Publishing Is Always Changing…
It Always Has and It Always Will…
And sadly, the road is littered with the writers who could not make the changes happening at the time.
Often, not always, but often the major changes come in how readers get the stories. The huge distribution collapse of 1958 pretty much killed the last of the pulps and allowed mass market paperbacks to take over. And then the distribution collapse of the mid 1990s pretty much killed the mid list and switched everything to bestsellers wanted only.
Then the final success of electronic publishing in 2007/8 after over 15 years of trying spelled the doom of the mass market paperback and brought in the electronic books. And the traditional publishing response to electronic books opened the door to the indie world with thousands of publishers, each writer being a publisher of their own books.
Readers loved it. Books were once again priced less than a cup of coffee.
Today, here in 2026, indie publishers put out over sixty times more books in a year than the remains of the traditional publishers. And writers are learning copyright and brands and trademarks and control of their own work.
The good thing is that there are millions of books out there, and a book published by an indie publisher ten years ago is still acting like a new book to a reader. Front lists and back lists are terms so dated and laughable, most indie writers don’t even know or care about the terms. And territorial limitations went out with the boombox. No indie writer would even think of limiting their sales to only one area of the world. We all make too much money selling all over the place.
And most indie writers understand the magic ad formula of 20 major books discoverability. And indie published short stories now help in that discoverability since the collapse of the major genre magazines into rights grabs and scams.
In the early days of electronic publishing, you could make a really nice living from just the income from the major online stores about the world. But as more millions of books came in, those income sources, while still there, shrank. And with Amazon creating a cesspool of AI writing that they are giving away as promotion, that has also damaged the overall “just publish it wide” thinking of making a living.
Your books still need to be wide, but your sales will be disappointing, even after the magic 20 discoverability number.
And then there is the issue that almost all new writers coming in have. They flat don’t understand how to get out of their own way with their covers and sales copy, and thus will often depress their sales down to almost nothing.
But the delivery system might be different, but alas the numbers for authors only counting on sales through bookstore has remained the same over a very long time.
For example: Let’s say a traditional writer got a great deal and a $50,000 contract for three books. First book to be published one year after the contract and then one per year after that, so four years. Payments will be in nine parts over those four/five years.
One part for each book a number of months after signing, one part for acceptance, one part for publication. Here is the math…
Agent fee of $50,000 is 15% leaving $42,500.
$42,500 divided by 9 payments is $4,667 per payment.
- 1st year the writer gets $14,000. Signing for three books.
- 2nd year the writer gets $$4,667 for acceptance 1st book spread out in two payments.
- 3rd year the writer gets $9,334 for acceptance2nd book and publication of 1st book spread out in two payments.
- 4th year the writer gets $9,334 for acceptance 3rd book and publication 2nd book spread out in two payments.
- 5th year the writer gets $$4,667 for last publication of 3rd book.
Three books published in over four years. Granted the deal looked great, and maybe even made news in the genres, but the writer was not quitting a day job. And most deals were no where near that large. See why I worked for upwards of eight publishers at a time under pen names? But sadly most writers just write one book a year and if they were lucky, really lucky, they got a second contract, normally for less.
$4,667a year divided by 12 is $389 a month. That in indie publishing is called “coffee money” for the most part. Say you make $50 from Kobo, another $50 from D2D, $25 from Google, $25 from a few other stores,$50 from Ingram paper and Electronic and say $200 from Amazon. And not counting your own Shopify store. And you just beat a $50,000 contract author in two of the five years of their contract.
Of course, you won’t make that on the first few books and then only if you are doing branded covers and great sales copy. Otherwise those “coffee money” numbers will be very high to you.
How many books would you need to have sold to make the $400. Book priced at $6.99 electronic. 70% so you get $4.90 per book.
$400 divided by $4.90 equals 82 books around the world in all the wide stores.
Trust me, that $50,000 contracted author only sells 82 books, the second and third books are cancelled and they will not sell another book, their career will be over under that name.
So what major advantages do we have as indie publishers???
- 1… Our books never go out of print. Their sales may fade off over time, but we can bring them back and refresh them at any time and start even higher sales.
- 2… As Kris and I are talking about in the 40K Seminar starting in August, indie writers have fifty or maybe even a hundred different ways to increase their income and at the same time boost their sales around the world in the stores. Traditional writers have none of that.
- 3… We can write what we want when we want and as many books and stories we want.
- 4… When a mistake happens in books or covers, we can fix them.
- 5… We have the massive income from licensing our work open to us without any publisher taking most if not all of it.
