my way through Uni.

I became a consultant after Uni working for a major publishing company (on the non-fiction side) doing big data analysis to try and upsell our customers. I can't be too specific about that because much of it was proprietary. I learned a lot about the publishing industry from the inside, and met some truly incredibly people.

Then there was a stint doing Software-as-a-Service Project Management.

Unfortunately I was balancing everything - studying and jobs - with looking after my Mum who is disabled. She's bed-bound, and requires full-time care. Writing was just one thing I could fit in around her hectic care schedule. I'm really lucky that it became a career.

I'm not filthy rich. Do you want the actual numbers? I'd have to go double check. But it's enough for two of us to live on (Dan and I split everything).

Well I did say Ask Me Anything so why not. For the tax year that just ended we had a gross revenue of £59,909.87. After costs we netted £52,683.76. After personal taxes (NI, income tax, student loan) and split two ways, that comes out to just about doable (but of course it doesn't come with a pension, healthcare, company car, etc).

It's not a steady gig. Income is heavily new-release dependent and there's a huge difference between #200 in store and #50 in Kindle Store so there's never any guarantee it'll last. It's much like any self employment/ freelancing gig: the good times have to pay for the bad.

The pay rate is just under half a cent per page (and pages are 'KENP' - Kindle Edition Normalised Pagecount; a measure Amazon created by free-flowing the author's text into their own formatting so that everyone is measured the same way).

A 400 page novel is therefore about $2 per complete read (~£1.30) which may well be more than the royalty rate (but sales don't require the reader to ever open the eBook, let alone read it to the end, so it's a much higher standard to hold authors to).

The rates are regional (India pays waay less) and it fluctuates. But the most read authors / books can get bonuses on top of the headline rates.