I had an interesting reply on Reddit a while back from someone who went the publishing route and regretted it.¹
"This is incredible advice. Great write up.
I want to reiterate and add to the first point: signing with the publisher before you have leverage.
I got really “lucky”. I was writing a non-fiction technical book and actually got in a competition between two publishers. I had never written before. Never published. I didn’t know what I was doing. But I knew that most first time authors end up self-publishing out of what I thought was desperation. But here I was sitting between two publishers who were fighting for my book.
I worked them a little against each other. I eventually got royalties up to 17.5% and got triple the advance of the original offer. At the time I thought that I had “made it”. I was guaranteed success. Not only did one publisher want me as a first time author, but two did and they even showed that support by increasing royalties and advances. I told everyone I knew that I was getting published. I figured that as soon as my book officially published that the publisher was going to go out and sell it like crazy. I figured I was the author, my job was to write it and the publishers job was to sell it. Now that I had a publisher, they would go sell it for me. I would be rich, my publisher would be rich. Everyone wins.
Oh how wrong I was.
To this day, I’m honestly not sure what a publisher does. I was harassed on the daily about my progress with the book. Then they needed changes all over the place. The book scope started to shift far away from what I originally intended it to be. The publisher was demanding a different book, claiming market research (which I don’t think was real). The book kept shifting and shifting. At the end, I was so glad to be done. I hated what I had written. It wasn’t the book I wanted. I wasn’t proud of it. But I figured it was my first book. No one loves their first of anything. So I was happy to be done, my first one was behind me. I learned a lot about the process. It was time to reap my reward, let the publisher sell the book, and start making money and work on my next one.
I did a few launch events at the request of my publisher. I organized these entirely. All my publisher did was demand that I figure it out. The publisher never sent a marketing team to sell my book. It was ALL on me. I started getting emails every week from the publisher asking what I was doing to sell the book. They started giving me lists of ideas for how I could go out and sell it. But they never really did anything to promote it themselves. I played along for a while but eventually just got annoyed. I was doing 100% of the work. They emailed it out to their email list a few times. Maybe the occasional mention on their site. But nothing significant.
Now I realize I might sound privileged and stuck up that I was refusing to go sell my book that I had written. Many people on here probably are thinking “well duh”. But here’s the thing, the finances don’t work out for me to grind away to sell my book. For example if I organize an event and sell 20 books, I’m making $60 or so with royalties. (I only get 17.5%). So for that event it might take me 2-3 hours to organize it. Plus a few hours to attend. Plus various other administrative stuff. I’m spending 6-10 hours to make $60. Meanwhile I make the publisher about $500 for all that work that I did by myself. Remember, I’m doing nearly all the work other than printing. So it wasn’t as much that I wasn’t willing to go run an event, it was just that I hated doing an event that made the publisher $500 and made me $60. I spoke at a conference once and sold around 100 copies. It was a “success” but I had to negotiate the speaking gig, plan the speech, go early to the event, wait around all day, spend 40-50 hours practicing, writing, prepping my speech, transport to and from the event. So I spent a whole day at the event and doing the event, plus another 50-60 hours of planning and preparing. Just to make around $300 for myself and my publisher $2,500. I really resented the publisher.
I actually somewhat enjoyed doing the events and selling the book. That’s not what bothered me. It was the amount of work to reward ratio. I also hated knowing how much money I was making the publisher who I felt wasn’t earning that money. If I self-published instead, then I would be keeping closer to the $2,500 for that speaking gig! That would be worth it! I could have done more speaking gigs and reused my speech and scaled it. It would have been worth it. But with my current arrangement of 17.5/82.5% it simply didn’t make financial sense for me.
Like OP said, the publisher needs to be able to make you 7x the sales that you could get yourself by self publishing. In this case I think my sales and the publishers sales were around 50/50.
It got worse as the publisher wanted me to do lots of one on one support with people that had bought the book (it’s a technical book so they essentially want consulting advice). Again, I hate to be rude here. But I’m only making $2-$3 per book sale. I can’t really sit down with every person that buys my book individually for 10 - 30 minutes. It just doesn’t make sense. If I was self-publishing and making $20+ per book then I’d be more willing to consider it. But at $2-3 it’s just a waste of my time.
I started to see that the publisher had a lot to gain here and almost nothing to lose. At first I figured that the advance was their risk. But after doing some math I realized that they earned back their advance on the first day. Remember they keep 82.5% of the sales. They earn back their advance far faster than I work over it.
In the end, I actually was “successful” for a first time book. I broke through my advance and started getting real royalty checks. I wasn’t quitting my day job (which I had btw), but it was nice extra money.
But this goes onto OP’s second point. A book with an expiration date. My nonfiction book was a technical book. It had an expiration date. The technology I was writing about becomes less relevant over time. I got about 1 year of solid royalty checks (after breaking through the advance) before hitting that expiration date. A book without an expiration date would make all that upfront work more worth it because I’d get the payout over the long tail. I will admit though, that even though my book had easily “expired”, I still get royalties on it. I just got a quarterly payment 2 weeks ago for $223.17. So it’s still making me about $1,000 per year. It’s not much, but it’s free money at this point. I’m not doing anything to support it.
The reason I wanted to tell this story is that in the end, as a first time publisher I think you should self publish. I got published and regretted it. It got me stuck in a position where I didn’t even want to sell my book a lot of times. I kept thinking I would write another one that more closely reflects what I wanted to write and then go self publish and sell that book.
I did the math about two years ago on that book after getting one of my quarterly royalty statements. I calculated what I would have earned if I had self-published the book given the numbers on this book from launch to that current date. My jaw dropped. I estimated about 80% margin (the book sells for $30 and costs about $7 to print self published). I would have made a ton of money if I had self published and done all the same work I did with the publisher.
I really recommend self publishing your first book. Publishers really don’t make sense unless your book is going to sell at a scale that you can’t manage yourself. I also highly recommend that anyone who is considering a publisher right now should interview them. Ask the publisher what they can do for you. We often are afraid of publishers because we feel like they hold our destiny. But they don’t. You’re going to make them a lot more money than they will make you. So make them earn it. Ask what they can do to sell more books. They should have a plan."
Notes
¹https://www.reddit.com/r/writers/comments/mkhqwg/714456_in_r...