So this new world of indie publishing has really been going now for just about twenty years. And it is always changing, with new and better ways to do things coming in all the time. Some are better, some are not, and some are dangerous. But for the thousands and thousands of indie writers making far over $100,000 net a year, this is a wonderful new world.
And after living in both worlds now, I think anyone publishing or trying to publish through traditional publishing has lost a bolt.
The old saying in traditional publishing was don’t quit your day job. In indie publishing, if you learn how to do things right, and write for yourself and keep learning, your day job will soon be a thing of the past.
8 Comments
Kristi N.
I had a writer with three books under contract to a small press inform me that unless I had a trad contract in my hot little hand, I had no right to speak about craft or publishing. I blinked, remembered that I usually don’t give advice in groups any more anyways, and withdrew from her FB group. But I found it very…unusual?…that her three books under contract (in 2018) made her more of an authority than those who chose the indie route.
dwsmith
Yup, run away, really fast. Just better to not engage with idiots like that.
Vincent zandri
Yo Dean,
Everytime I read one of these pieces of realism from one who knoweth, it pulls me back down to earth, and makes me remember with the utmost clarity why I establihed my own Bear Media label to publish what I want, and when I want to do it, which is every month. Now I’m serializing in Substack. What a concept.
It also reminds me of the bad marriage I had with trad publishing. For instance, my last three books deal was with a popular medium sized publisher during the pandemic. I noticed I was getting close to earning out the small advance, and when I saw that the price on the eBook had been reduced to 1.49, thus making it near impossible to earn out, I contacted the publisher and went totally ballistic on him while CC’ing my then agent. I didn’t send him a rotten rat or try to choke him out, but Harlan Ellison would have been proud. I demanded my rights back and got them. My agent was so sicked by the whole affair he found himself bed ridden for a week. “How will I ever sell another title to this publisher?” Okay I’m exagerating, but you get the point. Not long after, he retired claiming agenting was a “fools errand ” in the 21st century.
So after 50 trad books published, some selling hundreds of thousands of copies, other tens of thousands, some a few hundred, I’ve pretty much had it with trad altogether. But just recently, agurably one of the top 5 agents in NYC at one of the top five agencies, emaild me and asked if I’d ever consider coming back to the dark side. I suggested I would for a book or two and for the right price. So, I told him I was working on a new stand alone. He asked what my last few books did in terms of sales. “That’s all the publishers look at now,” he said. I said, “a couple thousand copies, maybe.” He said, “Unless your latest books are moving tens of thousands of units, it’s probably not going to work.” What I didn’t tell him is in indie I don’t need to sell near that amount of books to make a good living. We end it all by him saying, “You have an open invitation.”
Okay, so I finish The Woods, my new stand-alone, and I email him, “Let me know if you want to see it.” Crickets. After all that, he chose instead to ghost me. Now, at 62 years old and having been at this for 27 yeas full-time, that is exacltly the kind of bovine scatalogical product I do not need and no longer am I required to eat it.
Vin
dwsmith
Vin,
Thanks for sharing that. Some writers think I am just making up a lot of the bad stuff about traditional, even though both Kris and I went through it and gathered two writers worth of the crap. Agents in book publishing are crooks, in Hollywood they are laughed at.
So thanks for the stories and thank heavens you got your books back.
I suppose some day I should talk about how publishers used “deep discounting” to get books free from authors. Haven’t talked about that because not a writer in the world who was not in traditional publishing would even believe it.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Whenever I read comments like Vincent’s or yours, Dean, I think of that moment at the Global Licensing Fair when I was at a panel on merch which included book deals. The rep for athletes said that New York publishing was “crazy” and didn’t follow standard licensing terms, so if you did a deal with them, you either needed millions up front or you had to spend months of negotiation trying to get them to a standard merch deal. (5 years, with renewal options, payments each year, some up front, and a percentage of sales. The publisher had to list costs up front. If the product doesn’t sell, the license won’t renew.)
I think that was the moment it hit me that we’d been working in Crazy Town for decades and it made me even happier to be indie.
dwsmith
Exactly. Regular licensing deals are just sane and logical compared to the stupidity of traditional publishing contracts.
