Category: Self Publishing

So you’ve done all that work and you’ve also learnt a shed-load of new processes. You wrote the book, edited it, got a cover design, bought ISBNs (unless you took the “free” KDP one), uploaded it to the websites you’re selling it through, and told everyone you know via social media that your debut novel is OUT NOW!

What next? How does a self-published book launch look in numbers?

I can’t answer for everyone and every book, but for The Lost Piece I priced it at a competitive but still full-price £8.49 / 9.99€ / $10.49 for the paperback, £2.99 / 3.49€ / 3.99$ for the ebook. I didn’t enroll it in KDP Select (Unlimited) or anything similar. I didn’t spend any money on marketing, just used personal social media channels.

I released it via the following internet retailers:

• Amazon KDP print-on-demand paperback and ebook, global.
• Ingram Spark, print-on-demand-paperback, global.
• Apple iBooks ebook, global.
• Barnes & Noble Nook ebook, global.
• Rakuten Kobo ebook, global

I also got physical copies (bought from KDP, which turned out cheaper and in fact marginally better than Ingram Spark) into various small, local shops, and made some direct sales to friends.

My sales were predominantly Amazon KDP, and they were:

From all the other websites I added 3 books, and from direct sales 6 books, for a grand total of 50 sales.

In revenue terms, those Amazon sales paid a royalty of 91.44€. With other sales added in my total income from the book in these opening months adds up to around 135€.

How do I feel about this?

I mean obviously there are alternative, bigger ways it could have gone …but as an experienced editor I had a fair idea of what was likely, had set my expectations low, and at least met them.

I think the key thing to remember is that this book is now out there forever. It doesn’t need writing again, nor cover designing, nor placing on retailer websites, nor ISBNs bought, etc.. Anytime, anywhere, someone can buy a copy of this book, and when they do I’ll get my royalty from that.

Fine, but didn’t that sales curve above have its little spike and then tail off to zero? Yes, but I’ll release other books and do things like publishing this blog – essentially all marketing as far as The Lost Piece is concerned – and as long as I keep that up some future sales can be expected.

Will I ever “make it” as an author? My feeling has always been that this comes down to:

• First and foremost, the quality of my books. If this isn’t high enough then they’ll never maintain any momentum.
• Second, having a decent body of work out there. I’m going to say 6 novels, because that seems to be the average of other blogs I’ve read. If a reader likes one of your books only other books out there give them anywhere to go next.
• Third, and perhaps most importantly, just continually plugging away with marketing and writing. Keep going – for me if there’s any quality that marks out a self-published author who has a chance, it’s persistence.

So personally I’m not discouraged. My debut novel The Lost Piece’s first months are a decent building block.

This interesting thing happened the week I released my book “The Lost Piece”: I got a mail from an author friend asking “How did you do this?”

He wasn’t talking about writing the book, rather the email he’d received from Amazon recommending the book, which they had also reduced from £8.49 to £8.01 for the paperback at their cost (this discount wasn’t coming out of my royalties).

In answer to his question, I don’t know!
I hadn’t selected any marketing offer or paid for promotion. This was just a regular (zero cost) placing of a debut novel by an unknown author.

I have a couple of theories though.

Firstly, and probably, my name and his had been linked somewhere in the vast mass of data big tech collects from us. This would be no surprise as I’ve edited his book and we’ve had plenty of emails and video calls, WeTransfers, etc.. So maybe Amazon got the data and the chance of name recognition and a purchase made the email worthwhile.
It may also be that Amazon had picked up that I had print on demand paperbacks via KDP but also via Ingram Spark, and so wanted to increase the probability that my friends and family sales wave (and let’s be honest, that’s the only sales wave many self published books ever catch) went through them.

But the second theory is more interesting, and that’s that in some way what I uploaded to Amazon got liked by an algorithm.
There’s no way to investigate this beyond a point because the algorithms Amazon use to promote the best quality books that come through their platform are top secret, as they have to be to stop every fast-profit-and-damn-the-quality-merchant out there exploiting the heck out of it.

But back up a sec there: “Amazon [promotes] the best quality books”?! No cynic could let that go by unchallenged.
I believe it though, because it makes business sense.
Do you get annoyed when you search Amazon for a specific thing and have to scroll through half a dozen cheap Chinese rip-offs before you find the product you actually want? Does it sometimes make you go look elsewhere? Do you think Amazon wants that?
If no, then why would they want their site to have the reputation of pushing junk AI-assisted novels churned out by the worst kind of mercenary hacks and using eg. Indian review farms to game the system? Routinely disappointed readers leave, and Barnes & Noble, Rakuten and Apple are all there eagerly waiting to gather them up and take them somewhere cosier so they never come back.
So yes, I believe Amazon puts effort into searching for and promoting new quality.

