8 June 2022 – edited 14 June 2022

This is a long post (2250 words) on how I see the world of indie publishing right now, as I make plans for launching my debut novel on an unsuspecting world. It’s a snapshot – my view has changed since my first venture into publishing in October 2021.

Note: what I write now is from the perspective of someone living and writing in the UK whose first book sold in the UK, US and Canada.

Background

Although indie publishing is now well-established, it is hard to find accurate statistics on what is going on: it all depends who you ask and how they count things. I haven’t found any reliable numbers for average sales volumes or values at the level of the individual author as opposed to the market overall. What will be true – pretty much by definition – is that the Pareto principle (aka the 80:20 rule) applies. In simple terms, 80% of sales and revenue will be by 20% of the writers, or thereabouts, and the remaining 20% of sales will be distributed across 80% of the writers, and not evenly distributed either.

Just as so-called traditional publishing figures are distorted by a small number of high earning writers (strip JK Rowling, Terry Pratchett and a few others out of the figures and see what’s left), so too is indie-publishing. Focusing on the success of the few skews perceptions of what’s really happening for the many in a very crowded market. The estimates that I’ve seen of average sales by indie-authors, once the big sellers are taken out of the calculation, is that the average book sells anywhere between 10 and 500 copies, which is too loose a range to be helpful. As I said, hard and meaningful numbers are hard to come by.

‘Traditional Publishing’

The Author’s Licencing and Collecting Society (‘ALCS’) commissioned research on author earnings and their figures for 2017 suggested that:

seasoned authors who have been writing for at least 20 years typically earn less than £10,500 annually. Notably, the top 10% of authors account for 70% of the total revenue of the industry.

The typical median earnings for ‘all writers’ was £3000. I don’t think ‘all’ there included indie authors.

These, and other contemporary ills in publishing, are not new. Muriel Spark was an editor before she published as a novelist. Several of her characters are editors and/or writers, and she tended to be sceptical about publishing in general. In A Far Cry From Kensington (1988), Nancy Hawkins, editor in a small publishing house and aspirant novelist, advises a writer, Hector Bartlett, that he is a pisseur de copie. Unfortunately, Hector has a patron in the form of a successful romance novelist who is the publisher’s best-selling author …

It has, it seems, got worse since then; as my late editor friend Linden Stafford wrote to me:

Meanwhile the pisseurs de copie flourish so long as their copie sells, and the gifted writers don’t progress. Unfortunately the general public tend to assume that writers who find it hard to get published are talentless hacks. Muriel Spark’s experience as an editor would not have prepared her for today’s world of books.

‘Independent Publishing’

The reality for the majority, according to some old-ish SFWA estimates, is that a book might sell 250 copies over an extended period, but the average is fewer than 200. Yes, of course some writers do very well and there are breakout stars, but I’m talking about the whole market.

The worlds of ‘trad’ and ‘indie’ differ, but in both of them sales by volume and value are not directly related to quality: many acclaimed and well-regarded writers have other jobs or sources of income to make ends meet while pisseurs de copie sell by the warehouse full.

***

My Experience with Coyote in the Corner.

I chose to publish Coyote in the Corner exclusively through Amazon using one of their assigned (free) ISBN numbers. If I could do one single thing differently, I would have used my own ISBN rather than Amazon’s. I could still buy and assign my own ISBN to it, but that would effectively be to republish the book, which would risk losing my mostly 5* Amazon reviews. In short, using their ISBN then hobbled my options for the book now and in the future.

When I did it, it was a pragmatic following of the line of least resistance. I expected that the majority of my sales of Coyote would be eBooks in the US and it made sense to exploit Amazon’s international reach, ease of use, and the long-tail effects of their print-on-demand (‘POD’) offering. And it cost me nothing to upload Coyote to Amazon and press the ‘publish’ button. None of those things required me to use their ISBN. Unexpectedly, the majority of my sales to date have been paperbacks in the UK.

Changed Approach for The Raven and the Hart.

