Picked a smaller publisher over a corporate deal for my book last spring

I had two offers for my manuscript about banned books in high schools. One was a mid-sized publisher in Austin that wanted total control over edits and marketing. The other was a tiny press run by a guy named Dave who let me keep my chapter on book bans but paid half the advance, about $1,500. I went with Dave because he promised no content cuts. It ended up selling around 200 copies on Amazon and I made maybe $300 total from royalties. The Austin publisher would have pushed it to libraries but they would have stripped out the parts about specific school board names. Has anyone else taken a smaller payout to keep their full story intact and regretted it or felt good about it?

2 comments

2 Comments

johnthompson25d ago

Blinked twice when I read that $300. That's brutal, man. You basically worked for pennies an hour after editing, formatting, and everything else that goes into a book. I'm not saying you made the wrong call but that advance is literally less than a month's rent in most places. Dave sounds like a decent guy but a $1,500 advance tells me he didn't have the resources to actually push your book anywhere meaningful. You traded away exposure and actual distribution for the right to name drop some school board members. Hope that chapter was worth it because 200 copies is basically just friends and family buying it.

sarahh4825d ago

Are you kidding me? $300 is more than a lot of indie authors see in their first year, and 200 copies sold is actually a solid start for a local niche book. Not everyone's goal is to be a NYT bestseller or quit their day job. Some people just want to tell a story that matters to their community, and Dave's deal gave John that exact platform without him having to take on any of the publishing risk himself. The fact that he got to influence actual policy by naming those board members is probably worth more to him than a bigger advance from a random corporate publisher who wouldn't have cared about the local angle. Plus, Dave kept the book alive for years, which is more than most small presses manage for titles that aren't instant hits. I'd rather have a small, real impact than a bunch of warehouse copies getting pulped after six months.