My answer: Money, distribution, time and quality.

Money: You’re not risking your own money, and a publisher will invest a lot more than you want to risk. A trade book will usually cost more than $20,000 to launch. Yes, self-publishers can substitute time for money, and there are other ways to economize, but any commercial publishing venture takes a big old wad of cash.

Distribution: Even a modest-sized house will have better distribution than you’ll be able to secure on your own. Yes, anyone can sell online, even through the biggest sites, like Amazon. But that leaves a lot of potential sales and readers that you’re not reaching. You can trade volume for margin, but it’s a move that needs to be carefully examined.

Time: Publishing well is a lot more complicated than it seems. You can certainly learn to do it. There are even books on most parts of the process, and if you read three or four overviews, one or two on design, a couple on editing, three to five books on publicity and book marketing, and a couple on the general business aspects of running a publishing company, you’ll learn a lot of the basics, but that’s eleven to fifteen books, plus time to try the techniques and practice. By the time you’ve learned to publish at all well, you could have written another couple of manuscripts.

Quality: Most “civilians” don’t consciously see the difference between a pedestrian cover design and a good one, let alone the difference between a pro’s text layout and an amateurish job. But these “trivial” differences do matter in the end. They can make someone decide to buy or not to buy your book, on an unconscious level.

All the people who decide what gets onto the bookshelves can tell the difference at a glance. These standards are the way they are because they work.

So, yes, Virginia, you can self-publish successfully. There are even a few people who use one of the so-called “self-publishing companies” successfully. But your chances of getting a larger readership, or of getting a decent living, from the effort are much better if you sign up with an experienced publishing team.

So, that’s a very short answer to a very complicated question. Which points did I gloss over, or even get completely backwards? If you’re still with me after that last hiatus, you must have an opinion. Let’s hear it!

We all also know that this is easier said than done for print books, even with the advent of databases like Nielsen Bookscan, but it’s practically impossible for ebooks. So far. Bookscan doesn’t measure sales for ebooks. You can’t call Ingram and get sales numbers for them, either.

And no one knows what the Amazon ranks for ebooks mean — not to mention, that those volumes for a given rank would change wildly in the future, as ebooks become more popular. So, we can’t really predict the volume for a given price.

What can we do? We can say that for certain types of books, certain price expectations are becoming common. For example, Amazon has made $9.99 the norm for a trade book currently in hardback. And the ebooks of titles currently available in mass market paperbacks tends to range between $3.99 and $6.39, with the upper end representing current and high-volume books, and the lower end representing backlist.

And yes, Virginia, there is a backlist for mmp in ebooks. Who knew that this was possible?? Of course, it wasn’t for print books, because of the economics of producing, storing, shipping and selling the physical object, but ebooks make it work.

In short, we’re going to have to fall back upon the old standard: find your books’ competitive titles, and price your book to meet that competition.

Will that offer you enough revenue to cover your costs? Or even, wonder of wonders, make a profit?? That is, indeed, the question. And what costs should you consider?

1. Royalties. Authors deserve to get an amount similar to the amount they get for the sale of a print copy, in my opinion. Not a similar rate, but a similar total. That may well mean that the rate is double or triple the royalty rate for print, given the smaller list prices. And publishers should consider setting the breakpoints so that we’re splitting the proceeds evenly with authors after our investments have been recovered.

2. Marketing: getting the message out to your readers is pretty much the same thing, whether you’re selling a print book or an ebook. Same types of people, same reasons to want the book, same selling points in the book. (Currently a smaller total pool of potential buyers, but that will change, I suspect.)

3. Plant costs (that’s publishing jargon for the fixed costs of preparing the manuscript for publication): the only one you don’t have, for the Kindle and some other types, and for now!, is compostion/text design. All of the editing still needs to be done (structural/ developmental, line, and copy-editing are all important to the quality of the final book). Cover images are still necessary. Etc, etc.

If the ebook is just an extra dab of icing on top of the cake of a book you’d do anyway, then the plant costs are almost irrelevant, but that’s obviously not going to be the case for very long.

4. Distribution: yes, you don’t need to ship the physical object, but you DO still need to pay those who own the channels through which you reach your reader. That may be Amazon or Fictionwise, or whoever, but it’s still a very large chunk of the revenue, if not most of it.

5. Cannibalization of Print Sales: whether through piracy, or because you believe that your readers would buy print if and only if they didn’t buy an ebook, it is possible that ebook sales will cut into your pbook sales. It doesn’t seem as if this happens yet for most types of titles, but it’s something that every publisher should consider.

In the end, only you can tell if the projected sales revenue will exceed the costs for a given title. And the only way to do that is to run your numbers, just as you did for a print book.

Some things never change.

And, since ebooks and digital reading are still embryonic, at less than 1/2 of 1% of the total industry, I’m sure that the answer will change.

In the music world, an enormous amount of the digital music is freeware — legitimately given away by the rightsholders, with the hope that it will be passed on to others. Some people think that the book world should follow suit. I have some thoughts on the issue. (Surprised? I thought not!)

What models are there, so far?

1. Advertising. (This includes sponsorships, product placement and overt ads.) This hasn’t worked even for magazines and newspapers on the Web, and it’s a lot less likely to work for books. Books aren’t timely, there aren’t circulation figures that you can reliably pitch to sponsors, and so on and so forth. I’m not even going to class this as an “It depends” unless you’re selling the umpteenth installment in a successful series.

2. Selling ancillary products. Musicians do shows. Authors? Not so much. There are consultants who use books as expensive calling cards, and high-profile speakers who are able to follow this model, but there aren’t many of them. If you are among them, grand. Giving away copies of a book virally in order to add energy to another career is a great idea, but it’s not going to work for most of us.

3. Electronic ARCs or galleys. This really does work for most of us. The model is the same as the ARC on paper: give away some copies in order to build buzz for the rest. It could be that you’re giving away your current book, or it could be something from the deep backlist, but make sure that you help people understand the limits on the permitted sharing. That can be accomplished by DRM (as in the giveaways on the Kindle) or by actually asking recipients to limit their sharing, but it needs to be made overt in some way.

4. Giving up on compensation entirely. Many musicians and other artists create for the emotional rewards, knowing that they’re highly unlikely to ever make a living at it. This does work for many authors, but most of us want to make a living. And books tend to take longer to create than songs, or most other artforms.

So, what models did I miss?

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