As it turns out, author-publishing money is not just in selling your ebooks on Amazon or Kobo. There’s money to made getting your popular books’ sub-rights sold by an open-minded agent.
Seven years ago, in the run-up to that year’s Agents & Editors conference, Laurie McLean answered a Q&A for the WLT. She noted that self-published titles are part of her client list. Authors publish their own novels and then McLean gets a chance to sell the sub-rights: movie tie-ins, audiobooks, foreign rights, and more.
She said, “I’ve got indie authors who have no interest in traditional deals because they’re making mid-six figure income from their self-published genre fiction. And I love selling their subrights. Heck, I negotiated a six-figure advance with Audible for books 7 and 8 in Brian D. Anderson’s epic fantasy series The Godling Chronicles. Six figures for audiobook rights? It’s a wild, wild time to be an agent!”
Mid-six figure earnings could be $500,000 or more for a self-published genre book. To get to that high ground, you’ll need to have money to invest and work hard, of course. But the ebook success will speed up selling the sub-rights. Anderson later signed a deal with Big Five titan Macmillan.
This self-published route to an audiobook or movie deal is an unsuitable path for the author who simply wants to write, revise, and answer a few blog Q&As for publicity. The world brims with self-published books that have that little means of being discovered or sold. There’s nobody on board to do the work to earn the book its discovery.
I first heard McLean speak in 2011 at the San Francisco Writers Conference; her agency Fuse Literary is based in the Bay Area. Profitable self-published books were a novelty in those days. A successful self-published book, making $50,000 or more, was rare. But even in 2011, she saw a genuine career path for the indie-published writer. On a panel back then, she said she’d talk with someone who desired a self-pub route.
