Lecture #13: Publishing Part Two — Brandon Sanderson on Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy

hey everybody welcome to class uh this is our next to last class this will be another fire hose session i apologize for that but it is going to happen uh we will slow down next week for our last week where we will i will do q a on publishing questions from you so hold your questions um and then please write them into the forums that you are going to fill out saying that you were here for this session all right and i will use be using that list and last week's list to answer what you

guys need to know um this week i want to thank in particular jennifer peale and becky monson um these two are the students i have this year who are professional romance novelists who took the class because they wanted to try something new and learn some fantasy and science fiction uh they're both indie published and they have been an enormous research source for preparing this lecture they were going to give this lecture in class but with social distancing and things like that we just decided to have them send me their notes um which i am going

to incorporate into this lecture it's really handy to have notes from people who are doing it in the trenches right now so let's talk about indie publishing this week by the way our main topics will be indie publishing and then what contracts look like in traditional publishing along with royalties and things like that which will be comparing to how things work in indie publishing so brief and overly simplistic history of indie publishing back in the day if you wanted to be independently published it was really hard some people still did it and were successful uh

famously the christmas box was an independent book back in the day aragon was a uh an indie book back before the um the big change ever happened in about 2010. uh but during these days most of the time indeed publishing was synonymous with what we call vanity publishing uh which the two are distinct but the line blurred a lot more back then vanity publishing would be you go to a press you pay a bunch of money you are your book is published but you get five thousand copies which you store in your garage and occasionally

give away or maybe sell i had somebody who was a friend of my parents when i was growing up who had done this um they were a newscaster who had a story about a golfer they wanted to tell they wrote it they got it vanity published and then they sold three or four hundred copies of the five thousand copy print run that they paid for and the other five thousand copies sat in their garage um this was unfortunately the um the average story for someone who tried to indie publish back in the day the problem

being that warehousing shipping and distributing physical medium is really hard and requires a lot of connections or a lot of fame or your own model the people who are most successful with indie publishing back before the digital revolution were people who had a way to sell their books themselves for instance they were giving lectures or seminars on something and they would have their book for sale there they will have indie publish their book and then would sell it there or they were someone who you know sold at an expo doing something else and also had

a guidebook on the thing that they were doing i knew somebody who you know sold alpacas in alpaca wool who had indie published their book which was a fantasy novel about talking alpacas and sold it at their same booth these sort of things could be successful but for many years it was really hard and because of that it also picked up quite a bit of stigma uh stigma which was likely undeserved then and is very undeserved now that indie publishing was not real publishing um well something happened in 2010 um the digital revolution finally hit

books now this was a long time coming and long enough coming that people were uncertain if it ever would actually hit books because it had hit music it was hitting television and film people were moving to digital for things like music but people resisted that and continued to want print books um and then uh the kindle launched and in the space of the year the whole landscape changed it like everyone had been waiting and holding their breath and they'd started to think well maybe and then it just it all came rushing through so what happened

is uh you can actually i could see it on my royalty statements my royalty statements went from a handful of ebook copies being sold the air just tiny numbers you know earnings and they're like your ebook earnings this uh this quarter were 53 dollars to suddenly 20 to 30 percent of my business moving uh digital in one year uh this was a huge revolution in the industry um it has continued over the years though ebook versus print has stabilized across the last three years or so with the only growth segment of of it being audiobooks

right now audiobooks are still growing print and ebook meaning audiobooks is still swallowing a bit of the print and ebook percentages whereas print and ebook have hit about a stasis now this is going to vary widely depending on your genre for instance books for middle grade readers sell far fewer ebook and audiobooks than print books whereas big long books tend to do better in digital formats and in audiobook formats this is because the um number one they get hard to hold um and number two because of an audible subscription method one credit buys you a

book whether it's 55 hours worth of listening or nine hours worth of listening and people tend to save their credits for the very big books so the longer your book is generally that is an advantage particularly in audiobook but also to an extent in ebooks and the more tech savvy and likely to have digital devices your audience the more likely it is to move to ebook and then kind of the third thing factor here is how fast of a page turner it is so this kind of fights with the length a lot of the best

page trainers are shorter books but those tend to the ones that when you finish it you immediately want the next one just really quickly want to be able to click the link and say all right i'm going to read the next one i still have a few hours left tonight before i have to go get up and go to work i'm going to read this book and so these three factors kind of push things right now with my latest book being skyward sequel um starsight star site was only 17 print okay it was 83 audiobook

and digital book um in its opening weeks i haven't seen the final breakdown this was just you know the first two months um and of those audiobook it was the first book of mine that audiobook was larger than the um than the e-book numbers i believe so this is a big revolution and in 10 years we have gone from less than one percent digital in my royalties to only 17 print this transfer was offered a lot of opportunities to the indie published authors um and this revolution meant that the indie published authors could do a

lot of the work that the big publishers were doing and did not have to deal with distribution chains warehousing and things like this and today indie publishing is almost exclusively ebook and audiobook now you will generally as an any published author have your books up for print sale but they are usually print on demand with very small royalty rates just there so that people want print copies can buy them and put them on their shelves most of the time you're not making very much money off of that print on demand because you know it costs

like 19 bucks to print a copy and you sell it for 20 or something like that um probably a bit lower than that you're probably printing it for like 12 and selling at 15 or but people just aren't buying a ton of those and the the printing costs are expensive and so most of your sales will be digital indie published what happened in 2010 that really started driving this is a few authors um in particular some romance authors and some thriller authors who are writing fast-paced um what we would have once called pulp genre fiction

which means it's very solidly incited genre like it's it's romance with a capital r focused on the romance that is shorter and faster paced um usually in some sort of series sometimes in romance the author's name becomes the series uh this happens um in that genre same thing in thrillers often you know dan brown thriller is a genre rather than them all being about one character but sometimes they are a lot of dan browns are for instance a lot of john grisham's or not um but either way fast-paced shorter books real page turner's priced cheaply

