How Much Can a Bloody-Minded Self-Publisher Expect to Earn?
The bad news is that you probably won't sell 3000 copies in the first year. The good news is that you don't have to.
Instead of the usual excerpt from one of my translations, this is a screed about the advantages of self publishing.
Earlier this month,
expressed some frustration at seeing his work hacked up by an editor. I saw my share of blue-pencil busywork when I worked in publishing,1 so I wrote to Mr Hickman and encouraged him to consider the do-it-yourself route. I argued that he would not only avoid having his authorial voice changed beyond recognition, but that he would also (i) retain ownership of his copyright and (ii) make more money. Not long after this, I noticed that had reposted an article by Sam Jordison, the co-director of Galley Beggar Press, in which he crunched some numbers about profits per book.I thought it might be interesting to compare Galley Beggar’s numbers with the model that I espouse, using my current costs to illustrate how emerging and mid-list authors stand to gain by printing and distributing their own work.
In this scenario I am peddling paper books to readers on my own web site. I am not distributing through Amazon; I am picking, packing, and mailing the orders myself. John Martin handled all of the shipping in the early years of the Black Sparrow Press — why shouldn’t I? I am also charging buyers the true cost of postage separately and not trying to build those expenses into the price of my books.
“That’s another thing that’s missing from some independent publishing efforts: the willingness to stand there hour after hour on Saturday and Sunday and pack books, answer mail, type invoices, deal with the printer. I used to work from seven thirty in the morning until about six at night on my regular job. I was the first one to arrive and the last one to go home. I’d get home about a quarter to seven. I’d have dinner. I’d go to my Black Sparrow office and work until about two in the morning. I did that for a year or more. And then I’d work all day Saturday and all day Sunday.”
— John Martin, founder of the Black Sparrow Press, quoted in Robert Dana’s Against the Grain; Interviews with Maverick American Publishers (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), p. 140.
Right, on to the comparison.
Galley Beggar Press expects that a book with a recommended retail price (RRP) of £10.99 will yield a profit of £0.46 to £0.21 per unit sold. They have print costs of between £2.83 to £3.50 per unit on a run of 3000 copies, with a 10% author royalty, a retail discount of 50%, and distribution fees of 25%. The key number for our purposes is the 10% royalty (£1.10) per book that is earmarked for the author.2 We’ll leave the publishers to work out their own financial salvation with fear and trembling…
Jordison does not provide any details about the typical size or length of his titles, so I’m going to base my numbers on a perfect-bound paperback with a colour cover and matte lamination in the 5.5" x 8.5" digest format, with a black and white interior of 300 pages, printed on 50# cream paper.
To have an apples-to-apples comparison, I will convert the £10.99 to US dollars using today’s (29 May 2024) exchange rate, and price my book at $14.00.
Given these assumptions, I have the following three costs for this book:
$8.05 for printing and delivering the book to me
$0.85 in transaction fees
$0.35 in shipping supplies
Let’s break each of those down a little.
Printing and Shipping
I have been using Ingram’s Lightning Source as a printer for well over a decade, so that is where this $8.05 number comes from. The screenshot below shows the costs under their “direct to publisher” option. It includes the price of printing in USD plus all of the taxes and freight charges required to send the books to me in Canada. If you are using Ingram Spark, are located in the US, or do business with a different print-on-demand (POD) printer like BookVault or Total Printing Systems, your costs might be lower than mine:
You’ll note that this pricing is for an initial print run of just 100 copies. While my unit cost is quite high compared to the traditional publishing model, my upfront investment is minimal. I face little risk and negligible storage costs while I test the market to see if there is an interest in my book. If I were to order 750 copies straight away, I could find an offset printer to do the job and drop that unit cost down to $6. But for the sake of this exercise we’ll leave it at $8.05.3
Transaction fees
Stripe charges a 2.9% transaction on each sale, plus another 1% for international credit card fees, plus 30 cents per charge. 3.9% of $14.00 is $0.55, plus $0.30 is $0.85
Supplies
$0.35 is the cost for a #1 kraft bubble mailer from a supplier like Uline.
Drum roll please…
Let’s see how much I’ll earn per book sold:
We have the $14.00 RRP, minus
$8.05 for printing and shipping
$0.85 in transaction fees
$0.35 in supplies
which leaves me with
$4.75 profit per book sold
Jordison points out that in the first year of publication the median sell-through for literary fiction in the UK is just 241 copies (!!!), so let’s say that is how many books I manage to shift on my Woocommerce web site.
☞ If I sell 241 copies as a self-publisher, I will earn $1,144.75 compared to the $337.69 (£265.10) that I would have earned in royalties as a middle-of-the-road literary author.
And what if I am more ambitious?
☞ I will earn $14,250.00 if I sell 3000 copies as a self-publisher compared to the $4,204.22 (£3300) that would have been due to me in royalties.
