My perspective on self-publishing is, admittedly, biased.
As a writer, I want a book of mine to be published by a publisher that comes with a cover designer and a typesetter and all those same things that have come along with “being published” since Gutenberg designed his press.
However, I work in tech. I follow what’s happening in the publishing industry and I see the moves Amazon is making, and the Big Six really look like they are asleep at the wheel when Amazon is making some of these moves. You can’t look at the industry from the outside and not be boggled at what companies like Amazon are doing and think the status quo is going to continue without change.
Yesterday, on Twitter, there were two interesting little bubbles of discussion. One was about the somewhat viral video from now-infamous, would-be writer Sebastien Marshall to his agent. The general reaction from the traditional publishing industry — editors, agents, writers who are published — is that Marshall has clearly had some sort of breakdown. He’s destroyed his credibility. He needs help.
But in discussions with those who, like me, view the industry from two sides, I’m willing to bet the man is less insane than I am.
If you compare Marshall’s shirtless rant about his agent and the publishing industry to one other notorious online meltdown from earlier this year — Charlie Sheen — you’ll see marked differences: Marshall is aware he’s dressed inappropriately, and makes reference to it several times. The video’s subject matter was prepared in advance, from the white board to the bills in his wallet to the notes he has on the paper he refers to often. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He is a marketer, and he’s maximizing his platform. He no longer cares about being published by traditional publishers, because right now, he has a venue and he’s well aware of it, and he’s going to maximize it to its greatest potential. The book he was allegedly contracted to write was about that very topic, and now he’s doing it, live and in his best P.T. Barnum fashion, for everyone to see.
Do I think he went into his original contract without enough research? Absolutely. He likely had no idea how slow and old-fashioned traditional publishing can be. With a non-fiction proposal, he went in without a book even written, but if he could imagine how it works for fiction writers, who must write a book and edit it, THEN try to find an agent, who must then try to find an editor to buy the book, and then go through copious edits and then the publishing juggernaut … What most people don’t realize is that the books they see on the shelves in a bookstore or at a Target are often five years in the making, or more, depending on how long it took to write and how quickly a publisher fast-tracked it.
The allure of self-publishing when faced with that is enough to tempt anyone, no matter how badly you want to see your book on a wood table on that main aisle in a Barnes & Noble.
But then you are told that it’s not worth it, which brings us to Twitter issue number two: Dan Friedman’s breakdown of best-case traditional publishing advances vs. the ubiquitous 99-cent self-published e-book.
That math looks pretty scary, doesn’t it? Especially if you have no idea how publishing advances are structured. Friedman used Stephenie Meyer’s advance on Twitter, so that’s the one I based my own math on when I refuted it.
Meyer’s rumored $750,000 advance wasn’t for Twilight alone, but was for a three-book contract. Now, publishers aren’t stupid, and they generally structure those advances so that they are paid in installments based on deliverables. Any freelance writer would recognize the format. It isn’t like they handed over $750,000 cash the second that they signed her; some of it would have been paid upon acceptance of the contract, but other installments would have been paid upon acceptance of the final draft, as well as the drafts for the other two contracted books. In addition, in those cases, with a hefty advance paid on a three-book contract, it’s not like the publisher usually breaks it out and said “Okay, it’s a $250,000 advance for the first book, same for the second, etc.” For her to see any royalties, the advance has to “earn out,” meaning until sales for any and all books make back that $750,000 advance, she’s not going to see any more money. Obviously, with a series like Twilight that flew off the shelves, she made a boatload more money, but yes, it’s possible to get a hefty advance like that and never see another dime of money.
Now, the second issue is that most writers, even those like Amanda Hocking, who became famous (and rich) with the 99-cent e-book don’t generally price all their books at that price. It’s what’s known as a loss-leader. You lure readers in with the first book, priced at 99 cents or even free, then charge more for the rest of the series. So using the same math, while the 100K-selling author on Kindle would make $35,000 for that 99-cent book, if the same figures continued for books 2 and 3, priced at even $2.99 each (when the percentage jumps to 70 percent for authors), the royalties for the other two books would be $418,600, which added to the $35,000, looks a lot better, doesn’t it?
Now, keep in mine that Meyer also had an agent, and the agent’s percentage would come off the top of that $750,000. (As an aside, I have met her agent, and she’s lovely, and I’m sure none of her writers begrudge her a dime.) But the numbers that often get cited, such as Friedman did, suddenly don’t look as drastically different. And the Kindle author mentioned above will continue to make 35% royalties on the 99-cent book and 70-percent royalties on books priced $2.99 or higher in perpetuity. Traditional royalties aren’t that high, because of overhead for things like marketing and editing, etc. that the self-published author would have to pay for out of pocket.
So at the end of the day, the decisions really aren’t as easy as they might have seemed, are they? Odds are, authors probably don’t have the marketing savvy or the chutzpah to go out shirtless and ream a Big Six CEO and a respected literary agent online. And note that I said at the beginning I have no desire to self-publish my own books.
The reason? Simple research. In addition to being a voracious research of the industry on my own, I am lucky enough to work with some incredibly smart people. In years past, most of my debating with Mathew Ingram took place on Twitter, as we worked at different publications. Now that we work at the same place (and I get to edit all his pieces), a lot of that debate takes place over IM, but it’s still going on.
Mathew is a big proponent of the disintermediation going on in publishing, which is fairly obvious if you’ve read his stuff. But when I sent him a piece a little over a week ago written by someone who writes in my genre (I waver between literary fiction and upmarket fiction), he ended up writing his own piece on what purpose traditional publishing is still serving.
There are days I wish I wrote romance. If I did, I honestly doubt I’d be querying agents, because the audience for romance has already made the transition to e-books and self-published authors are doing well, as are other genre authors. But the disintermediation hasn’t made its way toward other holdouts: It’s still not there for young adult books, or other children’s genres. And it’s definitely not there yet for literary fiction.
But when you see editors like Stacy Cantor Abrams making the move to an e-publisher specifically to handle non-genre adult fiction, you can see the waves starting to lap a bit at the foundation. It’s coming, and the people like Sebastien Marshall who are saying they don’t care about burning that bridge because they won’t be crossing back over, they really may not need to.