what authors earn

Kindle Unlimited Not a Great Deal for Readers or Authors

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This post by Marion Stein originally appeared on her Marion’s Blog on 1/12/15.

One of my Goodreads friends recently asked if he could find my works on Amazon’s recently launched Kindle Unlimited scheme. Here is what I told him:

My books aren’t enrolled in Kindle Select and won’t be. Authors who participate are mostly losing money compared to before. Authors who aren’t in it are also seeing sales drop. Everyone is losing money but Amazon. There are now 700,000 books on Kindle Unlimited. That may sound like a lot, but unless you only read indies, most books you want to read are not there. Traditional publishers can put books into Kindle Unlimited and still sell those books in other venues like Nook Books and Kobo. However, indies have to also be enrolled in Kindle Select to be on Kindle Unlimited, which means they have to sell those ebooks exclusively on Kindle, and many authors (and readers) feel that that lack of competition is not a good thing.

Here are some more reasons why Kindle Unlimited is bad for authors:

Readers can use Indie Select as a private (but expensive) library. They can borrow your book, but if they don’t bother to actually read it, you get NOTHING. If they do read more than 10%, you get something, but it’s far less than if they bought it.

 

Read the full post on Marion’s Blog.

 

Fired Old Man Angry at World, Ranting About Something or Other

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This post by Ken Wheaton originally appeared on The Word O’ Wheaton on 1/18/15.

Leon Wieseltier, recently run out of The New Republic as a gang of Silicon Valley nitwits took over and tried to fix it, has a piece in The New York Times Sunday Book Review that starts thusly:

Amid the bacchanal of disruption, let us pause to honor the disrupted. The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of bookstores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the greatest thugs in the history of the culture industry. Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind. Everybody talks frantically about media, a second-order subject if ever there was one, as content disappears into “content.” What does the understanding of media contribute to the understanding of life? Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability. As the frequency of expression grows, the force of expression diminishes: Digital expectations of alacrity and terseness confer the highest prestige upon the twittering cacophony of one-liners and promotional announcements. It was always the case that all things must pass, but this is ridiculous.

I’m sure after reading that bit of succinct and too-the-point prose, you’re just dying to read the rest of it. Good luck with that. You see, Leon is what I’d call a writer’s writer — or, as he’s also known, the “last of the New York intellectuals” — someone much more interested in showing off — his skill, his education or his connections — than getting to the point already. There is, of course, a way to do both without looking like you’re trying to hard to do either. But Leon, who IS a smart guy whose writing I’ve enjoyed in the past, isn’t getting it done here. He also seems to be suffering from selective historical amnesia.

 

Read the full post (which is actually about the need for editors) on The Word O’ Wheaton.

 

These Days, Writing Isn’t A Career. It’s A Rich Man’s Hobby

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This article by Toby Young originally appeared on The Telegraph on 1/16/15.

Writing’s always been lopsided, but it’s got a lot worse in the last decade

I envy William Hague. Not the £2.5 million country house he’s just bought in Wales, although that would be nice. Rather, the fact that he plans to spend his retirement writing books.

These days, you need a substantial private income – or a public sector pension – to be a full-time writer. Last year, a survey of 2,500 professional authors found that their median income in 2013 was £11,000. That’s a drop of 29 per cent since 2005 and significantly below the minimum salary required to achieve a decent standard of living.

The writing game is notoriously lopsided, in which a small handful of bestselling authors earn a fortune and the vast majority live on scraps, but it’s got worse in the past decade. “You’ve always been able to comfortably house the British literary writers who can earn all their living from books in a single room,” says the author Will Self, whose own royalties have tailed off in recent years. “That room used to be a reception one, now it’s a back bedroom.”

 

Read the full article on The Telegraph.

 

Six Things Every Writer Needs to Succeed (Psst: MFA is not on this list.)

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This post by ML Swift originally appeared on Writer Unboxed on 1/14/15.

When Therese asked if I’d like to scratch out an article for Writer Unboxed, I literally — in the most figurative sense of the word — stood up, turned around, and knocked the gold bricks out of my chair. Did I read her note correctly? Would I like to write an essay for the website I’ve worshipped for over three years, and — e’en if for a day, ere I’m shown the door fore’er — dispense Parker-esque aphorisms to the most respected minds in the industry, while at the same time, make a complete and utter fool of myself? Would I? Would I? I pounced on the keyboard: “Does a bear sh—?” Wait. Breathe. Backspace and delete. Respond as if it were as commonplace as “You want fries with that?”