um we're talking books for three four or five dollars that people could immediately click on the next one at the end of buying one and just says click here to buy the next one and they would just rip through these and the indie publishing market just exploded uh to the point that you can find percentages but there is a significant i i don't have these numbers offhand i didn't look them up but often it's something like 40 percent of what's being sold on on amazon is independently published which is a huge huge chunk of the

market now let's point out that jk rowling is a not insignificant number of that forty percent she's like two or three percent by herself uh because she kept all the digital rights to harry potter for the audiobooks and the e-books and she self-publishes them um so jumping back to jennifer and becky here um they are excellent examples of um authors who are doing very well um i asked them just so i could let you guys know that they weren't just starving artists for uh some ballpark numbers so uh this isn't them bragging this is me

pushing them to uh to let you know but jennifer has published 30 books so far she makes six figures you can find uh her books in a lot of local physical media at bookstores um and she's won numerous awards uh becky has published seven books makes high five figures in a year she has an agent and has a movie deal on one of her books so i would recommend you check out their books um they're both great writers i have read quite a bit of their writing in the class so far and so i would

recommend that you uh you give them a look and uh thank you jennifer and becky who are watching uh for this now i'm going to kind of go down their list of reasons why you would independently publish um in today's market and um this is kind of a contrast to the traditional publishing model we talked about last week and then i'll start getting into some actual numbers and contracts and looking at what some of the numbers look like uh so they say that their number one reason is flexibility um so independently publishing if you are

indie published one of the things you can do is you can target the market much faster and better you also are flexible in how you publish um you're flexible in determining um you know how long your series is how long your book is you are your soul you are in charge of all of this and underneath this i would say equal to this is uh according to some things they said is control um so as an indie author you decide what goes on the cover review book you decide what goes on the back summary of

your book you decide the pricing of your book you decide when something is up for sale you decide when it's not up for sale you decide what promotions you want to be part of these things are really uh powerful reasons to to independently publish um if you are really worried that your book is going to have a terrible cover that you have no control over then indie publishing will look better to you because as a new author generally you have very little say over what goes on the cover of your book or what goes on

the back flap of your book if you are really worried about the idea of selling your book in perpetuity most contracts these days for print rights are for life of copyright when you sign a deal to sell a book to tor for instance you are selling that book for your lifetime plus 70 years to be published by them under that contract there are ways to get that back but that is what you're signing up for a lot of the other contracts are different a lot of audiobook contracts for instance are like for seven years or

something like that a lot of overseas rights are for like seven to nine years but u.s and i believe yeah us i'm not sure about uk i might have to look that up but us print uh rights are for life of copyright almost all the time and in fact i have never found someone who got them to budge on that at a at a top string publisher that's just one of the things that they know is a line in the sand so um flexibility control um the other is they put money um when you are

self-publishing you keep the lion's share of the money uh what is usually happening is there's a 30 70 split uh with a 70 going to the author um in most cases where you'll be publishing the place the platform you're putting it up on will take around thirty percent and you will make around seventy percent of whatever you set as the price uh we will put the caveat that amazon requires those to be um between three and ten dollars 299 to 999 to get that royalty anything below or above that gets a much worse royalty and

basically nobody does it um so you keep the lion's share of that money uh as you can you can see it will run some of these numbers later if you have a small but dedicated fan base that is willing to buy whatever you sell you could theoretically let's say you published with a with a new york publisher and with them you're going to sell about 10 000 copies and on your own you're going to sell about 10 10 000 copies well that is an excellent reason to independently publish if they cannot sell you a lot

more copies than you would sell if you've targeted targeted niche market you know that market really well and you're going to be selling to them then new york will do nothing for you you will make much more independently published if you also are really good at releasing things according to trends quickly writing and writing things that are good page turners and in long serial format any publishing's flexibility would allow you to do some things i would recommend you look up someone called bella forest uh bella forest is i believe the best selling in the author

on amazon she might have been replaced by someone else but usually she is and bella forest model is that she releases um books that are similar to current trends in publishing she jumps on them much faster and then she releases long serialized stories about them her biggest series is the shade of vampire and this is a series that is very similar to twilight romantic urban fantasies with vampires there are something like 50 entries she releases a new one like every six weeks um and she sells tons of copies uh she is often kind of chasing

at jk rowling and some of those right underneath them at like number three or four author on all of amazon uh recently i've looked and she's dropped down like number 10 or 12 or 15 but she has you know she has other things that feel a lot like hunger games she has other things that feel you know like nicholas sparks books basically and she's releasing a book every two weeks um and that flexibility um and that speed of publishing is just not something you can do in traditional publishing it just does not work um so

one thing they wanted to point out is that you can get everything a print book it's or a trad pup um so by this i mean sorry about that terrible handwriting guys by this what they mean is if you want to get your books in bookstores you can make it happen it does happen it's harder um if you want movie deals it can happen generally harder but it can happen um for instance the emperor's soul that i released i independently published the ebook um and i went through a uh a small press a regional press

called tachyon for the print book and they did a fantastic job on the print book and got it into every book store in the country and we got a movie deal offer on that that was an indie um it was a hybrid but uh i did a lot of the indie publishing for that myself um you can get they write um into the major bookstores you can get movie deals pointing out that the martian was indy published which indeed it was um you can get book signings you can get teaching speaking engagements and teaching opportunities

um so those are your arguments for self-publishing and they are legit um if you watching this retain any sort of bias against vanity press or things like that because of the way the industry has talked about it you should abandon those very quickly this is a realistic and in fact um a growing uh segment of the market and it is something that you should seriously consider as a writer right now trying to break in uh so let's talk a little bit about how one breaks in to indie publishing um so i have generally and they

