7 ms·
One thing to consider is royalty rate. If you sell 5000 copies for $20 and earn a dollar per copy, you've earned $5,000. (This math is based on 10% royalties on
by peterarmstrong 5y ago
One thing to consider is royalty rate. If you sell 5000 copies for $20 and earn a dollar per copy, you've earned $5,000. (This math is based on 10% royalties on the publisher's portion, which is about half of retail. And no, fiction books don't sell for $20 typically, but I'm using this number to make the math easy.)
Now, if you sell 5000 copies of an ebook for $20 and earn 80% royalties, you earn $16 per copy, and earn $80,000. This is the royalty rate on Leanpub (disclosure: cofounder), but with Gumroad or blog + Stripe approaches you'd earn an even better percentage (if you want to run your own store).
For fiction, however, the dream combination is probably publishing in-progress with subscriptions. Currently it seems that Substack is the best for that. If you can get a few thousand people to subscribe for a few bucks a month, you could do well. The people at the top are doing really, really well: https://stratechery.com/2021/sovereign-writers-and-substack/ https://stratechery.com/2021/sovereign-writers-and-substack/
- mritchie712 5y agoThis is self promotion done well. Provide insight into the problem you solve and explain where you fit into this story. Nice job.
- peterarmstrong 5y agoThanks :) Ironically, I've been talking about the relationship between lean publishing and serial fiction for a long time (for example, this video from a conference talk I did in 2013 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozO0kOnqmyA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozO0kOnqmyA), but Leanpub has never hit anything close to product-market fit for fiction. We do well in our niche of computer programming / data science / business types of books, but we have essentially no traction in fiction for a number of reasons. If an author was going to use Leanpub for fiction, the right thing to do would be to use our toolchain to generate the ebook and print-ready PDF, but then to also publish it on Amazon KDP and Wattpad for the exposure. For example, my teenage son did this with his debut sci-fi novel: he wrote it in Word (since he didn't want to write in Markdown, despite my best efforts to convince him that Markdown was superior), did a git push to his book repo on GitHub, generated the ebook on Leanpub (our Word support is an unofficial hidden feature; we just use pandoc to turn the .docx into Markdown first), and then uploaded it to Amazon. Ironically, the worst thing about this whole process was at the end: he also had to copy and paste the chapters into Wattpad when he did an update, and Wattpad wants small chapters for page views, so the copying and pasting was a very slow manual process...
- mritchie712 5y agoMy wife has toyed with the idea of writing romance novels. Do you have many romance writers on Leanpub? Her thinking is to keep the "trashiness" of most romance but improve on the story and writing. She keeps saying "I need a publisher", but I was thinking there must be a simple way to publish straight to Amazon, looks like that's Leanpub!
- cultofmetatron 5y agoyou can publish directly. no need for leanpub. https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/ https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/
- peterarmstrong 5y agoAgreed! We don't do anything to help with that part of the process: you need to use that page either way :)
- watwut 5y agoSelf publishing is easy. Finding audience is hard.
- peterarmstrong 5y agoRegardless of what type of book your wife is writing, if she uses Leanpub she needs to do the upload to KDP herself: Leanpub doesn't currently do anything here. There are other companies like BookBaby which do the "publish to Amazon for you" type of thing; Leanpub currently does not do that. We are just a toolchain to make ebooks plus an optional storefront to sell them. You can sell the ebooks you produce using Leanpub on any storefront such as KDP; you own your work. We do not have many romance writers on Leanpub, and a simple look at our homepage will explain why: our storefront looks like a place for computer programming books, not romance novels. Also, most romance novels are written in Word, not Markdown, and our Word support is a hidden feature, kind of like the secret menu at In-N-Out burger. The way our Word support works is that you write in a Dropbox folder (or using GitHub or Bitbucket), and you make your Book.txt file list one or more Word files (instead of Markdown files) as the manuscript content. Then when you click the button to preview or publish the ebook, we generate the PDF, EPUB and MOBI based on those Word files, and you can do whatever you want with them. It's actually pretty smooth once you set it up, but it sounds really complicated, and we don't market it at all: hence another reason we don't have many romance writers on Leanpub! Anyway, if that sounds like a useful thing then we may be worth a shot. Leanpub book landing pages look nice and professional, but in terms of attracting an audience of readers for a romance novel, we are not going to be much help. This is why places like Wattpad do well in this regard. (Leanpub does help attract an audience for our computer programming books and similar types of books, of course, primarily through our weekly and monthly sale newsletters.) Frankly, my recommendation for any aspiring first-time novelist with a small social media following would be to publish in-progress on Wattpad first to see if they get traction, and then to consider Substack and Amazon KDP for places to monetize if they do. Then once they've gotten to that point, if they're looking for tools to produce a nice ebook to sell on KDP, Leanpub is one of the options they can use as a toolchain. (On the other hand, if they have a reasonable social media following, they could skip Wattpad and go directly to Substack, KDP or even Leanpub and point their followers at the appropriate landing page for their book...)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kbenson 5y ago> For fiction, however, the dream combination is probably publishing in-progress with subscriptions. Currently it seems that Substack is the best for that. Depending on audience and how you advertise to them, I've seen people be really successful on Patreon. I outlined some of that in a different comment here earlier, but $15k+ a month (from Patreon alone, not including other publishing that you can also do) is achievable and I've seen it more than once on somewhat esoteric genre fiction at Patreon.
