Eight years ago, I formed Red and Black Publishers as a way to self-publish some manuscripts that I had written years before, and to perhaps make some extra side money. Today, Red and Black Publishers has around 300 ebooks and around 125 print books on its lists. But can anyone really make a living today through self-publishing? Join me below the orange ink blot for my answer.......
So, can you really make a living through self-publishing? Sadly, the answer today is....probably not. Over just the past few years, the self-publishing industry has changed a great deal--and not for the better.
Back in 2007, I was working fulltime at a place called Sea Vision, which manufactured prescription lenses for scuba diving masks. The pay was crap--$8.50 an hour, just enough to pay the bills. By chance, a cyberfriend of mine happened to mention that he had just self-published a book through an online print-on-demand publisher called Lulu. At the time, print-on-demand (POD) technology was still pretty new. Basically, in "print-on-demand", you write a book manuscript, typeset it and format it, then submit it as a PDF file to the POD printer who stores it on a computer and lists the title in their catalog. Whenever a customer purchases a copy, the POD printer downloads the PDF file to a high-end laser printer that prints one complete set of pages which are then bound together with a cover to make a finished book and shipped off to the purchaser. POD technology completely revolutionized self-publishing. Before POD, any potential self-publisher had to raise the money upfront to do an offset printing-press run of books (which would amount to several thousand dollars) then hope to sell enough books to recoup the printing cost. With POD, now there were no upfront printing costs--each book was printed only as it was sold. Lulu allowed anyone anywhere to self-publish as many titles as they wished; Lulu would charge a set printing price (per page) for every book sold and send you a check for the difference. Further, Lulu did all the order-taking and distribution work.
I had already been doing some occasional work as a freelance writer, starting back in the 80s. Today, it is utterly impossible for any book author to get his or her work looked at by any sizable publisher without submitting it through a literary agent. That was mostly true already back in the 80's, but despite never having had any agent, I caught a lucky break. I had done some occasional articles on exotic pets for some of the trade magazines, and in 1996 I was contacted by an editor from Howell Book House (then a part of the Simon and Schuster empire), which specialized in books about exotic pets; they had a series called "A Happy Healthy Pet", and were looking for someone to do a book on keeping snakes as pets. I ended up doing three books in that series for Howell, one book each for two other series, and then two stand-alone books.
By 2007, working at Sea Vision, I had more or less stopped actively writing. But I still had some manuscripts I had done years before. So when my cyberfriend mentioned POD and Lulu, I checked it out, thinking it might be a way to at least get my manuscripts available in print.
I quickly decided that Lulu was not a good place to be. The printing cost was high, and the distribution was minimal (basically, they listed you in "Books in Print", at Amazon, and at their own website). Because Lulu's titles were all self-published, they had a reputation for being amateurish crap, and Amazon dropped them into the very bottom of its search rankings, guaranteeing that they never sold. Lulu was basically a vanity printer.
That led me to Lightning Source, a large POD printer located in Tennessee. Lightning Source is owned by Ingram, the largest book distributor in the world, and it not only did POD for small independent publishers, but also for the major New York publishing companies, who were beginning to move towards having their backlists published on POD because it was cheaper than offset. By publishing my manuscripts with Lightning Source, I could get lower printing costs, better distribution (and higher search rankings at Amazon), and could do it all under my own independent publishing imprint.
Lightning Source, however, had one major characteristic which Lulu and the other POD vanity printers did not have: Lightning Source does not deal with individual authors, and only accepts titles from legitimate publishers who are registered with their state as a business and who have obtained their own International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs). The economics of Lightning Source were also different; Lightning Source allowed "short discounts". When books are sold to retailers (like bookstores or Amazon) they are sold at a discounted wholesale price, usually 50-60% off the cover price. The bookstore keeps this share when they sell the book. But Lightning Source lets its publishers set a discount as low as 20%, which means the publisher can get as much as three times more money per book. It was a godsend to small publishers, who sell only in small numbers and virtually never sell anything through bookstores anyway.