talk about these things a little bit so i'll try to write up their notes a little bit later i've generally heard two general schools generally general i've heard of two general schools of thought about breaking into indie publishing um school of thought number one is this idea of becoming what is called a platform writer a platform writer which i think is mostly my term for it others might call it something else is somebody who has a really great platform that draws a lot of attention and they use that as publicity to market their novels uh

larry korea is generally held up as a poster child for this larry curry if you're not familiar with him is an avid gun nut um he is um a right uh wing um commentator and things like this and loves his gun rights um issues and he broke in right before the big indie publishing thing took off by indy publishing on his own by running a blog where he talked about all his gun uh all the stuff he finds fascinating about guns and politics and then he wrote books um which accurately used it used firearms used

i accurately used firearms and people who knew their way around firearms as a contrast to a lot of the media he was reading where people just didn't know what they were doing and so if you wanted to read an action adventure story with people who knew their way around guns and who presented the world in a way that larry korea's um you know fan base would really enjoy then these were perfect books for you he then had his blog to kind of funnel attention toward this he was active on a lot of gun forums and

said hey you know you guys know me um i've been participating for years here i've got a good reputation here is my book maybe check it out that funneled a lot of attention toward his books and turned them into best sellers even before he got picked up by a traditional publisher which he eventually did he eventually um he picked bane which is kind of a almost it's like a traditional uh big publisher but works like a small press it's kind of an interesting case but anyway um there are still a lot of people who are

platform writers um talking to a lot of indie writers recently they have said that platform writing is very hard to cut through the noise on and they recommend method number two unless you have some really good platform already or something you know really well and are good at writing blog posts and stuff and that is the publish as much as you can as quick as you can model they say that your next book is usually the best piece of marketing you can make for your previous book this stands in traditional publishing as well it is

a good rule of thumb that generally making sure your next book is coming out in a timely way is more valuable to you as a marketing tool than anything else you could be doing with that time once you have that book coming out and you have extra time that's when you add on doing all the other stuff the going on the social media sites um the doing guest posts on other people's blogs people won't read blogs anymore but you know that sort of thing um all of this is secondary to making sure the next book

comes out and if you're indie published that may mean your next book that you're releasing in four months it might mean the next book you're releasing in a year it depends on your publishing schedule um so what do you do um they recommend the following and i'm not going to write these all up because some of these are a bit longer they recommend joining joining online groups and forums like 20 books to 50k uh these groups provide a wealth of knowledge into the indie publishing world go ask people who are into polishing right now where

they found their information i can't give it to you because i exist in a very different realm from this that even when i indie publish i have a platform and the platform is that i'm a well-known and reputable fantasy writer already with the marketing budget of a big five press behind me um attend conferences run specifically for indie authors or which include indie authors like story makers story makers is a local convention here to utah it is fantastic one of the best conventions i have ever attended uh point number three you must run it like

a business you must be willing to put in hours and invest money we'll talk about that in a minute uh you must write a killer book or more than one before you release rapid release can be your friend it gives you more ways to market uh so what's hap what happens a lot in the publishing i've seen right now is this this blitz method um i have a good friend who sometimes has has uh taught in the class before uh jancy um and jancy has done this thing with a co-author recently that i see commonly

happening in the publishing which is where they spend several years writing like 12 books in a series and then what they do is they save those all up and they release them in a blitz one a month for a year you might be saying i don't have any idea how bella forest can release a book every two weeks i don't know either no idea what's going on over there but i do know that a lot of my friends would not be capable of releasing a book a month but they can take three years and write

12 books and then blitz with a book a month for a year so that each one is building on the previous ones either way quick releases do tend to be very advantageous in indie publishing do everything you to make sure it doesn't look like an indie book uh this is their their next point this is really important this is the one where most people um mess up you need a really good cover and you have to pay for a good cover uh when i've indie published we're usually spending a couple grand on a cover you

don't even have to do that but you do have to be spending good money um i've heard that you can get a decent cover for 500 um but you don't want to be doing the covers that cost five bucks bucks off of fiverr you just they will look really really cheap um you want to be paying for editing and helpfully um this is information i didn't have jennifer and becky have included what the rates are that uh that people charge so let me write these up on the board so you have them and you can

write them down so rates that people charge make sure that it's not one okay uh so for a copy edit i'll explain these in a second you are looking at point zero zero seven through point zero zero nine cents a word um um content editing you are looking for uh looking at around uh 1.2 cents to 1.25 oh sorry um 0.0125 uh dollars um a word and proofreading is around point zero zero three uh a word so apologize again about my handwriting uh but basically these are these are rates um that you'll be looking for

uh paying by word uh a copyedit is kind of like a continuity edit con this is where a copyright is like a better proofread where they will also kind of look at style guide sort of things and try to apply a style guide if you have one if you're like make this look like you know chicago manual style or whatever um or watch out for if a character you know eyes are one color in one scene and a different color next scene copy editors kind of catch that stuff um content editing is like an editor

who's giving you substantive feedback about the plot characters pacing these sorts of things and proofreading is just the only looking for typos uh when uh my uh editorial director peter does proofreads and copy edits he often reads the book backward uh we'll be just so that he's not focusing on content type stuff he's only looking at at the words and things like this but um yeah you need this stuff you need to be paying for editing you need to be paying for a cover um you may want to have to you may want to pay

someone to lay out your book for you um this makes certain means it looks aesthetically pleasing on the page if your ebook only you don't have to worry about this nearly as much because people resize the font and things like that and so the layout on the page is much easier for a lot of ebooks so they say search the internet and ask in groups and forums about how authors find good freelance editors and cover artists um so uh just to kind of quickly um talk a little bit about well let's let's actually go to

um talk about the nuts and bolts of how you self-publish and then we're going to talk about the nuts and bolts of traditional publishing looking at contracts and then if there's time we'll talk about what they've written about advertising and branding which can be basically the same regardless of which way you're going so um they suggest there are um there are two main methods there is the go wide method or the amazon exclusive method so what they're meaning here is if you are willing to sign up for amazon exclusively you get a better deal um

