VANITY PUBLISHING ONLINE and

TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING

One example of an online publishing company is LULU.com.

Lulu is what they used to call VANITY PRINTERS. This is where an author pays the production costs of a book. And it ain't cheap.

I print the same book myself (I would not consider having LULU create the physical book) because my production costs here in my office for a totally acceptable book (of which I've sold tens of thousands) is $2. I use a GBC comb binder (like university text books), and a $50 inkjet printer. The labor involved is insignificant. LULU would add $10 for this same book before I would even begin to make a profit.

The real labor is in the creation of the material. In the case of my 260 page book, 25 years of experience, testing, teaching, and learning.

So, I charge the customer $20, and I make $8.74 royalties with LULU. The customer is actually paying $20 plus $2.50 for media shipping.

When I charge the customer $20 for the exact same book I make, I include a nice hour long CD, and include free shipping. my take is still $15.50, nearly double.

I sell 1000 books- that's $8700 from LULU or $15,500 from my own efforts- and the customer gets a better deal.

I don't know about you, but I can buy a lot of stuff for $6,800.

I have to sell nearly twice as many books to make the same money I would making doing the production myself.

This is especially important because most authors don't even sell near 1000 books, and the loss of revenue is even more notable.

For some people who have no time, no desire to print themselves, hey, LULU is for them.
Just not for me.

As for paying them 20%-- of course I and everyone else is- regarding electronic media.
I can post the same material downloadable from my own server and host, and the cost to me is ZERO, save the time it took me to post my shopping cart buttons and my processing the order-- about 1 minute per order. I already have a web site with a 250GB bandwidth that costs $10 a month, so the cost is already covered for my basic web site hosting anyway.

For those who don't have a website or rudimentary web page building skills- sure, LULU and other online vanity publishing set ups may be for them.

But for me to continue with LULU, last month I sold 100 downloads of my book its first month online. I generated $1000 income, and LULU keeps $200. (20%) They keep in their bank account the income I generated the first 2 weeks of the month for 45 days until they pay me through Paypal (see explanation above). In a years time this amounts to $2400 I would be paying to LULU for them to do what I can do myself for free just as easily.

For some, this would be attractive- and it was to me before I thought about it for a while.

Hey, this is AMERICA. It's LULU's prerogative to run their business how they see fit. I'm happy it works for them and for some of their customers. I just realized however, that it doesn't work for me.
 

Traditional advance-paying publisher?

Making money as an author in the publishing business is like winning the lotto. It almost never happens to any significant degree. I know, because I know a lot of known professional writers who have publishing deals. When I tell them how much money I make publishing my own materials, they invariable shreek, "YOU ARE DOING GREAT. You do NOT want a publishing deal."

We have this ideal vision of authors like Stephen King, and J.K. Rowling making a comfortable living as an author. These people are 1 out of 100,000,000. Most authors IF THEY ARE LUCKY get a few thousand dollars upfront for a manuscript they have worked months or years on, and then they never see another dime. And if they do, it is a paltry percentage on the sales price with all kinds of stipulations.

The publisher holds the rights, and can put the book out of print before you can say "starving artist". The publishing business runs on a 5% profit margin-- you think tens of thousands of authors in the country are making a real living wage from their efforts on this kind of operating percentage?

I believe authors should be able to reap the rewards of their efforts. But selling a book, and getting a well selling title is a difficult task. It will not occur by simply putting your book on a web site with a million other titles and sitting back and waiting for success.

If you do sell some books, and you can, you will likely start by selling a few books. If your production costs are high- i.e. giving a significant slice to the production company, you will have to sell twice as many books unless you take on the relatively simple task of printing your own books, or putting your books online upon your own web site.

But what is a shame, is when an author actually manages to succeed at some rudimentary level, it is the production-publishing companies who are reaping a big piece of the pie without the creative effort, nor the risk which is the sole responsibility of the artist/author.

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