For The Raven and the Hart, I want to publish as widely as possible to maximise opportunities to sell, which means using my own ISBNs for paperback, eBook and hardback editions. At the same time, I want to keep my upfront costs down, and that’s where it gets tricky.

eBooks

eBooks are relatively straightforward: I want to get them on as many platforms as I can in addition to Amazon – the major ones are Kobo, Scribd, Apple Books and Google Books. Why? Because I’ll be on lots of platforms, because my direct costs of publishing will be zero, and because I will reach people who use something other than Amazon.

Physical Books

It gets complicated if you want to go beyond having a stock of author copies on hand and want to get your books into high street shops (and libraries). The primary – linked – complications are the economics and structure of the market.

The bookselling industry here in the UK has made substantial steps towards working with indie authors and publishers, and there are some good packages out there. But those packages make some tacit assumptions.

The SFWA survey I mentioned earlier noted that, at the time, shops expected at least a 40% discount on the RRP, 60-90 day billing and full returnability of unsold stock. One of the big current players in the distribution of POD physical books, especially in the US, is IngramSpark (‘IS’). The IS model encourages the author to offer the US standard 55% discount on the RRP with full returnability. In the UK, distributing through Gardners to, say, Waterstones, the expected discount is no less than 40%. The discounts are in addition to the author paying printing costs and, usually, paying for carriage to the bookseller, as well as accepting the risk of unsold returns.

Those expectations are based on how publishing has traditionally worked. The tacit assumption is that the size of the print run will mean the average/marginal cost of physical production of copies of a book is low, creating headroom for the publisher and author to take their share. But costs of production look rather different from the perspective of the indie author, bearing in mind that SFWA suggestion that you’ll be doing well to sell 200-250 copies of a book.

So let’s look at the outlay for having some books printed.

I asked 4 UK printers for quotes for short-run copies of The Raven and the Hart. This wasn’t an academic exercise – I really did want to find an affordable printer for short runs. One of the printers didn’t bother to acknowledge or reply to my query; another told me that they print but don’t bind books and so can’t offer short runs at economical prices. I compared the replies from the other two printers with the major POD companies (one printer only quoted for 50 copies, their minimum order, acknowledging verbally that it’s expensive until economies of scale kick in and the mode switches from digital to litho printing.)

My benchmark cost/price was Amazon. An author can buy their own books at cost from Amazon to use however they want – typically promotion or in person sales. For a 100,000-word book (say 380 pages or thereby in B format (5”x8” or 127×203.2mm)) the cost per copy is around £4.50. Amazon will charge me that unit price whether I order 1 copy or 999 copies.

		1	50	100	200	500
Amazon	Total	£4.50	£225.00	£450.00	£900.00	£2,250.00
	Unit	£4.50	£4.50	£4.50	£4.50	£4.50
IngramSpark	Total	£5.00	£250.00	£496.00	£992.00	£2,430.00
	Unit	£5.00	£5.00	£4.95	£4.95	£4.85
Printer A	Total	–	£420.00	–	–	–
	Unit		£8.40
Printer B	Total	–	–	£495.00	£750.00	£1,500.00
	Unit			£4.95	£3.75	£3.00
Printer C	Couldn’t fulfil.
Printer D	Did not respond.
D2D	Author copies not available in UK.

(NOTE: the figures in the table are rounded and I’ve excluded p&p charges – they are illustrative only. The quotes were received June 2022)

This is obviously a crude survey, but it is clear that Amazon is the cheapest place for me to get physical stock of my book up to around 100 copies; from 200 copies onwards, Printer B is cheapest.

But there is an obvious risk to buying 100 or more copies (usually by up-front payment not on credit), assuming that I have the cash in hand to pay for them. If I want to keep physical stock, then the obvious approach is to buy small numbers of author copies from Amazon. Unfortunately most high street stores prefer not to stock something that has ‘printed by Amazon’ on the back page. Some indie bookshops point-blank refuse to have anything to do with Amazon. That creates a dilemma.