generally um they put you on kindle unlimited which is the kind of subscription service on amazon where people subscribe to it pay a monthly uh fee and then they amazon pays you based on the number of words they're read this can be really helpful for a lot of indie authors because a lot of traditional published authors are not in that so you are competing only against you know people who are in that program um but it works well for romance fantasy and mystery genres um people who are going to want to rip through an entire

series sometimes going exclusively on kindle can be good for you going wide means you're putting it not just on amazon but on all the different platforms uh which can give you a wider net but a slightly worse deal and not quite as good of marketing uh from amazon amazon uh they can um so uh if you choose to go wide you can use platforms like to digital to upload your manuscript and they will distribute it to barnes noble ibooks kobo amazon etc but always upload to amazon yourself it's easy and gives you more control and

more money this is what we have found as well indie publishing my books that's how we do it so on amazon your price must be 299 to 9.99 uh don't price it anything above that you can sometimes go lower than that and price your first book at 99 cents you'll get a terrible royalty because it's 30 you'll get like 35 cents a book um because you get a 35 royalty on a dollar but for a while giving away your first book for free or cheap was a method to get people reading the series readers have

kind of come wise to this and it happens it's it works a little less now than it used to it used to be the kind of the silver bullet put your first book up for free than the rest series then amazon stopped liking people doing that and they stopped letting them put them up for free and would give them periods where they could be free and so people started charging at 99 cents and you would have to ask the current indie authors um what uh jennifer and becky say um be careful how you price your

books and train your audience if you train them to get your ebooks for free or 99 cents from the beginning they will expect that of your future books um paperbacks um just do through their self-publishing thing until you get big enough where you may want to do a small print run of your own and sell them at conventions and things it's not a huge part but they say it's useful for getting t into particularly your local bookstores which you can do if you have enough sales and you have print books that you can give to

one of the distributors to put through um they make two notes at the end here which i think are really smart notes uh one of them is that there are a lot of scams out there for trying to prey upon indie authors there are a ton of these and one of the best things you can do is remember that um be very skeptical of anyone asking you for money now this doesn't include obviously you're paying people for cover and for editing and things like that but be very skeptical if someone says i will do all

the work for you just give me this much money a lot of those are scams not all of them but a lot of them a lot of them are vanity presses which you don't need these days because you can do this yourself the other thing they mentioned is that landscape is constantly changing and that you need to keep up to date on it and yes you do one of the big changes i've talked about this a little bit uh before in class but one of the big changes is amazon over the last couple of years

has become a pay to play location wrong turn market meaning that amazon charging authors uh to advertise their books on amazon has become a major source of income for amazon and in the beginnings of the indie book revolution it was all all of amazon's recommendations were based solely on what did people who read this book also like you went to a brandon sanderson book page they would serve you ads only for books that people who bought my book then bought another book and really liked it and rated both of them highly and it didn't matter

to amazon if you were indie if you were if you were traditionally published they were simply looking to sell you the best book they could to keep you reading books i think it is a mistake and short-sighted of amazon but recently they have shrunk and contracted that recommendation system and greatly expanded the an author paid to be on this page recommendation system if you go to the way of kings right now you will find the similar books that other people liked thing on there for a while they'd moved that all the way to the bottom

now they moved it back up but you also find an advertisement on the page this right to the the right of my book that is paid to be there you will often find a banner ad for something that is paid to be there and then you also find sponsored books um in a big long list paid to be on this page and asking jennifer and becky they um nowadays are paying thousands of dollars a month on advertising on amazon in order to keep selling books basically this 70 royalty looks a lot worse than it used

to when you're you're having to invest 35 or 50 percent 35 you're investing 50 percent of what you make back into pay amazon to advertise your book and if you don't they just don't appear on anyone's pages you don't sell them i think this is terrible for indie publishing i think it's terrible for books in general but it is what amazon has decided to do now and they are the big player in the market they are something like 80 of all ebooks um and so if you're going to be independently published you either are going

to have to have a platform that is driving people to those books pages you're going to have to somehow get popular enough that people are looking for them directly or you're gonna have to pay amazon thousands of dollars to advertise them in order to keep selling books um and this is i think very unfortunate but it is the way the world works right now double check me on that by talking to other indie authors i've asked five or ten and this is the answer they've given me but i might be getting an unrepresented a disproportionately

represented um say segment of the market who is um who is paying a lot for ads and having that work and so they're continuing to do it maybe there are other ways maybe it's uh this probably this ad payment has a has a ceiling on it so once you get to a certain amount of ad spend then you make more and more so once you hit that threshold it becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of your take um but be aware that that is part of the market right now all right let's talk about um

contracts uh how much time do we have left i don't have a clock in here minutes 40 minutes great all right we're going to talk contracts sorry again about the fire hose um let's jump over to traditional publishing because talking about contracts and your take here can kind of help you compare and contrast indie publishing right now and i'm going to switch markers because i think this one was writing better all right so in publishing a lot of the royalty rates are fairly standardized so in traditionally publishing in traditional publishing here's what you're looking at

almost all books have um between 10 and 15 i said between 10 and 10. uh of cover for hardcover almost all of them have between six and eight percent of cover for paperback and all of them have around 10 of cover for um uh trade paper all right i'll explain this to you so all the the print formats are based on a cover price calculation uh these stretch back decades maybe over a century that basically whatever the publisher charges for that book they are going to pay to you a percentage of that once they get

it in it does not matter what the book actually sells for so for instance usually bookstores are getting the books at around fifty percent off if they decide then that this twenty dollar book that they are going to sell for twelve dollars to put it on sale that is them deciding to make a profit of two dollars instead of ten dollars on your book they are still paying ten dollars to the publisher and out of that the publisher is still paying you ten to fifteen percent of the cover price of that initial twenty dollars as

