As I explained, it's an extremely crammed book market out there. There are millions of books in print. Readers buy primarily formulaic mysteries and romances. Publishers that focus on one of these and on keeping the price as low as possible (via mass market editions and not trade paperbacks) achieve sufficient profits to afford advances. I've published a couple of these types of books (fantasies) with a tiny start-up publisher that offered an advance. But my mission with Anaphora has never been selling to the mass market or finding formulaically minded authors. I've always wanted to help bring into light books that cannot find a home in these traditional venues. I email each new release as a review copy to 11,000 reviewers, academics, librarians and other influential people. This results in a good deal of librarians and others purchasing printed copies. You can find stats on all of my books somewhere out there - as they're all publically distributed etc. The here you found might not have sold well or you might have grabbed five titles I published back when I started in 2009, and by now even great sales would reflect as a lower rank due to the years since the publication. Once again, I'm not looking for authors who are looking to create a bestseller. The competition for bestsellers is a game for millionaires and gambling addicts. Instead, I help writers find readers by doing like the 100 free ebooks giveaways through LibraryThing. All of the titles given away get a good deal of reviews. I price all of the books the same way - books under 120 pages are $15, 120-270 or so $20, and then $25 up until a certain point. If an author requests a lower cover price, I work with them - but this decreases the profit per book sold. I split profits with authors 50/50 - so if I'm losing profits by lowering the price, so are the authors. The profit margin this sets is a lot higher than a giant publisher offering 5% or less - if their sales stats are 10X higher, their authors get the same amount of royalties as my authors... Readers that only buy books because of their price... aren't Anaphora's intended audience. My own scholarly books with McFarland were set at $45, and one of them sold over 500 copies. $20 is very reasonable. The Kindles and EBSCO/ ProQuest ebooks I create are set at $2.99 - these sell well in international markets where book prices are much lower (China, Cambodia, etc.) I've seen very high royalties from sales via different distribution channels every month for the last few years. The profits are probably evenly split between money coming in from new authors and royalties from the 240 titles Anaphora has in print. It would not be appropriate for me to share sales data for any of my authors in a public forum as they would object to it being private. Even if I relied more heavily on authors this would not be an ethical, a moral, a fiscal, or a logical problem. You can see on the Anaphora website the effort I've put into sending books for review, helping authors by creating press releases for them, and all sorts of other efforts. My job is doing all I can to help books sell. If the market is such that I have to rely on authors in addition to these efforts - it's the economy that's stupid.
