A "real" publisher vs. self-publishing? --

A NEW book is one that you haven't yet read!
And Author Nina M. Osier has a dozen good ones to choose from.

Survey Team Leader Nora Falconi's closest friend, anthropologist Marcus Cranshaw, has disappeared on Class M Planet No. 8055. Nora must find and rescue him before a long-awaited treaty takes effect, and 8055 becomes part of Ast territory.

                       AN EARLY EPIC AWARD WINNER

Question from the e-mail:  Is there still an onus on self-publishing? Do I really need a publisher at all?

Answer: As a publisher, of course, I think we are useful. Otherwise, I'd find something else to do with my time.

A publisher knows the difference between a pear and a pair of scissors. Unlike a vanity press, we earn through your sales, NOT by charging our authors fees. As an author myself, I was delighted to find a publisher who did that, and accepted at once when she asked me to carry on after she became too ill to continue. She didn't want to leave 90 authors homeless, and I surely didn't want to be homeless.

A publisher can market your books across more than one venue. We can help you design professional-looking covers and give you text that conforms to the standard professional style for book publishers. While it is certainly true that self-publishing no longer carries the "vanity press" onus that it once did, it can lead to less-than-ready books being marketed. The author writes, prepares the book files (or hires a book-jobber to prepare them), and posts the book for sale. Sales, if any, are then paid directly to the author.

They may not pay as well as some expect, but the self-published need not share the profits with anyone else, so you get to keep the take -- whatever that take may be. The self-published will also receive bushels of e-mail solicitations offering to help them market and promising to increase sales phenomenally -- your e-mail box will never be empty. All for a fee, of course. Usually, quite a substantial fee. Beware, though. They are not always the kindly, interested, supportive and caring service-providers they pretend to be. They are in business to sell you hope and collect a healthy fee for doing so.

For the technically-adept, the self-marketing motivated, the Grammatically proficient, and the very prolific, self-publishing CAN pay -- quite well. If one can convert the files and market them on many sales venues, and in many different formats, it can work for you. All that will definitely cut into your writing time. A drawback. Especially if you, like most writers, also have a day job to support your writing habit.

It may not pay as well as some expect, but the self-published need not share the profits with anyone else, so you get to keep the take -- whatever that may be. The self-published will receive bushels of e-mail solicitations offering to help them market and promising to increase sales phenomenally -- all for a fee, of course. Usually quite a substantial fee. They will be interspersed with offers to sellyour book on certain websites -- and if you read the fine print, you will discover that you must pay a fee just to be listed, whether you sell any books or not. The fee is supposed to be deducted from sales, but at least one author I know received a bill for $18 for t he three titles she sent them, none of which had sold a single copy all year.

These folks are not always the kindly, interested, supportive and caring service-providers they pretend to be. They are in business to sell you hope and collect a healthy fee for doing so. A professional publisher is in business to sell your books. A vanity publisher (or vanity sales site) is in business to collect fees from YOU.

Whether you self-publish or have a publisher, the result will be the same. You will have a book for sale and be challenged to draw folks' attention to it, so they will know where to look to buy it. Unless you have a Big Name publisher, no one is going to spend a lot of money on advertising your book. Self-promotion is the key. Even the big publishers only buy it to promote books they know will be controversial and provoking. (See the blog link below.)

Some folks will do very well. Most will sell two or three copies per quarter. I have just completed the data-entry and spreadsheet info for all the sales (if any) that took place for our 350 authors.  Only about 1/3 had sales. Most of those sold one or two copies this quarter. NOT by coincidence, the author who promotes most conscienciously is the one with the greatest number of sales.

Fall is generally a slow time for electronic book sales and 90% of our sales are electronic books.  With everyone doing holiday shopping, the amount of discretionary income devoted to self-gratification activities like reading is way down. Our sales usually reflect that by dropping like a stone in the last quarter of the year.  They dip again in spring when gardening and vacations kick in, but pick up quickly as the summer progresses. That is the same for both Publishers and the self-published.

If you are one of our authors, just e-mail me at arline@mail.com and I'd be happy to share your personal spreadsheet data with you. When you get the list it will show at the top, the key listing sales site abbreviations:

Key: k=AmazonKindle; kuk=Kindle in the United Kingdom; kit=Kindle in Italy; kd= Kindle in Denmark; kj=KindleinJapan; Kfr=Kindle in France: ki=Kindle in India; FW= Fictionwise; b-n = Barnes & Noble/Nook: AR= All Romance/OMNI: cs= POD paper; WWI=Write Words, Inc. (including both paper and e-books).

Followed by: 

Author's Name       Title                    Date of Sale        #       venue     earnings

 

Chase                Final Exit                          0912       1        k            0.87
Chase                Go Down Moses                912        1        bn            2.11
Chase                Drowned Land                0912        1        k            2.26
Chase                Fire Next Time                1112        1        k            2.27

So from that data, you can see that I sold two Kindle books and 1 Nook book in September and another Kindle book in Nov. As an author, I'm certainly not getting rich, am I?  Since the publisher and author split 50/50 the company makes whatever an author is paid, so Write Word, Inc. also received $7.51 on my sales for the quarter. Out of that they pay salaries, web site fees, cable network fees, postage, office supplies, computer equipment and repairs, corporate income tax, and all other costs of running a business.

Like most small publishers, we have no advertising budget. You will not see full page ads in Publisher's Weekly (as the author of the blog below did), though we do try to let folks know about your books through this blog and share every bit of good news from Write Words, Inc. authors who post on FB or Linked In, just as we hope you will share our news with your friends and ask them to share as well. Word-of-mouth is the best affordable advertising. Beat the Drums! Nobody ever bought a book they haven't heard about!

Here's a link to a blog with MUCH more about the self-publishing choice:

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/01/23/the-ebook-path-to-riches-possibly-steeper-than-assumed/