a royalty payment to you for every copy sold uh for the same thing for paperback six to eight percent same thing for trade paperback trade paperbacks are the oversized hardcover size paperbacks whereas when they say paperback we mean the pocket edition these are the u.s royalty rates uh they vary a little bit um in the uk so basically what's going on here is these you're like how do i determine if i get the 10 or the 15 almost every contract i've gotten had a break point of something like this 10 on the first 5k 12

and a half second 5k and then 15 after on the hardcover um so what this means is um if i sell 100 000 copies and you sell 100 000 copies we probably both have a very similar thing in the hardcover um thing we both make the same amount of money this is pretty nice um this is this is good to know that there isn't a lot of room here now there are rumors of people getting more uh the the most i've ever heard is that uh the rumor and i don't have this information so i

could be wrong that lucasarts was getting 22 percent of hardcover on their star wars books from uh from del rey or who it was one of the random house imprints that was printing them for years um i don't know if that's true um i've never met an author personally who got higher than this without doing a drastically different deal with the publisher um there are drastically different deals where you profit share and instead take an advance you take a larger chunk of the percentage later on stephen king famously has this as rumored to have this

i don't know stephen king's contracts as one of his deals and i do profit share with some of my publishers as well basically no advance higher royalties were kind of co-publishing at that point that sort of thing um but generally what you can change are in your negotiations these break points usually they don't change these percentages as much as they change the break points like for instance some of my um some of my teen books the break points were like you know first 10k or something um and then you know you shrink that same thing

here like um i think my ebook started at like six percent for the first 75 or my my paperback six percent for the first 75 000 and like eight percent thereafter for some reason seven percent almost never shows up but it's one of those weird things um and trade tends to like i've seen it like you know fluctuate just by a percentage point or two but basically this is what you're getting this is a fair deal um you may say wow i only get 15 percent of that do remember that you're really making more than

that because this is retail so about half is going to the retail establishment so on a a 20 book the publisher is um is getting ten dollars back and you are generally getting on that 250 so you're taking about 25 of what the publisher is making that could go higher but considering the way that they take risks up front this tends to be a fairly fair model which is why it's been negotiated over decades and has landed where it does what hasn't been negotiated for decades in fact only been negotiated for around a decade is

where the ebook and audiobook royalties will end up landing and so ebook and audiobook are different they are calculated on net that should scare you a ton but fortunately the net is very clearly defined um and does not include costs net on ebook and audiobook is defined by what the publisher gets from the um then you selling them this is usually 25 of net where net means the 70 um of actual price that the publisher gets so what does that mean well let's say that the publisher the book is sold on amazon for ten dollars

the publisher is taking getting seventy percent of that the same percentage that the indie book author is making then they are paying 25 of what they actually got to the author if this goes on sale then then your percentage shrinks it's no longer paid on cover all right so that's a very big difference this number um is starting to stabilize it is too low um a lot of industry advocates and author advocates have pointed out that this if you i'm not going to run all the numbers for you right now that this really should be

somewhere around 35 percent probably or even a little higher because the publisher if you run all the the numbers which you don't have time for the publisher is making more off of each ebook sold than they make off the print book and you are making around the same they are taking a slightly higher higher percentage cut a higher net cut at the end than they need to be taking these i haven't seen this get negotiated up because a lot of authors have what are called most favored nations clauses what this means is if one author

gets it negotiated up the other authors who have most favored nation clauses all should automatically get it as a matter of legal requirement in their contract so publishers have been very very resistant to change this basically to change that number you have to do some sort of profit share or something like that which requires give and takes from you but giving up advances and things like that that's been my experience your mileage may vary it could change in the future and there may be people out there who have negotiated different deals than we've been able

to this is kind of where it sits in audio 25 of net though i have this one has been more negotiable i've gotten as high as around 40 percent um i've met with certain uh book publishers um this has started to stabilize back at the 25 and has been going down with the advances going up um but um that's not necessarily a bad thing because a lot of these audio contracts are for seven years and so if your exam your advance gets sky high your percentage goes down it is possible for an advance to get

so high that it effectively gives you a higher royalty let's talk about that um oh there seems to be confusion in the chat between indian self-publishing they are the same we use both of those terms okay indian self-publishing are the same the only thing is different is vanity publishing which basically doesn't exist in its same form anymore and you should ignore it um indeed indian self-publishing uh words for the same thing um so you also ask about small presses i'll talk about small presses if we have time um all right so advances all right so

remember this is all against an advance that you get up front so i'll try not to spend too much on the boring numbers here this stuff is interesting to me i know it might bore some of you but let's say on your audiobook you get paid a million dollar advance right and the audiobook publisher has looked and figured out across the seven year life of the term that you are going to under a standard royalty earn around 800k right for that 25 percent of that they've figured it out they aren't giving you a higher royalty

but by offering you that one million they're basically giving you a higher royalty because they're giving you 200 000 extra and you could run the numbers and basically since that license is going to run out in seven years anyway you don't have to pay back the extra money they all ran the numbers it is possible for a book to not earn out earning out is where your royalties match the amount they gave you up front and still be successful this is how a lot of very powerful authors a lot of the politicians for example uh

and celebrities get sky-high advances higher than sales would indicate their royalty should earn but because the price per copy is down so much and because um the the the book is going to sell enough copies they can effectively give the author a higher royalty rate without changing the royalty rate in the contract deciding what the right advance is for a book is a very difficult and process that involves a lot of guesswork so most of the time you want your advance to be of a size where you're going to earn that out in a couple

of years um usually i look for them like do you earn this back off of the hard cover and like two years of the paperback run um if so pretty good advance that's about you know what you're looking to get sometimes it's it's viable to get higher than that only if your book is going to go to astronomical highly high sales numbers but let's just kind of look at this um number wise uh to kind of compare to indie publishing um and i did run these numbers earlier so i can write them out exactly um

we talked about keeping a larger percentage of the cut one of the other things that indie publishing is very good at doing is undercutting the markets because they have more money to work with now slowly what's happening more money to work was the wrong term they have more uh flexibility on pricing what has happened over time is traditional publishing has pushed their prices higher and higher in the e-book market um this is because they have a different deal with amazon amazon gives them a better deal they get the 70 percent even if they go over

