How the Self-Publishing Industry Changed, Between My First and Second Novels

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From Longreads:

As of this writing, my self-published novel The Biographies of Ordinary People: Volume 2: 2004–2016 is currently ranked #169,913 out of the more than one million Kindle books sold on Amazon. When Biographies Vol. 2 launched at the end of May, it ranked #26,248 in Kindle books and #94,133 in print books. At one point my book hit #220 in the subcategory “Literary Fiction/Sagas.”

So far, Biographies Vol. 2 has sold 71 Kindle copies and 55 paperbacks, which correlates to about $360 in royalties.

I know what you’re thinking, and you’ve probably been thinking it since you saw the words “self-published.” But no, those sales numbers aren’t because my books are terrible—and I didn’t self-publish because my books were terrible either. (It’s a long story, but it has to do with an agent telling me that I could rewrite Biographies to make it more marketable to the traditional publishing industry, or I could keep it as an “art book” that would be loved by a select few.) Last year’s The Biographies of Ordinary People: Volume 1: 1989–2000 was named a Library Journal Self-E Select title; Vol. 2 was just selected as a Kirkus Reviews featured indie, with the blurb “A shrewdly unique portrait of everyday America.” I regularly get emails from readers telling me how much my books have meant to them, and how they couldn’t put their copies down.

So. I could tell you a story that makes The Biographies of Ordinary People sound like a triumphant success, and I could also tell you that in its first year of publication, Biographies Vol. 1 sold 382 ebooks and 157 paperbacks, earning $1,619.28 in royalties.

. . . .

The day before Biographies Vol. 2 published, novelist Tom McAllister’s “Who Will Buy Your Book?” ran on The Millions. The essay, like my previous paragraphs, notes the difference between accolades and sales (and the difference between Facebook likes and sales, and the difference between people who say they’ll buy your book and sales), and includes the quote, “The book industry is partly kept afloat by a shadow economy in which the main currency is bullshit.”

I’m not quite that pessimistic, in part because it’s not my nature and in part because, as an indie author who is also her own publisher, I’m not hiding anything from myself. I publish a tally of my earnings and expenses on my blog, and I am very well aware that the book tour I just finished probably cost me more than I’ll earn from Biographies Vol. 2‘s first year of royalties. (The numbers work, in my case, thanks to the $6,909 in Patreon contributions I received while drafting the two novels. As my own publisher, I had to make sure I got an advance!)

But I am also aware that the book industry is — like politics and economics and climate change and pretty much everything else right now — not having its best year ever, and there have been a handful of changes between the publication of Biographies Vol. 1 and Biographies Vol. 2 that can’t be ignored.

. . . .

The first big change, at least for me, came on November 6, 2017. It arrived via email, with the subject line “Pronoun is shutting down.”

While many challenges in indie publishing remain unsolved, Macmillan is unable to continue Pronoun’s operation in its current form. Every option was considered before making the very difficult decision to end the business.

Pronoun was Macmillan’s indie publishing service. Think of it like Bandcamp for books. Authors could upload manuscripts, and Pronoun would take care of the formatting and the distribution. It also had an extensive marketing section that allowed authors to test covers, categories, and tags before finalizing their decisions, and you could even review data on optimum price points.

. . . .

Why did Pronoun shut down? Publishers Weekly quotes Jeff Seroy, senior vice president of publicity and marketing at Macmillan’s Farrar, Straus and Giroux:

Asked why Pronoun was being shuttered 18 months after the acquisition, Seroy said despite Macmillan investment in the platform and “terrific” feedback from Pronoun authors, “we came to the conclusion that there wasn’t a path forward to a profitable business model and decided to shut down the platform.”

Profit has long been an issue in the book industry — Borders closed in 2011, the Big 6 book publishers became the Big 5 in 2013, Barnes & Noble fired all of the full-time employees at 781 of its stores last February — and if your first thought is well, of course, Amazon, you’re right.

. . . .

Believe it or not, traditionally published ebook sales went down in 2017. I’ll cite Publishers Weekly again:

Unit sales of traditionally published e-books fell 10% in 2017, compared to 2016, according to figures released by PubTrack Digital, part of the NPD book group. The service, which tracks sales from about 450 publishers, said e-book unit sales hit 162 million last year, down from 180 million units in 2016.

People are buying more print books, and Amazon is opening more and more bookstores.

The indie publishing world hasn’t been hit quite as hard with this ebook decline, for a few reasons. Indie writers often sell their books exclusively online (and in many cases, exclusively with Amazon, since there are financial advantages to joining the Kindle Direct Publishing Select program). They reduce expenses by only selling ebooks, and increase sales by pricing those ebooks significantly lower than their traditionally-published counterparts. With no publisher to take its cut, indie writers get a larger royalty share per book than traditionally published writers, so the math works in their favor—and with more and more indie writers on Amazon, especially in popular genres like Romance, self-published books are both growing in number and gaining market share.

. . . .

Author Earnings also notes that, in Q4 2017, “284 of the top 1,000 selling ebook authors in the US were self-published indies.” (Go team!)

