It does seem to be about epublishing, although the figure of more than 100,000 novels published per year sure isn't coming from the publishing industry. A good number of those novels must be self-published.
According to this article in Galleycat, Smashwords' CEO Mark Coker has said, "Smashwords retailers will sell $18 to $20 million worth of eBooks this year."
That's a huge turnover, which any business would be proud of.
The article also says that "Smashwords has published more than 138,070 books". Again, that's a huge number which any business would be pleased with.
However, if you divide the money by the number of titles published it doesn't look quite so good.
$20,000,000 divided by 138,070 gives an answer of $145.
And that's the average turnover per title, not the actual amount earned as Smashwords keeps a portion of the money before paying authors their royalties.
I know that there are quite a few writers who are doing very well with self-publishing , but from those figures I'd bet that there are many, many more who are selling hardly any copies and doing really badly.
So what I'd like to know is, how does Smashwords compare to Kindle? Do people here make 10% of their sales through Smashwords and 90% through Kindle sales? What's the balance? (And what royalty level does Smashwords pay, so we can work out what that $145 really represents?)
Being the next Konrath may not be realistically possible for most of us indies, anyway. Remember, Konrath went in with the advantage of already having a large back catalog of mainstream-published books (plus the royalties that go with them), and he was already a fulltime author before he went indie too. His journey to fulltime IAE was much shorter and less difficult than what the rest of us are facing.
... for me, it's just not worth it.
"There are two possibilities. Your book might be in the top 1 percent of what readers are looking for — whether by the magic of your plot or the grace of your prose — in which case you are far better off self-publishing. You’ll make more money sooner, and you’ll own the rights when it comes time to negotiate with publishers (if you even care to). If, on the other hand, your work isn’t in the top 1 percent, it won’t escape the clutches of the slush pile. Your only hope in this case is to self-publish. Which means there isn’t a scenario in which I would recommend an author begin his or her career with a traditional publisher. Not a one. Even Jim Carrey is going the self-pub route with his children’s book, and he’ll make a mint because of it. The new top-down approach is to self-publish and retain ownership. The course of last resort would be to sign away your rights for the rest of your life."
This part - "You’ll make more money sooner" - assumes a lot. Too much, IMO. Self-publishing is basically putting your book in a public slush pile. Depending on your prowess (and luck) at self-promotion, the book, no matter how good, may or may not rise to the top of that slush pile.
As to Jim Carrey, once again this is a case of a person who already has a fanbase, plus the built-in publicity wagon that goes with fame. Hardly the situation for a new writer.
I find that at least with e-publishing it allows customers to sort through the slush pile, which they cannot do with a trade publisher.
I think one thing the article fails to take into account is the promotional machine a publisher can bring to bear. What if you're in the top 1 percent but if you self-published into the big public slushpile (as it were), nobody would ever find your book and it would never gain traction?
They could, but they don't always. Not every published writer gets that kind of promotion, and more and more trade-published folks talk about how much promotion they have to do themselves and the expenses they incur. I don't think major promotional backing is something someone should automatically expect, but it's worth hoping for.Whereas a trade publisher would bring enough promotion to gain a critical mass of readers and media attention for your book to find the word-of-mouth popularity it wouldn't have gained in self-publishing?
This is true. Some also handle those things themselves, which means we wear even more hats. Some don't want to do that either, and that's a fair enough reason not to want to self-publish, IMO.A self-publisher also acts as his/her own publisher in terms of editing, cover art, publicity, etc. -- and many writers either cannot afford to hire professionals for these jobs or don't care to.
I agree with most of what shelleyo is talking about, but this right here is key. I write erotica. I started in mid-December, and I'm a slow writer, so I only have six short stories released (two of which were total bombs). I'd never written erotica before outside of crappy fanfiction ages ago. I haven't promoted my stories other than creating a half-assed website (soon to be less half-assed) and making good covers. I've sold over a hundred copies of six stories across all vendors. That's over $200 (minus the small cost of domain and stock images) that I didn't have before. Not serious money or anything, but hey, it's the supplemental income Hugh was talking about for low-mid listing authors.Something unspoken in the article that I think
A lot depends on the genre you plan to self-publish, too. That always seems to get left out of these articles and discussions. Some are much harder sells than others. Too often people look at a success story and don't take genre into account. Romance novels have a decided market advantage over literary fantasies written in second person. What you write should factor into your decision-making and your expectations.