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How to Get That Book Published and Not Lose Your Soul day-5 2/12/2010 5:22:31 PM
February 12, 2010
The blog was written today but the computer ate it. So here I will have to give the short version. Then I will work on retrieving the longer version.
If you are determined to publish on your own, print, market, publicize etc the short version is that it will cost on the low side 6,000 dollars. On the high side 25,000. Making the self publishing companies asking 6,000 look good huh? But no that is only apparently true. If you go that way for 6,000 dollars you do not own the cover, the ISBN, bar code and other things you would like to own , not to mention royalties in various sale markets. So you could go with them if you are in a hurry but you could emerge embarrassingly naked having been stripped of all of your worldly goods, including the shirt off your back after the experience.
Now how many books would you have to sell to re-coup your 6,000 dollars? Well if you assume a sales price of 15 dollars, shipping at about 4-6 dollars depending upon the size of your book and how far away the customer is, and the cost of printing the book at about 6 dollars that leaves you with 3 dollars profit. Now, now there is no crying in self-publishing. So lets take the 3 dollars and divide into the 6 thousand and 2,000 books have to be sold. Humm. The best seller is 25,000 so look closely and you will see the exact size of the mountain you have to climb. Impossible? No because you have more that one product to sell. What about the e-book, virtually no cost here. What about the audio book, (part of the 6,000 assumes you can get an audio book done for about 500 dollars. I did, minimum but it sounds great, done by a great narrator. So sell the audio book as download. No cost.
Then you could sell CD's ( I have lots of poetry and lets not forget the possible TV or movie deal. Ok not likely, not right away but most authors have to work at it for a least five years to get any where. So it is not hopeless.
You could in year one make with the above parameters about 10-12k and would be out of the big Mac's you could have had working at Mcdonalds over the first six months period. But after that things improve.
But this will require additional math and I know you will hate that, so I am signing off for today.
