Should Indie Authors Have Ebooks (Or Paperbacks)?

Indie author guru Bryan Cohen runs something he calls the Five Day Author Ad Challenge every quarter. It’s a good experience for coming to grips with the basics of Amazon Ads, and I’ve recommended it to a lot of people who’ve had good results with it. I didn’t do it this year, but I’m still in the Facebook group and see the posts that come up every quarter.

One really caught my eye. A new author was resistant to the idea that she should have an ebook at all. She only wanted to sell paperbacks and not bother with ebooks.

Which leads to the obvious question. Should indie authors have ebooks?

Well, yes. Not to be harsh, but the answer will obviously almost always be yes.

For any kind of genre fiction, it will be far easier to sell ebooks than paperbacks. The Five Day Author Ad Challenge does have a lot of very new authors, and new authors not infrequently have a clear idea in their heads about how they hope it will go. Often they will talk about how they want to hold their paperback book in their hands, see it on the shelf of the local bookstore and local library, maybe have a table at the local book fair where they can sign books. Sometimes there will be a digression about the Smell & Feel Of A Paper Book.

However, this romantic dream then runs into the cold reality of economics – it’s very difficult to sell paperback books. Paperback books are expensive, and because of inflation and supply chain stuff with paper, they’re getting even more expensive. The day of the $5 mass market paperback is long past. And in the day of the mass market paperback, the author didn’t get all that much money – like $0.10 to $0.25 a copy, and sometimes less than even that.

Granted, nowadays the margins are better for self-published authors, but the economics still aren’t great. My most recent book, GHOST IN THE SERPENT, is $13.99 in trade paperback on Amazon. If the reader buys a copy of of the paperback on Amazon, I get about $3, and if they buy it through another platform, I get a little over $1. This is definitely better than the days of a $5 mass market paperback, but it’s still very expensive for the reader. By contrast, the ebook of GHOST IN THE SERPENT is only $4.99, and for every sale on every platform I get around $3.50.

Which is the point – it is much, much easier to sell a $4.99 ebook than a $13.99 trade paperback. And I get slightly more money from an ebook sale than I do from a paperback one.

So genre fiction will almost always be more profitable in ebook than in paperback for the indie author. (I really mean “always” but I said “almost always” to include flukes of fate and acts of God.)

Outside of genre fiction, it’s a little more varied, but it’s still a good idea to have an ebook. Certain kinds of nonfiction sell more strongly in paperback than in ebook. Children’s books, especially ones aimed at toddlers and younger children, sell way better in paper than in ebook. The reason for this is logical enough – toddlers and small children often like to throw things, and are you going to give a four-year-old a $399 iPad or a children’s book? There are also various specialty forms of nonfiction – cookbooks, technical manuals, and so forth – that do well in paperback. Or if you have a book that has a lot of interior pictures, which is often true of cookbooks and other speciality nonfiction.

That said, most indie writers will have an easier time selling ebooks than paperbacks.

Which leads to the next question – should indie authors have paperbacks? Especially the writers of genre fiction I just described above, the ones who will probably sell more ebooks than paperback?

The answer to that is: yes, if possible, and it’s usually quite possible.

It used to be quite a bit harder to make paperback books, especially the interior. You would need to copy and paste the chapters of your book into a specially prepared Word document, and formatting it was a serious pain. Now several software programs have come along than can automate the process for you. The one I use is Vellum, which automatically generates nicely formatted ebook and paperback book files for you. I believe you can do the same thing in Scrivener and Atticus, but I’ve never tried it. You can either make a wrap-around cover for your book, or use the automated tools include with KDP Print and Draft2Digital print to make a cover. Most indies use either KDP Print or Draft2Digital Print to make their paperbacks. You can also use Ingram Spark and several other services, but Ingram Spark has a way sharper learning curve and tends to be more expensive.

You almost certainly will not sell as many print books and ebooks, especially if you’re writing genre fiction, but paperbacks can be a nice bit of bonus income. Especially since it isn’t all that much additional work to set up a paperback.

But that leads to the next question. You’ve got an ebook and a paperback of your book. Should you have an audiobook?

The answer is “it depends.” You know how sometimes you ask an accountant or a lawyer a tax question and the answer is “no, except yes, but sometimes maybe?” The reason for that is that US tax law is so immensely complicated that the answer to any question about it can vary wildly depending upon an individual’s or company’s particular circumstances.

The same thing is true with indie authors and audiobooks.

If you want to sell an audiobook, you will almost certainly need to pay for a human narrator. At the moment, I think Google Play is the only storefront that allows the sale of AI-narrated audiobooks, so long as you do it with Google Play’s built-in tool. Which I’ve tested, and is actually pretty good. Amazon has also just started testing AI-generated audiobooks for sale, though they only just announced it in the first week of November 2023. That said, I suspect you realistically aren’t going to be able to charge very much for it (imagine the reviews along the lines of “I paid $13.99 for this computer voice! One star!”), and people generally don’t like AI-narrated audiobooks. My experiments with AI-narrated audiobooks on YouTube generated a lot of comments along the lines of “I like the story, but this voice sucks.” That will almost certainly be true for any AI-generated audiobook for fiction or nonfiction with a lot of emotion in it, like a memoir. It would probably work for something very dry, like a book about tax law or real estate licensure.

Realistically, if you want to make any money from a fiction audiobook, you will almost certainly need a human narrator, and I mean “almost certainly” in the same sense I meant it above.

So when I say “it depends” on whether or not you should pursue an audiobook, what it “depends” on is your financial status and business requirements. To get a good narrator, you can expect to pay in the $200 to $400 range. You can also get a narrator via royalty share, where you don’t pay the narrator up front, but then you and the narrator split any royalties from the book for seven years. If you do pay up front, depending on your business structure there’s a very good chance this will be deductible and may help you greatly at tax time (though, as always, for tax advice consult an accountant qualified for your taxing jurisdiction). It’s also important to note that self-publishing audio is a bit like regular self-publishing but on Hard Mode – the mechanics are the same, but everything is more difficult. Whether to pursue audio or not is a question that must be left up to the individual author and publisher.

So, to sum up, should indie authors have ebooks, paperbacks, and audiobooks?

For ebooks and paperbacks, definitely yes. For audiobooks, if your circumstances allow for it and it’s something you’re interested in pursuing.

-JM