Yes, but…
Yes, there are some overhead costs to self publishing, but they do not amount to much. I still use the free, open source software LyX and the Memoir class to generate the book block. I now rely on the Affinity suite for image processing and cover design, but when I started I used the free GIMP program and passed the files through Adobe Pro at the public library to make them conform to the PDF/X-1a: 2001 standard.
A single ISBN will run you $150 in the US, or $29.50 if you buy ten at once (ISBNs are free for Canadians). I pay about $36 a year for web hosting. You can find a beat-up Zebra LP 2844 thermal label printer for $50 on eBay. Throw in another $200 to bribe a friend to proofread and you’re still earning about twice as much as that mid-list author in royalties. When I look at the capital costs for other hobbies and trades, the amount of money required to start out in publishing today seems ridiculously low.
The case for DIY distribution.
I anticipate some sidelong glances over the fact that I do not sell on Amazon, but I believe it is unwise to build your house on another man’s land. I prefer to operate with a high level of autonomy and resilience, even if that means I sell fewer copies. I do not want to be in a position where business arrangements can be changed unilaterally, where communications with customers are limited and controlled, and where I might be throttled or even excluded from the retailer’s inventory entirely.4
In the good old days, I only had to offer a 20% short discount via Lightning Source’s global distribution program to get into the Amazon ecosystem. That minimum discount has now increased to 40% (although some people say they have wiggled it back down to 30%). In any case, Ingram’s distribution arm and the Bezos Behemoth want more than I am prepared to give. I’m happy to do some light manual labour and spend a portion of each day packaging books if it allows me to keep more money and deal with my customers directly.
Take a negative review I received a while ago to illustrate my point about autonomy. (The review is gone now, but the memory of it still rankles.) Ingram fulfilled an Amazon order for one of my books, but the print quality was substandard and the colour illustrations looked washed out. The customer was obviously disappointed, and left a poor review on Amazon. When I saw the review, I could do nothing but sigh quietly to myself. Without the customer’s name and address there was no way for me send a replacement copy or issue a refund. When I outsourced my fulfilment to Ingram and Amazon, I outsourced my quality control and customer relations as well.
Now that I handle everything in-house, I make sure that each book is up to snuff. If something does go wrong, I can make amends quickly and easily. I also don’t have to worry about twisting in the wind when my distributor shuts down, which is what happened to 400 publishers when Small Press Distribution (SPD) closed in April. (For more on SPD see
’s write up here.)I have sometimes heard people pooh-pooh self publishing on the grounds that it forces writers to spend too much time doing their own marketing. I dismiss this objection out of hand since, if you’re a new author, the publisher is going to rely on you to play an active role in your own promotion anyway. J. A. Konrath was setting up book signings and paying out of his own pocket to send ARCs to reviewers way back in 2005. Do you think the publishers’ budgets are any bigger today? As I said to Hickman, if you have to do the heavy lifting anyway, you might as well self-publish. You’ll retain ownership of your copyright and collect more of the profits too.
The new authors who are most likely to get a book contract are the ones who have already built up a decent-sized following. If you have a reputation and a manuscript that is good enough to interest a traditional publisher, I suggest that you can sell 241 copies — and even more — on your own. Go on, give it a try. Disintermediate!
Some final thoughts
I hope no one misconstrues this post as criticism of Galley Beggar Press. I’ve used them as a point of departure simply because they shared their numbers. They have a tremendous list (Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport won the Booker Prize in 2019), and a group of readers that are so devoted that they were able to crowdfund themselves out of financial trouble. If you are the kind of author who has no interest in learning typesetting, building websites, and stuffing envelopes, and would rather just focus on writing, you could not go wrong by publishing with them.
However, if you are an ornery control freak with an entrepreneurial bent, I think I have shown how you could earn more money by running your own shop and distributing books directly to readers.
Or, as George Gissing called it, “the valley of the shadow of books”.
I am working under the assumption that publishers will not pay an advance that is higher than expected royalties. If an author fails to “earn out” his advance, the publisher will want to renegotiate terms or drop him.
For the opposing point of view on print run size, see Joe Biel’s A People’s Guide to Publishing. Biel is the founder of Microcosm Publishing, and he argues that new publishers should start with a print run of 2,000 copies. “With a proper launch campaign, you should be able to sell 2,000 of any properly developed book,” he writes on page 105. “It’s always better to err on the side of giving a free book to someone who could create a positive influence for it than be forced into stinginess by a lack of copies.” See the Microcosm YouTube channel for more industry commentary from Biel and Microcosm’s co-owner Elly Blue.
Years ago, when I uploaded my translation of a monograph about Henri Le Sidaner to the Kindle store, it took me several weeks to convince the Amazon drones that author Camille Mauclair (1872–1945) was truly dead and not wandering around Paris and entitled to a share of my profits. I decided then that the game wasn’t worth the candle.
This is excellent, I wish you all the best for the future!