Are the most successful authors like Stephen King and Jk Rowling all trade-published?

Professionals are used by the famous, and even the not-so-famous but successful.

Nearly all of them. The reasons are simple; really, publishing enough books to let you be a full-time fiction writer earning as much as you could doing any other job you are capable of doing requires highly specialized knowledge, experience, and an extensive list of professional contacts on tap.

To earn even a middle class American life-style writing fiction, about $50K a year, you must sell tens of thousands of copies. To be specific, the typical royalty for a paperback is 15%, the typical price is $15.95 ($13.95 to $17.95); so the royalty per book is $2.39 ($2.09 to $2.69). So, not considering cuts that do happen, you need to sell 21,000 books a year to earn $50K per year.

Here is link on a publisher's P&L viewpoint.

That just isn't easy, it is its own entire business enterprise that requires full-time attention and an organization that knows what it is doing to negotiate with producers, shippers, bookstores, online venues, advertisers, artists, etc. Not to mention TV or film producers, scriptwriters, audio book voices, foreign venues, merchandise rights (for toys or T-shirts etc).

Real authors love the creative process, they don't want a full-time job managing a production and sales enterprise. Publishers earn their money. To be a successful author, you need to sell tens of thousands of books every year, and each one is not an evergreen source of income. One is seldom enough, the truth is that multiple books have synergy, even if they are not a series. Each sells the others. If you are going to be famous, you need to spend the majority of your time in the year writing, and let other people promote, produce, and sell, which is what they can do far better than you can because they are trained professionals.

The more things you try to do yourself, the more things there are for you to suck at. To be ignorant, and unaware of the culture, to be ripped off by a fraud that steals your money and/or work, to be truly incompetent at a critical juncture and cause yourself grief.

Forget the "success" stories of self-publishing, it is like studying lottery winners for clues about how to win the lottery. The success stories in self-publishing got lucky, with what they wrote, with who they met, with their timing and when they wrote it, with who they found for artwork, with every arbitrary choice they made along the way.

Look instead at the typical experience; which is far more likely to be your experience. Here is a post on the average earnings of a self-publishing author on Amazon. (Less than $100).

Being greedy is recipe for getting almost nothing. Take 15% of a $million, or 100% of $500, its up to you.

posted over 6 years ago

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Amadeus‭

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