Wow, pbbth, I don’t even know where to start.
I suppose we should get some terminology down first: when you “self publish” a book, you are doing literally that: publishing it yourself. I did this with my first two books. I paid the editor, I paid the proofreader, I designed the cover art, I picked the paper, I did the layout, I built the indexes, I selected a printer/binder, and I wrote a big fat check for over 1,000 copies of the book. I then did my own promotion, sales, shipping, and event scheduling (to be clear, I say “I,” but I had a co-author on one book who did much of the work, and my wife helped a lot, too). With my second book, I had spent close to $10,000 of my own money before I had a finished book in my hand – but we sold almost 1,500 copies, and most of those were at the full $29.95 price, so it paid in the end.
Vanity presses are a different story. Most of them are POD (print on demand) companies these days, so you don’t have to print hundreds or thousands of copies. You pay them a fee up front (most are under $500, and if it’s over $1,000 it’s probably a scam), and they handle all of the printing. You are still responsible for editing, proofreading and marketing, but you don’t have cases of books filling your garage. Again, you’re paying money up front to get your work published.
Twenty of my books have been published by traditional publishing houses of various sizes. All but one paid me an advance, and all of them pay me royalties. I didn’t have to pay a dime to the publisher for any of those. Some have flopped, and will never even pay out the advance. Others have done quite well (in one case, it paid out the advance in three months!). My aggregate sales haven’t hit a million copies yet, but I’m well up into the hundreds of thousands (that’s copies sold, not copies printed).
In no case has my royalty been as low as you’re talking about. The range has been 5% (for an expensive textbook) to 10% (for children’s books), with an average around 8%. In the children’s book market these days, you should be pulling a buck a book, not fifteen cents.
YES! For one thing, it doesn’t cost you any money up front to deal with a legitimate publisher (with or without agent). For another, they do most of the work. In self publishing, you have to assemble the necessary team to build your book. With traditional publishers, they have editors, illustrators, copyeditors, cover designers, indexers, proofreaders, book designers, sales people, marketing people, and shipping people on staff. They have established relationships with distributors, libraries, and retail booksellers.
Sure, you have to do some of the promotion if you want your book to succeed, but a traditional publisher that has invested in a 10,000-copy print run is highly motivated to get out there and sell it. Their reach is far greater than yours. Self-publishing is a full-time job, and writing is only a small part it.
Go back up to eclectic wench’s post and read it again. There’s a great deal of truth in there!
This is the number one rule of the publishing industry. Money flows ONE WAY: from the publisher to the agent (if there is one) to the author. As an author, you should never be writing checks to your publisher or agent, unless you are buying extra copies of your book from the publisher to sell on your own.
I own a bookstore, and I stock copies of books by all of our local authors – whether traditionally-published or self-published – EXCEPT for books published by PublishAmerica. I just won’t deal with those people.
Listen to Eve. Write “Every book needs editing” 100 times. My last nonfiction book went through a peer review with 9 people, then went to the publishing house where it was gone over by an editor, a copyeditor, and a proofreader. I had a fact-checker go through it myself. Every one of those people found mistakes, and I’m not a sloppy writer.