Some notes on self-publishing books

[thewayne]

Barry Eisler, a NY Times best-selling author, recently turned down a $500,000 advance and will self-publish his next book. The issue is what makes more money: 70% of everything forever, or $500,000 in advance that has to be earned back at 14.9% per sale, followed by 14.9% of a copy for a long time, with the knowledge that the book will eventually probably become unavailable. He chose to forgo the half mill.

http://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/articles/20110321/00183913568/best-selling-author-turns-down-half-million-dollar-publishing-contract-to-self-publish.shtml

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/03/ebooks-and-self-publishing-dialog.html

http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/03/22/0125218/Best-Selling-Author-Refuses-500k-Self-Publishes-Instead


26 of the Amazon Top 100 are currently occupied by indie authors, here's a post by John Locke, the current #1, who self-publishes and sells his books for $0.99. He pays an editor $1,000 who takes care of the cover art and converting his book to the various eformats. Apparently Amazon royalties pay the author 70% if the book is published at $2.99 or higher and only 35% if it's priced at $0.99.

"And yet, when I lowered the price of The List from $2.99 to 99 cents, I started selling 20x as many copies--about 800 a day. My loss lead became my biggest earner."

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/03/guest-post-by-john-locke.html


An IT book writer self-publishes, puts his book on Amazon's cloud. It's made him $9,000 since 2009.

http://slashdot.org/story/11/03/18/1932216/The-Adventure-In-Self-Publishing-an-IT-Book