Why I Should Have Turned Down My $165,000 Traditional Publishing Deal
Here are 5 things I wish somebody would have explained to me...
My company, New Wave Press, publishes expert nonfiction in health, wealth, and mindset. The intention of The Future of Publishing Substack is to show you both our philosophical approach to publishing and the actual strategies we employ when developing and launching bestsellers.
The deal with Penguin Random House (PRH) for my first book Rich20Something was for $165,000. It was a dream come true at the time…but I wouldn’t do it again.
Today’s post shares the five things I wish would have been explained to me more clearly before I made the decision to pursue a traditional publishing deal.
1. Timeline: It's going to take a lot longer than you think.
It took me four years to get the book published, and given the circumstances, that was fast. The first two years were spent pursuing an agent. The second two were getting the book sold and published.
Most authors that I know spend 3-5 years just building an audience that's sizable enough to get a conversation with a literary agent. Come to think of it, I’d spent about three years building my fan base before even reaching out to a literary agent.
Generally speaking, agents won’t take your calls. You have to get introduced by somebody who already knows them. My friend, author Stephen Key, introduced me to my agent—and even then, it took about 2 years to convince her to work with me.
This isn’t necessarily a knock on agents, it’s just a function of supply and demand. They can only represent so many people and they want to ensure they have the best chance of successfully selling the authors they do represent to publishers for the highest advance possible. Agents are similar to attorneys in that they are only interested in representing clients who they think have a chance of winning.
I get it. But from the author’s perspective, this means a lot of talented people won’t even get the chance to pitch their work because they’re immediately being filtered.
Once an agent decides to take you on as a client, it's not uncommon for the book itself to take another 2-4 years to sell to publishers, write, and release.
Keep in mind: Even with a good agent, most books get rejected by publishers. Some estimates say that only 20-30% of agented books actually end up getting a deal. This would not surprise me at all — publishers produced thousands of books per year but are pitched tens of thousands of times across all genres. Production capacity and shelf space are limited.
I was very lucky in that my book was almost immediately purchased by Tarcher Perigee (an imprint of PRH)—this was less a factor of how good my writing was and more about:
Timing: 2017 was peak hustle culture in the entrepreneurship space and my book spoke to that.
Genre: books about making money generally sell well.
Representation: my agent Kirsten is a killer and has experience closing bigger deals. She also represents Daymond John.
My existing audience: I had an email list of about 150,000 at the time and a social media following of 100,000+ in an era when Instagram actually mattered.
Luck: All the pieces lined up in the exact right way that had nothing to do with me. It could have just as easily gone the other way.
To claim it was anything less than the combination of those factors would be survivorship bias.
To drive this point home: One of the authors we recently helped launch at New Wave Press was rejected not once or twice, but SIXTEEN times by traditional houses before deciding to work with us.
His book CLEAR went on to be the #1 New Release in THREE categories on Amazon and sell more books in 2 months than the average traditionally published nonfiction book does in its lifetime.
You can read a case study about our learnings from that campaign here, complete with a breakdown of early sales numbers. Safe to say that agents and publishers are not always right about what sells—and we’ve proven that.
2. Ownership: You’re giving away your life’s work for a fraction of its value.
When you sell your book to a publisher, you no longer have the right to distribute it without their permission. Technically, you aren’t even allowed to give away free PDF copies legally. To do so would essentially be bootlegging your own work.
I never fully appreciated the fact that once I published my book traditionally, I would no longer own the intellectual property (IP). I understood it in a logical sense, but I didn't take into account that as a creative, IP is really all we have.
Publishers are essentially venture capitalists—they have no idea what’s really going to hit, so they are making calculated bets based more on gut feelings than they’d care to admit. In that process, they are only going to give you a fraction of what they anticipate being able to recoup from the sale of your work.
If they give you $100,000, it’s because they think they can make $1,000,000. From a business perspective, why would I want to give away the rights to my own product for $165,000 when I could keep it and make money forever?
3.) Advances: They’re scams.
An advance means “an advance against future sales.” Basically, whatever money they give you to write the book, you have to earn it back in book sales before you can begin collecting royalties from the book itself. That’s called “earning out” your advance. There are some caveats to this process.
A.) 90% of authors are getting advances below $100,000. The reason mine was relatively high for a first time author is because of all the factors mentioned above. I likely wouldn’t get the same amount for the same book now—I might not even get a deal at all. Assuming you actually do get a $100,000 deal and it takes you four years to bring the book to market, you’re only getting paid $25,000 per year. That’s less than minimum wage.
