Hey, everybody. Welcome to class. This is our next to last class.
This will be another Firehose session. I apologize for that, but it is going to happen. We will slow down next week for our last week, where I will do Q&A on publishing questions from you.
So hold your questions, and then please write them into the forms that you are going to fill out. Saying that you were here for this session. And I will be using that list and last week's list to answer what you guys need to know. This week I want to thank, in particular, Jennifer Peel and Becky Monson. These two are the students I have this year who are professional romance novelists who took the class because they wanted to try something new and learn some fantasy and science fiction.
They are both Indie Published, and they have been an enormous resource for preparing this lecture. They were going to give this lecture in class, but with social distancing and things like that, we just decided to have them send me their notes, which I am going to incorporate into this lecture. It's really handy to have notes from people who are doing it in the trenches right now. So let's talk about indie publishing. This week, by the way, our main topics will be indie publishing and then what contracts look like in traditional publishing, along with royalties and things like that, which we'll be comparing to how things work in indie publishing.
So brief and overly simplistic history of indie publishing. Back in the day, if you wanted to be independently published, it was really hard. Some people still did it and were successful.
Obviously the Christmas box. Was an independent book back in the day. Eragon was an indie book back before the big changeover happened in about 2010. But during these days, most of the time, indie publishing was synonymous with what we call vanity publishing, which the two are distinct, but the line blurred a lot more back then.
Vanity publishing would be, you go to a press, you pay a bunch of money. You are. your book is published, but you get 5,000 copies, which you store in your garage and occasionally give away or maybe sell.
I had somebody who was a friend of my parents when I was growing up who had done this. They were a newscaster who had a story about a golfer they wanted to tell. They wrote it.
They got it vanity published. And then they sold 300 or 400 copies of the 5,000 copy print run that they paid for, and the other 5,000 copies sat in their garage. This was unfortunately the The average story for someone who tried to indie publish back in the day. The problem being that warehousing, shipping, and distributing physical medium is really hard and requires a lot of connections or a lot of fame or your own model.
The people who were most successful with indie publishing back before the digital revolution were people who had a way to sell their books themselves. For instance, they were giving lectures or seminars on something, and they would have their book for sale there. They will have indie publish their book and then would sell it there.
Or they were someone who sold at an expo doing something else and also had a guidebook on the thing that they were doing. I knew somebody who sold alpacas and alpaca wool, who had indie published their book, which was a fantasy novel about talking alpacas, and sold it at their same booth. These sort of things could be successful. But for many years, it was really hard.
And because of that it also picked up quite a bit of stigma, stigma which was likely undeserved then, and is very undeserved now, that indie publishing was not real publishing. Well, something happened in 2010. The digital revolution finally hit books. Now, this was a long time coming, and long enough coming that people were uncertain if it ever would actually hit books, because it had hit music.
It was hitting television and film. People were moving to digital for things like music. But people resisted that and continued to want print books.
And then the Kindle launched. And in the space of a year the whole landscape changed. Everyone had been waiting and holding their breath, and they'd started to think, well, maybe, and then it just, it all came rushing through. So what happened is, You can actually, I could see it on my royalty statements.
My royalty statements went from a handful of eBook copies being sold a year, just tiny numbers. Earnings, they're like, your eBook earnings this quarter were $53 to suddenly 20 to 30 percent of my business moving digital in one year. This was a huge revolution in the industry.
It has continued over the years, though eBook versus print has stabilized across the last three years or so, with the only growth segment of it being audiobooks right now. Audiobooks are still growing. Print and ebook, meaning audiobooks is still swallowing a bit of the print and ebook percentages, whereas print and ebook have hit about a stasis. Now, this is going to vary widely depending on your genre.
For instance, books for middle grade readers sell far fewer ebook and audiobooks than print books. Whereas big, long books tend to do better in digital formats and in audiobook formats. This is because the Number one, they get hard to hold.
And number two, because of audible subscription method, one credit buys you a book, whether it's 55 hours worth of listening or nine hours worth of listening. And people tend to save their credits for the very big books. So the longer your book is, generally that is an advantage, particularly in audiobook, but also to an extent in ebooks. And the more tech savvy and likely to have digital devices, your audience.
the more likely it is to move to eBook. Then kind of the third factor here is how fast of a page turner it is. This kind of fights with the length.
A lot of the best page turners are shorter books. But those tend to, the ones that when you finish it you immediately want the next one. Just really quickly want to be able to click the link and say, all right, I'm going to read the next one.
I still have a few hours left. tonight before I have to go get up and go to work. I'm going to read this book. And so these three factors kind of push things. Right now, with my latest book being Skyward sequel, Starsight, Starsight was only 17% print.
It was 83% audiobook and digital book. in its opening weeks. I haven't seen the final breakdown.
This was just the first two months. And of those audiobooks, it was the first book of mine that audiobook was larger than the eBook numbers, I believe. So this is a big revolution. In 10 years we have gone from less than 1% digital in my royalties to only 17%. print.
This transfer offered a lot of opportunities to the indie published authors. And this revolution meant that the indie published authors could do a lot of the work that the big publishers were doing and did not have to deal with distribution chains, warehousing, and things like this. And today indie publishing is almost exclusively ebook and audiobook.
Now, You will generally, as any published author, have your books up for print sale, but they are usually print on demand with very small royalty rates, just there so that people who want print copies can buy them and put them on their shelves. Most of the time you're not making very much money off of that print on demand, because it costs like $19 to print a copy and you sell it for $20 or something like that. Probably a bit lower than that.
You're probably printing it for like $12 and selling it at $15 or... But people just aren't buying a ton of those, and the printing costs are expensive. Most of your sales will be digital indie published.
What happened in 2010 that really started driving this is a few authors, in particular some romance authors and some thriller authors, who were writing fast-paced, what we would have once called pulp genre fiction, which means it's very solidly incited genre. It's romance. with a capital R, focused on the romance, that is shorter and faster paced. Usually in some sort of series, sometimes in romance the author's name becomes the series.
This happens in that genre. Same thing in thrillers. Often Dan Brown thriller is a genre rather than them all being about one character.
But sometimes they are. A lot of Dan Browns are, for instance. A lot of John Grishams are not.
