I keep seeing lots of articles comparing the royalties earned from Traditional Published (TP) deals versus Selt Published(SP) works.

One argument that always comes up is the advance earned when signing a Traditional Publisher, but very few such articles take the time to explore this aspect of the equation.

Because I’m feeling physically down and having trouble wrapping my head around the edits I should be doing, I opened my spreadsheet instead.

I used this article from The Passive Voice as my starting place.

Say the writer in question receives a $5000 advance and $1.49 a book for a TP and $6.99 SP.

Under TP this author sees no royalties until the advance has been paid out. Meaning 3356 books must be sold before they see any new money. (Please note I’m rounding all calculation up for simplicities sake.)

Under SP this author must sell 716 books before they’ve made the same money as the advance. Should this author ever sell 3356 books, they will have made $23456.

Remember also that advances do not get paid out all at once. They could be dolled out in 2, 3, or 4 payments between the moment of signing and the book hits the shelf. (1,2, or 3 years?)

Some people do point out that stores like Amazon take a distribution fee from the author’s royalty. The actual amount being dependent on how many megabytes the book takes up. Other online bookstores may have similar charges.

So let’s say the say author looses $.30 a book to distribution for a net of 6.69. Now this author has to sell 748 books to match the TP advance and will only make 22450 when they match the 3356 book mark.

What if the SP author shells out $2500 for editing and a cover? This new $7500 break even point (versus the TP advance) now requires 1073 sales and will reduced the 3356 book match point to $19950.

Someone is bound the mention the whole arena of marketing. In theory, the big TP house does have an equally big marketing machine to help boost your numbers. If the word I see on social media is even somewhat accurate, the kind of author who receives a $5000 advance is going to get little or no help from the marketing machine.

I’ll take that a step further. When researching potential TP houses for my own WiP ALL of them have made it clear they expect me to have a pre-existing on-line presence and some idea of what MY marketing plan will be. Everything I’ve read on the subject suggest the author who comes home with a whopping $45000 advance will only see a marginal increase in marketing clout come their way. That kind of support appears to be reserved for the BIG (6-7 digit advance) players.

I’ll be the first to admit this is a rough overview that fails to take into account innumerable nuances that can affect the numbers I’ve used. I also don’t address the question of how long each book is kept available for sale, if ever for those who never win the TP lottery and make it to the acceptance phase.

Okay, I also gloss over the SP quality question except in the mention of paying out significant money for editing and cover.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought about the most authors earn less than 1000 a year survey from DBW and have decided there is still room for a rant.

Though this survey does break out aspiring authors from the published ones, the data people like me have access to doesn’t answer the big question. Of the aspiring authors, how many plan to self-publish and how many are waiting for a publishing house to offer up a contract? I know, these numbers will be skewed further by those who will decide to FP if they can’t get a contract.

Point is, the low threshold to SP means lots of people who aren’t ready are calling themselves published while on the House side lots of people who are ready must report themselves as aspiring. Until this gap can be bridged, all these surveys are guilty of comparing apples to oranges.

I do have one other question nobody seems to be addressing. Are to people responding to these surveys answering in gross or net earnings? For that matter, are the House respondents using the actual amount they received this year or the total advance amount given in the contract regardless of when it will be received?

Now to find out how those percentages of people who earn $20,000 a year or more compare in terms of real fingers to the keyboard authors.

A recent article over at Dear author got me thinking about my book buying habits.

Unlike the author of this article, I keep a virtual TBR pile and only purchase the next book when I get close to the end of the one I’m currently (unless they have already been gifted to me in the interim). To put that another way, I do not purchase a new book until I know it is time. As such, I cannot remember a time when I ever felt burnt because the price of my new book changed a few days later. I bought at a price I considered fair at the time of purchase and really don’t care what the author or seller decided to do with the pricing now that I own a copy.

To make matters worse, unless we’re talking about a Specialty or Hard Cover version, even full price House Published books are generally a deal for what I get out of them. While the kind of price differentials referenced in the Dear Author article would have felt nice to my pocket book, they are well within the range of my personal discretionary spending allowance and could just as easily have disappeared into an unplanned Hot Chocolate. What it won’t do is make me sweat over any perceived I’ve Been Cheated moments.

Okay, I have been known the break down and buy a book early because I did find it on sale, but I have never held off buyiing a book because it might come on sale later.

So there you have it, my very different view of Promotional Pricing policies.