Dale Beaumont

Yeah, best-selling in Australia is where the best-selling comes from.

So best-selling in Australia is to sell 10,000 copies per book.

But with the whole series, we sold 250,000, so a quarter of a million copies.

2005 and 2007 so it's kind of uh we only just put them on amazon actually probably around about two years ago so they were all sold uh through bookshops in australia um and not through amazon really wasn't uh you know even in australia until uh last year yep and did you decide to did you set up your own kind of publishing company to manage that or who'd you decide to deal with

Yeah, I self-published all of those books and that enabled me to obviously control the content and to be able to have a direct relationship with the distributor and bookshops.

And yeah, that was something that I did over 10 years ago.

Yeah, so most publishers, like, for example, Random House, are actually publisher distributors.

They publish and they distribute into all the bookshops.

However, if you break up the food chain, there is a series of independent distributors out there that all they do is they just do distribution, meaning they have a sales force around the country to get the book into bookshops.

So they work with either international publishers or only need distribution in that particular market, or they deal with self-published authors that have a book

that know how to produce it that know how to print it and can get a ready-made product and they take it and distribute it into bookshops so i use a the largest independent book distributor um in australia to be able to take the books and to get into bookshops so essentially i was not the author but also the publisher as well i see that makes sense and what cut do you give the distributor what do you pay them so they normally um you get 35 percent normally as a um

If you go through a major publisher, you normally get a 10% royalty and that's it.

If you go directly to a distributor, you'd get 35% out of which you take your costs.

So if your costs are around about 5% to 7%, then you're probably left with just a little bit more, maybe 15% to 20% is kind of what you're left with.

And that means potentially you can double the amount of money that you make per book.

But the real benefit of

doing what I've done, which is self-publishing, is that you basically are buying your book at cost.

You're buying your book at $2, where if you go through a mainstream publisher, oftentimes they'll sell the book back to you, the author, at, say,

50% less retail.

And if retail was, say, $20, they sell it back to you for, say, $10.