But either way, fast paced, shorter books, real page turners. priced cheaply. We're talking books for three, four, or five dollars that people could immediately click on the next one at the end of buying one, and it just says, click here to buy the next one, and they would just rip through these. And the indie publishing market just exploded to the point that you can find percentages.
But there is a significant—I don't have these numbers offhand. I didn't look them up. But often it's something like 40 percent.
of what's being sold on Amazon is independently published, which is a huge, huge chunk of the market. Now, let's point out that J.K. Rowling is a not insignificant number of that 40%. She's like 2% or 3% by herself, because she kept all the digital rights to Harry Potter for the audiobooks and the ebooks, and she self-publishes them. Jumping back to Jennifer and Becky here.
They are excellent examples of authors who are doing very well. I asked them, just so I could let you guys know that they weren't just starving artists, for some ballpark numbers. This isn't them bragging. This is me pushing them to let you know. But Jennifer has published 30 books so far.
She makes six figures. You can find her books in a lot of local physical media at bookstores, and she's won numerous awards. Becky has published seven books, makes high five figures in a year. She has an agent and has a movie deal on one of her books. I would recommend that you check out their books.
They are both great writers. I have read quite a bit of their writing in the class so far. And so I would recommend that you give them a look. And thank you, Jennifer and Becky, who were watching, for this. Now, I'm going to kind of go down their list of reasons why you would independently publish in today's market.
This is kind of a contrast to the traditional publishing model we talked about last week. And then I'll start getting into some actual numbers and contracts and looking at what some of the numbers look like. They say that their number one reason is flexibility. Independently publishing. If you are indie published, one of the things you can do is you can target the market much faster and better.
You also are flexible in how you publish. You're flexible in determining how long your series is, how long your book is. You are your sole, you are in charge of all of this.
And underneath this I would say equal to this is, according to some things they said, is control. As an indie author, you decide what goes on the cover of your book. You decide what goes on the back summary of your book. You decide the pricing of your book.
You decide when something is up for sale. You decide when it's not up for sale. You decide what promotions you want to be part of.
These things are really powerful reasons to independently publish. If you are really worried that your book is going to have a terrible cover that you have no control over, then indie publishing will look better to you, because as a new author, generally you have very little say over what goes on the cover of your book or what goes on the back flap of your book. If you are really worried about the idea of selling your book in perpetuity, most contracts these days for print rights are for life of copyright.
When you sign a deal to sell a book to Tor, for instance, You are selling that book for your lifetime plus 70 years to be published by them under that contract. There are ways to get that back, but that is what you're signing up for. A lot of the other contracts are different. A lot of audiobook contracts, for instance, are for 7 years or something like that.
A lot of overseas rights are for 7 to 9 years. But US and I believe, yeah, US, I'm not sure about UK. I might have to look that up.
But US print rights are for 7 to 9 years. are for life of copyright almost all the time. In fact, I have never found someone who got them to budge on that at a top string publisher. That's just one of the things that they know is a line in the sand. Flexibility control.
The other is they put money. When you are self-publishing, you keep the lion's share of the money. What is usually happening is there's a 30, 70 split, with the 70 going to the author.
In most cases where you'll be publishing, the place, the platform you're putting it up on will take around 30 percent, and you will make around 70 percent of whatever you set as the price. We will put the caveat that Amazon requires those to be between $3 and $10, $2.99 to $9.99 to get that royalty. Anything below or above that gets a much worse royalty. And basically nobody does it.
You keep the lion's share of that money. As you can see, and we'll run some of these numbers later, if you have a small but dedicated fan base that is willing to buy whatever you sell, you could theoretically, let's say you published with a New York publisher, and with them you're going to sell about 10,000 copies, and on your own you're going to sell about 10,000 copies. Well, that is an excellent reason to to independently publish.
If they cannot sell you a lot more copies than you would sell, if you've targeted a niche market, you know that market really well, and you are going to be selling to them, then New York will do nothing for you. You will make much more independently published. If you also are really good at Releasing things according to trends, quickly writing, and writing things that are good page turners and in long serial format, indie publishing's flexibility would allow you to do some things. I would recommend you look up someone called Bella Forrest.
Bella Forrest is, I believe, the bestselling indie author on Amazon. She might have been replaced by someone else, but usually she is. And Bella Forrest's model is that she releases Books that are similar to current trends in publishing, she jumps on them much faster, and then she releases long serialized stories about them. Her biggest series is A Shade of Vampire. And this is a series that is very similar to Twilight, romantic urban fantasies with vampires.
There are something like 50 entries. She releases a new one like every six weeks. And she sells tons of copies.
She is often kind of chasing at JK Rowling. and some of those right underneath them at number three or four author on all of Amazon. Recently I've looked, and she's dropped down to number 10 or 12 or 15. But she has other things that feel a lot like Hunger Games.
She has other things that feel like Nicholas Sparks books, basically, and she's releasing a book every two weeks. That flexibility and that speed of publishing is just not something you can do. in traditional publishing. It just does not work. One thing they wanted to point out is that you can get everything a print bookets or a Tradpub.
By this I mean—sorry about that terrible handwriting, guys. By this what they mean is If you want to get your books in bookstores, you can make it happen. It does happen.
It's harder. If you want movie deals, it can happen. Generally harder, but it can happen. For instance, The Emperor's Soul that I released, I independently published the ebook, and I went through a small press, a regional press called Tachyon, for the print book.
And they did a fantastic job on the print book and got it into every bookstore in the country, and we got a movie deal. offer on that. That was an indie, it was a hybrid, but I did a lot of the indie publishing for that myself.
You can get They Write into the major bookstores. You can get movie deals, pointing out that The Martian was indie published, which indeed it was. You can get book signings.
You can get speaking engagements and teaching opportunities. Those are your arguments for self-publishing. And they are legit. If you have Watching this retain any sort of bias against Vanity Press or things like that because of the way the industry has talked about it, you should abandon those very quickly.
This is a realistic and, in fact, a growing segment of the market, and it is something that you should seriously consider as a writer right now trying to break in. Let's talk a little bit about how, one, Breaks into indie publishing. So I have generally, and they talk about these things a little bit, though I'll try to write up their notes a little bit later.