9.99 you don't get that deal i'm sorry amazon doesn't offer it to us to me when i indie publish they do offer it to the publishers a stormlight archive book costs 17 ebook this is not a bad thing i actually wish that ebook pricing fluctuated more based on the length of the books i have pushed my publishers to charge less for my shorter books and more for my larger books they haven't always listened to me on this but i i think it is kind of um i know it's the way the industry works but i

think it's not a good way for the industry work to work that the longer the the longer books do not increase in price this pushes authors to release these very quick short books where you actually get less value for your book and i think it would be better if everyone's like you know a stormlight archive book is somewhere around eight times as long as some of these short books that are being published in a series that you are paying three dollars a piece for well eight times three would be twenty four dollars is what the

stormlight archive book should cost we charge 17. uh i think that's a fair price um i know some people online are like why is this one 17 when someone else's is three well it's 400 000 word book um that said traditional publishing is not good on varying this length i wish that they would charge a lot cheaper for the hundred thousand word books and a lot more for the big books and they don't um they tend to vary like i looked up a book that is half the length of a stormlight book and it's 13

so yes it's cheaper but not significantly according to percentage this is all kind of neither here nor there if you look at the indie published authors books a lot of them will be priced 299 399 or 4.99 if we take that author whose book is 13 who's uh a pretty i'm not going to say the name but a pretty solid midlister kind of top of the midless uh fantasy novelist their their book is selling for 13 as an ebook right well if um you have your standard royalty that i talked about earlier that author is

making two dollars and around 25 cents per copy that is sold by the publisher if you're indie published you can charge if your book is three dollars you are making around a two dollar profit so if your book is four dollars you're making a better profit um than the traditional published author on a book that is one-third the price this is where the power of indie authors is manifest and then being able to charge a reasonable but low price for their books undercutting the traditional published market this kind of creates this dichotomy where traditional publishing

is moving more toward more expensive books that are prestige books that are by well-known authors there is a reason why someone like andy weir who self-published was very successful eventually decided to go traditionally published and you do see a lot of the people who break out the midlist going to traditional publishers because they can demand a whole bunch from them these days a lot of the mid-listing does work way better in these numbers as an indie author um that said as an indie author you have to be willing to run the business all yourself and

do all these things up front one of the main reasons you would go traditionally publish instead of india published is number one you have a big enough name or enough expected sales or a book that is hitting the market at just the right time in order to demand a very large advance and to demand a lot of marketing push from the publisher another reason to go traditionally published is that doing it all yourself is just not something you want to do um this sounds like i have a good friend who's like i i know i

could do all this i just don't want to that's not what i want to spend my life doing i want to she says be sending books to a publisher working with an editor letting them handle all the cover art and things like that and release the book that is a good reason to go traditionally published it is a lot of work to even traditionally publish india publishing is even more work another reason to go traditionally published would be if you want to see your book in all bookstores across the nation uh indie publishing there are

very few who are able to get books in all print stores usually you can get them regionally to your local stores but getting them into bookstores all around the country and all around the world uh very hard to do as an any published author um not impossible but very hard to do and if you want to be able to walk into a bookstore and find your book on the shelf and you probably want to be traditionally published then another reason to be traditionally published is if you are writing in a genre that does not lend

itself well to the things that are selling well in indie books uh i often use um a book like the doomsday book um as an example of this uh connie willis it's a fantastic science fiction writer who does a ton of research for her books and writes basically time travel books with exhaustively researched historical periods where people from a future society go back to a historical period these books are long they're in depth she only releases one every four or five years if that often and they win a lot of awards and um they deserve

them she would be poorly placed in the indie publishing market because she releases books so infrequently that she needs the doesn't need it but it's better to have the publisher pushing the book to get a wider pickup by libraries and schools and to win awards and to have that drive the sales between you know the five years that she's releasing a new book that's an author who's served much better by traditionally pub being traditionally published uh 20 minutes great um so let's break and talk briefly about marketing and self-promotion and then maybe get to a

few of these questions which are popping up on the screen that i can no longer see so that is good all right so let's get to the last part of what uh becky and uh jennifer um put here which is advertising and branding they note you still have to do a lot of this even when traditionally published especially for first-time authors and yes you do so one of the advantages of being traditionally published is you get to take advantage of their distribution chain this means that you have a lot of people going to the various

bookstores and convincing them to carry copies of your book for a new author that does not have a particularly large advance this is basically all the publicity you will get they're not going to buy a lot of advertising maybe a little bit they're not going to spend a lot of money on amazon advertising they're not going to spend a lot of money on facebook advertising they'll spend a little bit but not a ton of advertising those things unless your book is considered like the big release by a new author that they're pushing very hard because

of this you with a smaller advance often have to do a lot of this yourself what they recommend doing is social media pages again this shouldn't take precedent over finishing your next book in my opinion but having a social media and a website presence is good if you can maintain it here's the thing a webpage that that has that never updates but has a blog on it that has you know if you go to this website and say in the last post that was posted is three years old that is worse than having no blog

on your website better to have a static page that just has your book and um sample chapters throwing that around and things like that than it is to have something that doesn't update same with your your twitter your facebook they mentioned by the way that facebook and instagram works for them and twitter doesn't work much for them anymore uh i know other people have been very successful with twitter but uh you're gonna have to you know pick some social media platforms and do a good job with them uh this can be tricky because a lot

