I have what may have the best news for traditionally published authors ever. In addition to what your publisher pays you, Red Room now pays you more than your publisher does on your existing books, and we’ll introduce you to the people buying them. This is going to change everything.  

Okay, in the subject line I allude to Marx and Kirk, but this is serious. We’ve had a secret plan for quite a while and we’ve finally launched it, today. Both Marx and Kirk do that kind of thing.

To get back to the point: Are you ready to get a bigger share of the profits from your books and to meet your customers? Because we’ve figured out how to deliver it.

Red Room has opened the world’s only authors’ bookstore. That is to say, where authors get the benefits they would get if they were the retailer. Our team worked behind the scenes to secure almost everyone’s books in stock for today’s launch, and we’re ready to kick off a new era for authors.

This is no ordinary bookstore. It’s more like a bookstore where you pull a certain book carefully from the shelf and the whole wall of bookshelves flips around revealing a secret passageway to a luxurious underground headquarters for the world’s secret inner circle of writers plotting to take over the world. My kind of bookstore.

More than half of all book sales happen online, and almost entirely through the big retailers, not independents. Most people who buy from local independent bookstores also buy books online from the big retailers. We love local independent bookstores, and we are looking for new ways to support them (send us your ideas!). We want to capture a big piece of the 50-60% of book sales that happen online with big retailers anyway, and leverage those sales to give authors unprecedented income and connection with their customer base.

More than 95% of book sales for at least the next few years will be traditionally published books, meaning books that you sold to a publisher. You receive an advance, plus royalties after you earn out your advance, with the average being about a 10% royalty rate (15% for very successful authors). There’s no way for you to make more per book. And retailers consider book buyers their customers, not yours, so you beg people on your book jacket to go to your website so you know who they are.

Let’s use some real numbers about how “Red Room Royalties” works:

To use myself as an example, if these programs had been in place when my book came out in 2009, and just half of my sales were through Red Room (the other half, we hope, from their local independent bookstores), I would have made an additional $6,000 through Red Room Royalties. And I’d have a great database of customer data and contact information.

At the other end of the sales spectrum, James Patterson has sold an estimated 220 million books. If half of these books had been sold through Red Room, he would have made more than three hundred million dollars more on his books. Perhaps even more importantly, he would have been connected with those customers immediately, rather than hoping they went to his website to sign up for his mailing list. You’re probably somewhere in between me and Patterson, right? That’s a safe bet. Unless J.K. Rowling is reading this (if you are, please join!).

If you check out the How It Works page we created, you’ll see an explanation of the economics if 100% of your books were purchased on Red Room, but as I mentioned, we don’t want to cut into sales from real bookstores in your community, only the books sales that are made online anyway.

We’re at an important crossroads affecting the future of publishing. If we, as authors, stick together and blaze a new trail that benefits us all, we’ll have the collective power to change the world for the better for every living author and the next generation of authors. I’m sick of us being acted upon by market forces—we need to become a market force ourselves.

That’s why we came up with Red Room Royalties and Red Room Relationships and have designed it so you can get unlimited benefits from both programs for an annual membership fee of $250 per year. How often do you have a marketing and career opportunity for $250 that will probably make you thousands of dollars and give you direct contact with your customers?

Like I said in the subject line: “Authors of the world, unite!” You have nothing to lose except the cap on your income and the “retail wall” between you and your customers. Even if you’re considering ebooks, self-publishing, and other innovations, what about your already contracted or published books with traditional publishers? How can you get more out of those?

Plus, you know the Red Room team in San Francisco is here to personally answer your questions on the phone or via email about these amazing programs (our entire team does customer service as needed).

I’m already receiving emails from authors who are in financial need. Please let us know you need a scholarship and we’ll get you onboard—this is all about creating the largest author community in the world so we have the collective power to shape the future of writing. We want you to get the benefits of Red Room Royalties and Red Room Relationships starting today. Let me know what you think in the comments section!