On this basis, where there’s an algorithm now there will very soon be AI. In fact there may well be already, and either way it’s going to get exponentially better at its job.

And there’s perhaps some evidence.
When you upload your eBook epub file it gets spell checked (I know this because the same author friend told me he only got a handful of errors flagged in his manuscript). Mine in fact passed first time with nothing flagged (I’m a decent copy editor, what can I say?!), and if a full spell check was done on the manuscript then that’s hugely impressive. As well as character and place names I’ve got idiosyncratic and accented speech in there. Word flagged all sorts, wrongly as usual (how does the world’s leading word processing software have so many clear errors in its dictionary?!) How did Amazon not trip up on this stuff? Maybe it’s a low bar and excludes everything within quotes, etc., but the other possibility is AI. Impressively good AI.

Whether AI is there as gatekeeper/selector is moot: it surely soon will be.
And then it gets more interesting. WAY more interesting!
My wife and I frequently drone at our children about how there were only 3 / 4 (Sweden / UK) TV channels when we were young, AND you had to be there in front of the TV at the time your programme was on. They, of course, blank us and return to turbo-navigating Netflix.
And when they finally go to bed and we bag the TV for half an hour before we crash…we can’t find a damn thing and frequently waste the whole half hour trying!
Why? Too much choice and no idea what’s any good.
Back in the 80s, you see, commissioners and editors had made the selection for us.
Do you ever miss that?
Certainly. And that’s why Richard and Judy or Oprah Winfrey can do so well out of a “book club”. Life’s a lot easier with trusted guidance to something we’ll fairly reliably like.

So imagine you’re off for a well-deserved holiday. What to read from all these millions of novels on Amazon? If only someone who knew your tastes could read every page of all of them (or at least scour the internet for all reviews and amalgamate then cross-reference them with your known tastes based on reviews left and ebook pages read) and recommend, just for you, that perfect book. A better version of this (screen grabbed from Amazon):

I suspect that very soon AI, armed with Amazon’s intimate knowledge of you and what you like, will be able to. And there will be a strong business case for making it do so.

Is it happening already? Perhaps.
Did my book rank well? Maybe so!
Yay!

But more important is that if I’m right then the future of publishing/literature may involve a new generation of AI gatekeepers.
…so spare a thought for the poor agents and commissioning editors of publishing houses, because they may be living on borrowed time, alas.

But for the self-published, the playing field may be about to get levelled.
And the key will be, purely and simply, quality.

(So if I hadn’t already decided to self-publish, this would have decided me).

As in my Back Story post, coming up with and using this research method is why I self-publish. What I’m going to describe here is something you can – and I believe should – go out and try for yourself on your agent picks.

It goes as follows:

(1) Research agents you’d like to represent you. As a budding author you’ve probably already done this, and if you haven’t you should, because even if you’re going to self publish I’d advise it’s better that choice be well-informed.

(2) We’re now going to do the same process for the top three agents from that list.
By the way, I’m assuming they’re probably a bit ambitious for you to go for (ie. they’re established industry names and you’re unknown) but you also have hope based on all the things they have in their bio and say online about finding undiscovered talent in their slush pile and helping develop it.
Why not?
…but I’d also like to share the actual overheard quote from an actual agent (shouted into a telephone) that started me thinking about self-publishing:
“I don’t want a f*#%ing project, I want something I can sell.”
Universally true? Do you know, I think maybe.

(3) Go to your agents’ ‘clients’ page. Here you’ll usually find some 40-60 authors they represent (which is a bit of a red flag in and of itself – how much time does that equate to per client?)
You’ve probably already been here, and probably imagined just 10% of what the top names here are doing as something you’d be happy with; I bet you would! (note implied conditional).
But for this method we’re going directly to the bottom of that list (or focus on the authors you’ve never heard of if the list is alphabetised). Work upwards until you find the first near match for your gender, colour, class and age. This is our target.

(4) We’re now going to go just the right side of the line on cyberstalking the target…and the brilliant thing about this industry is every-damn-one promotes every-damn-thing about themselves, so this is very easy to do. Specifically:
* The agency’s author page for the target.
* If the target has a publisher, the publisher page for the target.
* The Amazon author page for the target.
* The target’s own website.
* Social media feeds for the agent and publisher (search within these or via Google for mentions of the target).
* (most importantly) The target’s own social media feeds.
The aim here is to know the books the target author has out (and forthcoming) and to gauge their success and, most importantly, who did the work to make that happen (and how).

