The State of Book Publishing from Our Perspective
If you’re trying to publish your work with one of the Big Five Publishers, I have bad news for you.
Publishers are overwhelmed with submissions. You lose control over your product. You have to hire an agent to represent you—ka-ching. And your royalties, should you be lucky enough to sell books, will be 5-7% net, not gross, sales.
Don’t want to believe it? Here’s an example from a well-known agent’s website: “Royalties are based on the payments we actually receive from the sale of printed or audio copies of your book, less any shipping and handling charges or sales and use taxes. Also, we offer discounts to retail and wholesale customers, so the royalty amount you receive depends on what type of customer bought your book and any discount they received.… You should be aware that the largest retailers, including Barnes & Noble and Amazon, place orders for AuthorHouse titles through Ingram; those orders will appear as wholesale sales on your royalty statement.” (emphasis added, AuthorHouse.com)
You have to pay the agent, the publisher offers discounts so your royalty shrinks, and if you don’t sell enough books, they drop you.
Then there’s the market to think of. Book stores just aren’t the best place to sell books anymore. “A book has less than a 1% chance of being stocked in an average bookstore. For every available bookstore shelf space, there are 100 to 1,000 or more titles competing for that shelf space.
“For example, the number of business titles stocked ranges from less than 100 (smaller bookstores) to approximately 1,500 (superstores). Yet there are 250,000-plus business books in print that are fighting for that limited shelf space.” Article Link
Those are the bad numbers. Let me give you the good numbers.
3rd Coast Books offers a 40% royalty. But that’s only the frosting. The cake is even more delightful.
We help you market your book through social media and our proprietary book list, Readers Cloud 9, to 170 countries and over 11 million contacts.
We help you create an identity for your title.
We offer 100 books upfront as part of your package investment. You can buy more books at a generous 50% discount.
We give you the control while walking through the entire process with you.
The Big Five aren’t going away, but their importance will continue to decline as small publishers gain more of the industry share.
Because they can actually listen to their clients, small publishers will have the upper hand eventually. Nielsen already reports these facts: though traditional publishing is down 12%, indie and small house publishing is up 23%.
Small houses can often afford to help the author and perhaps pay better royalties. Certainly 3rd Coast Books is out in front by offering 40% royalties, unheard of in any other sector of publishing.
Those are the good numbers.