Let us assume you do go the traditional publishing route for your first book. If you were able to receive an advance of 6-10 thousand dollars, a very good advance for a first time author, I know many first time authors that walk away with advances of two to three thousand and the royalties are not very good either. This is not because they had a bad agent, it is because they have not proven themselves yet as a marketable author. Oh, yeah I forgot to mention that no matter how small your advance, your literary agent will take 15% off the top.



So let us talk about royalties for a moment. Generally speaking, hardcover books pay royalty rates of 10% on the first one to 250,000 copies sold. So if your book has a cover price of $25.00, then you will earn a $2.50 royalty on every copy sold, up to 250,000 copies.

This means that if you only sell 10,000 copies, then you will only earn $25,000. Some publishing contracts even stipulate that if your book does not earn back its advance, you owe them!

Keep in mind that our agent gets 15% of this too, and all of this is paid after you have earned your advance. Paperback royalties pay an average of 6%.

That is not much of a salary for all of the work you put into your book. Do not you deserve much more? We think you do!

In addition to the small pay check, publishers can withhold your royalties as a reserve against book returns and you are still responsible for promoting your own book, which can mean hiring a publicist. There goes your advance!

What does all this mean? It means, if you are willing to do the legwork yourself, meaning packaging, printing, distributing, and promoting your book, every single cent from every single sale goes directly into your pocket.

So if you sell 10,000 books at 19.99 each, you have made $199,990. Um...that is a lot of money.

Of course you do have to cover your printing and marketing costs but you will earn significantly more per book and with proper packaging, you can roll your costs into the price of your book. For example, if your book costs $2.00 to print and market then you up your price to $21.99. Readers will be willing to pay the extra $2.00 because you have told them, through your amazing packaging, that the book will benefit their lives the way no other book can.

In fact, I have seen books sell for several hundred dollars. If you have extremely specialized and unique knowledge, you can price it at any level that you desire and people will buy it. The really great thing about self publishing is that you can update your book and re-release it anytime you want and keep the profits rolling in. Self publishing is fun, it is challenging, and it is very very lucrative.