I think famously JK Rowling submitted Harry Potter to something like 20+ publishing houses, and only got picked up by a lucky accident - one editor plucked it out of the slush pile to give to their kid to read and didn't think any more of it until the child pestered them for more.

JA Konrath is a huge advocate of self-publishing. IIRC his story is that he was paid (for his series of novels) by the big publishers approx 0,000 ... which sounds like a lot ... until you realise that it's spread out over ten years. (So k per year)

But then of course he also had to travel around promoting his books, and so after deducting travel expenses (most of which he had to pay himself) from the k/year he was actually making below average wage - while working extremely hard for the privilege.

So then some of his stories reverted back to him (a standard publishing contract used to have that if they decided not to publish it (read as: not do another print run) then you got the rights back and could shop it around yourself - with an implied "haha, good luck with that").

So he published them on Amazon, and they started selling. Not necessarily in huge numbers (the average e-book sells 30 copies - but obviously Konrath's had had the advantage of an existing (if small) fanbase, as well as having been beaten into shape via professional editing).

Also, he had a back catalogue of about 60 books at that stage (IIRC). So in that first year he made as much from self-publishing his back catalogue on Amazon as he had in ten years with the print and paper industry.

Not entirely surprisingly, he thinks (and advocates that) Amazon is awesome and the traditional publishing industry sucks balls.

Also, not entirely surprisingly, publishing contracts now want to include the publisher getting the rights to e-distribution, and thus the rights will never revert back to authors anymore (because it's always 'available' online, even if the publisher isn't pushing it (which they have no incentive to do at that point)). Hmmm....

So let's examine the case of someone with sixty e-books versus someone with one:

a reader is sixty times more likely to find one of your books
if they like it there's 59 more to buy
word of mouth; you have 60x more exposure so you're 60x more likely to be recommended

So this is basically 60^3 or a leverage factor of 216,000:1

That's a really powerful advantage.

With Konrath for instance, if someone was a fan of his work and had maybe bought or read 4 or 5 from the bookstore or library, suddenly they were able to access the remaining 55-56 books. (I'm sure we've all had that frustration where you can find almost but not all of the books in a series of N books - well e-books are perpetually available so that problem goes away)

Subsequently Amazon have changed some of their platforms (e.g. KDP) from being egalitarian to having special bonuses for the best sellers. This makes them much less attractive for building a platform as compared to people with an existing platform.

Also Amazon's 'solution' to becoming popular is to tell authors to make their books available for free and then to make it up in volume.

If you have one book and you give it away for free you're not even treading water. Even if I became your biggest fan and wanted to give you money I couldn't in that scenario.

On the other hand, if you have say two books and you give the first one away, then people can still pay you money when they buy the second book.

I might have the wrong end of the stick, but I think Konrath rotates through about half a dozen books (sprinkled throughout his oeuvre) which are usually available for free as 'tasters'.

Also, Konrath didn't stay still and rest on his laurels. He continued to make more books, expanding into different genres (not necessarily under the Konrath name (cough bodice rippers uncough (and think about the success of romance as a genre before you pooh-pooh that concept - if romance outsells everything else put together there are obviously things to learn or consider unless you hate money and success))).

Also he collaborates aggressively and continues to promote his platform, and the platforms which support his platfrom (Amazon, paying an editor yourself if you're going to self-publish etc.).

That's one of the key things - if you hate self promotion then why even consider self-publishing?

NB: I think Amazon is dishonest in a broken way - I self published 6 novellas and sold over 200 copies (I can say this confidently because I know most of the people who bought them) (so I beat the average, yay me) and each one (after tax) should have paid approx 27c, but the total Amazon paid me was 23c for the lot.

It's a bit like google and the youtube thing. They tell you your video was viewed N times and so therefore you earn X ... but they are the only ones who know the true value of N (for sufficiently large values of N) ... and the system they control incentivises them to lie about it so they can keep more of the ad revenue.

Anyway, if we assume an n-squared or n-cubed relationship between number of (good quality) ebooks you publish and your success at self-publishing, then I think that probably somewhere in the 20-30 book range is where the break even (e.g. pay for your rent) point is.

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