C.E. Petit
Dean is, if anything, understating the financial problems old-school commercial trade publishing imposes on authors. In no particular order:
• Timing of payments. In the modern third-party distribution systems used by indie writers, the writer gets paid for a sale typically (on average) four weeks after the sale, and not more than 60 days. (Sale on the first of month n, paid in month n+1 is no more than 60 days even if that distributor pays at the end of the following month.) Conversely, in the trade-publishing distribution system, it’s up to 19 months after an actual sale that the money from that sale makes its way to the author’s account, and never less than 10. Royalty periods are six months; accounting thereafter isn’t for at least three months; author payments are typically 4-6 weeks after the accounting (although that has been shortening since legal changes caused by the 2007-09 mortgage crisis); the royalty statements only include actual money in hand to the publisher, so it’s entirely possible that the distributors take advantage of the calendar to increase everybody’s float… except the author’s.
• That’s not the worst of it. The worst of it with the commercial trade-publishing model is the returns system, which can — and does — result in clawbacks from authors’ accounts with rather unpredictable timing. Despite the wording limiting the time for a distributor to return to the publisher for full credit to x months (usually 3, 6, or 24, for historical reasons that make no sense whatsoever), publishers virtually never enforce that because they’re so dependent upon those distributors… except when someone involved is in bankruptcy proceedings (and then the bankruptcy Trustee — who knows nothing about how “publishing works” — gets involved to further confuse matters, and not to authors’ advantage).
If it was closer to Halloween, I might really scare everyone describing how remainders and high-discount clauses work…
• Oh, wait, that’s not the worst of it either. The worst of it is the imputed interest rate on that advance, which makes the internal accounting for “future marketing costs” in Hollywood look benign. The imputed interest is hidden in the royalty escalators; a typical trade contract at 10% for the first few thousand copies, then 12% for the next few thousand copies, and 15% thereafter is making the author pay that “advance” back with a third of the already-subject-to-further-shenanigans revenue (the 5% below the nominal 15% royalty rate for those first few thousand copies), or maybe “only” 20% (the 3% below the nominal 15% royalty rate for the next few thousand copies). Figuring out the “actual” interest rate is not at all easy, and depends on many, many timing factors… but taking an advance against a credit card at today’s rates is almost always cheaper. Too, 15% of that revenue stream is ending up in an agent’s pockets over 90% of the time.
• Last for the moment, the informational delays kill author careers. An indie can tell how successful a work is, and its synergy with other of that author’s works, within three to six months of putting the work on the market. She is getting detailed sales reports, promotional and marketing reports, etc. pretty darned quickly, and directly from the source. That three-book contract has a horizon even for an already-completed manuscript of the first book of not less than eighteen months for reliable information about that first book to be in the author’s hands, and even that has been filtered through various industry smokescreens. (There are exceptions, like certain “current interest” and celebrity-based books, that will be somewhat quicker… meaning there’s only a nine-month lag for the information to make its way to the author.)
This is not at all saying “thou shalt write to market”; it’s recognizing the uncertainty and sometimes paralysis from not knowing whether “the market” likes book X for so long. For people as focused and prolific as Dean and Kris, that may not make much difference… now, anyway (I’d bet things have evolved over their careers, even just over their indie careers!). For authors who are doing something fundamentally unknown to them, it does make a difference. I’ve seen authors give up writing precisely because they weren’t timely getting information back on their earlier efforts, and when they did it was too late to use that information to adjust the next two or three books (or even take a completely different path).
• • •
When I say that the commercial trade publishing industry’s financial model is a century and a quarter old, I’m not at all kidding. The last time they truly changed was in 1937-38, and that was just when — notwithstanding any antitrust scrutiny, which wasn’t forthcoming anyway — the “commercial custom” for how to deal with the then-relatively new returns system became more than custom, instead chiselled in stone on tablets hidden from authors in the first place. Keep in mind, too, that this is just the fossilization of the farthest-back end; the intermediate areas fossilized in different, incompatible ways.
Conclusion: Absent certain other circumstances, a young writer becoming dependent upon commercial trade publishing for all of his/her/their income is making a baaaaaaaaaad financial decision. If those other circumstances apply, they won’t be hanging around here in the first place…
dwsmith
C.E.,
This is wonderful and thank you for spending the time to try to explain some of the most insane and money-killing for authors practices. As I sometimes am, I was trying to be kind and even with that I made it so ugly as to be impossible. And you just piled on, which is wonderful.
Folks, I published 106 books in traditional publishing with maybe over twelve different major publishers (when there still were a bunch) and thirty or more imprints, and everything C.E. said is spot on the money, and maybe even a little nice. Added in could be things like deep discounts and discount schedules and a ton of other things, not the least of which is agents.
Sometimes writers wonder why I am so negative about traditional publishing. Getting a clue?