I've generally heard two general schools of thought about breaking into indie publishing. School of thought number one is this idea of becoming what is called a platform writer. A platform writer, which I think is mostly my term for it, others might call it something else, is somebody who has a really great platform that draws a lot of attention, and they use that as publicity to market their novels.
Larry Correa is generally held up as a poster child for this. Larry Correa, if you're not familiar with him, is an avid gun nut. He is a right-wing commentator and things like this. and loves his gun rights issues.
He broke in right before the big indie publishing thing took off by indie publishing on his own by running a blog where he talked about all his gun, all the stuff he finds fascinating about guns and politics. And then he wrote books which accurately used firearms, used it? Accurately used firearms and people who knew their way around firearms as a contrast.
to a lot of the media he was reading, where people just didn't know what they were doing. So if you wanted to read an action-adventure story with people who knew their way around guns, and who presented the world in a way that Larry Correa's fan base would really enjoy, then these were perfect books for you. He then had his blog to kind of funnel attention toward this.
He was active on a lot of gun forums and said, hey, you guys know me. I've been participating for years here. I've got a good reputation.
Here is my book. Maybe check it out."That funneled a lot of attention toward his books and turned them into bestsellers even before he got picked up by a traditional publisher, which he eventually did. Eventually he picked Bain, which is kind of almost, it's like a traditional big publisher but works like a small press. It's kind of an interesting case. But anyway, there are still a lot of people who are platform writers. Talking to a lot of indie writers recently, they have said that platform writing is very hard to cut through the noise on, and that they recommend method number two, unless you have some really good platform already or something you know really well and are good at writing blog posts and stuff, and that is the publish as much as you can as quick as you can model. They say that your next book is usually the best piece of marketing you can make for your previous book. This stands in traditional publishing as well. It is a good rule of thumb, that generally making sure your next book is coming out in a timely way is more valuable to you as a marketing tool than anything else you could be doing with that time. Once you have that book coming out and you have extra time, that's when you add on doing all of the other stuff, the going on the social media sites, the doing guest posts on other people's blogs. People won't read blogs anymore, but that sort of thing. All of this is secondary to making sure the next book comes out. And if you're indie published, that may mean your next book that you're releasing in four months. It might mean the next book you're releasing in a year. It depends on your publishing schedule. So what do you do? They recommend the following. And I'm not going to write these all up, because some of these are a bit longer. They recommend joining online groups and forums like 20 Books to 50K. These groups provide a wealth of knowledge. into the indie publishing world. Go ask people who are indie publishing right now where they found their information. I can't give it to you, because I exist in a very different realm from this, that even when I indie publish, I have a platform. And the platform is that I am a well known and reputable fantasy writer already with the marketing budget of a big five press behind me. Attend conferences run specifically for indie authors, or which include indie authors, like story makers. Storymakers is a local convention here to Utah. It is fantastic, one of the best conventions I have ever attended. Point number three, you must run it like a business. You must be willing to put in hours and invest money. We'll talk about that in a minute. You must write a killer book, or more than one, before you release. Rapid release can be your friend. It gives you more ways to market. So what happens a lot in indie publishing I've seen right now is this blitz method. I have a good friend who sometimes has taught in the class before, Jancy. And Jancy has done this thing with a co-author recently that I see commonly happening in ePublishing, which is where they spend several years writing like 12 books in a series, and then what they do is they save those all up and they release them in a blitz, one a month, for a year. You might be saying, I don't have any idea how Bella Forrest can release a book every two weeks. I don't know either. No idea what's going on over there. But I do know that a lot of my friends would not be capable of releasing a book a month, but they can take three years and write 12 books and then blitz with a book a month for a year so that each one is building on the previous ones. Either way, quick releases do tend to be very advantageous in indie publishing. Do everything to make sure it doesn't look like an indie book. This is their next point. This is really important. This is the one where most people mess up. You need a really good cover, and you have to pay for a good cover. When I have indie published, we're usually spending a couple grand on a cover. You don't even have to do that. But you do have to be spending good money. I've heard that you can get a decent cover for $500. But you don't want to be doing the covers that cost $5 off of Fiverr. You just, they will look really, really cheap. You want to be paying for editing. And, helpfully, this is information I didn't have. Jennifer and Becky have included what the rates are that people charge. Let me write these up on the board so you have them and you can write them down. Rates that people charge. Make sure that's not one. OK. For a copy edit, I'll explain these in a second. You are looking at 0.007 through 0.009 cents a word. Content editing, you are looking at around 1.2 cents to 1.25. Oh, sorry. O125, dollars, a word, and proofreading is around 0.003 a word. Apologize again about my handwriting. But basically, these are rates that you'll be looking for paying by word. A copyedit is kind of like a continuity edit. This is where a copyeditor's like a better proofread, where they will also kind of look at style guides sort of things and try to apply a style guide if you have one, if you're like, make this look like you know, Chicago manual style or whatever, or watch out for if a character's eyes are one color in one scene and a different color in the next scene. Copy editors kind of catch that stuff. Content editing is like an editor who's giving you substantive feedback about the plot, characters, pacing, these sorts of things. And proofreading is just the only looking for typos. When my editorial director, Peter, does proofreads and copyedits, he often reads the book backward, just so that he's not focusing on content type stuff. He's only looking at the words and things like this. But yeah, you need this stuff. You need to be paying for editing. You need to be paying for a cover. You may want to pay someone to lay out your book for you. This means it looks aesthetically pleasing on the page. If you're ebook only, you don't have to worry about this nearly as much because people resize the font and things like that, and so the layout on the page is much easier for a lot of ebooks. So they say, search the internet and ask in groups and forums about how authors find good freelance editors and cover artists. Just to kind of quickly talk a little bit about—well, let's actually go to Talk about the nuts and bolts of how you self-publish. And then we're going to talk about the nuts and bolts of traditional publishing, looking at contracts. And then if there's time, we'll talk about what they've written about advertising and branding, which can be basically the same, regardless of which way you're going. They suggest there are two main methods. There is the go wide method or the Amazon exclusive method. So what they're meaning here is if you are willing to sign up for Amazon exclusively, you get a better deal, generally. They put you on Kindle Unlimited, which is the kind of subscription service on Amazon where people subscribe to it, pay a monthly fee, and then Amazon pays you based on the number of words that are read. This can be really helpful for a lot of indie authors, because a lot of traditional published authors are not in that. So you are competing only against people who are in that program. It works well for romance, fantasy, and mystery genres. People who are going to want to rip