(5) Next up we’re going to do some sales maths.
In the credits column we want an idea of the lifetime sales of that book. Okay, this is tricky because it’s not public info. Except in ways it is: sometimes an author will post on social media if they just hit 1,000, 5,000, 10,000 copies, etc.. Also if you’re able to follow a target author’s book from release you can use this sales calculator from Kindlepreneur to get a good idea of sales volumes (the bulk of which are usually in the first month). Similarly any historic chart positions (which are invariably publicised on social media) can be used with current chart titles to extrapolate sales volumes.
A quick aside to say that yes, I do focus mostly on Amazon. In part this is because you can get accurate sales figures for it from chart rank, but mostly it’s because it dominates the market with around 50% of physical book sales and 80% of ebook sales. Almost any book getting market traction is probably seeing 2/3rds of its volume go via Amazon (thus add 50% to any Amazon-only number to get a whole market estimate).
I’m sorry if you’re getting a headache here! Basically do this as detailed or sketchy as you like – the aim is to make a guess at lifetime sales for the target’s books (times number of books published). If any maths is too much maths for you then you can just go with 5,000 based on eg. this article. My view is this falls somewhere between realistic and optimistic for the target author…because if they were doing this they would be higher up the agent’s client list.

(6) Next we want to change that sales volume into an annual income.
The first detail we want for that is the royalty percentage the target author is receiving after the publisher and agent take their share. I’m going to avoid getting complex here and just say that over hardback and paperback (most sales volume is paperback) the average publishing deal pays 7% of RRP royalty and out of that the agent takes 15%, which we can add up to give a combined author royalty of 6%.
Yes, I know some readers will be frowning about this, to which I’d answer, have you noticed how every headline deal figure (eg. car rental) in the world seems to get worse for you once it goes into detail? So why would this be different?
I want to stress here that I urge you to calculate the target author figures as accurately as you can: the whole point of this exercise is to see through all the smoke and mirrors of the publishing industry and the overhyped numbers across the internet and actually see, up close, what someone like you IF you got this agent and a publishing deal with a major publisher, would likely be getting by way of hard, take-home cash.
But by way of a working average, let’s say the target author puts out 1 book per year selling at £10 ($13) and gets 5,000 lifetime sales of that book at a 6% royalty.
£10 x 5,000 x 6% = £3,000
(or $13 x 5,000 x 6% = $3,900)
Maybe this is less than you expected, but it’s consistent with this research, and that’s in the pre-AI era…!
But what about the advance? For fiction by a debut, unknown author it would greatly surprise me if it’s bigger than the £3,000 ($3,900) figure above. Yes, 6-figure deals happen, but so do lottery wins. One of the few sensible articles online about this says maybe a little more, but if there’s a trend then fiction novel advances are declining.
Grim, right?

(7) Well now it’s about to get grimmer!
How and why? Two main reasons:
a) Cost to the author of getting a manuscript to the level required to get an agent.
b) Cost to the author of the publicity required to generate those sales.
Starting with a), because of the absurd imbalance between supply and demand in this industry, agents (see the agent quote above) have a lot of choice over who they represent. They therefore – logically, because literary agencies are businesses – mostly go with the books which are of the required quality and arrive needing the least work to get to a saleable state.
At this point a question – does a professional editor make your book better? That’s a clear yes. A second question – are there wannabe authors out there prepared to invest in editing services so their manuscript becomes more attractive to agents? Again a clear yes, and in fact I’d say it’s becoming the norm (and I’m an editor by profession).
Gulp, okay…so how much does an editor cost? Well that depends on the level of editing and also manuscript length, but £2,000 ($2,600) is a low-ball average. (But okay, a caveat is that if you get a multi-book deal with a publisher they should pay for all editing from book two onwards…unless they drop you of course!)
Now b), and what you’ll be able to see from researching your target author is that these days authors are expected to do a LOT of the marketing. Firstly the agent/publisher will want you to tap up (the hell out of) your friends, family, co-workers, etc. until they’re sick of seeing your name. They’ll also want you to do bookshop signings, talk to reading groups, do interviews, etc.. And if it’s in some distant town and you’d need to take a day off work, drive 100 miles each way, eat out there, and perhaps even stay in a hotel for the night? From what I could see on socials the norm is you’d do it, and whilst you can save the receipts to deduct as expenses against royalty revenue, the publisher/agency will not be reimbursing any of this. I guess you could say no, but my assumption is the agency/publisher would take that as a signal you’re not serious about your career as an author…
So can we put a value on this? Perhaps if you do careful research, but for the sake of drama I’m going to go with a book-lifetime average cost of this of £1,000 ($1,300).
And thus we arrive at a figure of zero income if you get a named agent, a major publisher, and have a lifetime sales figure of 5,000 per book.