of people aren't looking for a marketing feed in their uh their twitter feed they already get a lot of advertisements from the big companies if your twitter feed looks just like a marketing feed then your twitter feed is perhaps not going to be that useful to you uh same with your facebook and things you have to dedicate time to actually making that a place where people want to go and uh and discover things now if you have a fan base if you're starting to grow one posting about your life that can do it um and

and things like that but just be aware that a twitter feed that just lists when your book is on sale probably going to be of no use to you um have a professional website yes have a website that looks professional and if you're not going to update it often make it look nice without you know a date saying when things were posted um this is one of the best things you can do uh for for your for your time is just have a good website so when people google you like some of you might google

jennifer and becky you land on their page and can find out about their books um they suggest blogger bloggers and blog tours um i have no realistic understanding of how valuable these are a lot of people do them where they all share posts on different people's blogs this is a very common practice it really got popular after i had broken in and i don't know how useful it is the fact that they mentioned here means it probably is at least somewhat useful and people continue to do it uh this is where you write a really

good blog post for someone else's blog that they can post that'll be of high value to their readers that'll make their blog a destination that people want to visit um and so they go and read about you your post and also about your book lending you their uh um their audience um how you do those by the way is by making contacts at conventions and things like that and having a good blog of your own so that you can say hey go look this is the sort of thing i do do you do blog exchanges

would uh you let me do a guest post for you on your blog about x you know give them a proposal say i could do a really great blog post for your audience about this thing that would they'd be really interested in i don't know if larry does these for instance but you know if you were indie published and going to larry and say i know about you know these new assault rifles i've shot them out on the front lines i can do a really great post about how awesome they are maybe someone like larry

would let you do a blog post i don't know again but that's the sort of thing we're looking at uh paid advertisements we talked about those author cross promotion uh basically um doing events with other authors particularly when you're new i have found to be very effective when i was new in my career book signings were almost useless but a book signing where three of us got together were way better because if each of us drew like five people then we had at least a respectable audience and plus we were kind of cross promoting to

each other's audiences that point and a lot of people bought all three books so um build an email list uh let me emphasize this one um email lists tend to be your best uh marketing tool as long as your email list is a good one that you're not spamming people with it that you're you know if you're only gonna write like four blog posts a year you may be better off having a newsletter than a blog and just doing a really good newsletter that people are interested in signing up for and having because you know

this is like a blog that's a little more personal and generally email lists have the best click-through rate because people have opted into them of any sort of advertising that you can do a lot of people in industry say email list is your your number one thing to do even before some of your social media um this all goes for uh for publishing and traditional as well the only thing that you will add is they will be spending some money not much um but some money uh advertising they will also be doing what is called

co-op where they're offering the bookstores a little more money in order to put your book in nice places in the bookstore if you walk into a barnes noble and you see all those nice books for sale at the front of the bookstore that's all advertising space they don't just imagine you know say oh we'll put this one out it's new no the publisher has gone and said if you put this one on your octagon at the front of your barnes noble we will let you keep instead of 50 of what you sell you can have

55 um and they make all these kind of negotiations and deals bookstores do generally have a few discretionary locations where they can build an end cap or something so if you do a book signing there they might put your books on the end cap which is the end of the shelf um and things like that but a lot of that space is sold to publishers um and that's why they end up there so that's all advertising space everything but just basically being on the shelves even a lot of times if you see a little thing

that says hey if you like this you might like this shelf talker is what they call them a lot of those are paid for not at the indie bookstores but a lot of the barnes and nobles and things those are those are things that they are kind of cooperative they call it publishing agreement with the publisher where they're both trying to sell more books and the bookstore gets to keep a little bit more of the money in exchange for that um the last thing they will do is they might send you on book tour uh

book tour um book tours are weird in that bookstores do not make money um you can just run the numbers a really great uh book signing like the the biggest book signings i get um when i'm on tour maybe a thousand people that'd be amazing right george can pull around two thousand it's george martin i've heard of celebrities like the biggest book signing i asked one of the bookstores i went to that they ever had was ozzy osbourne um when at the height of the osborne's and he had like nine thousand um but let's say

you do one of my book signings and it's a thousand people of those thousand people statistically around ten percent of them will buy the book and ninety percent of them will already have the book um and so the signing if you can if you magically could make it so that all 100 people that went to that book signing are people that wouldn't have bought it otherwise but bought it because of the book signing then what is the book signing done it has sold 100 extra books which equates to earnings for an author on the 15

thing for a round is going to be like 300 to 400 that might sound good to you but for an entire day's work where you have to fly somewhere where you have to be put up in a hotel where you often have to have drivers or media escorts whose job is to get you around it can cost three or four grand to put an author on tour for a day depending on the author um and even the publisher selling an extra hundred books making an extra what is that ten dollars a book they're making a

thousand bucks just not make any money for them it loses money so what is a bookstore good for well or a book signing uh book signing is to meet the people at the bookstore as the author and have them be like wow the publisher is actually sending this author on tour it must be an important author maybe i'll read the book to get some extra books in that bookstore the publisher the bookstore will usually order like 50 copies or whatever depending on the author and then put them out on nice shelves and you will usually

sign a bunch of those books and leave them and they'll use their discretionary space to put up an end cap for you like author who came through here are their signed books so you might sell extra books like that you might get more velocity selling books in the first week of release is way more useful than selling them in the 12th week of release if you sell a bunch of books in the first week of release all the bookstores say wow this is a very big important book we better order more copies it also places

you on the best seller list which a bunch of sales at once is better than sales spread out for that you appear on the best seller list and then there are special places in the bookstore which aren't co-op space which are the best seller list that you get on basically as free co-op which markets and sells your book more if you do really well you end up on the bestseller list in the airports which can be huge exposure for selling your book these um things can are all kind of intangible things plus you start building

an audience they start seeing coming out to see you as an event um and then it's a way to kind of meet the fan base and things like that all of these things are intangibles that are hard to quantify books signings should not be done to make money uh at least upfront money they should be kind of long-term sort of things early in my career i'll just give you guys a tip uh we ran all these numbers and the publisher was just not gonna send me on tour guy who got ten thousand dollars on his

