Reader question: ebook, paperback, or audiobook?
Reader Daniel asks:
“I know you do paperback and ebook and now audiobooks. Which do you prefer to do? Which one makes you the most profit?”
Oh, ebooks, definitely. A couple of reasons. They’re the easiest to do, and also the cheapest. You can make an ebook entirely with free software. They’re also the easiest to sell, because I have the fullest control over pricing. I can make the first ebook in a long series (like GHOSTS) free. Can’t do that with paperbacks or ebooks.
Paperbacks are a little harder to prepare, but not that much. I used to have to prepare the interior files by hand, but then I got Vellum for Mac, and that automates the process. I can make the files for a paperback edition in about twenty minutes now. I technically make more per copy with paperbacks than ebooks, but I sell way more ebooks than paperback books. My bestselling paperback book is THE LINUX COMMAND LINE BEGINNER’S GUIDE, and over the last few months, I’ve made more from the paperback version of that book than the ebook, which surprised me. But I think there’s more demand for paperback books in nonfiction than in fiction.
Audiobooks are tricky and difficult because they’re kind of their own thing, separate from ebooks and paperbacks. Don’t think of audiobooks as a “book”, think of them as a “one man or woman radio play adaptation”. (Except for the super-fancy Audible.com productions with a full cast, which really are full-scale radio plays.) The biggest challenge with audiobooks is the large upfront cost to hire a narrator. The reason the upfront cost is large is because reading a book aloud comprehensibly is really hard (I can’t do it – I can barely get a sentence out coherently most days) and because there are other costs associated with preparing the audiobook, like editing and corrections and mastering and so on. (Some narrators do this themselves, others hire it out.)
But! I did make more from audiobooks than from paperbacks in 2018, and I only had self-published audiobooks available for the last two months of 2018. So I have hopes for continued growth in 2019!
Audio rights are the only rights I will even think about selling to a publisher because the upfront cost for audio is substantial. As of right now, there is absolutely no way I would even consider selling ebook or paperback rights to a publisher. I can do it myself 1.) more cheaply, 2.) more efficiently, 3.) faster, and 4.) more profitably.
So, to sum up, ebooks are my favorite, but I definitely want to be in paperbacks and audiobooks as well.
-JM