AE lite

Just for comparison, a couple of things. Following a writer's article on her tax returns, I just did some math. That last chart? Let me assume that it's 25-75 distributed. I don't have the data, but it's certainly more drastic than 30-70 (which would be bad enough).

With the article's data on hand, 9 tradpubs vs. 6 indies, and assuming equal distribution in each category, that writer is making about 3% (a tad less) of her income with each tradpub book... and 12.5% from each indie. 4 times as much.

This about matches some calculations I did on my purchases these past two weeks. I spent some 30+ EUR on ebooks. Had it been traditional, that would have given me two books (one and a half, with some publishers). Two writ... authors would have won a foothold in my house, a spearpoint into other people's buying habits, in addition to mine. And 5.67 EUR in royalties if they had a truly good contract.

With indies and small publishers, I got several bundles (some at around 2€/book; some at half that for the whole bundle), several writers I plan to follow (and I'm already doing that)... and even in those 0.99 cases, a total of 17.65€ for their writers.

But, of course, we've always known that indie paid better. But traditional had the publicity, the marketing, the push...

I don't want to draw false correlation, but you'll notice that the numbers are in similar neighbourhoods. About 3x-4x the income for indie.

Take care.