through an entire series, sometimes going exclusively on Kindle can be good for you. Going wide means you're putting it not just on Amazon, but on all the different platforms, which can give you a wider net, but a slightly worse deal and not quite as good of marketing from Amazon. If you choose to go wide, you can use platforms like Draft2Digital to upload your manuscript, and they will distribute it to Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Kobo, Amazon, etc. But always upload to Amazon yourself it's easy and gives you more control and more money. This is what we have found as well, indie publishing my books. That's how we do it. On Amazon your price must be $2.99 to $9.99. Don't price it anything above that. You can sometimes go lower than that and price your first book at 99 cents. You'll get a terrible royalty, because you'll get like 35 cents a book, because you get a 35% royalty on a dollar. But for a while giving away your first book for free or cheap was a method to get people reading the series. Readers have kind of come wise to this, and it happens it works a little less now than it used to. It used to be kind of the silver bullet, put your first book up for free, then the rest of the series. Then Amazon stopped liking people doing that, and they stopped letting them put them up for free, and would give them periods where they could be free. And so people started charging at 99 cents. And you would have to ask the current indie authors what Jennifer and Becky say. Amen. Be careful how you price your books and train your audience. If you train them to get your ebooks for free or 99 cents from the beginning, they will expect that of your future books. Paperbacks, just do through their self-publishing thing until you get big enough where you may want to do a small print run of your own and sell them at conventions and things. It's not a huge part, but they say it's useful for getting into particularly your local bookstores. which you can do if you have enough sales and you have print books that you can give to one of the distributors to put through. They make two notes at the end here, which I think are really smart notes. One of them is that there are a lot of scams out there for trying to prey upon indie authors. There are a ton of these. And one of the best things you can do is remember that, be very skeptical of anyone asking you for money. Now, this doesn't include, obviously, if you're paying people for cover and for editing and things like that. But be very skeptical of someone who says, I will do all the work for you, just give me this much money. A lot of those are scams. Not all of them, but a lot of them. A lot of them are vanity presses which you don't need these days because you can do this yourself. The other thing they mention is that landscape is constantly changing and that you need to keep up to date on it. And yes, you do. One of the big changes, I've talked about this a little bit before in class. But one of the big changes is Amazon over the last couple of years has become a pay-to-play location. Wrong turn. Market. Meaning that Amazon charging authors to advertise their books on Amazon has become a major source of income for Amazon. And in the beginnings of the indie book revolution, it was all of Amazon's recommendations were based solely on what did people who read this book also like. If you went to a Brandon Sanderson book page, they would serve you ads only for books that people who bought my book then bought another book and really liked it and rated both of them highly. And it didn't matter to Amazon if you were indie, if you were traditionally published. They were simply looking to sell you the best book they could to keep you reading books. I think it is a mistake and short-sighted of Amazon, but recently they have shrunk and contracted that recommendation system and have greatly expanded the an author paid to be on this page recommendation system. If you go to The Way of Kings right now, you will find the similar books that other people liked thing on there. For a while they'd moved that all the way to the bottom. Now they moved it back up. But you will also find an advertisement on the page that's right to the right of my book that is paid to be there. You will often find a banner ad for something that is paid to be there. And then you will also find sponsored books in a big, long list paid to be on this page. And asking Jennifer and Becky, they nowadays are paying thousands of dollars a month on advertising on Amazon in order to keep selling books. Basically this 70% royalty looks a lot worse than it used to when you're having to invest 50% of what you make back in to pay Amazon to advertise your book, and if you don't, they just don't appear on anyone's pages, you don't sell them. I think this is terrible for indie publishing. I think this is terrible for books in general. But it is what Amazon has decided to do now, and they are the big player in the market. They are something like 80% of all ebooks. And so if you are going to be independently published, you either are going to have to have a platform that is driving people to those books pages, you are going to have to somehow get popular enough that people are looking for them directly, or you're going to have to pay Amazon thousands of dollars to advertise them in order to keep selling books. And this is, I think, very unfortunate, but it is the way the world works right now. Double check me on that by talking to other indie authors. I've asked five or ten, and this is the answer they've given me. But I might be getting a disproportionately represented segment of the market who is paying a lot for ads and having that work, and so they're continuing to do it. Maybe there are other ways. Maybe it's probably this ad payment It has a ceiling on it. Once you get to a certain amount of ad spend, then you make more and more. Once you hit that threshold, it becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of your take. But be aware that that is part of the market right now. All right. Let's talk about contracts. How much time do we have left? I don't have a clock in here. 40 minutes. 40 minutes. Great. All right. We're going to talk contracts. Sorry again about the fire hose. Let's jump over to traditional publishing, because talking about contracts and your take here can kind of help you compare and contrast indie publishing right now. And I'm going to switch markers, because I think this one was writing better. All right. So in publishing, A lot of the royalty rates are fairly standardized. So in traditional publishing, here's what you're looking at. Almost all books have between 10 and 15% of cover for hardcover. Almost all of them have between 6 and 8%. of cover for paperback. And all of them have around 10% of cover for trade paper. All right. I'll explain this to you. All the print formats are based on a cover price calculation. Please stretch back. Decades, maybe over a century, that basically whatever the publisher charges for that book, they are going to pay to you a percentage of that once they get it in. It does not matter what the book actually sells for. For instance, usually bookstores are getting the books at around 50% off. If they decide then that this $20 book, that they are going to sell for $12 to put it on sale. That is them deciding to make a profit of $2 instead of $10 on your book. They are still paying $10 to the publisher, and out of that the publisher is still paying you 10% to 15% of the cover price, of that initial $20, as a royalty payment to you for every copy sold. Same thing for paperback, 6% to 8%. Same thing for trade paperback. Trade paperbacks are the oversized, hardcover-sized paperbacks, whereas when we say paperback we mean the pocket edition. These are the U.S. royalty rates. They vary a little bit in the UK. So basically what's going on here is these, you're like, how do I determine if I get the 10 or the 15 percent? Almost every contract I've gotten had a break point of something like this. Ten percent on the first 5K, 12 and a half second 5K, and then 15 percent after, on the hardcover. So what this means is. If I sell 100,000 copies and you sell 100,000 copies, we probably both have a very similar thing in the hardcover thing. We both make the same amount of money. This is pretty nice. This is good to know that there isn't a lot of room here. Now, there are rumors of people getting more. The most I've ever heard is that the rumor, and I don't have this information so I could be wrong, that LucasArts was getting 22 percent of hardcover. on their Star Wars books from Del Rey, or who—it was one of the Random House imprints that was printing them for years. I don't know if that's true. I have never met an author personally who