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Comment by jakewolf | Hacker News Reader

With a traditional publisher you usually get a royalty of about 10-15% versus 4-6 times that with print on demand. Announce publication on YC and let bloggers promote with amazon affiliate links. Everyone wins but Barnes and Noble.

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With a traditional publisher and a good book, you can easily get more than 4-6 times the sales. Sorry, gatekeepers can still be pretty effective, even in this day and age.

Question: if a publisher pays the author 4-6x the revenues brought in for the book, wouldn't that mean that on any 'good' books, they're losing money to publish them? Or am I missing something?

I just had to set the price of my own book, so I quickly learned where all the money goes. If the MSRP is $25.95, as mine is, then distributors who sell the book to bookstores or sites will require a 55% discount right away. That means that per copy, the publisher receives 45%, or $11.68. Of that 45%, a publisher might typically pay the author 10%, or $1.17 per copy. The printing costs are probably in the $3.50 (China) to $6.50 (United States) range, so the publisher stands to profit anywhere in the $7.01 (China) to $4.01 (United States) range.

When you print on demand, your printing costs are twice as high per copy, but since there's no middleman, you make more as an author. Of course, it's impossible to distribute, so it doesn't really matter. It's only a good option if you really only intend to sell a few copies to friends and family.

A decent book contract is more on the order of 10% of list price, with increases at certain volume levels.

This is 100% correct. My book sold over 100k copies the traditional route, there's no way it would have sold more than a few k with my pushing it myself, even though I had a widely read blog in the niche.

It's just like the equity equation. Also, being published once makes it easier in the future should you desire to go that route, while self publishing does not.

The way I see it, a writer self-publishing is like a hacker building his own servers and running them from his basement.

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