Who Pays For Publishing Your Book?

I often hear authors interested in self publishing arguing that a big factor is that the fact that they get 100% of the profits. No agent commission. No publisher taking part of the money. It all comes back to the author. While this is sort of correct, I did want to take the time today to discuss a twist to this that is often not brought up.

In the traditional publishing model, authors are often given an advance for their book. This is simply a prediction of how much the publisher thinks the author will make on the book after sales. That is the easy part. Now, the author is not getting 100% of the profits from those sales. The publisher is taking a piece of that pie. But where is that money going?

The publisher is responsible for the legal side of things including ISBN numbers and so forth. The publisher also handles much of the marketing, the printing, the editing, the copy editing, they cover work and so forth. The publisher will also likely be marketing your book to foreign markets, the movie industry and the like. This is built into that contract you sign when you work with that publisher.

If you decide to do this on your own, guess who picks up that tab? That's right! You! When we hear authors talk about taking home all of the profits, this is GROSS PROFITS. What we often do not hear about are the outside expenses that author has to put out there. In many cases, they are paying for a PR person to handle the marketing. They may be hiring outside editors, cover artists and so forth. All of those services are now your responsibility.

I would also add that you now have a time factor to consider. If you do traditional publishing, please understand that you will lose some of your writing time for that marketing you do on your end. You may also have expenses for book marks, and other advertising that you have found to be successful for you. But for those of you doing this on your own, you will likely lose a lot more of that time.

I think it is important to remember that publishing is not an easy gig. There are no free routes and there is nothing glamorous about this. I also wanted to take the time to remind those of you being swayed in the direction of self-publishing to understand that, all that you have heard, my not be the full picture.