Wherein I Continue To Keep Paying Authors Even If The Quarter Sucked

(Note:  This is talking about the books I publish as Alliteration Ink, and does not include numbers for those books which I distribute.)

I’ve had a lot going around in my head about the way I do business, especially since I started last month by getting questioned semi-publicly about the viability of my business model.1

It didn’t help seeing fourth quarter’s earnings. They kind of sucked. All the numbers were down, across the board. I’m not sure why they’re so low. Maybe the economy. Maybe series fatigue. Maybe a lack of in-person publicity. Maybe all of the above to varying degrees.

And then I realized something as I was preparing my end-of-year earnings statements for the authors2:

My business model means that these books still exist, and can keep earning money for the authors.

The royalty-based books can have a bad quarter, a slow launch, or any number of things happen, and it not matter at all. It’s not good, but it’s not the devastating blow that it would have been without modern technologies. I can keep selling the books indefinitely…and paying the authors indefinitely. And that’s something awesome.

In 2013, I am going to be “levelling up” in a couple of different ways. One of them is experimenting more with different pay structures for authors in order to make sure that they get paid, and paid as well as I can manage.

It’s nice to know that there’s something in place that already works and can keep working, even if things suck for a while.

1 Long story, made more dramatic by misinterpretations all around.
2 Which did not count authors selling their own author copies.