The top-selling ebook in 2017, however, wasn’t an indie. As Publishers Weekly reports, it was Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

Link to the rest at Longreads

23 thoughts on “How the Self-Publishing Industry Changed, Between My First and Second Novels”

  1. No mention of said book being a thirty year old politically-driven fantasy that just happened to have been adapted to a video series.

    Exactly what every author with an agent can expect, right?

    (BTW, KIRKUS is the outfit that charges for indie reviews, right?)

        • Yup. In fact, Data Guy pointed out in his recent video that Handmaid’s Tale alone put its publisher (Hachette, I believe) on top of the publisher list.

          The Longreads author also bought into the story that ebook sales are dropping simply because trad pubs’ sales are dropping. Not true.

          • Not the only thing he’s bought into.
            Especially if he thinks HANDMAID’S TALE has anything to teach indies.

          • “The Longreads author also bought into the story that ebook sales are dropping simply because trad pubs’ sales are dropping. Not true.”

            So how is it that Data Guy stated the 2016 US ebook market to be worth $3.2 billion (AE Report Feb 2017) and in the January 2018 AE Report said that the nine months of 2017 tracked totalled just $1.3 billion?

              • Thanks for the attempt at a reply, Smart Debut Author.

                I was merely citing the actual statistics as stated by Data Guy in the Feb 2017 and Jan 2018 AE Reports.

                I agree it’s so much easier to just completely ignore anything we prefer not to hear.

                The fact remains Data Guy’s supposedly far more accurate tracking every sale made numbers for the 2018 report show a total ebook market value down by around 50% compared to Data Guy’s numbers offered a year prior.

                No reading impediment on my part, SDA. It’s all there if you actually care to look.

    • Handmaid’s Tale is less of a tradpub success story than a convincing argument for successful indies to pursue subsidiary rights sales to new-media companies like NetFlix, etc., directly themselves, because those companies couldn’t care less about the old agent/publisher-oriented way of film deal licensing.

  2. “The book industry is partly kept afloat by a shadow economy in which the main currency is bullshit.”

    Damn! Wiping spewed coffee off the keyboard and monitor now… 🙁

  3. I’d love to hear replies to the comments above.
    BTW, I enjoyed Atwood’s Handmaid (14 years ago).

  4. Asked why Pronoun was being shuttered 18 months after the acquisition, Seroy said despite Macmillan investment in the platform and “terrific” feedback from Pronoun authors, “we came to the conclusion that there wasn’t a path forward to a profitable business model and decided to shut down the platform.”

    From day one, Pronoun had *no* business model whatsoever. Basically, it was:

    1) Offer services to indie authors for free.
    2) ?
    3) Profits

    Then Macmillan bought them.

    Anyone surprised by Pronoun’s subsequent shuttering just wasn’t paying attention.

    • Agreed. We all had questions when Pronoun first showed up. I couldn’t see what their cut was, how were they making money? If I remember right the theory was they had some sort of sweet deal with Amazon, getting a better slice than the standard 70/30. I couldn’t think of any other way for it to work.

      • Pronoun’s 70% payout for books below $3 or above $10 is no mystery.

        Back when they were still Vook, they were a non-KDP publisher with an Amazon deal where they earned 70% regardless of price, like a lot of publishers do.

        Amazon possibly might not have loved the fact that when Vook became Pronoun, they turned around and farmed their 70%-across-the-board rate out to a handful of indie authors, but Pronoun’s total sales and title count always remained so trivially insignificant that I doubt Amazon even noticed them.

        Incidentally, it was the latter problem (Pronoun’s lack of traction with both authors and readers) that killed them just as much as their lack of a moneymaking business model.

      • Probably an “asset sale” where Pronoun folks settled for getting a few of their staff acqui-hired, and investors took pennies on the dollar.

        That’s what a “soft landing” looks like when a startup fails.

        No big checks thrown around, that’s for sure.

  5. Er… The Biographies of Ordinary People: Volume 2: 2004–2016 is not a phrase that would lead me to think of fiction. I’m absurdly sleepy right now, but mayhaps that doesn’t help sales.

    Take care

      • Not the kind of covers that imply things I’d buy, but I’ve seen the kind before. If that what she sells, I have to qualms. The title… I think it might confuse readers. A confused reader tends to lead to an angry customer.

        Take care

        • You’re not alone.
          The cover strikes me as a generic, low effort product.
          Doesn’t exactly pop from the listings.

          I’ve seen other generational saga covers that stand out. All it takes is some imagination.

          Ditto for the blurbs and quotes, especially since it’s known Kirkus sells reviews.

          Title, cover, blurbs are all handicaps.
          That’s a big hurdle for any book, regardless of content.

    • Good catch! I completely missed that this was supposed to be a novel. As it is, I like biographies … but if they’re focused on ordinary people, they better be living in Interesting Times. And those times must oblige the Ordinary People to become extraordinary.

      I’ve always thought that title, cover, and logline/synopsis must work harmoniously to promote a book. Second best option is if either the title or the cover is doing the heavy lifting (if a reader doesn’t go past either of those then the synopsis won’t get read). A good beta reader could have helped her out here. Or an editor. Or a copywriter. An author has got to know her limitations.

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