Jessie Childs

I read an excellent book by an author named Jessie Childs, and I reviewed it with five stars on Amazon.  I was astonished to see only one review when I got there, the book is way too good for only 3 stars.  Well, since there was only one other review, she is on average now at 4 stars.  Very strange for a world class book, and her sales are in the 700,000 range, at least today (meaning none...)

I googled her to email her to suggest she remind admiring readers to review her book on amazon.com.  She has a website, but all contact with her must be though her agent and publisher.

Two things wrong here... to sell books today you must offer "you" to the reader as well.  You can make them pay on a "closer you get, the more you pay" basis, but direct contact must be there.  Childs needs an email address she reads, a snail mail address she attends.  Childs cannot be contacted directly.  A reader wants to write the author, not the agent.

In my particular case, some of what I will say the agent will not like, so it is unlikely to be forwarded.

And her book is with limited access on GoogleBooks, another mistake.  If researchers cannot land on every page of the book, they are less likely to find what they are looking for and buy the book.

No doubt she believes her publishers, a world-class outfit, will take care of all of the necessary promotion for her. Well, several years into publication and just two ratings on Amazon?  She is an excellent talent.  She needs to perish her publisher and start making top dollar as a writer.

Working For Royalties

I just got a quote for printing my next book.  These will land at about $2.00, amazon sells for $16...  they take 55%, so $8.80 to them...  $7.20 gross to me, less $2.00 cost... is $5.20 gross profit.  Out of the $5.20 comes the expenses of running the business of selling the book. Self-employed,  it takes my time and creativity to sell the book.  It takes technology to do so, mine.  It takes travel and entertainment, etc.  Mine.  How much net profit is up to me. What the tax rate is, is up to the politicians.  Like Senator Reid said, taxes are voluntary.

People who rely on royalties may earn say 5%.  Say they get a check for $10,000 and the tax rate is 30%, so they net $7000.  

$10,000 is 5% of $200,000. So for an author to earn the $10,000 royalty, a publisher has to move 12,500 copies. For an author to earn the same $10,000 in the perish your publisher method, the author need only sell 1923 copies.

If I sold $200,000 worth of this book on Amazon.com, that would be 12,500 copies.  At $5.20 each gross, that would yield $65,000 for me.  I can spend that money on things I think need to be done.  Develop a business website in which you put the zip code of your best customers, and a program spits out other zip codes in USA with similar demographics, so you can keep finding where to prospect for your best customers.  I can develop white board technology for editing books that allows for 50 pages to be shown and edited at once.  I can spend a month in Hong Kong and London researching a book on free trade. All of this takes my time, creativity and the income from the sale of the books, but it is what I love to do.  It is all business related.  What is left over is taxed.

Now, a person earning royalties can also spend his $10,000 on whatever he wants as a business expense as well.  In both instances there is the subtle point that the money being spent is pretax.  (If you needed $65,000 to develop a new whiteboard, but if you had no business, and you were an employee, you would start with your own money, after tax dollars, so you'd have to earn say $100,000 at your job to net the $65,000 after taxes to finance your project.)

More: if I sold 12,500 in a year, I'd be buying at least at the 5000 copy level, so my landed drops to $1.00, and so my gross profit jumps from $5.20 to $6.20, from $65,000 to $77,500, that I must spend or have taxed, my choice.  Someone earning royalties still gets only $10,000.  (How do you think publishers afford those swank offices in New York?)

Why anyone would do all the work to create a book out and then leave all the profits to someone else, I do not know.  Authors mount lawsuits against Amazon.com and Google over copyright violations, when Amazon.com and Google.com can assist you in sextupling your income, or more, as a writer.  Authors desperately work to keep their incomes as low as possible, slavishly demanding that copyright laws be enforced.  Not only is there no basis for copyrights in theory or practice,  it is just plain nuts to write for royalties.

News Roundup

Peter Thiel says we are in another Bubble, this time it's education.

NYTimes wants to know if it can be online and education...

Here is a blog covering well copyright law and changes...

Here University Of Texas advises employees on "fair use"

Amazon POD Suggests A Kind of PYP Strategy

Amazon.com's POD imprint, CreateSpace, offers the chance to get your worked critiqued and feedback as you create... my goodness this sounds familiar...

Monetize Websites

The website may be “monetized” immediately. Anyone vending anything relating to your field, Amazon in particular, will be glad to pay you a commission on any sales you drive to their sites from your site. As you blog, you may be referring to movies, books, tools of the trade, all with links to online vendors. These payments are commonly called affiliate fees. Some states are taxing the vendors for paying these fees, so it's no longer available to people in every state, pending a Supreme Court challenge. There is a way to monetize a website without the ads. Simply take donations, whatever that entails as far as reporting to the IRS, although this entails setting yourself up as a nonprofit organization. For example, here is a remarkable website one teacher put up: http://www.khanacademy.org/. 

Tim O'Reilly On Copyrights

Tim O'Reilly is a powerhouse innovator in publishing, with books, courses, trade shows and endless other gigs.  And what does he have to say about copyrights?  When asked in April 11 Forbes, page 24, about why he dropped digital rights management on his media, and fear of piracy, he says:

"People who don't pay generally wouldn't have paid you anyway.  We are delighted when people who can't afford out books don't pay us for them, if they go out and do something useful with that information."

Just so, And here is a young author who has done well with online self-publishing, well worth a read...

NYTimes Faces Facts

Even the New York Times is not trying to get every dime...  sometimes you have to let people sneak into your classes for free... first, they are not your customers anyway... and 2nd, the cost of keeping them out is too expensive...  So, next question... if your customers can have it for free, but they will pay for it anyway... then why have copyrights?

Some readers will get around paywall: NY Times

March 24, 2011 - 3:20AM

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The publisher of The New York Times said Wednesday that some people will manage to find ways around paying for the newspaper online but they will mostly be teenagers and the unemployed.

"We did create something purposely porous," Arthur Sulzberger said of the system being implemented by the Times to begin charging readers next week for full access to NYTimes.com.

"Can people go around the system?" Sulzberger asked during an appearance at The Paley Center for Media here. "The answer is yes. There are going to be ways.

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"Just as if you run down Sixth Avenue right now and you pass a newsstand and grab the paper and keep running you can actually get the Times free," he said.

"We have to accept that. Is it going easy? No. Is it going to be done by the kind of people who buy the quality news and opinion of the New York Times?

"We don't think so," he said.

"It'll be mostly high school kids and people out of work," Sulzberger said, before adding "I can't believe I said that."

The Times will offer readers 20 free articles a month at NYTimes.com before they will be asked to sign on to one of three digital subscription plans that cost from $15 to $35 a month.

Web users who find articles through links from Internet search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter will be able to read those articles even after reaching their monthly reading limit.

There will be a five-article a day limit of free links to articles to readers who visit NYTimes.com from Google or Microsoft's Bing.

Sulzberger said he believed the Times plan to charge online would work because "unfortunately quality journalism is less and less out there."

"There are fewer and fewer news organizations that have foreign correspondents," he said. "There are fewer and fewer that have national correspondents."

"We have more foreign bureaus than ever in our history," he said of the Times. "We have more national bureaus, probably, than ever in our history as well."

Sulzberger also said print was not going away anytime soon. "All of us think that print has very long legs, longer than people expect," he said.

© 2011 AFP
This story is sourced direct from an overseas news agency as an additional service to readers. Spelling follows North American usage, along with foreign currency and measurement units.