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.