got higher than this without doing a drastically different deal with the publisher. There are drastically different deals where you profit share, and instead of taking advance, you take a larger chunk of the percentage later on. Stephen King famously has this as—rumored to have this. I don't know Stephen King's contracts. as one of his deals. And I do profit share with some of my publishers as well. Basically, no advance, higher royalties. We're kind of co-publishing at that point, that sort of thing. But Generally, what you can change are, in your negotiations, these breakpoints. Usually they don't change these percentages as much as they change the breakpoints. For instance, some of my teen books, the breakpoints were like first 10K or something, and then you shrink that. Same thing here. I think my eBook started at like 6% for the first 75,000, or my paperback, 6% for the first 75,000, and like 8% thereafter. For some reason 7% almost never shows up, but it's one of those weird things. And trade tends to, like, I've seen it fluctuate just by a percentage point or two. But basically this is what you're getting. This is a fair deal. You may say, wow, I only get 15% of that. Do remember that you're really making more than that, because this is retail. So about half is going to the retail establishment. So on a $20 book. the publisher is getting $10 back, and you are generally getting on that $250, so you're taking about 25% of what the publisher's making. That could go higher, but considering the way that they take risks up front, this tends to be a fairly fair model, which is why it's been negotiated over decades and has landed where it does. What hasn't been negotiated for decades, in fact, only been negotiated for around a decade, is where the eBook and audiobook royalties will end up landing. And so eBook and audiobook are different. They are calculated on net. That should scare you a ton, but fortunately the net is very clearly defined and does not include costs. Net on eBook and audiobook is defined by what the publisher gets from the venue selling them. This is usually 25% of net, where net means the 70%. of actual price that the publisher gets. What does that mean? Well, let's say that the publisher, the book is sold on Amazon for $10. The publisher is getting 70% of that, the same percentage that the indie book author is making. Then they are paying 25% of what they actually got to the author. If this goes on sale, then your percentage shrinks. It's no longer paid on cover. All right. That's a very big difference. This number is starting to stabilize. It is too low. A lot of industry advocates and author advocates have pointed out that this, if you—I'm not going to run all the numbers for you right now, that this really should be somewhere around 35% probably, or even a little higher, because the publisher, if you run all the numbers, which you don't have time for, the publisher is making more off of each ebook sold than they make off of the print book. and you are making around the same. They are taking a slightly higher percentage cut, a higher net cut at the end than they need to be taking. I haven't seen this get negotiated up, because a lot of authors have what are called most favored nations clauses. What this means is if one author gets it negotiated up, the other authors who have most favored nation clauses all should automatically get it as a matter of legal requirement in their contract. So publishers have been very very resistant to change this. Basically, to change that number, you have to do some sort of profit share or something like that, which requires give and takes from you by giving up advances and things like that. That's been my experience. Your mileage may vary. It could change in the future. And there may be people out there who have negotiated different deals than we've been able to. This is kind of where it sits in audio, 25% of net. Though I have, this one has been more negotiable. I've gotten as high as around 40% of net. With certain audiobook publishers, this has started to stabilize back at the 25%, and it's been going down with the advances going up. That's not necessarily a bad thing, because a lot of these audiobook contracts are for seven years. And so if your advance gets sky high, your percentage goes down. It is possible for an advance to get so high that it effectively gives you a higher royalty. Let's talk about that. Oh, there seems to be confusion in the chat between indie and self-publishing. They are the same. We use both of those terms. Indian and self-publishing are the same. The only thing that's different is fantasy publishing, which basically, I doesn't exist in its same form anymore, and you should ignore it. Indie and self-publishing, words for the same thing. You also ask about small presses. I'll talk about small presses if we have time. All right. So advances. All right. So remember, this is all against an advance that you get up front. So I'll try not to spend too much on the boring numbers here. This stuff is interesting to me. I know it might bore some of you. But let's say on your audiobook you get paid a million dollar advance. And the audiobook publisher has looked and figured out across the seven-year life of the term that you are going to, under a standard royalty, earn around $800K for that 25% of that. They've figured it out. They aren't giving you a higher royalty, but by offering you that $1 million, they're basically giving you a higher royalty, because they're giving you $200,000 extra, and you could run the numbers, and basically since that license is going to run out in seven years anyway, you don't have to pay back the extra money. They all ran the numbers. It is possible for a book to not earn out. Earning out is where your royalties match the amount they gave you up front and still be successful. This is how a lot of very Powerful authors, a lot of the politicians, for example, and celebrities get sky-high advances, higher than sales would indicate their royalty should earn. But because the price per copy is down so much, and because the book is going to sell enough copies, they can effectively give the author a higher royalty rate without changing the royalty rate in the contract. Deciding what the right advance is for a book is a very difficult and process that involves a lot of guesswork. Most of the time you want your advance to be of a size where you're going to earn that out in a couple of years. Usually I look for, I'm like, do you earn this back off of the hardcover and two years of the paperback run? If so, pretty good advance. That's about what you're looking to get. Sometimes it's viable to get higher than that. Only if your book is going to go to astronomically high sales numbers. But let's just kind of look at this, number-wise, to kind of compare it to indie publishing. And I did run these numbers earlier, so I can write them out exactly. We talked about keeping a larger percentage of the cut. One of the other things that indie publishing is very good at doing is undercutting the market, because they have more money to work with. Now, Slowly what's happening, more money to work with is the wrong term. They have more flexibility on pricing. What has happened over time is traditional publishing has pushed their prices higher and higher in the ebook market. This is because they have a different deal with Amazon. Amazon gives them a better deal. They get the 70 percent even if they go over to $9.99. You don't get that deal. I'm sorry, Amazon doesn't offer it to us. me when I indie publish. They do offer it to the publishers. A Stormlight Archive book costs $17 an eBook. This is not a bad thing. I actually wish that eBook pricing fluctuated more based on the length of the books. I have pushed my publishers to charge less for my shorter books and more for my larger books. They haven't always listened to me on this. But I think it is kind of—I know it's the way the industry works, but I think it's not a good way for the industry to work, that the longer the book the longer books do not increase in price. This pushes authors to release these very quick, short books where you actually get less value for your book. And I think it would be better if everyone's like, you know, a Stormlight Archive book is somewhere around eight times as long as some of these short books that are being published in a series that you are paying $3 a piece for. Well, eight times three would be $24 is what the Stormlight Archive book should cost. we charge $17. I think that's a fair price. I know some people online are like, why is this one $17 when someone else's is $3? Well, it's a 400,000-word book. That said, traditional publishing is not good on varying this length. I wish that they would charge a lot cheaper