advance that they're expecting you know to sell like five thousand copies of or whatever the the books signing there was no way i was gonna get on the list there's no way i was going to make the money back they just were not going to send me on tour i went to them and said what if i went on tour with another author that you were thinking of sending on tour and the two of us shared a car and drove instead of flights which saves you know a bunch of money what if we just drove

around the west coast where we where we live kind of the west coast um what if we shared a hotel room i was going with dave who's a buddy of mine and you know we kind of ate cheap um we we dave and i went and pitched and said you give us a thousand bucks each this was in 2005 so a thousand bucks went a little further um and we will do a 10 city book tour and it will bring it in under that thousand dollars each uh they're like you can't do that we're like

yes we can and they're like all right here's a thousand bucks right whatever that's you know that it takes two thousand to put an author on tour for a day we'll give you each a thousand bucks for for ten days and we made it work um and we did uh three tours like that um before my book started exploding and the publisher started saying no you can't do that anymore uh we need to send you on a big real book tour um but that was very effective for me your mileage may vary in convincing a

publisher to let you do something like that all right adam what do we got ten minutes just okay uh turn that over and let me hit a few of these questions how do you know if you're a niche genre so this is hard because knit genres tend to be genres that are mashing two or three genres together a lot of times what happens is you have a venn diagram of genres and it's hard to tell when you're going to get for instance let's say you have mysteries and romances right well sometimes when some when a

book comes out it grabs both of these audiences in fact um you know sf science fiction fantasy uh charlane harris um who did the true blood books somehow grabbed some of each of these audiences and it worked really well and i think they shelved the true blood books in sci-fi fantasy um which makes some sense um but you know they were mystery moment science fiction uh fantasy they were basically vampire romance mysteries sometimes you grab that whole audience sometimes you only grab this audience and it's hard to tell i have a friend in the industry

who published what looked like a book that was going to grab great big audiences it was basically military uh lawyers for a space fleet basically starfleet's military lawyers right where they've got this big military science fiction thing where you know there's like wars going on and they're going to do the trials of the people who you know violated whatever and they're going to be very action action adventurey but also with the lawyers it's like law and order meet star trek right and those books flopped hardcore despite being great books um and they only hit the

venn diagram people who people pick them up they're like i like science fiction but i don't like lawyers so they put them down other people pick them up and like i like lawyer fiction but the science fiction stuff we don't know right like if if publishers knew how to market a book perfectly to the broadest possible audience they would do it every time they don't know nobody knows what's going to hit and what isn't if those books had been published online there might have been a thousand or two thousand people who are like wow i

was in the military police i love science fiction this is just perfect for me this is like the best thing ever and you get that audience who just becomes a really dedicated um fan base that is what i would call a niche genre right kind of this melding of two genres that that doesn't grab the whole venge diagram but god's narrow group who are very dedicated to it indie publishing would be great for that fortunately that story has a happy ending because uh he re branded himself um and published a lot lost fleet books under

the name jack campbell his name is john henry he's a great author um i really like lost fleet books but he took out basically the lawyer part and just did great military science fiction books and the books took off and sold really well um and so uh that has a happy story the publisher was really believed in them they all knew the books were good they just didn't hit the audience so he got another chance at it and ended up working for him um so do short stories sell well when any published no short stories

do not sell well indie published historic short stories do well free there are places where free short stories do very well i have a student in the class this year who's done very well on no sleep the reddit short story horror subreddit um and gotten lots of views there but generally that price point is very hard for a short story novellas do sell a novella is uh 17 000 words and above as long as you can get that magic number of realistically charging 299 for it on amazon then suddenly it becomes viable anything under that

299 is just not viable monetarily that said short stories can be very popular they just don't work right now paid wise your mileage may vary ask some other people about what they've done with short stories i see collections now and then selling most of the short stories i see people put up for free just for advertising or they try to sell the magazines for prestige are there indie small presses publishers that specialize in novellas yes tor.com and several others tor.com generally prefers diverse books um that's one of the ways they have made their name right

now and so they have a very narrow application submission guideline window and they tend to be looking for diverse fiction um and so uh do be aware of that but in the publishing with novella's work and there are some other places like tour.com for instance emperor's soul which was published with tachyon went with a small press for the print that was big enough to get the book in bookstores um but which was um which was uh small enough that they were willing to take print only rights and leave me with the ebook rights to sell

myself um how would one go from indie publishing to traditional on their advantages to doing this yes i guess we'll end here what i got like five minutes left adam three minutes we'll end here if i were me trying to break in right now i would try going hybrid meaning i would write some books and i would then decide are these best traditional or these best indie if they're best traditional i would start submitting to the traditional publishers and if their best indie i would just start with indie at the same time i would be

looking for something targeted at indie publishing that would work really well i would be like you know what i can write if you guys are fans of my books the wax and wayne books the fast-paced mysteries uh detective thrillers is really what they are that are shorter are a better match for indie publishing maybe if i were not well known and not broken out i would be like i'm going to write six of these across the next few years just in between other books save them up and then i'm going to launch the mindy published

after books then go through the traditional publishing route and if they all got rejected i would hold them back for when i did an any publishing push so i could slot those books in at the end the big epic fantasies to be like if you liked my fast-paced you know ones maybe you will like the longer book that has more lore that is using the same world and so i might try to break out that way i think considering both as viable methods of breaking in is just the wisest way to go right now talking

to a lot of authors both traditionally and indie publish finding out what's working for them is a great way to go don't close any doors do your research this is just an overview i couldn't get into a lot of the the depths of it i will next week if we have time during the questions try to outline the big five publishers and who they are to kind of give you a head start on uh submitting to them but for now do your research take this and hopefully you can expand it into something that will help

you get published thank you guys we will see you next week for the last of our classes