Status Report: Paperback Fuckery

Jul. 26th, 2025 07:13 pm
renegadefolkhero: (Default)
[personal profile] renegadefolkhero

This is gonna be a quick one. I'm doing the math on print-on-demand paperbacks and this is so dumb.

It costs about $5.50 to print a 300-page paperback. That's not the dumb part, that's great. Technology is wonderful.

Here's what's dumb. I've got a few distributors that take IDK 45-50% royalties on print. Here's how that calculation goes: the distributor takes their cut off the retail price, subtracts the print costs, and the author gets the remainder. So assuming I didn't screw something up somewhere...

Selling through D2D:

  • If I price that paperback at $12.50 I make 15 cents in royalties.
  • If I price it at $19.99, I get $3.48 in royalties (roughly what I'd make on a $5 ebook).

According to the Amazon calculator, I'd get (I think?) $1.70 in royalties for a $12.50 book they print.

Selling direct from my own website:

  • If I price that paperback at $12.50 I make $6.86 in royalties after printing costs and payment processing fees
  • If I price that paperback at $19.00 I make $11.66

I haven't even looked at Ingram Spark yet. asdklfja;sdklfj I'm hoping I'm fundamentally misunderstanding something here.

Status Report: The Struggle is Real

Jul. 20th, 2025 07:28 am
renegadefolkhero: (Default)
[personal profile] renegadefolkhero

Struggling a bit here. My current book is at about 60k and I'm projecting 100k, and "Why Am I Doing This?" keeps rattling through my brain.

One of my colleagues recently made $10,000 on their first novel the first month. Friendly reminder I recently had my best launch month, which was $250. This writer is three decades my junior, and very new to writing comparatively. They made more in one day than I made in a month. They made more in one month than I did in 3 years.

ExpandRead more... )

Anyway, all this to say, this is awesome, and this author is a very kind, hard-working person, but fml. Royalties are reflective of readership, so even if you ostensibly don't care about the money, you actually do care because that's the primary metric by which we gauge interest and engagement with the work.

As a matter of self-preservation, I've recently adopted the attitude "my books don't sell and that's okay," as way to sorta push through my doubts and keep publishing. But the truth is... that's not a very good strategy. Because you need a carrot and a goal. "I write because that's what I do" is neither. So I'm gonna sit down and revisit my goals and think about being a bit more brave in terms of my ambitions and defining my own success.

Status Report: Best Launch Ever

Jul. 13th, 2025 09:54 am
renegadefolkhero: (Default)
[personal profile] renegadefolkhero

I'm so annoyed lol.

Expandyeet report )

So I'm annoyed on two fronts. First is I don't know why it sold better. Second, this seems to confirm allllll that launch work and $$$ I spent before amounted to jack squat.

The conventional wisdom is that novels sell better, and longer novels sell better than shorter ones (understanding the people saying this are often in KU, which rewards length). Erom is not a conventional genre, and I traditionally write a pretty tight book, but I think I might loosen up a bit for the next one, aim for higher WC, and be less ruthless with my edits.

I have a hard time NOT editing the bejesus out of a book, even when it's a "this won't sell" weird-ass erom. I would like to get more comfortable with less work for these types of books. Final edits are by far the most tedious part of the process for me, and if I could cut that out and just write, have a good time, and yeet, that would be swell.

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