Traditional Publishers

These are Publishers that are not print-on-demand or self Publishers. They are very selective in who they will offer contracts too. For these you can expect to wait in line and don’t bother holding your breath. Below is a sample traditional Publisher and Author profit. Again, this is not a reflection of a current company. This is only an example of what an Author might see concerning finances in a traditional publishing contract. There are 100’s of thousands of manuscripts being submitted to these larger traditional publishers every year and very few are ever accepted.

Here’s the “sample” math with a traditional Publisher contract:

1. At the signing of the large contract deal, the Author may pay out: $10,000-$50,000 for a minimum of having 10,000 books printed. These are not your books when printed, they belong to the Publisher.  

2. The Author signs their rights to the book away (content & cover of book). If the Publisher is nice, they may let the Author buy the rights off of them for the book at a later time. Of course this is never cheap to do, if allowed at all. Some Publishers will give rights back at end of long-term contract.

3. The Author must also buy their books for their table, ministry, or store from the Publisher at somewhere from 30% - 90% off the retail price. This is after putting out at least $10,000.00 up front. Now the Author is being asked to fork over another couple grand just to get some books on hand to sell. Usually you can't get a large discount until you buy a huge amount of books.

3. From the books that the publishing company sells, the Author will get a royalty of around 3-15% average. If they sell the book for $15.00 and they give the Author 5% royalty, the Author will only get:  $7,500.00 of the 10,000 book profit. (Not covering money the Author had to put out up front= STILL IN THE HOLE!)

 4. Traditional Publishers might get your book in up to 25,000 bookstores, which may sound really great at first. Six months after the book is finally completed (May take over a year) they are pulling your new book off the shelves and either sending them back to the Author or to a book storage company. This will later be docked from the Author’s royalties or they will charge a monthly amount to store them per book.  Why did the book not go as well as planned? The Publisher didn’t mention that one of their top Authors just released their new, more popular than ever book, which is on the eye-level shelf, while yours was placed on the bottom. Consumers can’t buy both so they buy the “big Authors” book because they don’t know anything about the new Author yet.  Now you may have more debt tacked onto the debt you already owe on your book!

5. You made the book. You did the work. If they are giving 5% royalties off your book to you, assuming that all 10,000 copies sell, they now make 95% off of your efforts. They get: $15.00 per 10,000 books x 95% = $142, 500.00 back into their company and pockets leaving you still in the hole for the most part.

6. At the end of this path, the Author has made someone in the traditional publishing industry really rich. We believe this "old wine skin" is finally popping!

Self Publishers

1. Self Publishers will allow you to keep the rights to your book. Some are now keeping copyrights like traditional Publishers.

2. They promise large marketing plans, but most of their marketing efforts produce little, mainly because the larger traditional Publishers use big distributors that come first in the picks of what products will be displayed and what ones won’t. Your self-published book will not be on their main list come choosing time. To the "big dogs" you are a little puppy with a small bone.

3. They will normally charge high amounts up front, but you must do most, if not all the work yourself, unless you pay out a lot of money. You can easily have up to $5000.00 up front and walk away with just a few hundred books. Of course, you would have to buy more each time you needed them. Don’t forget about shipping & storage space in your garage!

A Self-publishing sample is like this:

1. At start of contract you may pay out: $2,000 - $6,000.This will normally include the book being done, but not re-written or edited a second time. This price normally does not include many books, only giving around 1-200 copies to do whatever with. All other books you wish to buy and sell will have to be purchased from them also. That means after you have forked over around $4,000.00 to get the book done, you will then have to pay anywhere from $2.00 – 9.00 per book that you must buy upfront if you want to sell them once they are finished. If you want 100 books @ $6.00 per book you now have $4,000.00 + $600.00 into only 100-150 books. Sure didn’t get your money back on that one!

2. At the end of this path, you may have some boxes of books, hoping to one day get out of debt and turn a profit. In the meantime, you are solely responsible for most, if not all of the book selling and promotions.

Co-Publishing:

We specialize in Co-Publishing contracts.  We offer big discounts, even on lower print volumes of books, starting at 50% discount if you want just one book printed! If you do some "shopping around" with other publishers, you will find that we charge smaller amounts to get started. We use similar layout programs, graphic designers, editors, and all the other components that the traditional & self publishing companies use, but we have less overhead because we do not need a warehouse with this system. This allows us to give you a stronger return.