Publishing a Book Still Runs on a Model Most Industries Abandoned Decades Ago
Imagine pitching a business partnership where one side does all the work and the other side keeps most of the money. Nobody would take that deal in any other industry. In publishing, it's just called standard practice.
Traditional publishers keep 60 to 70 percent of an author's royalties. Not for the odd bad contract, for basically everyone. And in exchange, the author waits. A year, sometimes closer to two, before the manuscript they finished becomes an actual book on a shelf. Try explaining that arrangement to someone outside the industry and watch their face.
The strange part is how long this has gone unquestioned. Every other creative industry has been forced to modernise. Musicians stopped needing a label to reach an audience. Filmmakers stopped needing a studio's blessing to get distribution. Photographers stopped needing an agency to sell their work. Publishing kept the gatekeeper model largely intact, and somehow convinced a generation of authors that giving away most of their earnings was simply the price of being taken seriously.
Self-publishing was supposed to be the correction. In some ways it is. No agent to win over, no publisher taking the lion's share. But ask anyone who's actually done it properly and they'll tell you the trade-off: you become a project manager overnight. Proofreading, cover design, formatting, marketing, all of it now sits on your desk, priced out separately, coordinated on your own time. It's not exploitative the way traditional publishing can be. It's just exhausting in a different way.
What's actually changing is quieter than either of those two stories. A handful of full service platforms have started doing something traditional publishers never offered: keeping zero percent of royalties while still providing the team a traditional publisher would have. Australian Publishing Press is one of them, built specifically against the vanity press model where a flat fee gets you a printed book and nothing else.
It shouldn't be a radical idea. A business owner writing a book to build their credibility shouldn't have to choose between losing most of the royalties or losing most of their free time to project management. Yet for years, those were the only two options on the table.
The publishing industry likes to talk about itself as a guardian of quality. Fair enough, sometimes it is. But guarding quality and keeping 70 percent of someone else's work are two very different things, and conflating them has let the model go unchallenged for far longer than it deserved to.
Author Bio
Australian Publishing Press. https://australianpublishingpress.com.au/ | australianpublishingpress@gmail.com