“Why, yes, Therese, that would be lovely.” There you go. Classy. Mature. Professional. Kiss, kiss; hug, hug. After all, what’s the worst that could happen?

By dinnertime, my euphoric ride on the Cumulonimbus9 had ended with a belly-flop to earth, leaving me stranded in the middle of nowhere, dusting off rainbows and gnawing my thumbnail like a piece of beef jerky. “Mike, what in the world were you thinking?” Actually, if you really want to get down and velveteen about it, I used a much more colorful, less Hogwarts-friendly expression.

You see, that very morning, Sharon Bially had written a post listing six criteria for an impressive writer’s resumé, and according to the stats, I was batting zero. Even worse, I didn’t foresee three of the six items making my five-, ten-, or twenty-year plan. Her suggestions, in order of my probable attainment (from “most likely” to “you’ve got to be kidding”) included:

 

Read the full post on Writer Unboxed.

 

The Self-Publishing Sky is Not Falling

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This post by James Scott Bell originally appeared on The Kill Zone on 1/11/15.

Toward the end of last year a meme started to develop, asserting that the salad days of self-publishing are over. Only spotty hors d’oeuvres remain. One blogger put it this way:

I’ve been luckier than many Indie writers. I heard the complaints about falling sales, but for a time I hung in there, made more money every month than I had the previous month. But then the other shoe dropped and my royalties, rankings and readership tanked. New readers are not discovering me as they’ve done for years. I can’t ignore reality. Things might pick up, but I doubt it. And I’m not taking any chances.

Much of this despair was drummed up because of what many authors experienced in the Kindle Unlimited program. Indie superstar H. M. Ward had this to say:

Ok, some of you already know, but I had my serials in [KU] for 60 days and lost approx 75% of my income. That’s counting borrows and bonuses. My sales dropped like a stone. The number of borrows was higher than sales. They didn’t compliment each other, as expected.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch, one of the more astute observers of the writing biz, wrote that the “gold rush” is over, and that 2014 became “The Year of the Quitter.”

 

Read the full post on The Kill Zone.

 

Adjusting To Being A Full-Time Author – Part 2

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This post by Michael Hicks originally appeared on his site on 1/30/12.

In this second installment of my musings about moving from a full-time day job to writing for a living, let’s take a look at some of the financial issues you need to be aware of in the rapidly evolving industry of self-publishing…

 

Keep The Faith, But Don’t Count On Next Month’s Income

Between February and August 2011, I made a ton of money, around $105,000, from my book royalties. Not like the big authors, but more than the “modest car payment” amount I’d been making before from month to month. I had stars in my eyes and money burning a big hole in my pocket. We already had some hefty financial obligations (I’d been a well-paid federal employee, remember, and had the payments to go with it), and made some financial decisions based on “projections” that, in hindsight, maybe weren’t such a good idea.

Because in September, a month after I left NSA, sales took a nosedive after Amazon (which is where I get over 95% of my royalties) apparently changed some of its algorithms. The royalties for that month were about $7,000. Yes, that’s a lot of money to a lot of people, but in terms of our existing financial commitments, that was not good at all. Even if Amazon hadn’t changed anything, eventually your bestsellers are going to drop off the list. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any books in the top 100 except King, Koontz, and Patterson, right?

 

Read the full post on Michael Hicks’ site.

 

On Being “Discontinued”

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This post by Deb Baker originally appeared on bookconscious on 12/17/14.

I’ve been writing The Mindful Reader column for The Concord Monitor since April 2012. Thirty-three columns, one a month on the Sunday book page, reviewing dozens of books, all by New Hampshire or northern New England authors, many published by small presses. It’s been a wonderful experience.

People often stop me when I’m out and about to tell me how much they liked a column, or to ask my opinion about some aspect of one of the books I read. They come into the library, where I am the librarian in charge of adult services, and our local indie bookstore, where I was once event coordinator and bookseller, to ask for the books. That’s been a thrill — there is nothing better for a writer than knowing your work not only reached someone, but moved them enough that they wanted to participate in the thing you’ve written about. And the authors I’ve heard from who are so grateful to get a published review, when so much book publicity is focused on a handful of “it” titles — that’s been great too.

This week I received a brief reply to my monthly invoice from the Monitor’s editor, who has been with the paper a few months and had never communicated with me previously. He let me know my column is discontinued and invited me to chat with him about the direction the paper would be taking. I cried — I admit it. But the next day I called him and he called me back and we had that chat.

