Bizarre story of an author spending over $34k on self-publishing just one book

[LilyBLily]

My favorite: Spent $11,738 on editing

If you go to YouTube, read the comments, too. There's a whole other world out there that is convinced self-publishing must be expensive.

[TimothyEllis]

Hooley Dooley!

The eBook is doing about as well as my current one is. The paperback is doing better. But the category ranks on both are pretty crap.

But on those ranks 4 days after release, I seriously doubt she'll get her money back. And the people doing royalty share will get nothing.

That's insane!

Someone has put her in touch with Trad editors and people, and she ate it up that was what it cost.

The advertising budget must be working though to some extent.

I put a comment on there, so might be interesting what I get back on that. Probably a lot of hate. I mentioned the forum.

[hjmoritzo]

Totally agree this is crazy but it looks more like this is a way to sucker people in.
As an 'expert' it seems people are falling over her to show them the way. I'm guessing 'the way' involves introducing them to other 'professionals' who will tell them how best to spend their money.
She also seems to offer investment advice. Wonder how much you need to spend to get a return?

[Maggie Ann]

Back before Amazon encouraged indie publishing. I spent a lot of postage sending my first book to agents. One and all referred me to the same editor and this guy wanted $5K to edit my book. Happily, I joined a news group that exposed this scam and a lot of others. This so called editor didn't do any editing, but did split the $5K with the agent who initiated the referral.

Lucky escape.

[Post-Crisis D]

I had my first three books professionally edited and had the first cover for the first book done by a professional illustrator.  I register the copyright on every one of my books.  And I've done minimal advertising.  If I combine all that, I've not spent anywhere near any of those amounts in any of the categories.  I mean, holy cow, man.  I wish I had that kind of money to spend on a single book.

[TimothyEllis]

I was thinking about that before i went to bed.

My guess is she's actually set up a production company to do her book, and actually intends becoming a Vanity Publisher herself.

Her ranks when I looked at them were indicative of a good launch, but not good enough to make back 34k$.

The only question I have is if she's managed to get the same sort of ranks on Ibook, Kobo, and and B&N at the same time, in which case I guess she has an outside chance of breaking even.

But honestly, that 6 grand for advertising should have put her eBook pre-order into top 500 on the US store, and it didn't. So I'm assuming most of it went somewhere else.

The fact that the paperback was doing better than the eBook suggests everything she's done was to the Trad model.

I guess it will be interesting if the book breaks even or not, so someone keep us up to date please?

[TimothyEllis]

Just had another look at the YouTube.

She has 1 million subscribers, and 1.3k ticks on the video.

That's what? 0.1%

With a million subscribers, I'd have expected 10k sales, and that would gross 70k$. So maybe across all platforms she is getting her 34k back?

Edit: The mill subscribers is not for fiction though, but non-fiction. and this maybe shows that one audience isn't going to buy something different from the same person. She may have overestimated the crossover.

Edit2: Yes, she went Wide. Kobo has less than impressive rank on the paperback though. Not sure she got any traction there at all. Couldn't see a rank at all on B&N.

[Bill Hiatt]

I replied to Timothy's comment. I also noticed that there were at least a few other commenters that pointed out that self-publishing doesn't have to be that expensive.

This particular author is in an unusual position (YouTube channel with over a million subscribers). That puts her in a different category from most beginning self-publishers.

One thing I liked about the video was that she praises self-publishing.

[alhawke]

This particular author is in an unusual position (YouTube channel with over a million subscribers). That puts her in a different category from most beginning self-publishers.

I think it sets her up more like a celebrity publisher. She'll get sales from her branding alone.

I enjoyed her enthusiasm. But, yeah, her cost is pretty astronomical.

[writeway]

I admit, I didn't view the video but already this sounds like BS. I'm not saying newbies don't do this. Yep, some do blow tons of money on one book (though I never heard one spending nearly this much) but this seems like something she is doing to go viral or something or to sell other services. Just the pic on the video looks like Scammer Central. Unless I've heard of author/publisher industry people on Youtube, I ignore people because most of the so-called indies and "experts" on there are crooks. Without even looking at the video, my eyes are rolling.

Also, I'm tired of these nonfiction indies who make thousands from NONFICTION but suck at FICTION acting like they know what it takes to sell fiction. Almost every so-called indie expert out there loves to tell you what to do and how to do it, then you go look up their fiction books on Amazon and their in the 5 millions meaning, the bulk of their money they get are from desperate authors who still want that "get-rich-quick" way to buy all of their guide books and watch their videos, sign up for their "classes", etc. 

