Books, are They Worth the Paper They are Written On?

So you've always wanted to be a writer? However, you wonder, is making a living from writing only possible for the likes of Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling?

Well, lets do the maths for you and look at traditional publishing…

How much would you pay for a 350 page paperback novel written in a forgotten ancient language, making the content of the book totally worthless to you? I would imagine, very little. However, given the paltry amount in terms of author royalties that publishers pay out to writers, the publishing industry it seems are suggesting that the books we buy are not worth the paper they are written on and that the writer’s words are relatively worthless too.

Now let’s look at the consumer. Think about this the publisher pays their author a mere 15% of the net sale value of every book sold. Now for the sake of this argument lets pretend you’ve just purchased the latest novel by your favourite author for £10. Let’s assume that it cost the publisher £2.50 to have it printed and distributed to the book store. This leaves £7.50 of which the publisher gets a whooping 85% for their ‘hard’ work (hold on did we not just deduct £2.50 for their hard work?) leaving a mere £1.87. Whilst the publisher adding back in their so called costs gets the lion shares of the deal at £8.13. This effectively means you are paying £10 for a book which the publisher calculates only has a real value of £1.87. In other words this is the value they place on your favourite author’s hard work.

Here’s another way of looking at it if you visited a car boot sale and you saw the same novel for sale and the owner wanted a meagre £2 for it you would still be paying over the odds for it.

Now, let us look at the leading author sales in 2008 as follows:

Given that in the United Kingdom, the average number of books sold by each author who becomes published is in the region of 200, whether it is through the traditional or self publishing route and using the above data to calculate average value per book and average royalty value per book sold, this would mean that on average each author would make an annual income per book project of only £226 when comparing the established royalty models.

OK, we know that these are only average sales and that some authors sell much less than this and sucessful authors sell many many more. But either way, unless you are J.K Rowling, you are hardly going to be able to afford your villa in Tuscany by signing up to a traditional publisher are you?

But is there a solution?

Well, OK, I guess we are biased, but we reckon, self publishing is the most cost effective return on 95% of any writer's effort and time.

Look at it this way...

Let's assume that as a writer you sell 2,000 books for £10 using the traditional model, you are left with £1.87 per book as your writer royalties, that's £3,740.

However...

Using the self publishing model (which we are obviously keen to promote), if the writer gets 75% of the royalties, that's £7.50 x 2,000 so a massive £15,000

But dont take our word for it http://www.bbc.co.uk/suffolk/content/articles/2009/06/29/vanity_publishing_bryony_allen_feature.shtml