It is commonly said that writers, artists, musicians, and all manner of creative persons cannot make a living off their work. Why? Take writers for an example.

Why can’t writers make a living off their work? To begin, the industry has conditioned them to require an agent to navigate it (and indeed virtually all publishers will not talk to you without one)– an agent that often takes 15% of all revenue. The agent will find a publisher, which takes 20% of revenue. Then the now published material is sent to a distributor, who charges 15%, and finally arrives at a vendor that skims another 15% off the top. What are you left with? 35% of all sales, if that [1]. It doesn’t end there either. The standard practice for publishers to take on a project with no investment, that is to say, at their own cost. Although this may seem like a silver lining, the reality is that publishers will withhold profits until the cost of production has been met, and will attempt to gain the rights to your work in perpetuity. This means that after you’ve spent innumerable hours creating, tweaking, editing, and workshopping your manuscript;

1. A vast cavalcade of middlemen will take about 65% of all your revenue.

2. The remaining 35% will be eaten by your publisher until you’ve met the cost of production (usually an arbitrary value with 5 figures) [1]. 

3. You almost never even own your work by the end, and may never be able to get out of a bad deal.

In fact, most authors may only make 2$ per book sold [2], with some authors earning around 35 cents per book [4].  

So what would it look like at Carminica?

Carminica Obsidion Collective is committed to ensuring creators make as much as they can.

Some of you may have seen similar language elsewhere, heard similar things from other publishers; “Everyone else sucks, we are the future,” and such. Those words are often used by publishers worse than the titans of the industry, vanity publishers and serialized publishers to name a few.

We do our best to shine a light on the state of publishing, and we don’t want to lead anyone to thinking that we are a vanity nor serialized publishing house. We are not a vanity publisher nor a serialized publisher.

Carminica is a Publisher. Carminica operates on a principle (one of many) that creators know their work better than others, and this is reflected in how our organization runs. In that regard, we generally defer creative decisions to their creator(s). That being said, Carminica is legally structured as a publishing company. We will operate as a publishing company and not as a self-publisher nor any other variant of business entity which publishes books and other material. To that end, outside of our stated and promised practices, clients do not have the right to dictate business decisions. As a general operating practice, Carminica takes care of the business side and lets clients take care of the creative side. This is an important boundary to set, as it has legal repercussions for what sort of company Carminica is classified as because the US government has strict rules when it comes to what our company can do (mainly via trademark classes if you are curious).

You are not guaranteed to be accepted. Whether an author is offered a publishing deal or rejected, the author has the right to be selected fairly and on the basis of Carminica’s terms of selection. Such terms are a trade secret and will not be disclosed, however, all authors must be judged on the basis of creative integrity and skill, free from any influence of financial or monetary incentive (or lack thereof) from the publisher. Our organization’s motto is “Creating stories to be told, not sold”, thus we promise to act in accordance with it.

[1] Information and numbers are averages courtesy of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame Founder and Exec. Dir. Don Evans and may vary. Margins may be as slim as 10% per book. Bookstore and Vendor rates may vary.

[2] Beer, Sarah, et al. “Author Book Royalties: How Much Do Authors Get Paid per Book?” Spines, spines.com, 5 Feb. 2025

[3] “Literary Agent.” Publishers Association, publishers.org.uk, 11 May 2020

[4] Information and numbers are averages courtesy of Columbia College Chicago faculty; primarily Joseph Meno.