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Guild of Blades Fiction Group
Basic Business Model
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The Guild of Blades Publishing Group is a new player in the fiction publishing arena. Due to troubling times within the mass book distribution channels which have made it very difficult for the large fiction houses to maintain profitability and next to impossible for new fiction publishers to gain any effective distribution at all, the Guild of Blades Fiction Group will be implementing a completely different approach. The primary marketing and sales venue for the Fiction Group shall be the Internet. Intergrated within the Guild of Blades online network, linked closely to the Guild's gaming products and online support pages, and marketing through an affiliate program. In addition to this, our fiction novels will be marketed and sold through the hobby game distribution channels, then lastly, be made available for special ordering to the traditional book chains. Finally, we intend to encourage and support our authors towards pushing the sales of thier own works. Authors can support books at conventions, with local retailers, and online, more directly than the publisher can. We will make all books we publish for sale to their authors at our distribution wholesale rate, minus our standard royalty payout for books sold. Hence a book with a retail price of $6.95, a wholesale price of $2.85, and a standard royalty payout of $.50 per book would be made for sale to the author for $2.35. This provides enough margin for the authors to profitably become a retailer of their own books, and even the potential for them to act as distributor of said books to retailers they can support in their local area. Author participation in this manner is not at all required to be an author for the Fiction Group, it is merely another means we've allowed for more copies of an author's books to be sold. |
In the more traditional publisher-author relationship the author royalty arrangement would work something like the following. 1) Publisher signs author to an optional 3 book contract. They foward the author an "advance" on royalties ranging between $1,000 to $5,000. These days, for first or second time published authors, the "advance" tends to be on the lower side of that range. The advance on royalties is usually against 5-12 points on book sales revenues. Newer publishers typically earn 6-8 points. That means if a book sells for $6.95, and the publisher's wholesale (traditional 55% off the retail price) price is $3.13, an author earning 6 points gets 6% of $3.13 for each book sold. That would be roughly $.19 per book. So, with an advance of $1,000, the other would get no additional royalties until the publisher had sold more than 5263 books. 2) Publisher releases the first
book written by the author. Publisher prints the utter minimum quantity
they can, which is usually 5,000 books printed through a traditional printer.
If the publisher can't sell at least 3,000 of those books, they won't use
their contract option to have the author write the second book. Over 90%
of first time authors fail to sell more than 1,500 books. The author doesn't
get the complete the series, doesn't see any royalties above the initial
advance, and has a very tough time ever landing another contract
with another of the major publishers.
The Guild of Blades Fiction Group will publish its books in a more print-to-order fashion. As a publisher, we can turn a profit selling only a fraction as many books. We can do this because we own our own printing presses and run a color print consolidation business. This allows us to print just 1,000 book covers, then produce and assemble the rest of the book in quantities as low as 50-100 copies at a time. As such, any author that can write a book for the Group which sells just several hundred units will continue to get new contracts and thus new royalties. In order for this model to work, we offer zero advance payment on royalties. We also offer no royalties on the first 150 books sold for each 1,000 book produced. This is because once we've sold just 150 books, the company should have effectively "broke even" on the production of 1,000 book covers, book cover and interior art, and production of those sold to date. After 150 total copies of a book have been sold, the Fiction Group will pay out royalties on each book sold. Royalty checks will be sent out once each fiscal quarter. The amount of royalties paid per book will depend on a number of factors. The first of those will be page count of the book. Smaller books command less of a retail price (typically $5.95), while large books can command higher price points (Typically $7.95, but can be more). Also influencing the royalties paid, per contract with the author, is the past sales performance of other books they have written for the Fiction Group. Strong selling authors may be rewarded a premium on top of our standard book size royalty base. Standard royalties base on book size are listed below: 200-260 page books = $.35 per book
sold. (Retail $5.95)
If your book is more than 600 pages, well, it becomes difficult for us to print and turn a profit with. You need to sell high volumes in order for it to become cost effective for the publisher. As a general rule we won't be publishing anything larger than 600 pages. In addition to the royalties listed above, we double royalty payments for books we sell direct to the consumer over the Internet. So, if your book sells through the first 1,000 copies we print, assuming it was a 300 page book, then your base royalties would be $340. If a third of those are sold online, then there would be a bonus of $133. So, a total of $473 per 1,000 books sold. So, if you books sells only 2,000 copies over a couple of years, your royalties would be $946, about what you might expect from a larger publisher these days. The difference thus becomes, we reward authors who write books that sell well, and further reward those who support their works. If you sold 5,000 books through us, your royalties would likely be greater than those you would recieve from a larger publisher. But if you don't sell 5,000 books, or even just 500 books, you'll likely get to write more books beyond the first. So for authors looking to establish a name for themselves, the Fiction Group is ideal as well. The down side, of course, is you don't the nice cash advance against future royalties. Lastly, you will find the Guild of Blades Fiction Group more than willing to work with new authors. Our team of others will help new authors to get better, as the more total books in print by the Fiction Group, the more likely that we'll be able to establish stronger book chain presence for all of our authors. For the authors not yet deemed to be up to "publishing" quality writings yet will still find a home here as we will gladly publish those authors short works written for the Fiction Group along with our more experienced authors' works. |