All in all, there are rational grounds to abandon the idea of having my books available anywhere other than online markets. But I’m old-fashioned and I like bookshops and libraries, so I’m not quite ready to abandon the idea yet.

Some companies have stepped in to address the dilemma through POD: IS is one; Draft2Digital is another. I’ve looked at both of their offerings.

IngramSpark has been subject to some social media criticism of late – though a friend is happy to recommend them from his experience of publishing non-fiction titles. The three problems I see with using IS are: file types (I have professionally created files for both content and the cover that I can upload for free to Amazon, Kobo and Draft2Digital and other companies but not to IS); the fact that their default model is to charge for uploads; and the way that their cost/pricing structure is stacked against micro-indies who are new to the market.

Draft2Digital is much more attractive – they don’t charge to upload, I can use the same files I use for Amazon, and they tend to provide a better royalty rate, even for POD physical books ordered through a bookshop. And they distribute to libraries.

Note: even though the D2D royalty rate for POD is better than IS, it applies a 55% trade discount in its calculations and it isn’t as good as Amazon. In my case, I couldn’t keep my cover prices uber-competitive because, in the UK market, I’d have to set my price above the market average to make any return via D2D at all. That might be worth it were I to treat Amazon as my primary marketplace and anything else as ‘nice to have.’

[Added 14 June 2022: However, at the moment, the way D2D interact with Amazon means that I would need to use two ISBNs – one for Amazon POD and one for everything else. That’s crazy, and defeats the purpose of having an ISBN as the single international identifier. Ah-ha, you say, why not just use D2D for all physical copies since they sell via Amazon? Because, at the time of writing, D2D don’t supply author copies outside of the US and Canada, so I couldn’t have physical stock of my own book. This might change, but right now it’s a deal-breaker. On the plus side, I can bring my paperback down to a more competitive price point in all markets.]

Remember: any royalty for me is NOT profit – I want to put out professional-standard product and therefore have my costs of production to cover (for example editing, typesetting and cover design). My royalties from Coyote haven’t yet recovered the cost of a pro photoshoot for headshots. The cumulative sum of small margins is OK with high volumes, but I don’t expect high volumes.

So where is all of this leading me?

Money talks. As much as I’d like to fantasise about commercial and critical success, the likelihood is that sales will be ‘modest’ unless I manage to source that under-rated ingredient, luck. My approach will be to de-risk my options – Amazon, Kobo and Draft2Digital for eBooks (D2D distribute to, eg, Scribd, Google and Apple), and Amazon  for POD physical in hard and paperback.

The Raven and the Hart will also be registered with Gardner so that, in principle, shops will be able to order directly from me. I doubt that’s going to be a worry though. I continue to look at options for short-run printing, but volume is the key to that, and I can’t rely on the hope of volume.

Finally, I’ll have some Amazon-printed physical copies on hand for direct sales, and I will add a hardback on Amazon because you never know.

***

There’s a lot in the above, and you might have read this far and think that I’m despondent, but I’m not. For all that sales of Coyote have been modest, so far, it has sold – and sold beyond family and friends – and continues to sell, most recently this past week. That’s despite Coyote being a collection of short stories, which are generally less commercially popular than novels. Also, like all of my writing, it’s cross-genre, which is definitely not helpful when so much of book marketing and sales is based around increasingly baroque hierarchies of genre.

And readers seem to like my stuff – none of the 5* Amazon reviews of Coyote were co-ordinated, procured or shepherded in advance: they’re all from real readers who bought the book with their own money.

I said I can’t rely on hopes of volume, but I can hope that people discover what I write and look for more of it. And I can take what steps I can think of to try and make the conditions for discovery to happen – doing the work needed to get lucky – then do the same when my next novel is released in, probably, early 2023.

It’s a long game.

What do you think? Am I over-thinking it? Have I missed something? Let me know. Comments are open below but moderated at first (because even though Akismet does a good job, I still have to delete the pornbots).