I've just gotten an email from a new "self-publishing platform" called Written (written.app), which is making suspiciously extravagant promises about the benefits they offer to authors.
After further research, this is just "upload your book with us and we'll make it an NFT :)"
There is a "thesis" that you can read right on their website if you're interested in looking for yourself at the business model of their grift, but if you'd like to save yourself the trouble, I've pulled out some of the highlights of the receipts over on Bluesky.
TLDR: I would not touch this platform with a ten-foot-pole. This is not a book-selling platform, this is a Coincidentally Book-Themed NFT Platform.
Hihi Mr Fawnduu. Was wondering how you make your physical comics? Like if you make them by hand what paper you use/how you print them/etc, or if you order them in what company you use? I am far from printing something like this myself but I’d enjoy the knowledge for future reference,,
I've been printing all my comics with www.keness.com for many years!
Super friendly guy who is happy to walk you through the process and sends a physical proof before continuing with the job so you can check everything over.
He's also obviously fine with printing NSFW/LGBTQ+ content and is always kind about it.
Every time, you guys. Every time I look into alternatives to Lulu.com for self-publishing I come up with “Wow Lulu really is the best of a bad set of options, huh?”
Recently, Draft2Digital bought Smashwords in order to bring a print book company under their aegis; they’d formerly only done ebooks. I thought I might investigate them as an alternative to Lulu, which I’ve used for about twelve years now. For ebooks I would venture D2D is probably top of the line. For print books they are....not.
I’m writing this out half so other folks can see it but half so that in the future I can look this up and remind myself of why I’m still with Lulu.
TLDR: Not only does Draft2Digital want 60% of my print book royalties where Lulu takes 0%, and $30 for a proof that costs me $11 at Lulu, but I also appear to have solved the problem of why Lulu was making me price my books so goddamn artificially high. Which is like. Honestly the best anti-anxiety drug I’ve experienced this week.
Basically there are a number of elements that go into self-publishing with a print-on-demand service. For some publishers, there’s a “setup fee” which doesn’t really set anything up, it’s just there to be a fee, everything is done by computer on the back end. Traditionally, Lulu has not charged a setup fee. Smashwords used to charge $50, but Draft2Digital currently waives it. I was heartened by that because the setup fee was keeping me from migrating, since I can afford $50 but I balk at knowing I’m paying them $50 for nothing.
Next is the cost of printing -- what it costs the company in paper, ink, machinery, labor, etc, to just make a book with no profit. Lulu’s price calculus isn’t super clear and I’ve never bothered looking at what the breakdown is, because they’re pretty up-front -- they tell you in the process of setting the book up how much it’ll cost. In this case, a 140-page 6x9 trade paperback, no frills, which is how all my books are printed, is $5. Draft2Digital doesn’t tell you the flat price anywhere but they do offer the breakdown information; it costs $1.22 flat plus $0.0133 per page. So, for a 140 page book, the at-cost is $3.08. So far so good.
Now, if you’re going to sell through Lulu, the “at cost” is the minimum price. You won’t make any money but you CAN charge just $5 for a $5 book. Any pricing above that is your cut. So -- let’s price this 140 page trade paperback at $13-$15. That’s a bit high to be honest but let’s just see. At Lulu, your take is roughly $6-$8 based on those prices, because you’re just dropping out the cost of printing from the retail price.
At Draft2Digital, the same 140-page trade paperback, which remember is quoted as costing roughly $1.20 less to print than Lulu charges, gets you $2.75-$3.50 in royalties per book.
....wait, what?
So now we need to sidetrack a little but I promise it’s for a reason. One of the motivations for looking into a change to Draft2Digital is that I didn’t like that Lulu was setting higher “minimum prices” than I was accustomed to -- they would tell me the book only cost $5 to print but require me to sell it for $12 or similar, and I couldn’t work out why. I’m an idiot but the penny did finally drop: it’s because when you distribute them outside of Lulu (say, on Amazon or Barnes & Noble or similar) your royalties drop like a stone. $7 in royalties purchased through Lulu comes out to like twenty-five cents purchased through Amazon. So Lulu forces you to price the book at a point where you even GET royalties and don’t end up weirdly owing Amazon money. The “global distribution” is what’s driving that minimum up.
So in price-quoting a competitor I actually solved the problem with Lulu.
Which is good, because the fun doesn’t stop there. If you want a proof copy of a book from Lulu, it’s the at-cost of the book, plus tax, plus postage. Buying a proof copy of this book from Lulu would cost me $11. Lulu makes you order a new proof copy every time you make a change, which is shady, but usually I only need to make 1-2 changes across the life of a book, so at most the cost will probably be $35 and for that I’ll get three copies of the book. Draft2Digital doesn’t give you an option. If you want a proof pre-publication, it’s $30 flat. If you want to publish and then buy a copy you can, but you can only make one change to the book every 90 days once it’s published. If you want to make more than one change, it’s $25 every time you upload a new version of the manuscript within that 90 day period.
So Draft2Digital’s books cost less to print but they take a massive cut of your royalties out of the retail cost of the book. If the book costs $3 to print, and I price it at $15, that’s $12 in profit on the book. Of that $12, however, I only receive $4. Draft2Digital literally wants 2/3 of my royalties per book. They want $20 more than Lulu to send me a proof copy. If I need to correct the proof, the correction is free, but I’m assuming the second proof will also cost me $30. Any changes after that, within 90 days, will cost $25 plus $30 for a new proof.
Which means my upfront costs at Lulu are about $35 per published book; to do the same thing at Draft2Digital is between $60 and $105 depending on whether I need to make changes after the second proof copy. And even after that, my royalties at Lulu are just about twice what they would be at Draft2Digital per purchase.
So, well, Lulu it is. And the problem I was having with Lulu is solved if I decide to just retail through Lulu rather than selling globally. Which...selling globally has done two things that I’m aware of:
1. Fucked up my author page so badly on Amazon that one of my books is still attributed to Kathleen Starbuck, and one of her books is for sale on my author page.
2. Raised the minimum price I’m allowed to set my books at by like, 40%.
So I think probably what’s going to happen is going forward my books will be for sale only on Lulu. I can still assign them ISBNs and they still will ship worldwide, and the prices will fall significantly. My deepest apologies to those of you who have paid an artificially inflated price for the last few books; I’m going to fix that going forward, I’m going to go in and try to fix it retroactively in the books that are already on Lulu, and if it’s any consolation at least the cash came to me, and TWO THIRDS OF IT didn’t go to Lulu.
It’s gonna take me a little time, untangling Lulu’s relationship to other retailers is tricky, but eventually the Shivadh Omnibus and Twelve Points should come down significantly in price, and there ought to be a dollar or two drop for the older books as well.
This is why it always pays to do the math, even if like me you are dreadful at it.
Captain Jonah Morgan was damn tired of taking in strays. The logic was simple: a larger crew meant solving more problems, and solving more problems meant caring about more people. The more people he cared for, the more he’d someday watch die.
Today was QuestPit over on bluesky, so hey, why not post some of my pitch materials on here, too!
after months of planning, drafting and executing, it's about time i let the cat out of the bag. right?
i'm self-publishing my debut novel, IN THE END, YOU KILL US BOTH, on October 19th, 2024.
IN THE END is an adult literary horror and queer coming-of-age about the first three months following a nineteen-year-old arsonist's release from an out-of-state mental health facility and the dark, spiralling path she takes after falling in with a suspected cannibal.
this book is an ode to the indigestible ways we process trauma, grief and our own desires. it is my heart project, through and through, and i can't wait to share leo & elowen with all of you.