[TimothyEllis]

I admit, I didn't view the video but already this sounds like BS. I'm not saying newbies don't do this. Yep, some do blow tons of money on one book (though I never heard one spending nearly this much) but this seems like something she is doing to go viral or something or to sell other services. Just the pic on the video looks like Scammer Central. Unless I've heard of author/publisher industry people on Youtube, I ignore people because most of the so-called indies and "experts" on there are crooks. Without even looking at the video, my eyes are rolling.

The YouTube channel is obviously for some sort of financial advice videos. So she comes across as a financial guru who's trying to use her million subscriber base for something else, to sell her novel with.

Given the ranks at 4 days old, that million didn't convert very well at all.

And it could be that spending that amount of money for her was just a case of no big deal.

So this really isn't a new author, but a content creator turned author.

And she isn't using it as giving advice to other would be authors. It's her documenting her progress with it.

[Bill Hiatt]

She makes some astute observations, like her criticism of Amazon's audiobook pricing policy and the low profits on paper in traditional publishing. Also interesting are her comments on how time everything takes. (Clearly, she's not a minimum viable product kind of person.)

It's too bad, though, that she didn't seem to spend much time learning from the self publishing community. There's enough good advice out there that she could probably have given herself a much better chance of earning out and making a profit.

And yes, celebrity publisher is a good label. How many of us could do a book tour with ticketed attendance and actually expect to make anything? How many of us could get a Big-Five editor to violate her contract with her trad employer to do an edit for us--at $10,000 or at any price? (How many of us even know a Big Five editor?) Chelsea says in a response to one of the comments that she didn't intend the video to be advice, but since she apparently gives financial advice on her channel all the time, I think there's a lot of possibility for confusion. I would have been happier with some kind of disclaimer. "Don't try this approach yourself unless you're a celebrity." comes to mind.

I was fascinating by the mailing of copies all over the place. I know that's the way the trads do review copies, but I'm hard-pressed to see how that works in self-publishing.

[TimothyEllis]

Honestly, I could have brought that book in below 5k$, and that's with an expensive editor, and a thousand dollar cover.

With a 1 million subscriber base, I'd not have done any advertising at all.

And with the ranks she's showing now, she'd have made back that 5 grand already.

[Bill Hiatt]

The YouTube channel is obviously for some sort of financial advice videos. So she comes across as a financial guru who's trying to use her million subscriber base for something else, to sell her novel with.

Given the ranks at 4 days old, that million didn't convert very well at all.

And it could be that spending that amount of money for her was just a case of no big deal.

So this really isn't a new author, but a content creator turned author.

And she isn't using it as giving advice to other would be authors. It's her documenting her progress with it.

Yes, this is why I don't see her as a scammer. She's sharing her journey with her audience. I do think there's some possibility part of her audience will emerge with a distorted view of self-publishing. We all know there are overpriced service providers out there who might pick up a few more customers from this video. However, I see no evidence that she herself is trying to sell those services. She doesn't even name any providers. I'm reasonably confident that she isn't trying to scam anyone.

[TimothyEllis]

Yes, this is why I don't see her as a scammer. She's sharing her journey with her audience. I do think there's some possibility part of her audience will emerge with a distorted view of self-publishing. We all know there are overpriced service providers out there who might pick up a few more customers from this video. However, I see no evidence that she herself is trying to sell those services. She doesn't even name any providers. I'm reasonably confident that she isn't trying to scam anyone.

Mercedes Lackey has dropped figures on Quora which suggest that Trad based people charge a great deal more than Indie ones do. She's quoted 30k$ for ghostwriters for example.

So that 11 grand for editing could well have been an actual Trad editor.

And the rest of it was also Trad people.

I hate to think what the cover cost.

[Bill Hiatt]

Honestly, I could have brought that book in below 5k$, and that's with an expensive editor, and a thousand dollar cover.

With a 1 million subscriber base, I'd not have done any advertising at all.

And with the ranks she's showing now, she'd have made back that 5 grand already.

As you pointed out, though, her million subscriber base is interested in financial advice. Not everyone who follows her for financial advice is going to be interested in a romance novel. Anyway, as I think about my own subscriber behavior, I may find a channel amusing or interesting, but that doesn't mean I'd buy merch from most of them. (I have over 50,000 subscribers on FB, and some of them will like things occasionally, but most of them never buy anything. There's a big difference between liking a page or subscribing to a channel and making a purchase.)

What puzzles me is why she didn't put out a financial advice book, which would certainly have resonated more with her users.

That said, I glanced at the Look Inside, and she seems to be a good writer. That is, of course, a subjective call. Own of my former editors would have screamed at her (as would ProWritingAid) about sentence length. But she has a good command of the language and could easily draw me in (even though I'm not a romance reader).

Earlier, you mentioned the paperback doing better than the ebook. Do we think the $9.99 price point has something to do with that? It's a little high for a self-pubbed work, whereas the paperback price is pretty typical of what paperbacks of that length go for, maybe even a bit lower than average.

