According to Amazon, the battle over e-book prices is really a war against the unfair profits of big publishing houses, which are ripping off both writers and the reading public by claiming a disproportionate share of the proceeds. E-books, unlike physical books, have no printing costs, no transport, no warehousing, no pulping: yet publishers still earn around 50% of their retail price – with around a third going to Amazon and 20% to the author – a higher percentage than writers are likely to get from hardback and paperback sales. No wonder the life of a writer is so unremunerative, except for the tiny few.
So, rather than signing binding, long-term deals with publishers. about a quarter of all writers are self-publishing and are typically making a 40% return on their investment out-earning their equivalents who rely on the big publishing houses.
This reminds me of the cry of the solo business consultant: “If you are selling it you can’t be doing it, and if you are doing it you can be selling it”. Forty per cent of nothing is precisely nothing. Selling your book is both extraordinarily hard work and very time consuming. The first (self-published) book I wrote with my wife sold a respectable number. We did it for fun, and just as well, because if we had costed out the hours spent handling sales etc., the 40% return on investment figure would have been a huge joke. Our second book had a modest print run and we gave them away. It was cheaper that way!
The universal 80/20 principle rules in book publishing as it does to most other areas of commercial life. That is, 80% of the profits go to 20% of the writers, and this applies to publishers, oil companies and ice cream makers as well. Unless you are confident that you will be among the 20% you can look forward to just getting by. You also have to cope with the fact that the big companies in our capitalist world have a natural tendency to delight in monopolization, and will spend lavishly to be able to have a rich and easy life once they have achieved it. But this is a world a million miles away from that of the writer, who has never in the history of printing , been so poorly rewarded for years of hard work.