B.) Don’t forget about your agent. 15% goes to your agent—now your $100k deal is $85,000. Then, you’re paying taxes on that. When it’s all said and done, you’d be lucky to take home $60,000 for four years of work.
C.) You’re not even getting paid up front. Advances are typically broken into 4 payments, not a lump sum. You get paid:
1/4 upon signing the deal
1/4 upon acceptance of the completed manuscript
1/4 upon publication of the first edition (hardcover)
1/4 the following year with publication of the softcover
D.) Worst of all: I was expected to use the money from my advance to pour back into marketing the book. That’s right—the advance was my marketing budget. The publisher wasn't going to put up any additional money outside of my advance to ensure the book was successful. More on this in a second.
4.) Royalties: They’re predatory.
I was given a 92/8 royalty split in favor of the publisher, which is pretty terrible but also standard with an advance of my size, given the fact that I was a first time author with no track record to negotiate against.
That split means for every $30 hardcover book you sell, you’ll see about $3. But wait— you first need to earn out your advance. It is that $3, not the full cover price, that’s applied to the earn out against the advance. In other words, on a $100,000 advance, you’ll have to sell 30,000+ copies before you began seeing royalties from book sales.
Great for the publisher, bad for me.
5.) Marketing Support: It’s non-existent.
You would think that after investing $160,000 into a project, the publisher would be eager to help me to make the book as successful as possible. This simply isn’t the case.
In reality, big publishers are more like deadbeat dads. Once the baby is born, they bounce. The reason Penguin agreed to do a deal with me is because I already had the audience and connections to sell the work myself. They are in the business of co-opting the best talent, not building or promoting it.
What I came to learn later is that not only do publishers generally have little interest in doing a "full court press" for their authors unless they’re a gigantic celebrity...in most cases, they don't even have the ability or resources to do so.
This is because publisher interests are generally not aligned with author or audience interests. You, as the author, are not their customer. In fact, even the readers of your book are not their customer. Their main customers are Amazon and retail bookstores. They focus their efforts on selling to retail outlets, not to end users.
This means:
They don't have any customer lists to promote or market your books.
They don't have particularly strong social media skills.
They cannot guarantee you will get in any major press. All they can do is make phone calls like anybody else.
The only thing you'll get when you sign with a publisher is possibly seeing your book on a limited (and shrinking) number of physical store shelves for 2-4 weeks after launch.
If it isn't selling as projected after that, the stores will stop ordering your book and it'll just live online until it goes out of print.
That's it. That's their entire marketing play.
Their goal is to spend as little as possible to acquire your work and market it. Their job is to make as much as possible and depend on you to promote, while retaining your intellectual property.
Good for them. Bad for you.
Here’s What I’d Do Instead of Traditional Publishing
Would I publish traditionally again?
No. Knowing what I know now, I wouldn't. I had to go through the process to extract the lesson....but there's nothing in it for me now.
Whenever my entrepreneur friends ask me about shopping their book ideas to a big house, the above is basically what I tell them.
If you're going to do all the work and all the marketing anyway, why pay an agent 15% of the advance and the publisher 90% of future sales to get your book to market, while also giving away the rights to your life’s work forever?
It just doesn’t make sense.
These are the problems we looked to solve when I started New Wave Press in 2024.
We flip the model and charge $100k+ to write and publish your book—but unlike traditional publishers, we actually market you across our entire author catalog in perpetuity.
As our list grows, so does the reach of your book over time, rather than launch and fizzle.
We run our own printing and logistics in house (offset, not print on demand) with a vertically integrated supply chain. While most royalties on traditional books are $2-3, our authors make $10-15 per sale because we control margins.
Since we manufacture the book, this also means you get to retain all your customer data, even from Amazon.
We offer a 70/30 profit split on all sales in favor of the author. We also have some pretty exciting new tech integrations with AI that interact with the reader to create a unique experience.
And best of all, you retain all ownership of your intellectual property. We just license the right to publish it in 5 year increments. This model works best if you have something to sell on the backend — coaching or consulting. It’s the best of both worlds. It's the model I should have had access to when I was a new author.
It didn't exist. So I made it.
You can learn more about our process at New Wave Press by scheduling a call here with our team.
I'm so glad I took the time to read this! Definitely interested!! New Wave Press is the wave of the future, my friends! I'm interested!! Lets go!!