[Bill Hiatt]

Mercedes Lackey has dropped figures on Quora which suggest that Trad based people charge a great deal more than Indie ones do. She's quoted 30k$ for ghostwriters for example.

So that 11 grand for editing could well have been an actual Trad editor.

And the rest of it was also Trad people.

I hate to think what the cover cost.

Hand-drawn covers do cost more. There is something to be said for the the fact that, unlike a cover based on a stock photo, there won't be several covers in circulation with the same base. That said, it probably cost more than a typical starting self-publisher could afford.

In general, there'd be a lot less competition in self-publishing if the startup cost was $34,000 plus. One of the points I made in my comment on YouTube was that self publishing is  typically not about one book. Most self-pubbers don't drop a bestseller on their first outing. It's about backlist. And if each book cost more than $34,000, think about how far in the hole someone would be if he or she spent that on each book. At about the fifteen-book point, that's more than half a million. That kind of investment really isn't scalable. You'd have to hope you could spend less on each succeeding book.

[TimothyEllis]

Earlier, you mentioned the paperback doing better than the ebook. Do we think the $9.99 price point has something to do with that? It's a little high for a self-pubbed work, whereas the paperback price is pretty typical of what paperbacks of that length go for, maybe even a bit lower than average.

Very likely, although the paperback is too expensive as well imo.

She actually was smarter than the Trads are. They go for $14.95, but lose out on the 35% royalty. She went for $9.95 and got the 70%.

But one has to wonder if she'd priced at $4.95, if she'd have boosted into the top 200 of the US paid store instead of somewhere around 2000 (although I'm guessing on that.)

Most self-pubbers don't drop a bestseller on their first outing.

She didn't either. Unless it was a fast hit in a sub-category, but I doubt it. Her category ranks are really terrible. But that might be a romance thing.

With her sales in Sci-Fi, she should have pulled out a top 10 rank somewhere. I don't know anything about romance categories though.

[Bill Hiatt]

Yes, I know this book isn't a bestseller so far. I was referring to the general pattern in indie publishing. A few of us had a real hit the very first time--though that's been progressively more and more uncommon. Most of us follow something more like a slow build pattern. Even prawns like me have sales go up over time, assuming they stick with it.

Are we sure the trads have the same royalty structure we do? I thought the drop above $9.99 didn't apply to them. Or am I mistaken about that? (Trad authors, of course, don't get the 70%, anyway, though I think how much of it the publisher pockets may vary.)

Anyway, I think it is safe to say that she would have sold more ebooks at a lower price point. How many more exactly is hard to know.

One thing we haven't taken into consideration in her stats is that she seems to have done an Amazon preorder and encouraged people to preorder. That would have hurt her ranking on Amazon because those sales would have been scattered instead of concentrated on release day, as they are with other vendors.

[LilyBLily]

Interesting that a nonfiction author is trying to get her followers to cross genre to fiction. That's a huge leap.

How successful has any of us been in getting people who already are fiction readers to check us out in a different subgenre? The usual answer is: Not very.

[Bill Hiatt]

I think it takes a really big name to genre-jump successfully, and even then, I'm not sure it's necessarily all the readers following the author as the author using name recognition to pick up new readers in new categories.

When Stephen King published Different Seasons, he was already famous. Horror fans I know sometimes bought DS but often didn't finish it. I also know people who read it that didn't read King's horror. I don't know if this small sampling is typical, but it suggests a possible pattern.

Ten years after Stephen Chbosky did Perks of Being a Wallflower, a bestseller that became a movie, he released Imaginary Friend. Unlike the teenage characters in Perks, the main character here is a little kid, though other characters are townspeople of all ages. Also unlike Perks, which is usually considered literary fiction, Imaginary Friend is hardcore horror that reads more like Stephen King or Clive Barker wrote it than like Chbosky did. Though it wasn't as successful as Perks, it was a bestseller. Both books are four-star on Amazon, though Perks has more than 50,000 reviews, and IF has just a little over 4,000. So the genre-jump worked, but something along the lines of Perks might have done better.

[Hopscotch]

I think it takes a really big name to genre-jump successfully, and even then, I'm not sure it's necessarily all the readers following the author as the author using name recognition to pick up new readers in new categories.

Genre writers may have trouble leaping btw genre but general fiction writers like Thomas Berger - Little Big Man, Crazy in Berlin, Neighbors, Arthur Rex, etc - expanded their readership that way.  The general fiction audience may offer a more flexible readership worth mining.

