Well, my friend, he’s kinda poor he can’t afford some books and some streaming services, so he pirates. He pirate books, audiobook and videos and other stuff. Sometimes he buys books he likes a lot out of loyalty to the author (yeah, I don’t understand it either), he likes to read physical books, but yeah, if he hates the author or just wants to skim through it, he will download the book.
He usually doesn’t like to pirate from small companies or professors who are trying to make a living by selling books, but from millionaires & plenty of mega corps which already have loads of money, he feels like it’s the right move to pirate
Also, have you ever noticed that you have felt that the value of a product has decreased just because you didn’t pay for it, thus you are less interested to read it? i.e., had you paid for the book, you would have more likely read that book.
He says he will buy stuff when his time is more valuable than money, let’s all hope that day is soon.
What are your piracy habits?
If you just write for yourself, it only costs time. If you plan to (*self-) publish it, though, you want at least a good cover, and optimally, you’d hire an editor and maybe things like sensitivity readers. And then, most people seem to prefer audio books these days, which is either expensive, or hard to pull off, due to having to find a narrator who’s okay with royalty share with a non-established author. And then you haven’t advertised your book at all yet.
I’ve so far only worried about cover and editing. Wrote 4 novels. Now I’m writing a series and am considering writing the whole thing completely first, then getting a deal with an artist for all the covers. This also makes it easier to do foreshadowing properly over the course of more than one book, and it’s probably advantageous to stagger book releases, even if that means a few years without putting anything out to the world.
*All these points are moot if you aim to get published by an established house, but then you’re dealing with “the suits”, and people who rank “will it sell” higher than “is it good”.
How expensive does editing and cover art get? I imagine it’s pretty pricey to hire people to do that. You mention this is moot going the traditional publishing route — I guess because publishers will front the costs for these things if they think your book will sell? If you’re buying cover art and stuff to self-publish, where do you publish your novels? Do you sell print copies, or is it all digital? Is selling physical copies even feasible without a traditional publisher?
The cover costs anywhere from USD 100 to 1000, depending on the artist and the cover, where 100 would get you a somewhat decent one on Fiverr, while something not generic can go up in price very quickly. Most “cheap” artists have a flat rate with one or more stock image sites, where you’d then pick a model and tell them what setting you’d like to have. If you have very specific needs that would require hand crafting, the sky is your limit (The covers for ebook, print and audiobook are separate, and print/audiobook covers will cost extra).
Editors come in categories. Developmental editors check the characters and plot for consistency, logic problems and structural things. Then there are copywriting editors that focus mainly on things like grammar, spelling etc and, while being a bit cheaper, still cost quite a lot (Which is why people use tools like grammarly or pwa to self-edit, which basically saves you the copy editor).
Sensitivity and beta readers are tricky. If you already have a fan community, you might be able to recruit some of them for this purpose. You’d want them to avoid faux pas when describing people of another ethnicity, sex, gender etc, and there are professional options for that, too (I already suspect my current project might not be fireproof, because names like Born Of Rain remind Americans of natives, even though they’re completely unrelated to my story – there aren’t even humans in my book).
Audiobook narration can go way, way up. You might be able to negotiate royalty share with a new voice actor who needs gigs to build skills and a portfolio, but nobody wants to spend hours every day for weeks in a recording booth if there’s no money to be made, and therein lies the problem – you need exposure to sell your books and make some money back, but exposure doesn’t come for free. While less and less people read books, they do listen to audiobooks, which would increase your chances of being seen drastically.
Newcomers don’t usually have a backlog of ten books, with lots of positive reviews, but most people don’t buy books from some dude with two books and zero reviews. They also don’t buy books that don’t have a nice cover, and they demand the professional quality you’re getting from having your book edited by an expert. Some genres also just sell better in general, like romance or thriller (to a lesser extent).
If you go with just a cheap Fiverr cover and some basic copywriter editing, you’re already looking at approximately 1 grand, with sales extremely unlikely, unless you have a platform somewhere with a related following (you often see book-related youtubers advertising their books during their videos). For someone like me, who has 3 books out (Out of 4 – I pulled my first novel, wasn’t satisfied with the book), writing something like science fiction, which doesn’t have a ravenous market, that means you calculate with 100% loss and are happy if you sell 10 units.
Indies often rely on things like Facebook/Google ads, newsletter and heavy social media marketing, all of which I hate with a passion. But it’s “part of the business”, which makes it a very unpleasant endeavor for me, and I’ve so far not done any marketing at all, which basically guarantees I’ll stay an obscure writer in the hobbyist league, one small fish in an endless ocean. And that’s okay.
If you think of traditional publishing, you have “the big 4” in the USA, and some foreign houses elsewhere, and you need an agent. Agents take a cut of anything you might earn, and they’re not optional. An agent helps with some very basic plot doctoring, and most publishing houses won’t even look at your manuscript if you send it in directly. Even with an agent, even if they’re well-connected, there’s a high chance your book will end up on the slush pile and never be seen. Not because editors are malicious, but because they’re overwhelmed. You wouldn’t believe the amount of books people put out every day, with a large percentage being unacceptable.
Agents, and editors at publishing houses, look for something they think sells. They’re notoriously bad at predicting trends, but they are the ones who decide what gets published and what not. Remember the vampire hype? Then the “magic academy” boom? Editors tried to create an “angel hype” with very lacklustre success.
If you’re lucky and write a book that falls into a category editors are looking for right now, they will then assign development and copywriting editors who work with you and tell you how to get the book in shape. They’ll get a cover made (over which you have zero control, even if your name is Stephen King or Brandon Sanderson) and pay you a 5k advance, with a small percentage of the sales if and after your book makes the advance back (and if it doesn’t, your pen name is burned).
It takes me about 3 months to write a book, which is just the writing. The planning can take weeks or months, depending on the setting, the characters, the plot and how far you lean on the planner-pantser-spectrum. If you just count the writing hours, a 5k advance means below minimum wage, so you won’t live off your books. Add to that the high barrier of entry and the other activities like marketing, in which you will have to participate especially as a new author, and you’ll see a very skewed effort/reward ratio.
Traditional publishing used to be more competitive, and until a few years ago the Big4 were the Big5. There also used to be a mid-list, the kind of author who could work as a writer full time, barely profitable, and usually paid for with profits from star authors’ sales, in the hopes that one of their books breaks through. G.R.R. Martin was such a mid-lister for decades. The trend though has been to abandon that concept completely and fully focus on the established star authors, and on cheap newcomers who hopefully sell their books themselves by somehow going viral on TikTok.
That’s why I said I see it as an expensive hobby, and why I don’t mind being pirated. I want to be in creative control of my work, get a cover I like, tell the story I have in mind, without deadline or the pressure of having to sell.
I want to be read, not to sell; readers, not customers. So if someone puts it up for free, cool. Not that I could do anything about it anyway.
That all makes a lot of sense. If I’m reading you right it sounds like you do make a profit, but you’re making much less than minimum wage? Or has it been not profitable at all and a loss in that sense? You at least mentioned that new authors go in expecting it to be a total loss, which makes it sound like it could be sensible to put the writing online (basically free self-publishing), at least if the point is just to have people read it, and you’ll make a loss from a more properly published thing anyway (although it sounds like your biggest costs are editing / audiobooks / covers which maybe you consider an important part of the work in the first place). That said I feel like the internet has changed quite a lot and people don’t really follow specific creators and their websites so much anymore.
