Musings on Self-Publishing Vs. Mainstream, Part 2

So here I am, exactly eight months after I got my rejection form letter from Unnamed Publisher X. Armageddon Girl is out (the companion book is coming soon, I promise y'all). I published the book on Kindle on November 17, 2013.

Let me start with the blog entry by Wendy Higgins that sparked this article: http://www.wendyhigginswrites.com/201...
I am incredibly grateful to Ms. Higgins for talking about money - it's so hard to find out what to expect out there and her candor is highly appreciated. Her first book for a $10,000 advance, which after taxes, the two years' wait for publication and earning-out royalties, agent's fees, etc, turned out to be a net $3,000 a year. Subsequent books earned significantly higher advances. Royalty-wise, she is getting slightly over $0.60 a book ($0.51 after agent fees) - she needed to sell 17,000 copies to recoup the advance).

So this is where I am on Armageddon Girl. I launched a Kickstarter campaign to finance publication costs. It raised $5,000. After paying the artists, editors, fulfillment costs, operating expenses and so on, I netted around $1,000, which I guess it counts as an advance (except I don't have to pay it off against royalties). On Kindle e-sales, I make about $2.25-2.45 per copy sold (or loaned out through Amazon Prime) . I've sold a couple hundred copies in the first 30 days, and sales have been climbing steadily via word of mouth and a couple ad campaigns here and there (still haven't spent the full advertising budget).

If sales peter out after a few weeks, then I'll make a couple thousand bucks and turn out to be an idiot not to wait for a mainstream publisher to pick up the book. If sales remain steady or pick up, I'll do a sight better than $3K a year, especially if the follow up books (New Olympus and Doomsday Duet, both due for release this year) do as well.

Does that make self-publishing better than mainstream? Nope, even if my novel continues to sell as well or better as it has in its first couple of months (which remains a big unknown). Mainstream publishing offers editing, marketing, an entire infrastructure dedicated to help authors sell their work. I had to pay for an editor (and said editor fell asleep on the job, necessitating me to do additional proofreading at the last minute), did the cover art myself (and it shows), and will have to spend a good deal of time and energy doing marketing (although this is true of mainstream authors as well - publishers are delegating a lot of that stuff to the authors themselves nowadays).

One big difference is time: as soon as Doomsday Duet is written, edited and laid out, I can click a few links and the book will be available for sale on Amazon. No need to wait 2-3 years to see the book come out. As I'm getting older, time's winged chariot makes its presence painfully obvious. I would like to have Doomsday Duet and The Apocalypse Dance (the third book in the series, which will conclude the first story arc in the New Olympus Saga) done in 2014. And with self-publishing, the only thing stopping me from realizing that vision is me.

So, all in all, I don't regret my decision. I may not make as much money, but the books will come out when I want and how I want, which is probably arrogant of me, but I'm at a cantankerous "rage against the dying of the light" stage of my life, got a chariot on my arse and books to write.

tl;dr - Jury's still out as to whether I did the right thing going selfie instead of mainstreamy. Hell, it's likely a weird alt-hist superhero genre-bender was never going to make it in the mainstream unless you're Brandon Sanderson or the like (i.e., someone which much greater writing chops than moi). Alea Iacta Est.