It’s the kind of Cinderella story every author dreams of.

The Wall Street Journal reports bestselling, self-published author Hugh Howey signed a six-figure, print-only deal with Simon and Schuster. The unusual deal allows the author to keep all digital rights.

Of course, unlike most authors, Howey had plenty of leverage to negotiate a deal to his liking.  His thriller, “Wool,” has sold more than a half-million copies.

According to the WSJ, Howey was already raking in $120,000 a month, so he had little incentive to give away digital rights.

Other self-published authors, like romance novelist Bella Andre, have also negotiated print-only deals. Again, Andre had plenty of negotiating power, since she’d already sold 1.5 million copies of her books on her own.       

Click here to read the full article.

Author Brenda Hiatt is showing us the money again.

On her blog, Hiatt lays out her initial findings as to how much “indie” or self-published authors are earning.

So, far, she says she’s collected data from 82 books, 33 of them are backlist titles. The rest are original self-published works.

The titles have been available as ebooks an average of seven months.The average price of the titles is about $3. About one-third have been discounted or offered for free for anywhere from a few days to months.

The earnings per title ranged from a few dollars to a current maximum of nearly $140,000.

For backlist titles, the average total amount earned over a book’s “e-lifetime” (as Hiatt refers to it) is $7,915. The median earned is $4,134.

The “average” usually refers to adding up all the numbers and dividing that sum by the number of numbers. The “median” is the middle number or the average of the two middle numbers.

When it comes to original titles, which have been available an average of 6 months, the total earnings to date averaged $12,548. The median was $5,150.

Hiatt reports the single highest-earning title in her survey was an indie original by a previously unpublished writer.

For the complete results of Hiatt’s survey, click here to visit her blog.