In 2008, I formed Red and Black Publishers, paid for a block of ISBN numbers, and published my manuscripts, along with a few other books on which the copyright had expired and which had fallen into the public domain. I expected at most to sell a few occasional copies--enough maybe for a night out every couple of months. Instead, to my utter shock and surprise, sales were good (by self-publishing standards) and climbed steadily from month to month. So I began to think seriously about doing POD self-publishing as a living. Over the months, as I put out more and more titles, my sales continued to grow, and I quickly quit my day job at Sea Vision. And when ebooks began to take off, I signed up with Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and began putting out ebook titles (which have the advantage over Lightning Source print books of being completely free to submit.)
Though I've been making my living with self-publishing ever since, I quickly realized the brutal economic realities of the business. Here are the self-publishing facts of life, which remain just as true today as they were in 2008:
--Most original self-published books fail utterly. Statistics show that the vast majority of self-published POD books sell fewer than 30 copies, total, over their entire lifetime, and most of these go to the author's family and friends. Most POD titles sell no copies to the public at all. During my years of POD publishing, I consider any title a success if it averages 3-5 copies sold per month--and anything that sells over 20 copies a month is a rare runaway best-seller. Most people say that they get into self-publishing because they just want to write, but that is not really true. What authors actually want is to be READ, and the brutal reality is that self-publishing is not a good way to do that; sadly, virtually no one will ever read your self-published book. You will easily reach far more readers if you just put up your entire manuscript as a website.
--Self-publishing is a numbers game. If all you want is to see your own book in print, then the numbers won't matter; your self-published book will sell occasional copies and you'll get some beer money once in a while. But if you want to make a living at self-publishing, you will need to put out titles. Lots of them. Continuously. Since every individual title will sell only a handful of books per month, you have to make up for that by having lots of handfuls, which collectively add up to enough income to make a living. To do this, you will simply have no choice but to reprint other published works that have fallen into the public domain. Of the 400 or so titles that Red and Black Publishers has put out, as ebooks or print books, only around two dozen were written by me, and all the rest are public-domain reprints. Without them, no small publisher can sell enough copies to make an actual living.
--Bookstores do not carry self-published POD titles. Bookstores have limited shelf space, and they devote it entirely to stuff from major publishers that they know will be promoted and sell books. While many vanity printers dangle the prospect of "having your book available in every bookstore!", the brutal reality is that your self-published book will never see the inside of a brick and mortar store. Ever. At all. With a very few exceptions (I have had some titles that are consistently purchased in small numbers by college bookstores each year at the request of professors for use in history courses), all of your sales will come from online venues like Amazon, Barnes and Noble online, or Powells online. Which leads to...
--Amazon will own you. Before ebooks appeared, Amazon held a large slice of the book-selling pie; with ebooks, Amazon's share has gone up. As brick-and-mortar bookstore chains struggle and many have closed their doors, Amazon has grown, and since bookstores will not sell your book anyway, Amazon will be the only game in town for you. I knew a few small publishers who, out of ideological principle, refused to do business with Amazon; sadly, they sold no books and quickly folded. While there are a number of other online print and ebook outlets, and as a small publisher you need to seek out every sale that you can get, if you do POD or ebook self-publishing, the vast majority of all your sales, like it or not, will be through Amazon. That leads to an enormous disparity of power and a fundamentally lopsided relationship: to Amazon, you are simply a minnow, and your few thousand sales a year don't matter diddley-doo to them. They can, and will, treat you like utter crap. Particularly with Kindle ebooks, they will arbitrarily change their rules and conditions on a whim, seemingly at random, in ways that only make things more and more difficult for you--and they don't care at all about your opinion. But, while you don't matter even marginally to Amazon, YOU cannot survive without THEM. When Amazon says "Shit", you have utterly no choice but to ask "What color?" That is the simple brutal reality.
--Amazon is not your friend. By 2012, with my print books going through Lightning Source and my ebooks going through Kindle, I was making a pretty nice living, averaging about $65k a year. At that time, print books made the majority of sales, and ebooks were a sideline. That quickly changed, however, as ebooks began to take over the majority of the market. Within a short time, Amazon did two things which have now mostly killed off the small self-publishers....
