A Writer's Life

From Jenny Chapman

Jenny lives in Achanha where, with her husband Nigel, she runs MacAvon Media.

She writes here about the grim facts behind an author's life.

For books published by MacAvon Media, we - as both authors and publisher - can expect to receive between £2.00 and £2.50 for each paperback copy of one of our Web Security Topics books, which have an RRP between £6.99 and £8.99 - that's for every copy "sold through", i.e. actually bought by a customer from a bookseller, and not returned. Returns represent a loss, as we pay for the printing in any case, and returns usually have to be pulped. Kindle e-book sales bring in about the same amount, though the price to the customer is lower.

For paperback sales, the rest of the money goes to others in the chain - printers, distributers and retailers. All of these are vital, of course, and provide an essential service. If we also paid for other services such as copy editing and publicity, those costs would have to be deducted from the figure of £2.00 to £2.50 per book. From the point of view of the balance sheet, such costs could be spread across the book's lifetime, but in reality they would have to be paid up front, either before the book is published, or very soon afterwards. Each book therefore starts out at a loss, as there are always some production costs, no matter how much of the work we do ourselves.

For a textbook published by MacAvon Media, with a list retail price of £26.99 (modest by textbook standards), we might get something in the region of £8 per copy "sold through". If we set the "trade discount" lower, we could get a bit more, but the retailers would get less. This would mean that sellers like Amazon would not be able to offer discounted prices, would tend not to hold books in stock, and would not be inclined to promote the books - as in other businesses, the retailer buys each book at a trade price, which is determined by deducting the trade discount from the RRP or list price.

It takes a large number of £2.50s to pay the everyday bills. Even at £8 per book, we would have to sell a fair number of books on a regular basis to be sure of being able to support ourselves, and we could only get that rate for the larger textbooks, which are one of the most difficult types of book to sell as an independent publisher.

However, these figures should be compared with the royalties which authors receive when they publish with major publishing houses. As a very broad rule of thumb, we tend to get something in the region of 10% of the list price of a book in royalties (though that's not how royalties are actually calculated) for a title published by a major publisher. So, for a £26.99 textbook we would only get around £2.70 in royalty for each copy "sold through". In principle we are better off publishing the books ourselves, but only if we can sell in sufficient quantity, which is not easy to do.

In exchange for the lower rate of return, major publishers take care of all the headaches of publishing and - above all - they have big marketing departments with large budgets. But the story doesn't end there. The efforts of those marketing departments are usually concentrated on just a few titles. In order to have a book promoted by a major publisher - whether that book is fiction, non-fiction or a textbook - it has to be on the "A list". As many published authors know to their cost, only a very few authors' work gets onto the "A list" and promoted by the publisher. All of the rest is virtually ignored, even though it is published, and it therefore doesn't sell. There is a term often used in the publishing industry - "the long tail". This refers to all that work which is formally published but largely forgotten, only selling a few copies here and there over the years. The vast majority of published books form that long tail.

Have you ever looked at the "Amazon Bestsellers Rank" for a book on the Amazon web site? The real bestsellers - the ones that people hear about - will be up in the top 100 or so. Beneath those are approximately 5 million other titles - that's on Amazon UK, it's more like 8 million in the USA. If a book is consistently ranking around the 20,000 mark, it is probably selling one copy every couple of days. If it stays around the 200,000 mark, it's likely to be selling one copy per week or less. The rankings are calculated in a complicated way and vary all the time, but that's roughly what they indicate. The millions of other published titles below those top few hundred thousand titles sell far fewer copies than one per week. Out-of-print books have rankings too, because Amazon records second-hand sales through Amazon Marketplace. So the rankings don't necessarily indicate sales of new copies.

Our bestselling textbook "Digital Multimedia" was on the publishers "A list" and got heavily promoted in its early years. It has received far more promotion than MacAvon Media could possibly provide for any book. The publisher doesn't just advertise the book and display it at trade fairs and conferences, but - most importantly for a textbook - they employ reps who travel round all the academic departments in person, persuading lecturers in many different countries of the world to consider the book for their course. Competing with that is impossible.
However, we are hoping that for any book which would not make it onto a publisher's "A list" - and that means most books in reality - we may be able to achieve almost as much promotion from Achnaha as the book would have received if a major publisher had commissioned it. That should mean that we may be able to make almost as much income as if that book had been published by a big publisher - perhaps even more for some titles - given that the returns per book will be relatively higher.

Trying to make a living from writing or independent publishing is difficult for almost everyone who tries it. For the majority, it is impossible to make enough money to live on. Although "bestselling" may mean millions of sales per year for the biggest names in fiction or popular non-fiction, in the context of textbooks it only means a few thousand sales per year at most. And that's best selling - most college textbooks don't sell that well, and many sales transactions are of second-hand copies, which provide no income at all for either publisher or authors.

When we first started writing seriously, our commissioning editor warned us that it was simply not possible to make a living writing textbooks. She was more or less right, though her idea of "a living" was probably higher than that of most people in Ardnamurchan. However, it's more possible to make a living by writing textbooks and technical books than by writing fiction. Only a tiny proportion of published fiction writers are able to support themselves by writing. As it says on one of the many Web sites providing advice to would-be writers, "The percentage of writers make a living from their writing is pitifully small, and that's one reason so many fiction writers keep their day jobs." We have been lucky to just about get by financially as professional writers, but we will only be able to continue if the books we are now publishing ourselves sell in sufficient quantity.

Nigel and Jenny Chapman are partners in MacAvon Media, website here.