 

Read the full post on bookconscious.

 

Business Musings: Things Indie Writers Learned in 2014

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This post by Kristine Kathryn Rusch originally appeared on her site on 12/23/14.

I’d love to say nothing, but that’s not true—if we’re discussing indie writers who have remained in the business for several years. There will always be new indie writers who know very little, and there will always be those with “experience” who turn a year or two worth of sales into a know-it-all platform.

However, those indie writers who’ve been at this since the beginning of the self-publishing revolution in 2009 have learned a lot in 2014. Like last week’s piece, “What Traditional Publishing Learned in 2014,” this week’s will be my opinion. Next week, I’ll examine what I learned (or relearned) in 2014, before moving to brand-new topics.

A few bits of organizational business: Unlike my previous two blog series, The Freelancer’s Survival Guide  and The Business Rusch, Business Musings will appear irregularly. Sometimes it’ll show up in the old Thursday slot like last week’s, and sometimes it’ll show up on a different day like this week’s. Sometimes it’ll be long (like this week), sometimes there will be two or three posts in a week, and sometimes there will be none. If you worry that you might miss one, check back and look at the tab Business Musings under either the Business Resources or Writer Resources in the header.

Also, please note that, as in the past, I’ll be using “indie writer” instead of “self-published writer,” following the music model. I’ll also talk about “indie publishing” instead of “self publishing,” because so many writers who are not with traditional publishers have started their own presses. It’s not accurate to lump all writers who are not following the traditional route into the self-publishing basket any longer, if it ever was.

So, back to the topic at hand. What did indie writers learn in 2014? I wish they all learned the same things simultaneously, but they didn’t (and won’t). I also wish that there were indie writer financial statements, like there are financial statements for the big traditional publishers (which is what I based much of last week’s piece on).

Even if indie writers have formed corporations, those corporations are privately held, and therefore the quarterly financial reports are not public. Privately held companies do not need to list their earnings to anyone outside of the company (except the IRS), and therefore the smart ones do not.

So, in this blog post, I’m piecing together a lot of other people’s blog posts, anecdotal evidence, and just plain common sense. In other words, good old journalist me feels a bit uncomfortable, even though this is an opinion piece, because I don’t have as much quantifiable information as I’m used to for these blogs.

What have indie writers learned?

 

Read the full, very lengthy (and very much worth reading in full) post, which goes into detail on 15 specific lessons learned, on Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s site.

 

Amazon Offers All-You-Can-Eat Books. Authors Turn Up Noses.

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This article by David Streitfeld originally appeared on The New York Times on 12/27/14.

Authors are upset with Amazon. Again.

For much of the last year, mainstream novelists were furious that Amazon was discouraging the sale of some titles in its confrontation with the publisher Hachette over e-books.

Now self-published writers, who owe much of their audience to the retailer’s publishing platform, are unhappy.

One problem is too much competition. But a new complaint is about Kindle Unlimited, a new Amazon subscription service that offers access to 700,000 books — both self-published and traditionally published — for $9.99 a month.

It may bring in readers, but the writers say they earn less. And in interviews and online forums, they have voiced their complaints.

“Six months ago people were quitting their day job, convinced they could make a career out of writing,” said Bob Mayer, an e-book consultant and publisher who has written 50 books. “Now people are having to go back to that job or are scraping to get by. That’s how quickly things have changed.”

 

Read the full article on The New York Times.

 

Year-End Tax Help for Authors

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This post by attorney and tax expert Julian Block originally appeared on Indies Unlimited on 12/7/14.

The only time most of us think of doing something about our federal income taxes is once a year — the hours we spend actually grappling with Form 1040 or when gathering records to deliver them to a paid preparer. What we should do is make tax planning a year-round concern and position ourselves to take full advantage of the many opportunities that are available to lessen the amount that is siphoned off each year by the IRS. The savings can amount to many thousands of dollars. What follows are some tactics that not only can save taxes for 2014, but even provide a head start on 2015 as well.

Timing receipt of income pays off for freelance writers. The IRS requires most freelance writers and other self-employed individuals to use the cash method of accounting, under which income isn’t counted until cash, a check, or an e-payment is received and expenses aren’t counted until they’re paid.

How does the IRS apply that requirement to a hypothetical freelancer we’ll call Phyllis Neff? Like most other writers, Phyllis has a good deal of flexibility on whether to report income or deduct expenses in 2014 or 2015. As part of her end-of-year financial planning, therefore, she should review perfectly legal tax-trimming tactics that must be taken by Dec. 31 if they aren’t to be lost forever.

