Paying for the Obvious? I Don't Think So.

So, what advantages do traditional publishers offer authors that self-published authors can’t find for themselves?

Digital Book World knows, and for $295, it’ll sell you a 2.68 megabyte PDF of a study it did finding out.

Alas, I’m too cheap to shell out that many beans for the study, so a look at the analyses done by others will have to suffice.

Here’s what the folks at GalleyCat say:

• The majority of authors make less than $1,000 a year (no surprise there).
•  Almost 80 percent of self-published authors and 50 percent of traditionally-published authors fall into that category (again, no surprise there).
• Ten percent of traditionally-published authors make more than $10,000 a year, with half of that number reaching the same monetary plateau among self-published authors (again, no real surprise).

Digital Book World, through its press release, offers the following:

Authors held favorable views of traditional publishing and expected that traditional publishing would offer several advantages over self-publishing, and most of the authors wanted to publish their next book with a traditional publisher. However, authors experiences with traditional publishing seemed to fall short of expectation, and authors were not overall highly satisfied with their experiences with traditional publishers.

Again:

Obviously, this study is either really boring, GalleyCat didn’t pay the $295 either or Digital Book World is holding the best gems tight to its chest until enough people pay the cash.

What did they expect to discover? That the moon reflects sunlight?

I might revisit this topic in a few weeks after more details of the report leak out. If more details are not forthcoming, then I’ll suspect either the report reports some pretty obvious stuff, or Digital Book World’s goons are more efficient than we’ve been led to believe.