Saturday, April 23, 2011

I'd rather be read than rich!

When Amazon's top sellers are the cheapest e-books even the main-stream publishers are taking notes.

Consider that with Amazon if you sell an e-book through them at $2.99 you get $2.00

At $0.99 you get 35 cents.

If a top seller sells 75,000 copies a month at $2.99 and 3780,000 copies at $0.99 he makes a comparable income of over $128,000 a month (less tax) the key difference is that at $2.99 he makes that by only selling 75,000 copies, and at $0.99 he sells over 370,000

All writers will tell you they would rather have readers than income. Most of my published work never earns me a dime - but a recent check on BrokenSea's Doctor Who series download stats shows we have over 2000 downloads a week. Not bad for minimal promotion on our part.

My self-published books this year are going to be sold for $0.99 cents. That's a couple years worth of work for each of them and I value it at a lot more - but I have a job. I don't need to sell books to eat or pay rent.

I'd rather be read than rich!








4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't think you really did your math on this one. More copies at less money actually accumulates to more money.

$.35 x 3,789,000 = $1,326,150
$2 x 75,000 = $150,000

So actually, you can have both rather than just one. If more copies are being sold at a lower rate then this author is still making more money by selling at the smaller amount.

Personally, I'd rather be read and rich ;P

Unknown said...

No my math is fine. I said "over $128,000" and it's only three hundred and seventy thousand copies, not 3 million copies.

Not sure of any one who is selling over 3,000,000 copies of anything in a month at the moment.

But yes, you do make more money at the higher price. The key message is that you make a comparable amount of money ($128K+ compared to $150K+) but you sell a lot more books at the lower price.

Lynne Jamneck said...

Wow, that's an eye-opener. Periphery just got picked up by Untreed Reads :)

Dale T. Phillips said...

Paul, I see from your comments on Konrath's site that you're not happy with the poor quality (and poor copyediting) of a lot of what you read. I'm with you on that. I've taken years to get published, and finally went with a small startup publisher, because I knew I had a good product, but wasn't getting anywhere with "Big Pub."
If you enjoy mysteries (you're on Konrath's blog, after all) I invite you to listen (no signup required) to chapter 1 of my new novel on my website. Then check out more of it for free on Amazon or Smashwords. The book went through extensive, tough editing, and I believe it's better for it. And let me know how you feel: www.daletphillips.com