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@kristiedegaris Thank you for sharing. Something I suspected but haven't really thought about. In Germany we have set book prices. You cannot discount books unless they have some kind of fault. Which is good because small book shops can survive with this rule. And I don't have to online shop because it doesn't matter where I buy my books. It's like socialism, everybody pays the same, gets the same.

@burningTyger @kristiedegaris

Wow. Mind blown.

So a dime novel for a train ride is the same price as a technical reference for a library?

Are they affordable?

I buy one new book for every ten used ones. I give them away frequently. We have little front yard book stands everywhere here.

@kristiedegaris So, rather than buying the book, best someone can do is gift you the cost of the book in a shop, so that you get 100% (minus taxes) rather than 10% (minus taxes)?

Because how it reads is that the publisher makes a profit almost for sure, as long as a modicum of books gets sold.

Suppose each book costs £1 to print and distribute.
Editing (actual work and office overheads) is a fixed cost, say £2,000 per book.
There's tax baked into the cost of the book, perhaps 20%.
The shop keeps some amount, perhaps £1 per book.
The advance to the author is a fixed cost.
So if 1000 books sell at £15 each, that's ~12,000 after tax, of which £2,500 is the advance to the author, £1,000 is the cost of printing and distributing the books, £2,000 for editing, another £1,000 is for the shop, and the reminder, £5,500, go to the publisher.

Are these made up numbers far off?

@albertcardona @kristiedegaris It depends. The big trade publishers in New York and London will almost certainly lose money on a book that sells 1000 copies, that won't come close to covering costs. Printing a hardcover book, at least here in the US, is probably going to cost about $3/copy for a short run. (I should say that I work at a uni press, our books are a little higher quality than a lot of trade books these days). A long time ago, I was doing small press publishing, and 1000 copies might be enough to pay the printer and give the author a few bucks. Most of the profits come from bestsellers and backlist, I worked at one place in New York where the two or three most popular authors pretty much paid for everything else.

@kristiedegaris It’s difficult. But we have ordered the book - from our local small bookshop, Wedale books

@Wen Thank you so much! And thank you for supporting a local business too

@kristiedegaris As someone whose first book is coming out at pretty much the same time as yours on a very similar deal, I hear you

As you say, it’s an almost unpaid grind & it really does feel as though the traditional publishing model exploits the egotism & pride that society invests in being “an author” and being “published”

And of course the fact that the industry still exists does suggest someone is making money, even if not most of the authors

@markmccaughrean @kristiedegaris I think it works well for those who already have a "platform". I made a mistake of assuming that having a book out would give me a platform, and that publishers would have the connections to make that happen; but no, the publisher made it clear that getting it promoted and sold was my job, not theirs...

@simoncozens @markmccaughrean @kristiedegaris That was one of my biggest disappointments. I didn’t mind profit sharing OF that meant paying for the supposed support infrastructure. But then the marketing - which is supposedly why they get a cut - is actually on you. That, IMO, was a bit of a bait and switch.

@kristiedegaris
My father worked in publishing, I worked in publishing. It's a shady business.
This is why I only work with book on demand publishers these days. Of course I have to do all the proof-reading and editing myself, but then I get 80% of the sales price per book (about 50% when selling via retail).

@kristiedegaris how about I PayPal you a fiver and you email me an .epub

@kristiedegaris having read what you have to say about the financial side of writing and being published I went on to read https://kristie-de-garis.ghost.io/the-slog-what-no-one-told-me-about-writing-a-book/ which I identify so much with, even though all my writing is short. Eulogies at funerals need to tell a story, not just be a chronological account of what they've done.

Back to the finances. I think LJ Ross self publishes, successfully. Certainly it's at least 30 books now.

@kristiedegaris

Thank you so much for sharing this. It's so important that we talk about the money part of this. I just signed the contract to be lead editor of an edited volume - royalty numbers for it are less than yours and I know it's going to suck up a lot of my life over the next year. I often say to friends that walking through the book room at a conference is now like a horror show for me- I can feel all the unpaid blood, sweat, and tears leaking out of every book on every table.

I *did* manage to argue up the royalty percentage of the film rights - it's a book on climate change, heritage, and migration, so I have mad plans for those!

And also - congratulations on your book!

@kristiedegaris Thank you for this article. A #mustread @writing @writers #WriterCommunity #bookstodon #authors

I published #books in Germany (with fixed prices) but it's similar. I know a famous writer with several awards who sells about 500 copies a year in the most famous literary publishing house.
And the money is a gross amount, freelance writers have to use it to pay for their workplace and insurances, taxes etc.