So what would you do? Let me tell you about the problem and then you can solve it for me.
I understood the best thing any writer could do was to create a channel to promote their work and extend the readership. I did this pre-Net with a syndicated column and radio show. Now I do it with 8 websites themed around different topics. And I deliver well over a million articles a month and growing. My newsletter (currently morphing into an e-magazine) has almost 15,000 subscribers.
My websites are a source of significant income and I track the ad values and responses very carefully. I know what an ad is worth per click on each of the sites and Ive run enough trials on affiliate marketing to understand the returns there. Ive taken courses with Google and chatted with their optimization folks to get specific site recommendations. My aim is to make money here so I work hard at it.
The problem is I cant afford to publicize any of my own books. I lose money when I run an ad for my own traditionally-published book on my site. While I cant give specific numbers because of a contract, I can say that my latest book makes me less than .50 a book sold in royalties.
Heres the math on the recent adventure in rejection.
1000 views of the ad. Click-through-rate of 5% (high) means 50 people visit the bookstore site. 5% buy rate there (again high) means 2.5 books get sold. If the book sells for $20.00 and I have a 10% royalty, I make $2.00 per book. (Actually I don’t – there’s the various potential discounts that bring this number much closer to $1.50 to 1.20 than $2.00 but we’ll leave it here for simplicity)
This in turn translates to $2.00 x 2.5 or $5.00 to me. Sounds fine until you understand that it took 1000 ads to get there giving me only a $5.00/1000 visitor or CPM return. I get more than that for weight-loss ads or my own ebooks. And those are really high click-through-rate percentages as youll know if you look at your own click-through-rates on Google adsense or any ads you run on your blog.
I just turned down a contract with a publisher I really wanted to work with because of this kind of situation.
They insisted on exclusive e-rights and when I ran the numbers for books in the likely price range, I would lose money by promoting this one as well. I might make money on the hard copy but would clearly lose money on the e-books.
Coupled with not being able to use any of the content in any way meant I would wind up writing the book for the advance. Not fair to the publisher because I couldnt promote it and clearly not something I could afford to do. I cant work for 4 months on the kinds of advance money now being given out.
(remember I write for a living so any book that takes several months to write has to equal the money I could make writing for myself. I dont do this for the fun of it.)
I dont know what the answer is for me and writing books but my guess is I wont be able to write another print book because it will cost me money to do so. Having built a channel in order to sell books, Ive moved out of the mainstream publishing model because they cant afford to work with me and I cant afford to work with them.
I dont know if there is an answer but if anybody has any ideas dont be shy now.
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