 

Read the full post on Indies Unlimited.

 

Don't Pay to Self-Publish

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This post by J.A. Konrath originally appeared on his A Newbie’s Guide To Publishing on 11/23/14.

My name is Joe Konrath, and I write fiction.

I’ve sold over a million books by self-publishing.

You probably were searching for “how to self-publish” or something similar and my blog came up.

This post for all newbie writers considering self-publishing. While it would be extremely helpful to you to take a week and read my entire blog to get a full understanding of how the publishing industry works, here’s the most important thing you need to know:

DON’T PAY ANYONE TO PUBLISH YOU.

Now you can certainly pay people to help you publish. Freelancers such as editors, cover artists, book formatters, proofreaders, and so on.

But when you hire a freelancer to assist you, you keep your rights.

That’s very important.

When you write something, you own the copyright. That’s automatic, even if you don’t register with the copyright office.

Copyright means exactly that; you have the right to copy it, to distribute it, to give it away, to sell it. You own those rights.

But if you pay someone to publish you, you GIVE THEM YOUR RIGHTS.

NEVER GIVE ANYONE YOUR RIGHTS.

There are many publishers, called vanity presses, that exist to prey on writers who don’t know any better. These presses are sometimes part of big, recognizable publishers, and it’s easy to be tricked into thinking that if you pay hundreds, or thousands, of dollars, you’ll be published by a major press.

The truth is, major presses PAY THE AUTHOR, not the other way around.

I have sold books to major publishers, and was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then I had to hire lawyers to get those books back so I could self-publish them. Because I make 10x as much money self-publishing as I did by selling my rights to publishers.

If you are looking to get a publisher, do your research.

Check out David Gaughran, Writer Beware, and Preditors & Editors. They have a lot of information about publishers you should avoid.

Learn all you can about vanity presses. Don’t get suckered in.

Ask questions. Seek answers. And DON’T PAY ANYONE TO PUBLISH YOU.

Now some Q&A.

Q: I saw an ad for a publisher. Are they legit?

 

Read the full post on A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.

 

Ebook Publishing Gets More Difficult from Here – Here's How to Succeed

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This post by Mark Coker originally appeared on the Smashwords Blog on 11/19/14.

First the good news.

For indie (self-published) authors, there’s never been a better time to publish an ebook. Thanks to an ever-growing global market for your ebooks, your books are a couple clicks away from over one billion potential readers on smart phones, tablets and e-readers.

As a Smashwords author, you have access to tools, distribution and best practices knowledge to publish ebooks faster, smarter and less expensively than the large publishers can. In the world of ebooks, the playing field is tilted to the indie author’s advantage.

Now the bad news.

Everything gets more difficult from here. You face an uphill battle. With a couple exceptions – namely Scribd and Oyster – most major ebook retailers have suffered anemic or declining sales over the last 12-18 months.

The gravy train of exponential sales growth is over. Indies have hit a brick wall and are scrambling to make sense of it. In recent weeks, for example, I’ve heard a number of indie authors report that their sales at Amazon dropped significantly since July when Amazon launched Kindle Unlimited (I might write about Kindle Unlimited in a future blog post). Some authors are considering quitting. It’s heartbreaking to hear this, but I’m not surprised either. When authors hit hard times, sometimes the reasons to quit seem to outnumber the reasons to power on. Often these voices come from friends and family who admire our authorship but question the financial sensibility of it all.

The writer’s life is not an easy one, especially when you’re measuring your success in dollars. If you’re relying on your earnings to put food on your family’s table, a career as an indie author feels all the more precarious.

At times like this, it’s important for all writers to take a deep breath, find their grounding, remember why they became an author in the first place, and make important decisions about their future. It’s times like this that test an author.

Don’t fail the test.

Back in December, in my annual publishing predictions for 2014, I speculated that growth in the ebook market would stall out in 2014. I wrote that after a decade of exponential growth in ebooks with indies partying like it was 1999, growth was slowing.

I wrote that the hazard of fast-growing markets – the hazard of the rapid rise of ebooks – is that rapid growth can mask flaws in business models. It can cause players to misinterpret the reasons for their success, and the assumptions upon which they build and execute their publishing strategy. Who are these players? I’m talking about authors, publishers, retailers, distributors and service providers – all of us. It’s easy to succeed when everything’s growing like gangbusters. It’s when things slow down that your beliefs and underlying assumptions are tested.

