He just posted some interesting numbers over on his blog:
Since 2004, Whiskey Sour has sold about 60,000 copies in print and ebooks. That's earned me about $54,000 not including foreign sales. (Not bad considering I got a $33k advance for it.)
...
Compare those numbers to The List.
In six years, I'll have sold 108,396 copies. Almost double what Whiskey Sour has sold. And I'll have earned over $200k--almost four times what I earned with Whiskey Sour.
I'd hope that this has the Big 6 worried. He's a solid mid list author who can prove that he's better off without them. They'd better come up with a pretty damn good reason why other mid list authors actually need a publisher. Otherwise, they're screwed.
The problem is that his self published numbers are in the aggregate so you aren’t comparing apples to apples you are comparing a bushel of apple sales to one singular apple.
I don’t see what you mean. He compares the sales of 1 title to the sales of another.
Ah – I thought that his six years has to do with a number of different books rather than just one book. Sorry!
Well, I know of at least one mid list author who isn’t buying it. She posted the link to the same post you used on her Facebook – and basically saying, “That’s nice, but we NEED publishers!” However, as a reader, looking in from the outside, if you will, I have to agree with Joe. Seems to me publishers screw authors any which way they can get by with, and authors beg for more. It makes no sense to me.