The one in which I attempt to find an audience for my book
“I make about 2.5x more from my self-published books than I do from my traditionally published ones, and that's largely due to earning MUCH more on each individual sale,” says the author Michael J. Sullivan in a comment on one of my articles.
Sullivan, as it turns out, secured his publishing deal with Orbit Books around the same time N.K. Jemisin did—his advance was $22,500, hers was $25,000. Initially, he sold more books than she did, but eventually she did, their paths crossing as each attempted mastery over their perspective genres.
But then they diverged—Sullivan decided to self-publish, Jemisin stayed with Orbit. “I was earning a full-time income long before she did (mainly due to my self-published novels),” Sullivan says. “She ‘should’ have been able to make a living wage but the low payout of the traditional model meant she had to turn to Patreon in order to quit her day job.”
Using KDSPY—an analytics tool which uses Amazon rankings and the price of a book to estimate author income—Sullivan estimates that now “N.K.'s Amazon ebooks earn $33,818 per month (her cut of that would be $5,038) and my KDSPY numbers are $8,844 but my cut of that is much higher (because many of my titles are self-published).”
