From Bestseller to Self-Pub
Twilight Fall by Lynn Viehl
Two scary things caught my eye this past week.
First, Harlequin Enterprises has joined the realm of self/vanity publishers, following the heels of West Bow (which I mentioned in this post on Writer Beware Blogs!). Again, Victoria at Writer Beware Blogs! has been covering the resulting scandal all last week, down to the reactions of Mystery Writers of America, Romance Writers of America, and Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. In her typical fashion, Victoria highlights the risks of an industry development (I want to say "tsunami") that now seems impossible to stop:
For the record, I don't for one teeny tiny second believe that discovering new writers, or giving them a chance to "begin their legacies" or "reach the stars," plays a major part here. That's just a marketing pitch. This is about money. Now more than ever, commercial publishers need to shore up their bottom lines--and adding self-publishing divisions is an easy and profitable way to do so.
Harlequin Horizons offers more confirmation of this fact. But what it confirms even more is the ambition of Author Solutions. Over the past few years, Author Solutions has been absorbing its largest competitors. Now it seems to have come up with a lucrative new business strategy that offers even more possibilities for expansion. For that reason alone, I think we'll be seeing more self-publishing divisions in the coming months or years.
Agent Nathan Bransford was more accepting of this new direction taken by publishers, at least in theory:
Setting aside this controversy for a moment and the specifics of Harlequin's operation, let me just say that in principle I don't think publishers facilitating self-publishing is necessarily such a bad thing. However, there should be complete transparency, fair pricing, total disambiguation between traditional publishing arms and self-publishing arms, and every good faith attempt made to educate writers about the difference between the two. This industry obviously needs new revenue streams, and provided that the publisher's program is genuinely nonexploitive and transparent I don't see the problem, and I don't see why publishers should continue to cede ground to self-publishing companies when they have every capacity to provide the same service. It just has to be done correctly.
As Nathan points out, it's all about the bottom line. And everyone is being hit by the bottom line. Publishers with the decrease in sales. Newly published authors with the small advances. Mid-list authors with the sharply shrinking advances. And agents, who make their living on these shrinking advances.
There are ways out of this storm, of course. Like getting on the bestseller lists, right? Right?!
Well, in Revenue Reality of a Bestseller, Lynn Viehl draws out all your demons. Showing readers the most recent royalty statement from Twilight Fall, Viehl sums up the horror:
So how much money have I made from my Times bestseller? Depending on the type of sale, I gross 6-8 percent of the cover price of $7.99. After paying taxes, commission to my agent and covering my expenses, my net profit on the book currently stands at $24,517.36, which is actually pretty good since on average I generally net about 30-40 percent of my advance. Unless something triggers an unexpected spike in my sales, I don't expect to see any additional profit from this book coming in for at least another year or two....
Speaking of comparisons, the publisher's portion of sales on this book has grossed them around $453,839.68. I don't have any hard figures on the publisher's net, so I can't give you the bottom line there. If I had to make a guess, I'd say they probably netted around $250K on this one.
Viehl's bottom line: It's hard for even bestselling writers to make a living from writing if they're producing only one book a year. Reading Viehl's post shocked me. For a long time, it was hard enough to accept that a writer needed to land on the bestseller lists to have a full-time writing career.I I believed this for bestselling trade paperback writers as much as for anyone. Now? If it gets made into a movie or you write two or three bestsellers a year, then maybe you can do this full time.
Getting your book published and physically printed by a traditional press, I suppose, is becoming the reward.
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