Navigating Indieworld Discussing All Things Indie discussion

I've come across this:

"Self-Published Authors
If you’re self-published, you get much better royalties, but you also have to take on the costs and time of creating and marketing the book.

Let’s assume that your book is good and you’ve put in the money for good editing and cover design (your book will not sell without these). You cannot sell your book for as much as a traditional publisher would, because you do not have the name backing of a traditional publisher. So instead, you may sell your paperback at $15 and your ebook at $4.99. You get all the royalties this time, so for 11,250 paperback sold ($9 royalties), you’ll get $101,250, and for 3,750 ebooks sold ($3.42 royalties), you’ll get $12,836.25, for a total of $114,086.25. If your self-publishing costs (editing, cover design, and typesetting) are $3,000, your profit will be $111,086.25. For self-publishing, it likely won’t take you a year to write the book, but you also have to spend time on promotion, so we’ll just keep that year amount for a single book. That means you would make $53.40 an hour.

Now, that’s a great number, but as a self-published author, it’s difficult to sell that many copies of your book in its lifetime, especially if you're just starting out. You don’t have a publisher selling your book to bookstores and getting it into libraries. You don’t have the authority of a well-known publisher to back your work. You may not have the time or experience to market your book enough. (Note: publishers are doing less and less to market lesser-known authors, though.) Some self-published books may only sell 100 print copies in lifetime. But we’re assuming that your book is well written with an eye-catching cover. We’re also going to assume that you’re putting extra money aside for marketing, so you can sell more books. Let’s say that your book sells 5,000 copies in its lifetime. As a self-published author, you’ll likely be selling more ebooks than print books, since an ebook is cheaper and a safer bet for readers who don’t know you (and a lot of marketing sites will only market ebooks). So if 60% of your sales are ebooks, then you’ll sell 2,000 print books ($18,000) and 3,000 ebooks ($10,260). That’s a profit of $28,260, minus the $3,000 in self-publishing costs, and then another, say, $500 in marketing costs (for the lifetime of the book). That’s net profit of $24,760, or $11.90 an hour.

You can push that profit up as you become a better writer. Eventually, writing, publishing, and marketing a book may take you only a total of 6 months, which means you’d earn $23.81 an hour. Or maybe you publish, say, 5 books, then use marketing money to only market one, and that marketing also drives up the sales of the other books, which in turn saves you marketing money on those books (in our scenario, that would save up to $2,000, although $1,000 in savings would be a better estimate). The more books you publish, the more effective your marketing will be, because it will affect sales on all of your books.

Maybe you offer the first ebook in a five-book series for free (but keep the print price the same), which loses you out on those ebook sales, but instead gets readers hooked on the series. Then you could offer the next ebook for $2.99, and the next three books for $4.99. That drives up the ebook sales of your entire series, so the second book sells, say 10,000 copies, the third 8,000, and the subsequent two books 5,000 copies. With these numbers, we’ll assume the same print sales stay the same (since, for simplicity's sake, only ebook sales will increase), so 2,000 print copies sold of each book, for a total royalty of $90,000 for all five books ($9 x 2,000 x 5). (Note: honestly, unless you are doing school visits and book signings and pushing to get your print books in stores, your actual print numbers could be far less, and that's okay because you can usually make up for it in the ebook sales.)

For the ebook sales, book 1 would, of course, get you $0, book 2 would get you $16,184 ([$2.99 - $0.10] x .7 x 8,000 copies), the third $20,538 ([$4.99 - $0.10] x .7 x 6,000 copies), and the fourth and fifth $10,269 each ([$4.99 - $0.10] x .7 x 3,000 copies), for a total ebook profit of $57,260. We combine that with the print royalties to get $146,260, then minus production costs ($3,000 x 5 + $500 x 5) to get $128,760, or $12.38 an hour if each book took a year, or $24.76 an hour if each book took 6 months. Of course, with good marketing, and MORE money spend on advertising, your books should sell even more copies, but it will take consistent effort. Some successful self-published authors sell 100 copies of one of their books per day! Other authors are doing really well to sell 30-100 of a book per month. If you have 50 books out there, that can still add up. Keep in mind that if your book hasn't been edited well and you don't stay on top of marketing, it won’t make nearly this much.

Another Note
All these calculations are for the lifetime of a book. In other words, you’re not recouping this money right away, but instead over the course of a lifetime. But with ebook publishing, "lifetime" in books no longer means what it used to. In the old days, publishers marketed books hard only a few months, and after three or so years, the average authors really didn't see many sales. With ebooks, that lifetime is extended, and you can keep pushing your book indefinitely and continue making more money. Even if you don't hit our projected lifetime sales per book in 3-10 years, that's okay. There is time."

This is an excerpt from a reputable site called "My Book Cave".

Is this a fair assessment of how much self-published authors make?

It may be a fair assessment of how some self-published authors who work full-time as self-published authors, who write well, who write in popular fields, and who have keen marketing skills make. A better assessment is probably found in this Author's Guild survey of published authors. A couple of notable items:

53% of all authors (not just self-published authors) consider authoring books their primary occupation, spending half or more of their work time writing.

46% are traditionally published; 27% self-publish only; and 26% do both—meaning that slightly more than half of the respondents have done some self-publishing.

The median book-related income for all authors surveyed was $6,080. Median book-related income for full-time authors was $20,300.

25% of all authors earned nothing in book-related income for 2017, and 18% of full-time authors earned nothing in book-related income.

Self-published authors saw a significant increase in book-related income over the past 4 years, but they still earn 58% less than traditionally published authors. The median book-related income for self-published authors in the top decile (those lucky few who are raking it in) was $154,000, while the same figure for traditionally-published authors is $305,000.

It seems that on average it is more lucrative to be traditionally-published, if you can find a publisher. (But we all know the odds of that.) But either way, the fact remains that although a few authors make good money at it, the overwhelming majority do little more than earn a modest living, and a great many never even manage that much.

Like anything else, if you want to succeed, you need to have talent, hone that talent through practice, practice, practice, practice, persevere, get a bit lucky now and again, practice, practice, practice . . .

. . . and, I suppose, not lose faith in yourself.

Very useful, thank you, Dale and definitely looks more like reality than the stats I'm quoting.

I'm now going to follow your link.

Very interesting!