(8) But the silver lining must surely be that you’re building a career and those high-calibre professionals in the agency and publishing house will be there to support you as you learn, succeed, and finally earn?
I’m really sorry to keep doing this to you, but of all the gut-punches in my own use of this method, this next one was the worst…
I tracked Twitter, Facebook and Instagram feeds for my (three) target (middle-aged unknown white guy with a debut fiction novel) authors and got a handle on who from the publisher/agent side was doing what for how long and with what sort of budget. All three looked similar from what I could see:
* Advances paid by publishers were small or none. I base this on no mention being made of one (agents tend to mention ‘5-figure’ advances extensively when they get them for new authors).
* I think the named agents allotted very little of either their name power or their own time to the authors. Possibly it was as limited as the odd retweet, with assistants (graduate interns) seeming to be the more involved (based on Twitter activity).
* The publisher also didn’t appear to allocate much marketing time or budget to the authors’ books. What I was able to see looked like low-cost strategies run by fairly junior employees for a period of only around two weeks around the publication date.
* Beyond that publisher/agent seemed to be setting up some promotion ‘opportunities’ for the authors such as bookshop signings, talking to readers’ groups, etc., but, as above, I assume all of the associated travel and other costs were covered entirely by the authors.
* Amazon sales appeared unspectacular (probably in the hundreds) and reviews numbers were equally low (below 100).

(9) So my conclusion from all of this?
It was that even if I managed to attain the holy grail of a big-name agent and major publisher, it would amount to little more than a basic platform from which it would once again be me being required to promote and prove myself largely at my own expense (ie. financial and also social media time/energy/contacts). And from this position the majority still fail (in the sense of ever making a living as a novelist).

BUT I’m not saying “Never Pursue This Traditional Route”. My advice is simply to understand what it’s likely to offer you (based on detailed research) and weight that up against your other options carefully.

In my case, as a professional editor I could self edit. THAT’S quite a claim! …but in fact (after being quoted $80 per hour from every editor I was impressed enough by to approach – way beyond my means) I developed a methodology for doing reasonably effective self-editing.
And I’ve written it up and it’s available in full for free on this same website.

Also, I know how to typeset a manuscript and do all the publication process complete with personal (non-Amazon) ISBNs and so on. My wife (www.studioannadahlberg.com) is a designer and so can do book covers, adverts and video teasers.

These are substantial costs you’d normally expect a publisher to bear, so for me it tipped the balance firmly in favour of self-publishing. I also believe that AI is going to undermine a LOT of what traditional publishers do and dramatically tip the balance away from them…but that’s another blog post.

I want to end this tome of a post by saying that it’s aim is DYOR (do your own research). As in really do it, with eyes and mind open, and then make a hard-nosed decision about what’s best for you. Literature may present as a nice, fluffy industry, but…

Let’s kick off with a very potted bio. I’m a fifty-one-year-old Brit called David Imrie who lives on the Atlantic coast in northern Spain. After a couple of different careers I started working as a freelance editor (soon specialising in novels) in 2017. This work has been for a couple of small publishers, self-published authors and the Page Turner Awards, where I’m the in-house editor. My website is www.noveledit.net if you’re interested.

Pretty soon into this new career I got the itch to write. I hit on a concept and I added ideas to it. I wrote it, and I loved the experience. THIS was what I wanted to do in life.

Now all I had to do was send off my manuscript to my preferred agent and wait… I mean they all want new, raw talent to develop, right?

Of course I knew enough about my industry not to believe that, but at the same time I also wanted to believe it! You see, writing I like, marketing (especially myself) not so much.
Long story short, in 2023 I sent off The Lost Piece to a handful of agents, and I got precisely zero interest. Please believe me that I’m not bitter about this – the version I sent hadn’t had enough revision then, and a rather slow-burn novel from another middle-aged white guy (even J K Rowling can’t pull that off!) …well, it’s a business and I don’t delude myself.

I didn’t give up on the traditional publishing route at this point, but I did work more on my books (I had “Ghosts” in development by then too), and I did resolve that when I came back to submitting to agents I would do it more carefully.

Except those were my last submissions. Why? When I came back to researching agents I came up with my research method…and the clear conclusion from that is that I prefer to self-publish.

So what’s that method? It’s something I urge you to try yourself, using the step-by-step process described in this next post.

Hi. It’s July the 1^st 2024. My name is David Imrie and I’m a freelance fiction editor who wants to be a professional novelist.

This blog is the full and honest details of my journey in self-publication starting with my first novel “The Lost Piece”, which was released today.

In the blog I intend to share ALL the numbers: costs, revenues, sales figures, giveaways, etc.. Interspersed with this will be posts related to why I chose self-publishing and what I learn about it along the way. Ultimately it’s a detailed and honest story that will unfold right here in real time.

I want to be transparent about why I’m writing it and sharing so much financial information: it’s a marketing strategy. My hope is that readers considering self-publishing find it useful and buy my book out of a bit of reciprocal gratitude, to compare it with their own writing, or just because they’re intrigued. And that’s it. There’s nothing else being hyped or sold here.

Starting as I mean to go on: please buy my books!
David Imrie’s Amazon author page.