- swyx 5y agototally. I basically do blog + stripe, selling 1.5k copies with an ASP of $90, and I keep 97% of it. it was a pretty productive use of 2 months (altho i do spend about 2-3 hours a week continuing to market it and to serve the book community) would have loved to use leanpub but it had issues, as already reported to leanpub support :)
- yesenadam 5y ago> but it had issues What were they? (Particularly if they're still issues)
- peterarmstrong 5y agoWe treat all author support issues to hello@leanpub.com as confidential, of course. For author support issues which are fine to discuss in public, you can see our author forum at https://community.leanpub.com/c/authors https://community.leanpub.com/c/authors ... If you look there, you can see a representative sample of the issues people have had recently. (I don't want to turn this HN thread into a Leanpub author support forum thread, of course! However, our authors typically seem pretty happy with our service...)
- swyx 5y agoi dont wanna air their dirty laundry but go try them out and if you like them then great. they certainly seem to work for most people. they struggled greatly with my 500 page book and after about 6 hours of wrestling with it i just gave up.
- u678u 5y agoThis model assumes the publisher does nothing. At least if you buy a OReilly or Wiley book you know it will be a decent standard. Many ebooks are junk and its not always obvious which ones.
- sdgasg 5y agoYup, having been burnt by a few bad e-book purchases (both, fiction and non-fiction), now I stick with big name publishers. Unless books are recommended by trusted Twitter or hn accounts.
- benibela 5y agoAnd advertising is a big expense (when you cannot post it on HN) Afair I read a post about self-published fantasy authors, and the only author who earned over 100k, also paid like 50k for ads
- markwisde 5y agoIndeed. Royalties are the issue. I just published a book with a well-known editor and I’m making 10% per copy (ebook or print). The book is priced at more than 50$ and yet I’ll only make this amount by selling 10 copies (of course this is before tax). Interestingly, if your editor has an affiliate program you can make as much money by advertising some link that leads to purchases. So as a writer, if you do both you end up getting 20% on these. It’s still not that much. Recently, I wrote a small handbook about security and the mindset you need to care about security in your company (https://www.securityhandbook.io https://www.securityhandbook.io) and I self published it for 20$ using stripe checkout. Every purchase yields me a bit more than 19$, which feels amazing every time as I directly get the money. I actually made more money selling this self published book than with my big editing company.
- la_fayette 5y agoOk cool, congratulations to the security handbook! I have checked prices for printing books, because I am in the process of writing a regional mountain bike guide book. Although, I only find deals for 3-5$ per book... 1$ seems quite cheap to me.
- panopticon 5y agoIt's hard to tell based on the material available on the website, but it looks like their book isn't physical. If you go through the checkout process, it doesn't gather shipping information. I assume the <$1 figure was just the Stripe transaction costs.
- markwisde 5y agoYes indeed! It is an ebook. I should probably write that in the landing page :)
- dorchadas 5y agoCan I ask how you went about self-publishing and selling via a website? I'm considering this with a couple of short guidebooks I've written for learning a specific language, among other things, and am very curious how you got started and set it up with Stripe checkout and manage delivery, etc.
- cmsefton 5y ago> For fiction, however, the dream combination is probably publishing in-progress with subscriptions As someone who likes to write fiction myself, the idea of publishing in-progress feels incredibly alien. Typically, if I finish writing something, it's a first draft that I would revisit a few months later and rework. How are authors handling this aspect of wanting to re-edit if they're publishing chapters on the go? I seem to recall Stephen King describing locking his manuscripts away for six months before revisiting them. The in-progress model seems to work against this type of workflow, or are there ways of dealing with that?
- inglor_cz 5y agoThis was incredibly common back in the early 1900s. Whole books were at first published in one-page installations in newspapers. Including the most famous Czech novel, Good soldier Švejk. Prior to the advent of radio and TV, this was the best way how to hit a huge audience at once. And for the newspaper, it was a way to entice people to buy the next issue.
- Joker_vD 5y agoThat was also common in the XIX century as well: that's how Alexander Dumas and Charles Dickens were published.
- webmaven 5y ago> That was also common in the XIX century as well: that's how Alexander Dumas and Charles Dickens were published. It wasn't exactly uncommon in the early XX either, during the "Golden Age" of SFF: https://www.andrewliptak.com/blog/2015/01/22/the-history-of-serialized-sf-gets-a-new-chapter https://www.andrewliptak.com/blog/2015/01/22/the-history-of-...
- cmsefton 5y agoRight, so it's basically serialisation. Interesting, I always saw serialisation as releasing an already finished novel bit by bit, but just reading about the history of serialisation, it seems that was not always the case. Thanks for giving me the pointer.
- d0100 5y ago> the dream combination is probably publishing in-progress with subscriptions If you are into Chinese webnovels you'll be familiar with the subscription predatory practices that big companies like Qidian have, where the real cost of a whole 1500-chapter novel (inflated because of the perverse incentives of subscription-based revenue) ends up being close to 500USD It is sad watching the transition from fan translations' funding trough donation pooling into predatory big-novel subscriptons/per chapter "tokens"
- Dylan16807 5y agoWhat's that in word count, and how often are the chapters coming out?
- tumbleweedwords 5y agohttps://tumbleweedwords.substack.com/ https://tumbleweedwords.substack.com/