Good Morning December 28, 2016

Good morning on this the twenty eighth day of December in the year of our Lord 2016.

I read an interesting blog post by Brian Niemeier on the subject of how an indie author pays for all of the work he does while wearing his publisher hat. I think this accurately sumarizes his conclusion:

Never give anyone a percentage of the royalties for one-time work on a self-published project.

So far I’ve followed that myself, though Brian (being a much more popular author) comes at it from a very different angle than I do. He discusses at length why giving away a large part of what you own—let’s face it, as important as the cover, editing, etc. are, without the book they’d be nothing—is a really bad idea financially. And let’s face it, authors do not typically have a smooth, even, reliable income stream in the way that, say, university professors do. And to be clear, it’s obvious in his post that he’s talking about paying a fair one-time price for a person’s work, such that they’ve been well compensated for the value of the time they put in.

But I’ve got the opposite problem. My royalties don’t amount to much, yet—I’m still only in year 3 of my 20 year plan—and until one starts to make real money from books there’s absolutely no guarantee that one ever will. (So far sales have paid for one cover and part of the second cover.) Especially in my case where I’ve never been the stuff of which popularity is made. So I’ve got a strong preference for paying a one-time fee for work such as cover art and copy-editing (I haven’t been able to afford to pay for full editing yet), because this ensures that the person I’m dealing with has been paid fairly for their time. I’m not asking anyone else to share in my risk.

God bless you.

2 thoughts on “Good Morning December 28, 2016

  1. Hi, Chris. I can certainly empathize with your problem.

    Here’s a piece of advice from a friend who is far more financially astute than me: If you don’t have money, you can substitute time.

    That advice dovetails nicely with a second key principle of indie publishing that I didn’t have space for in the OP, which is learn to do as much as you can by yourself. If you can do an hour of online research per day, take a community college night class, or attend a web seminar on cover art, formatting, or web design, you’ll gain skills that will slash your overall publishing costs.

    And even if you don’t have extra time for learning new skills, producing professional quality books doesn’t have to be expensive. On average, each of my books cost me around $650 total to make and get to market. Building good professional relationships is key.

    God bless,
    Brian

    Like

  2. Pingback: Good Morning December 29, 2016 – Chris Lansdown

Leave a Reply

Please log in using one of these methods to post your comment:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
https://blog.chrislansdown.com/2016/12/28/good-morning-december-28-2016/
blog.chrislansdown.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-09
74045
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:JP2XMONDXVBSDTX4DX2XJDCKA6ZNJN2E
<urn:uuid:c43ac37b-4c47-4ef0-8739-8f0473e49640>
2019-02-23T15:59:19Z
192.0.78.12
text/html
sha1:K37NZ46QZZFUJX3TMGLPJUVIBXMTC25Q
<urn:uuid:be59f8c2-b17d-445c-8d35-57e47e4b24eb>
https://blog.chrislansdown.com/2016/12/28/good-morning-december-28-2016/
response
<urn:uuid:1ef787bb-ba82-4228-b38d-bb47cd4981bc>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-09
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for February 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-165-183-132.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 0.11-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/