Writing can be a very isolated occupation. I found that out this week when I came across an item on The Daily Weekly blog, part of the Seattle Weekly Blogs. Not only had I somehow managed to miss this piece when it came out back in April, but the content frankly astounded me.
The blog details an open letter from Amazon
founder Jeff Bezos in
advance of a shareholder meeting held later that month. Or, more particularly,
a small section of that letter:
“Kindle
Direct Publishing has quickly taken on astonishing scale - more than a thousand
KDP authors now each sell more than a thousand copies a month, some have
already reached hundreds of thousands of sales, and two have already joined the
Kindle Million Club. KDP is a big win for authors. Authors who use KDP get to
keep their copyrights, keep their derivative rights, get to publish on their
schedule - a typical delay in traditional publishing can be a year or more from
the time the book is finished - and ... saving the best for last ... KDP
authors can get paid royalties of 70%. The largest traditional publishers pay
royalties of only 17.5% on ebooks (they pay 25% of 70% of the selling price
which works out to be 17.5% of the selling price). The KDP royalty structure is
completely transformative for authors. A typical selling price for a KDP book
is a reader-friendly $2.99 - authors get approximately $2 of that! With the
legacy royalty of 17.5%, the selling price would have to be $11.43 to yield the
same $2 per unit royalty. I assure you that authors sell many, many more copies
at $2.99 than they would at $11.43.
“Kindle
Direct Publishing is good for readers because they get lower prices, but
perhaps just as important, readers also get access to more diversity since
authors that might have been rejected by establishment publishing channels now
get their chance in the marketplace. You can get a pretty good window into
this. Take a look at the Kindle best-seller list, and compare it to the New
York Times best-seller list - which is more diverse? The Kindle list is
chock-full of books from small presses and self-published authors, while the
New York Times list is dominated by successful and established authors.”
The part of the letter which most gained my
attention is this bit:
“…more
than a thousand KDP authors now each sell more than a thousand copies a month,
some have already reached hundreds of thousands of sales, and two have already
joined the Kindle Million Club.”
Looking at the usual rules of
marketing-speak, “more than a thousand” means not many more than a thousand, otherwise he would have said “almost
eleven hundred” or something similar.
Another way of looking at this is, that of
the huge numbers of indie authors using Amazon’s KDP program to achieve their
publishing dreams, less than eleven
hundred are selling more than a thousand books a month.
That’s quite a sobering thought.
Then in May a survey of 1007 indie authors was
carried out by The
Guardian newspaper. They discovered that despite the publicity afforded to
indie superstars like Amanda
Hocking and EL James the vast
majority of indie authors do not make enough to live on.
The survey, carried out by Dave Cornford
and Steven Lewis for Taleist, claims
that the average earnings of indies last year was $10,000 (or £6300 at today’s
exchange rate). If that still sounds pretty good, those figures were lifted
(perhaps artificially) by the small percentage of high-earners ― less than 10%
earned more than $100,000/£63,000. In fact, half
the writers questioned earned less than $500/£315 and many failed to recover
their production costs.
However, those who invested in professional
editing and proofreading earned 13% more than average, and pro cover design increased
earnings by another 34%. Writing romance, it seems is another good way to up your
take-home pay. Romance authors earned 170% more than the $10,000 average (if
I’m reading this correctly) while literary fiction authors tended to earn just
$200/£126.
The survey also discovered that moving from
a conventional publishing background into self-publishing increased the chances
for success, with those authors earning 2.5 times more than authors who went
straight for the indie option. Oh, and it helped to be female, in your forties,
dedicated to writing hard, and educated to degree level.
“It
shouldn't have surprised me that 75% of the royalty pie is going to 10% of
authors: that's life in many industries. If I'm being honest, though, I'd hoped
self-publishing might be a bit more democratic. Someone asked me if I thought
this might deter authors from self-publishing, but actors don't stop heading for
Hollywood despite the odds against them," Lewis told the Guardian.
There's
a clear link, he said, "between earnings and the amount of help, and
therefore feedback, that an author is willing to take on board. Authors who
engage editors, for instance, end up with more royalties. Readers are excited
by having access to new voices, but they've not been waiting for unedited,
unproofread and amateurish books. There's more to being a successful author
than finding the 'Save and publish' button on Amazon, but there are a lot of
authors who haven't realised that yet. In that sense, the low earnings were
not surprising.”
Until I read these two reports, months
after they were first published, it had not occurred to me how incredibly lucky
I am. Apart from the ‘educated’ bit ― I opted out of mainstream education at
the age of twelve ― I realise that I tick all those boxes mentioned above. (OK,
so I don’t write romance, although there is an emotional element to my novels ―
does that count?) I just had no idea that the success I’ve achieved by
indie-publishing my Charlie Fox
backlist puts me in such an elite club.
And, quite frankly, the whole thing has
astounded me.
Working in isolation, I’d kind-of assumed
that anyone who held the rights to backlist titles lying dormant could put them
out there and do as well if not better than I was doing. Yes, I’ve been careful
with the presentation, and my cover designer, Jane Hudson at NuDesign, has done a
brilliant job, but it’s been a huge learning curve.
I find myself not only honoured and humbled
by the response of readers ― ie, they are buying the books and coming back for
more ― but also that I am inspired to Get On With It just that little bit
harder.
I’m fascinated to hear about the experience of other indies. Has self-publishing been like winning the lottery for you, or merely winning a ticket to another lottery? Do you feel the results of these surveys present an accurate picture of what it’s like out there, or are they further proof that there are ‘lies, damned lies, and statistics’?
This week’s Word of the Week is trangem,
a worthless article or knick-knack. The origin of the word isn’t clear, but it
might have some connection to the Scottish trankum,
meaning a trinket.