for the 100,000-word books and a lot more for the big books, and they don't. They tend to vary. Like, I looked up a book that is half the length of a Stormlight book, and it's $13. So, yes, it's cheaper. but not significantly according to the percentage. This is all kind of neither here nor there. If you look at the indie published authors'books, a lot of them will be priced $2.99, $3.99, or $4.99. If we take that author whose book is $13, who's a pretty, I'm not going to say the name, but a pretty solid midlister, kind of top of the midlist fantasy novelist, their book is selling for $13 as an ebook. Well, if you have your standard royalty that I talked about earlier, that author is making $2. and around $0.25 per copy that is sold by the publisher. If you're indie published, you can charge, if your book is $3, you are making around a $2 profit. So if your book is $4, you're making a better profit than the traditional published author on a book that is one-third the price. This is where the power of indie authors is manifest in them being able to charge a reasonable but low price for their books, undercutting the traditional published market. This kind of creates this dichotomy where traditional publishing is moving more toward more expensive books that are prestige books that are by well-known authors. There is a reason why someone like Andy Weir, who self-published and was very successful, eventually decided to go traditionally published. You do see a lot of the people who break out of the mid-list going to traditional publishers because they can demand a whole bunch from them. These days, a lot of the mid-listing does work way better in these numbers as an indie author. That said, as an indie author, you have to be willing to run the business all yourself and do all these things up front. One of the main reasons you would go traditionally published instead of indie published is, number one, you have a big enough name or enough expected sales, or a book that is hitting the market at just the right time in order to demand a very large advance and to demand a lot of marketing push from the publisher. Another reason to go traditionally published is that doing it all yourself is just not something you want to do. This sounds like I have a good friend who's like, I know I could do all this. I just don't want to. That's not what I want to spend my life doing. I want to, she says, be sending books to a publisher, working with an editor, letting them handle all the cover art and things like that, and release the book. That is a good reason to go traditionally published. It is a lot of work to even traditionally publish. Indie publishing is even more work. Another reason to go traditionally published would be if you want to see your book in all bookstores across the nation. Indie publishing There are very few who are able to get books in all print stores. Usually you can get them regionally to your local stores. But getting them into bookstores all around the country and all around the world, very hard to do as an indie published author. Not impossible, but very hard to do. And if you want to be able to walk into a bookstore and find your book on the shelf, you probably want to be traditionally published then. Another reason to be traditionally published is if you are writing in a genre that does not lend itself well to the things that are selling well in indie books. I often use a book like The Doomsday Book as an example of this. Connie Willis is a fantastic science fiction writer who does a ton of research for her books and writes basically time travel books with Exhaustively researched historical periods, where people from a future society go back to a historical period. These books are long. They're in depth. She only releases one every four or five years, if that often. And they win a lot of awards, and they deserve them. She would be poorly placed in the indie publishing market because she releases books so infrequently that she needs the—doesn't need it, but it's better to have the publisher pushing the book. to get a wider pickup by libraries and schools, and to win awards, and to have that drive the sales between the five years that she's releasing a new book. That's an author who's served much better by being traditionally published. 20 minutes? Great. So let's break and talk briefly about marketing and self-promotion, and then maybe get to a few of these questions, which are popping up on the screen that I can no longer see. So that is good. All right. Let's get to the last part of what Becky and Jennifer put here, which is advertising and branding. They note, you still have to do a lot of this even when traditionally published, especially for first-time authors, and yes, you do. One of the advantages of being traditionally published is you get to take advantage of their distribution chain. This means that you have a lot of people going to the various bookstores and convincing them to carry copies of your book. Speaker 2 For a new author that does not have a particularly large advance, this is basically all the publicity you will get. They're not going to buy a lot of advertising, maybe a little bit. They're not going to spend a lot of money on Amazon advertising. They're not going to spend a lot of money on Facebook advertising. They'll spend a little bit, but not a ton, of advertising those things, unless your book is considered the big release by a new author that they're pushing very hard. Because of this, You, with a smaller advance, often have to do a lot of this yourself. What they recommend doing is social media pages. Again, this shouldn't take precedent over finishing your next book, in my opinion, but having a social media and a website presence is good, if you can maintain it. Here's the thing. A web page that never updates but has a blog on it that has, you know, if you go to this website and say in the last... post that was posted is three years old, that is worse than having no blog on your website. Better to have a static page that just has your book and sample chapters, throwing that around, and things like that, than it is to have something that doesn't update. Same with your Twitter, your Facebook. They mentioned, by the way, that Facebook and Instagram works for them, and Twitter doesn't work much for them anymore. I know other people have been very successful with Twitter, but you're going to have to, you know. Pick some social media platforms and do a good job with them. This can be tricky because a lot of people aren't looking for a marketing feed in their Twitter feed. They already get a lot of advertisements from the big companies. If your Twitter feed looks just like a marketing feed, then your Twitter feed is perhaps not going to be that useful to you. Same with your Facebook and things. You have to dedicate time to actually making that a place where people want to go and discover things. Now, if you have a fan base, if you're starting to grow one, posting about your life, you're going to want to make sure that you're getting the right people to follow That can do it, and things like that. But just be aware that a Twitter feed that just lists when your book is on sale is probably going to be of no use to you. Have a professional website. Yes. Have a website that looks professional. And if you're not going to update it often, make it look nice without a date saying when things were posted. This is one of the best things you can do for your time, is just have a good website so when people Google you. Like, some of you might Google Jennifer and Becky. You land on their page and can find out about their books. They suggest bloggers and blogtours. I have no realistic understanding of how valuable these are. A lot of people do them where they all share posts on different people's blogs. This is a very common practice. It really got popular after I had broken in, and I don't know how useful it is. The fact that they mention it here means it probably is at least somewhat useful, and people continue to do it. This is where you write a really good blog post for someone else's blog that they can post that'll be of high value to their readers, that'll make their blog a destination that people want to visit. And so they go and read about your post and also about your book, lending you their audience. How you do those, by the way, is by making contacts at conventions and things like that, and having a good blog of your own so that you can say, hey, go look, this is the sort of thing I do. You do blog exchanges. would you let me do a guest post for you on your blog about X?"Give them a proposal. Say, I could do a really great blog post for your audience about this thing that they'd be really interested in. I don't know if Larry does these, for instance.