I urged authors to embrace the coming shakeout rather than fear it. Let it spur you on to become a better, more competitive player in the months and years ahead. Players who survive shakeouts usually emerge stronger out the other end.

 

What’s causing the slowdown?

While every individual author’s results will differ from the aggregate, I think there are several drivers shaping the current environment.

 

Read the full, lengthy post, which includes further analysis and specific action items, on the Smashwords Blog.

 

Why the Amazon–Hachette Deal Is Likely Good for Writers and Publishers

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This article by Vauhini Vara originally appeared on The New Yorker on 11/14/14.

The end of the months-long impasse between Amazon and Hachette over e-book pricing was a bit anticlimactic for those who had been watching the drama unfold. For months, the companies and their supporters had been accusing each other of bad behavior, warped motives, and plain dimwittedness. At one point, Amazon, apparently hoping to put pressure on the publisher, began delaying shipments of hard copies of Hachette-published books ordered through its site, to the ire of those books’ authors. In response, many writers signed an open letter from a group called Authors United, begging Amazon to back off; later, Authors United announced that it would ask the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate whether Amazon’s delays, or other tactics, amounted to antitrust violations.

Journalists covered each of the escalations attentively, and the negative publicity hurt Amazon’s reputation and maybe even its bottom line. The company posted disappointing earnings results in late October, including the slowest growth it had seen for North American media sales (which includes books, movies, and music) in more than five years. But then, on Thursday morning, the companies issued a joint press release announcing that they have agreed to make Hachette responsible for setting e-book prices, as Hachette is thought to have sought. It is believed that Amazon, which has typically favored keeping e-book prices low, had hoped to set those prices itself. Instead, with this agreement, Amazon will, according to David Naggar, Amazon’s vice-president for Kindle, offer “specific financial incentives for Hachette to deliver lower prices.” The agreement will take effect in early 2015.

 

Read the full article on The New Yorker.

 

The War of the Words

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This article by Pete Gessen originally appeared in Vanity Fair‘s December 2014 issue.

Amazon’s war with publishing giant Hachette over e-book pricing has earned it a black eye in the media, with the likes of Philip Roth, James Patterson, and Stephen Colbert demanding that the online mega-store stand down. How did Amazon—which was once seen as the book industry’s savior—end up as Literary Enemy Number One? And how much of this fight is even about money? Keith Gessen reports.

 

I. Discovery

Otis Chandler is a tall, serious, bespectacled man in his mid-30s whose grandfather, also named Otis Chandler, used to own the Los Angeles Times. Chandler grew up in Los Angeles, attended boarding school near Pomona, and then, like his father and grandfather, went to Stanford. Upon graduation he entered the computer field. Because it was the turn of the millennium, that meant working at a start-up: Chandler found a job at Tickle.com, which was an early venture in social networking. At Tickle, Chandler eventually became a project manager, starting a dating site called LoveHappens.com. It did O.K. In 2004, Tickle was acquired by Monster Worldwide, parent company of Monster.com, the huge job-posting site, and about a year and a half later, Chandler left.

He started to think about what he should do with himself. One day, while visiting a bookish friend, he had what he calls an epiphany. “He had one of those bookshelves in his apartment,” Chandler told me when I met him in San Francisco. “You know what I mean, the bookshelf when you walk into someone’s house, the one where they keep all their favorite books. I walked into his living room and started checking out his shelf and just grilling him, like, ‘That looks cool. What’d you think of it? What’d you think of that?’ ” He left his friend’s place with 10 good books. “I was like, if I could go to all my friends’ living rooms and grill them about what books they like, I would never lack for a good book again. But instead of doing that, why don’t I just build a site where everybody puts their shelves in their profiles?”

 

Read the full article on Vanity Fair.

 

Two Important Publishing Facts Everyone Gets Wrong

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This post by Hugh Howey originally appeared on his site on 10/27/14.

Almost everything being said about publishing today is predicated on two facts that are dead wrong. The first is that publishers are somehow being hurt by ebook sales. The second is that independent bookstores are being crushed. The opposite is true in both cases, and without understanding this, most of what everyone says about publishing is complete bollocks.

Let’s take the health of publishers first. Below you will see that profit margins at the major publishers are either flat or improving. For three of the top publishers, margins have improved quite a bit:

 

Read the full post, which includes numerous infographics and much further analysis, on Hugh Howey’s site.