Thursday, February 17, 2011

A Bankrupt Borders Makes Everyone Poorer, Especially Authors

I commented on an authors post the other day who was contemplating going with a traditional publisher versus continuing to self-publish.  I asked the question why she was even considering it when a publisher will give you at best 5% royalty on the sale of each book and self-publishing via ebooks and POD you can get 70%.

A number of other authors then chimed in leaning towards the published route claiming that an author gets more 'exposure' that way.

I then pointed out that most published books are limited to a print run of a finite number of books which directly returns a...finite...amount of money an author can make while ebooks and POD return an...infinte...return to a self-published author.

They...still...didn't get it.

After I made that statement, another author then stated that she self-published and sold 600,000 copies of her first book which caught the attention of her current publisher who published her next twelve books and gave her more...exposure.

I shook my head at her statment and felt sorry for her because she lacks business sense.  I say this because if she indeed sold 600,000 books she would gain an...established reader base...of at least half that with her subsequent books.

What's my point those of you on the...exposure...tip ask?  Let's do some simple math shall we...

Let's keep the example simple with a readerbase of 300,000 (70%) self-published readers versus 900,000 (5%) published readers with a book price of $5:

                  Self-Published Sales                   Published Sales

Book 2       $1.05 Million                                $225,000

Book 3       $1.05 Million                                $225,000

Book 4       $1.05 Million                                $225,000

 

Starting to get the picture?  I didn't even bother to estimate an advance for the published sales because the gap would still be glaring and I kept the example simple and didn't show an increse in readership which most authors get publishing a new book.

Hopefully you can see that...exposure...doesn't mean shit when you're making 70% on the sale of each book you write!  Yea you may get more people reading your work...  But you're making much less money!

The author who gave the example above also stated that she was writing full time.  If she would have used a better business model she'd be writing on a beach.

If you have an...established...readerbase that enjoys your work they will buy every thing you put out and give you positive word of mouth making your readership grow and you'll make more money.

Get it?????

For those of you that still don't I now get to the article.  With the advent of ebooks...traditional publishing is dying.  Case in point, Borders is now bankrupt and has stopped payments to publishers and publishers will not ship new titles to them.

In the future, B&N will decrease the number of books in their stores and Walmart and Target will replace their books shelves with demonstration areas for much profitable ebook devices.

There goes your...exposure.

The future is self-publishing with ebooks and POD. A self-published author can sell his work on Amazon, B&N, Books-A-Million, Sony, Apple and Kobo to name a few. Seems like a lot of expose to me.

 

Following is the link to the article:

http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/investing/bankrupt-borders-makes-everyone-p...

 

 

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