But if you were indie published and going to Larry and say, I know about these new assault rifles. I've shot them out on the front lines. I can do a really great post about how awesome they are. Maybe someone like Larry would let you do a blog post.
I don't know, again. But that's the sort of thing we're looking at. Paid advertisements.
We talked about those. Author cross-promotion. Basically, doing events with other authors, particularly when you're new, I have found to be very effective.
When I was new in my career, book signings were almost useless. But a book signing where three of us got together were way better, because if each of us drew like five people, then we had at least a respectable audience. And plus, we were kind of cross-promoting to each other's audiences at that point. and a lot of people bought all three books.
Build an email list. Let me emphasize this one. Email lists tend to be your best marketing tool, as long as your email list is a good one, that you're not spamming people with it, that you're—if you're only going to write like four blog posts a year, you may be better off having a newsletter than a blog, and just doing a really good newsletter that people are interested in signing up for and having, because This is like a blog that's a little more personal. And generally email lists have the best click-through rate, because people have opted into them, of any sort of advertising that you can do. A lot of people in the industry say email list is your number one thing to do, even before some of your social media.
This all goes for publishing and traditional as well. The only thing that you will add is they will be spending some money, not much, but some money. advertising. They will also be doing what is called co-op, where they're offering the bookstores a little more money in order to put your book in nice places in the bookstore. If you walk into a Barnes & Noble and you see all those nice books for sale at the front of the bookstore, that's all advertising space.
Don't just say, oh, we'll put this one out. It's new. No, the publisher has gone and said, if you put this one on your octagon at the front of your Barnes & Noble, we will let you keep, instead of 50% of what you sell, you can have 55%. And they make all these kind of negotiations and deals. Bookstores do generally have a few discretionary locations where they can build an end cap or something.
So if you do a book signing there, they might put your books on the end cap, which is the end of the shelf, and things like that. But a lot of that space is sold to publishers, and that's why they end up there. So that's all advertising space.
Everything but just basically being on the shelves. Even a lot of times if you see a little thing that says, hey, if you like this, you might like this. Shelf talker is what they call them.
A lot of those are paid for. Not at the indie bookstores, but a lot of the Barnes & Nobles and things, those are things that are kind of cooperative, they call it, publishing agreement with the publisher, where they're both trying to sell more books, and the bookstore gets to keep a little bit more of the money in exchange for that. The last thing they will do is they might send you on book tour. Book tours are weird in that bookstores do not make money. You can just run the numbers.
A really great Book signing. Like, the biggest book signings I get when I'm on tour, maybe 1,000 people, that'd be amazing. George can pull around 2,000. It's George Martin.
I've heard of celebrities. The biggest book signing, I asked one of the bookstores I went to that they ever had was Ozzy Osbourne, at the height of the Osbournes, and he had like 9,000. But let's say you do one of my book signings and it's 1,000 people.
Of those 1,000 people, statistically, around 10% of them will buy the book, and 90% of them will already have the book. And so the signing, if you magically could make it so that all 100 people that went to that book signing are people that wouldn't have bought it otherwise, but bought it because of the book signing, then what is the book signing done? It has sold 100 extra books, which equates to earnings for an author on the 15% thing for a round is going to be like $300 to $400. That might sound good to you, but for an entire day's work where you have to fly somewhere, where you have to be put up in a hotel, where you often have to have drivers or media escorts whose job it is to get you around, it can cost three or four grand to put an author on tour for a day, depending on the author.
And even the publisher selling an extra hundred books, making an extra, what is that, $10 a book, they're making $1,000, just not make any money for them. It loses money. So what is a bookstore good for? Wow. Or book signing.
Book signing is to meet the people at the bookstore as the author and have them be like, wow, the publisher's actually sending this author on tour. It must be an important author. Maybe I'll read the book, to get some extra books in that bookstore.
The publisher or the bookstore will usually order like 50 copies or whatever, depending on the author, and then put them out on nice shelves. And you will usually sign a bunch of those books and leave them, and they'll use their discretionary space to put up an end cap for you. Like, Author, who came through? Here are their signed books. So you might sell extra books like that.
You might get more velocity. Selling books in the first week of release is way more useful than selling them in the 12th week of release. If you sell a bunch of books in the first week of release, all the bookstores say, wow, this is a very big, important book.
We'd better order more copies. It also places you on the bestseller list, which a bunch of sales at once is better than sales spread out for that. You appear on the bestseller list and then there are special places in the bookstore which aren't co-op space.
which are the bestseller lists that you get on basically as free co-op, which markets and sells your book more. If you do really well, you end up on the bestseller list. In the airports, which can be huge exposure for selling your book. These things are all kind of intangible things.
Plus, you start building an audience. They start coming out to see you as an event. And then it's a way to kind of meet the fan base and things like that.
All of these things are intangibles that are hard to quantify. Book signings should not be done to make money, at least upfront money. They should be kind of long-term sort of things.
Early in my career, I'll just give you guys a tip. We ran all these numbers, and the publisher was just not going to send me on tour. Guy who got $10,000 on his advance that they're expecting to sell like 5,000 copies of or whatever, the book's signing.