[Bill Hiatt]

I think such transitions are helped by the fact that some avid readers have eclectic tastes. I started with fantasy, science fiction, and horror, but I'll read practically any kind of fiction if it's well-written and have absorbed a lot of literary fiction over the years. (Being an English teacher will do that.) I also read a wide range of nonfiction. I don't know how many people there are like me, but I'd certainly follow an author across genre lines and even across the fiction-nonfiction divide. That's how I ended up reading Isaac Asimov's biblical criticism, for example.

[Post-Crisis D]

The difference in genres would be a factor as well.  I would venture to say that there is a greater chance of overlap between scifi and horror readers than there would be between thriller and romance readers.  Same goes with crossing over between non-fiction and fiction.  The overlap of readers who would read a how to stop smoking book and a fantasy novel is going to be small whereas you would probably have better luck if you're a scifi author that also writes science books with the possible exception of geology books.

[Post-Crisis D]

I think such transitions are helped by the fact that some avid readers have eclectic tastes. I started with fantasy, science fiction, and horror, but I'll read practically any kind of fiction if it's well-written and have absorbed a lot of literary fiction over the years. (Being an English teacher will do that.) I also read a wide range of nonfiction. I don't know how many people there are like me, but I'd certainly follow an author across genre lines and even across the fiction-nonfiction divide. That's how I ended up reading Isaac Asimov's biblical criticism, for example.

Excluding early childhood books (you know, the ones with animals and such), I pretty much started with non-fiction.  I think it was my fifth grade teacher that complained all my book reports were about non-fiction books and I needed to read fiction.  (It may be inherited because my mother largely reads non-fiction.)  So, the first fiction book I picked out was The Odyssey.  From there, I don't really remember.  I remember reading 2001: A Space Odyssey or 2010: Odyssey Two (or both?) at some point, I think around when the movie (2010) was either in theaters or on cable TV.

But, yeah, I'm not a stickler for genre.  I don't know how you could read only one genre and not get bored.  I think that makes it challenging for me as a writer because I write in different genres.  I have to skip around or I get bored.  I know series sell, but how can you sit there and write the same thing every day for how ever many years?

[TimothyEllis]

I have to skip around or I get bored.  I know series sell, but how can you sit there and write the same thing every day for how ever many years?

8 years later, and 61 novels, I'm not sure I can answer that. But I can do it. 

I started with Biggles, JE MacDonald, Dick Francis, Alistair McLean, and Adam Hall.  So air action, WW2, horses, action adventure, and shadow operative. And others, including several children's series. Watership Down, Swallows and Amazons etc.

From there I went to sci-fi and then fantasy.

And until I typed this, I'd forgotten where I started.

[LilyBLily]

Part of it is you create a world and your brain thinks it's real and it's comfortable to write in. That's why I'm eight books into a series instead of stopping at three or four or five and doing a different series.

[cecilia_writer]

I'm just writing the 26th in a myatery series at the moment but I am a fast writer and have also dabbled in near-future dystopia, regency sort-of romance and 1950s 'historical' mysteries. I think the reason I keep returning to the long-running series is partly because of the confort factor for me as a writer and partly because my most loyal readers treat it as a kind of soap-opera and are more interested in the characters than the mysteries.

[She-la-te-da]

desperate authors who still want that "get-rich-quick" way

To be honest, that's where the real money is in writing, in telling others how to do it, especially if you're telling them they'll get rich and won't have to work hard.

It's why youtube is full of people who really can't write and sell their own fiction, but are good at "selling" themselves, so they're full of tales about that low content stuff, and now it's "AI" books. This "AI" will write it for you, make your cover, do your blurb, find your keywords, give it all a title, and all you have to do is upload and wait for the money to roll in.

[Crystal]

I don't see anything wrong with splurging on a series of great edits. Just because you can do something cheaply, doesn't mean you should. I'd go a little cheaper than 10k, but I think a really thorough package of edits (developmental, line, copy, proof), like what you would get with a Big 5 publisher, would likely come in around 3-4k. (More if you're paying trad prices. Editors typically underprice for indies IMO. Not that I'm complaining).

As far as genres go, I read romance, mystery, courtroom, non-fiction, and YA regularly, but I don't pick up romances by courtroom authors or visa versa. I have to truly love their voice and POV to even consider it. I don't even pick up paranormal or historical mysteries by authors whose contemporary mysteries I really enjoy. I'm just not interested!

[LilyBLily]

What makes me sad are not-so-great edits, which are rife in the indie world. Malapropisms are my bete noire, but reign/rein, flout/flaunt, mantle/mantel, and phase/faze are right up there.

[sliderule]

most loyal readers treat it as a kind of soap-opera and are more interested in the characters than the mysteries.

This is me and a long-running series I'm currently reading. Yeah, the story and escalation of the overall series is interesting, but I'm really there for the characters and how they're going to get out of the current pile of goo that they're in since the last book.