These are the best places to self-publish your novel

“I make about 2.5x more from my self-published books than I do from my traditionally published ones, and that’s largely due to earning MUCH more on each individual sale,” says the author Michael J. Sullivan in a comment on one of my articles.

Sullivan, as it turns out, secured his publishing deal with Orbit Books around the same time N.K. Jemisin did — his advance was $22,500, hers was $25,000. Initially, he sold more books than she did, but eventually she did, their paths crossing as each attempted mastery over their perspective genres.

But then they diverged — Sullivan decided to self-publish, Jemisin stayed with Orbit. “I was earning a full-time income long before she did (mainly due to my self-published novels),” Sullivan says. “She ‘should’ have been able to make a living wage but the low payout of the traditional model meant she had to turn to Patreon in order to quit her day job.”

Using KDSPY — an analytics tool which uses Amazon rankings and the price of a book to estimate author income — Sullivan estimates that now “N.K.’s Amazon ebooks earn $33,818 per month (her cut of that would be $5,038) and my KDSPY numbers are $8,844 but my cut of that is much higher (because many of my titles are self-published).”