There was no way I was going to get on the list. There's no way I was going to make the money back. They just were not going to send me on tour.
I went to them and said, what if I went on tour with another author that you were thinking of sending on tour, and the two of us shared a car and drove instead of flights, which saves a bunch of money. What if we just drove around the West Coast, where we live, kind of the West Coast? What if we shared a hotel room? I was going with Dave, who's a buddy of mine.
And we kind of ate cheap. Dave and I went and pitched and said, you give us $1,000 each. This was in 2005, so $1,000 went a little further.
And we will do a 10-city book tour, and we will bring it in under that $1,000 each. They're like, you can't do that. And we're like, yes, we can. And they're like, all right, here's $1,000.
Right, whatever. That's, you know. that it takes 2,000 to put an author on tour for a day.
We'll give you each 1,000 bucks for 10 days. And we made it work. And we did three tours like that before my book started exploding and the publisher started saying, no, you can't do that anymore. We need to send you on a big, real book tour. But that was very effective for me.
Your mileage may vary in convincing a publisher to let you do something like that. All right, Adam, what have we got, 10 minutes? Just under.
OK. OK. Turn that over and let me hit a few of these questions. How do you know if you're a niche genre? This is hard, because niche genres tend to be genres that are mashing two or three genres together.
A lot of times what happens is you have a Venn diagram of genres. It's hard to tell when you're going to get, for instance, let's say you have mysteries. And romances. Well, sometimes when a book comes out, it grabs both of these audiences.
In fact, SF, science fiction fantasy, Charlene Harris, who did the True Blood books, somehow grabbed some of each of these audiences. And it worked really well. And I think they shelved the True Blood books in sci-fi fantasy.
Which makes some sense, but they were mystery romance science fiction fantasy. They were basically vampire romance mysteries. Sometimes you grab that whole audience.
Sometimes you only grab this audience. And it's hard to tell. I have a friend in the industry who published what looked like a book that was going to grab great big audiences.
It was basically military lawyers for a space fleet. Basically Starfleet's military lawyers, where they've got this big military science fiction thing, where there's wars going on, and they're going to do the trials of the people who violated whatever. They're going to be very action-adventurey, but also with the lawyers. It's like Law and Order meets Star Trek. Those books flopped hardcore despite being great books.
They only hit the Venn diagram. People picked them up and were like, eh, I like science fiction, but I don't like lawyers. So they put them down.
Other people pick them up and are like, I like lawyer fiction, but the science fiction stuff, we don't know. If publishers knew how to market a book perfectly to the broadest possible audience, they would do it every time. They don't know. Nobody knows what's going to hit and what isn't. If those books had been published online, there might have been 1,000 or 2,000 people who were like, wow, I was in the military police.
I love science fiction. This is just perfect for me. This is like the best thing ever.
And you get that audience who just becomes a really dedicated fan base. That is what I would call a niche genre, kind of this melding of two genres that doesn't grab the whole Vanguard diagram, but has a narrow group who are very dedicated to it. Indie publishing can be great for that.
Fortunately, that story has a happy ending, because he rebranded himself and published a lot. Lost Fleet Books under the name Jack Campbell. His name is John Hemery.
He's a great author. I really like Lost Fleet Books. But he took out basically the lawyer part and just did great military science fiction books. Books took off and sold really well. And so that has a happy story.
The publisher really believed in them. They all knew the books were good. They just didn't hit the audience. So he got another chance at it and it ended up working for him.
Do short stories sell well when indie published? No. Short stories do not sell well indie published. Short stories do well free.
There are places where free short stories do very well. I have a student in the class this year who's done very well on No Sleep. the Reddit short story horror subreddit and gotten lots of views there. But generally, that price point is very hard for a short story. Novellas do sell.
A novella is 17,000 words and above. As long as you can hit that magic number of realistically charging $2.99 for it on Amazon, then suddenly it becomes viable. Anything under that $2.99 is just not viable monetarily.
That said, short stories can be very popular. They just don't work right now paid-wise. Your mileage may vary.
Ask some other people about what they've done with short stories. I see collections now and then selling. Most of the short stories I see people put up for free just for advertising, or they try to sell the magazines for prestige. Are there indie small presses, publishers that specialize in novellas?
Yes, Tor.com and several others. Tor.com generally prefers diverse books. That's one of the ways they have made their name right now.
And so they have a very narrow application submission guideline window, and they tend to be looking for diverse fiction. And so do be aware of that. But indie publishing with Novella's work, and there are some other places like Tor.com, for instance, Emperor's Soul, which was published with Tachyon, went with a small press for the print that was big enough to get the book in bookstores, but which was...
which was small enough that they were willing to take print-only rights and leave me with the ebook rights to sell myself. How would one go from indie publishing to traditional, and their advantages to doing this? "Yes. I guess we'll end here. What, I got like five minutes left, Adam? Three minutes. We'll end here. If I were me trying to break in right now, I would try going hybrid, meaning I would write some books, and I would then decide, are these best traditional or are these best indie? If they're best traditional, I would start submitting to the traditional publishers. And if they're best indie, I would just start with indie. At the same time, I would be looking for something targeted at indie publishing that would work really well. I would be like, you know what, I can write, if you guys are fans of my books, the Wax and Wayne books. The fast-paced mysteries, detective thrillers is really what they are, that are shorter, are a better match for indie publishing. Maybe if I were not well known and not broken out, I would be like, I'm going to write six of these across the next few years, just in between other books, save them up, and then I'm going to launch them indie published. After books then go through the traditional publishing route, and if they all got rejected, I would hold them back for when I did an indie publishing push so I could slot those books in at the end, the big epic fantasies, to be like, if you liked my fast-paced ones, maybe you will like the longer book that has more lore. that is using the same world. And so I might try to break out that way. I think, considering both as viable methods of breaking in is just the wisest way to go right now. Talking to a lot of authors, both traditionally and indie published, finding out what's working for them, is a great way to go. Don't close any doors. Do your research. This is just an overview. I couldn't get into a lot of the depths of it. I will next week, if we have time, During the questions, try to outline the big five publishers and who they are to kind of give you a head start on submitting to them. But for now, do your research, take this, and hopefully you can expand it into something that will help you get published. Thank you, guys. We will see you next week for the last of our classes.