First, Amazon formed its own print-on-demand company, called CreateSpace, to compete directly with Lightning Source. At the time it was formed, CreateSpace had higher costs than Lightning Source, less distribution, and no short discounts, so most of the people who did self-publishing as a living stayed with Lightning Source. And that is when Amazon pulled a really dirty trick--it began to alter the listing of books on its site that were published through Lightning Source, changing them from "ships in 24 hours" to "ships in two to three weeks". It was a blatant and open attempt to strong-arm small publishers into switching to CreateSpace, and it was devastating. Many small publishers (including me) saw their Amazon print sales fall by over half. After months of fighting with each other, Amazon and Lightning Source reached a surprising peace treaty; CreateSpace now prints all of its POD print books at Lightning Source. But Amazon still sets any POD book that is not published through CreateSpace, once it begins selling a particular number of copies per month, at "two to three weeks" availability. There is also a widespread suspicion among small publishers that Amazon sets non-CreateSpace books lower in its search rankings, though this cannot be confirmed since Amazon does not release the algorithm it uses to calculate search rankings. Since all this has happened, self-publishers with Lightning Source have seen their sales fall by as much as two-thirds (and even those who give in to the bullying and switch to CreateSpace make much less now than they did before with Lightning Source, because of CreateSpace's higher printing cost per copy, lesser distribution, and lack of short discount). It devastated us.
In the meantime, print book sales began to lose ground to ebooks. And that is when the second axe fell.
When the ebook market began to balloon, many small publishers realized that they could be quite successful by submitting public-domain reprints as Kindle ebooks, and since submitting them to Kindle was free, we could submit PD titles by the hundred. While each individual ebook title only sold a few copies per month, collectively they added up to some serious income. With both Kindle and Lightning Source, my own income tripled in just a few years. It was a great time to be a self-publisher.
Alas, the get-rich-quick scammers also saw an opportunity, and literally hundreds of people began downloading public domain books from Project Gutenberg or elsewhere and uploading them, as unedited text files, straight to Kindle, setting their prices as low as 99 cents a copy. Since these unedited versions were poorly laid out, full of typos, and hard to read, they sold virtually nothing and didn't have much effect on sales of the edited versions being submitted by legitimate small publishers. But Amazon decided that they didn't like having all that crap cluttering up their lists, so they did two things that ultimately killed the Kindle for self-publishers: they supplied versions of every possible public domain work for free download on the Kindle, and they imposed a set of constantly-changing restrictions that limited which public-domain content could be submitted for the Kindle. They also set the share of revenue that goes to the publisher for reprinted public-domain ebooks at just 35%--half of what a publisher could get with a printed POD book at Lightning Source (so with ebooks vs print books you may sell a greater number of copies, but you get less per copy, and so get less income overall). Combined with legal changes that have virtually halted the public-domain process in the United States, all of this, coming in a short time period, was enough to kill the market for self-publishers: revenue from public-domain ebooks, which had become the bread and butter of every successful small publisher in the country, dropped like a rock. At the same time, the number of people submitting to Kindle keeps going up, meaning more people submitting the same public-domain titles, and fewer sales for each.
Today, most of the fulltime self-publishers who were around when I started, are gone; they have either dropped to a mere part-time hobby, or they have folded up altogether. My publishing income has fallen to less than one-third what it was a couple years ago--I survive on it only because I am a very non-materialistic person and have very low expenses (and because I am a single person living alone; if I had a family to support, I could never do it and would also have folded). There is a fear now among self-publishers that Amazon will one day simply forbid anyone from submitting any public-domain content at all to KPD. That would kill the micro-publishers dead and insure that none of us can make a living at it.
And there the situation stands as of today.
So, you want to go into self-publishing? If all you want as a self-publisher is to write books of your own and see them in print, then CreateSpace and Kindle provide easy ways to do that (and you might even get some pocket change once in a while). But if you are planning on making a decent living from self-publishing, forget it. You'd probably be better off going into the emu-ranching business instead.
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