Author Website Service - Books.by

Hello, good people of the blogosphere! I bet you all missed me like crazy, huh? Well, I missed THIS. Once we got moved, our renovation wasn't done, so I took hold of the job and bossed a lot of people around for a number of weeks. It finished pretty quickly after that. Now, we're somewhat settled and getting into a routine, so I'm back, like I said last week. Man, it's good to be back and giving you all something worth reading.

Soooooo... Today, we're gonna look at one of those author website offerings called Books.by. These guys say they outdo Amazon for self publishers because they don't take a portion of your sales. Let's check them out and do some math, shall we? Here's what their homepage looks like:

I closed the popup, and you can see the tabs at the top. We'll go through each one then math ourselves into a coma after we scroll down the page a bit. Sound good?

Scrolling down, I see this:

It seems like these folks are loving the platform, so I did a little digging. Claire Messud is indeed an author (here's her Wiki page), but her website looks a bit like a shell. For a woman that's published at least ten novels, it seems as though nothing is clickable. Only one of her books is listed on her Books.by page.

Author John Buck seems like a real author, too, and all his books are on editing.

This search sent me down the mother of all rabbit holes. Apparently, the site is owned by Tablo Publishing. You should check this Reddit thread out. Also check out this page on Kindlepreneur (they mathed, too, but not as hard as I math below). 

Also, what's with this math on the homepage?

That math ain't mathing... $31 for each sale? Something's rotten in the state of Denmark, y'all, and I'm fairly certain it ain't the fish.

Anyway, you can go down your own rabbit hole, but let's move on to the About Us page! Right away, we get this cartoon talking about royalties disappearing.

Snark. They go on to talk about how they were founded in 2022 and tell you very little about their pricing structure. You all know me. I ONLY look at the math when I'm thinking about a service. By the way, in case I didn't say, they ONLY do paperbacks. If we keep scrolling down, we see another math equation. 22 books sold, and 963 in royalties. This one is $41 per book. Um... What? I can't get a reader to pay $20 for a paperback, never you mind $30 or more. WTF?

Okay, so enough of that crazy mathing. Let's move on to the FAQ page. Jeebus. Okay, so I scrolled down a little and found a TOY! Oooooooh! A royalties calculator. Let's click it!!! I'm so excited right now.

Clicked it. Here's the link in case you want to check it out. Probably not, but hey, I give you options, right? There's a lot of information to fill out here, so I'm gonna just pop some numbers in based on one of my books currently published with *gasp* Amazon. Here's what it says:

You can also choose either to charge the customer an ADDITIONAL $5 for shipping or let them take it out of your royalties. That brings the number down to $3.83 paid to you, and for the customer with Prime, they just spent an extra $5.

So, what does Amazon send me when someone pays $19.99 for that massive paperback (on Amazon, mind you, not for other marketplaces)?

Also, my customer gets free shipping, and I don't PAY for the site use other than the fees. We'll be tacking that on in a moment. Isn't this fun?

Their Printing tab just goes over sizes, so we're skipping that one. It's boring.

Royalties tab is the same calculator they sent me to before. Skipping that screenshot, too, because you already have it. haha. ha.

Reviews! Yay! Let's take a look at them. Okay, I literally loaded all of them. None of the reviewers have given fewer than three stars (I refuse to buy from any website where all the reviews are praise). That's weird. I'm going to run an analysis on the page and see what we get. Hang on. INTERESTING. Here are my results:

Now, is it conceivable that with only 239 reviews, that many people have the exact same name? When it looks like a coincidence, it's usually a lie. BTW, there were also a TON of variations on each of those names, and I didn't list all the 3s. Sheesh.

Let's go on to the pricing page and REALLY dig into the math, shall we?

Well, here's where I hit a wall--a paywall. If you don't give them that $99 (right now--it's usually $199--or is this just some cheesy, ongoing "promotion" to drive sales?), you can't see more. I wonder if you get charged per title over X number of titles. That would be helpful to know. I have 52 titles. Ha.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Let's base it off the $99 per-year subscription fee.

Okay, so at $99 per year, you'd need to sell at least 26 books at $19.99 (with you paying the shipping, which gets you $3.83 per book) to make up your overhead. Those 26 books do NOT count towards royalties you earn because it's a fee. For a site that says they don't charge fees for sales, that's pretty substantial.

Once the price goes up to its usual $199, you'll have to sell a minimum of 52 books before you make a single dollar. Of course, if you're getting $41 per book sold, you can recoup that in no time. *more snark*

Amazon charges me $7.72 to print my book. Books.by charges me $10.28.

Now THAT math is mathing. 

It seems like these guys have found an angle that sells, but you always need to be looking at the math. Don't get taken advantage of.

They say, "You're driving all the traffic and still paying a percentage, but we don't do that." It's a lie. They're still taking a fee, even if it's hidden in that $10.28 AND the yearly fee.

I hope you all got something out of this post. I know I learned a lot by writing it, and it pissed me off a lot, too. Y'all know how much I despise companies that take advantage of Indie authors. We have enough to deal with.

Well, that's all for today, folks!

Until next time, WRITE ON!

Jo