Cost/Benefit

I recently went to a meeting of local sci-fi/fantasy writers. All more or less amateurs. It was a meet-up of people who like writing, some who want to eventually get published, some who just do it for fun. It was a lot of fun and I met some really nice people there.

One individual was a guy who has recently self-published his novel and has moderate success. I define moderate success as more than a few books a day on average. So he’s not rolling in the profits, but it’s not languishing in oblivion. I asked him about his experience with self-publication and he informed me about a publishing house he formed.

The idea behind his company is that new authors sign up with him and he takes care of the details: formatting the book for E-book and Print-on-Demand, registering it with all the different distributors (Amazon, BN, iBooks, etc), some advertising (limited currently, but any exposure is good exposure when you’re an unknown). I also got hooked up with one lady who is offering editing services as a contractor with him. Essentially, in exchange for 20% of the sales, I would just need to hand over my finished novel, and everything else would be taken care of.

I liked a lot of what he is offering here. But I am also very nervous about it. So I thought I’d run through the pros and cons, to help myself understand them, and to give the random internet a chance to point out anything I missed.

Pros

• Lot of the details taken care of. I write, he takes care of the rest.
• Becoming involved with a new company early. If any of the authors takes off, being associated with them helps all the others.
• Not being in it alone. Writing and self-publishing is a very lonely business. Being involved with some others who are trying the same thing is nice to have.
• Any advertising is useful when no one knows who I am. Getting involved in the networks he has, and the other authors have, is valuable.
• Working with the editor will be extremely helpful in turning the book from amateurish to semi-professional.

Cons

• 15% to him and 5% to the editor of the books sale price. If I take an optimistic sales rate of 1000 books a year for 5 years at $4 a book (very optimistic), that is $4,000. I would make, after everything’s taken out, $10,000 (the remaining $6,000 goes to the distributor and there’s no getting around that). That ends up being 40% of what I made.
• If I were to decide to leave, the company would own the cover-art and ISBN. So I would have to relist the book and lose all of the reviews and sales history that it had earned.
• The audience the company can currently reach with advertising is small. Early on it will still be mostly random people on Amazon, and people I can convince to purchase the book.
• There is a lot of trust involved here. Sure, there will be contracts and I’ll still own all the rights to the book (except the first print and electronic rights). But this is a one man operation that is a start-up. The modern age has taught me to be wary of such things.
• Formatting and dealing with book registration with the various distributors, while it may be annoying,  it’s something I am capable of doing on my own.

In the end, 15% buys me into a network, that is currently small, but might grow. This has the potential to expand the potential readers for my book. But if goes no where, I could just be conceding some rights and profits for the convenience of someone else formatting and registering my book.

What do you think Internet?

(Note: I’ve intentionally not linked to this guys website. Irregardless of my decision, I support the idea, and since this is a post exploring the good and bad, and I haven’t made up my own mind, I don’t want to give him bad press)